By Willy Stern

The Tennessean morphs from ball-busting to bland

In 1973, an enterprising 28-year-old Nashville reporter pretended to be mentally ill, infiltrating Central State Psychiatric Hospital to uncover horrendous and systemic abuses of some of the city’s weakest and most vulnerable citizens.

That reporter was Frank Sutherland, who went on to write a hard-hitting, award-winning series on the subject for The Tennessean.

“Central State Psychiatric Hospital is a warehouse for the storage of people—an unaccredited and unclean hospital with more than half its doctors unlicensed to practice in Tennessee,” his first story began. “I know. I just spent 31 days there.”

Today, Frank Sutherland, 55, now the editor of The Tennessean, says the rules at the paper aren’t the same anymore. “Our code of ethics, adopted last year, says we should not misrepresent ourselves,” he says. “That is a change that has taken place in the industry and at The Tennessean.”

The paper’s in-depth series these days are more like the one the paper ran in September and October of 1999 about the Robert Glen Coe execution. The story ran, however, five months after the convicted rapist and killer—who was, incidentally, mentally ill—was executed.

The newspaper of then and the one of today is a striking contrast. And The Tennessean’s seeming devolution hasn’t been lost on everyone. Gilbert S. Merritt, 65, is a newspaper reader, a lifelong Democrat, and a federal appeals court judge. Heir to a reasonable fortune, he was raised in the city’s genteel classes, is a member of the Belle Meade Country Club, and lives on Belle Meade Boulevard. A man who falls in the category of “city leader,” Merritt has always embraced liberal politics and cares deeply about the future of the city.

Newspapers are known for having bases of power in the cities where they operate. They cultivate friendships with people who share similar ideologies, passions, or pursuits. Based on his background, one would think Merritt and The Tennessean would be fast friends. After all, he is a longtime intimate of former Tennessean editor and publisher John Seigenthaler, has made plenty of visits to the newsroom over the last four decades, and has shared the paper’s generally progressive instincts.

But Merritt does not care for The Tennessean of today. Although he is a federal judge, and as such is discouraged from commenting publicly about much of anything, he does not mince his words. “The criticism of The Tennessean among the people I talk to is severe,” he says.

What is it that people are reacting most severely to, Merritt is asked.

“The quality and idealism level of the newspaper are clearly not significant to the owners. I guess that’s because they’re not related to the profit picture.”

Merritt says there has always been criticism of the paper, but “it used to be of the liberal positions of the editorial page. Now it’s all about the quality.

“My particular criticism has been the minimum level of coverage of the federal court system. The coverage primarily comes today off the O.J. Simpson-type sensational stories. For years, the paper had a regular reporter covering the [federal] courthouse. Now they tell me nobody is interested in reading about what we do here.”

Merritt says he’s voiced his concerns to the paper’s top brass. “I play golf with [Tennessean editor] Frank [Sutherland], and he clearly is trying to run a good newspaper.”

And so it goes. If Merritt is unhappy, much of the rest of the city is apoplectic.

Plop down in a chair at the downtown Satsuma restaurant on Union Street for lunch, and talk eventually will turn to how awful The Tennessean is. Or listen any morning to a half-hour segment of Teddy Bart’s Round Table, a radio show for Nashville insiders, and somebody will take a swipe at the daily paper.

For better or worse, Tennessean-bashing is in full blossom in Nashville. It ranges from community leaders to political leaders to media experts.

It’s not uncommon in American cities that many people—including the city’s cognoscenti—like to whine about their daily paper. Still, the discontent here reveals that much of Nashville’s civic leadership believes the paper is no longer interesting or relevant, well-written or provocative, visionary or exciting.

The Scene identified 136 community leaders to hear their views about The Tennessean. The vast majority of them criticized the paper, providing mounting evidence that the paper gets no respect. In the past, particularly during the heyday of the civil rights movement, liberals saw the paper as an enlightened institutional player in the affairs of the city and state. Conservatives, meanwhile, lambasted the publication as a liberal mouthpiece for government causes. Back then, you either feared or embraced it.

Many of those interviewed see The Tennessean as lacking in ambition—a boring, unimaginative collection of news items. Seen against the newspaper’s storybook history—an epic chapter in Southern journalism filled with crusades for black men and women, for open government, disenfranchised voters, the poor and infirm, and the otherwise dispossessed—the newspaper’s muted journalism of today is considered a tragedy by many of those who were once so close to it.

Meanwhile, if the criticism on the reading side of the equation is aggressive, the answers from The Tennessean follow a familiar pattern.

The paper’s leadership thinks everything is going quite well. “The readership of The Tennessean...has substantially and consistently grown over the years I have been here,” Sutherland explains. “The rest is subjective.”

In fact, Sutherland is right that The Tennessean’s readership has grown. (There will be more about readership later in the series.)

That numerous residents of the city find The Tennessean to be a bad read may not be revealing in and of itself. As legendary newsman William Allen White noted in 1917, “There are three things that no one can do to the entire satisfaction of anyone else: make love, poke the fire, and run a newspaper.”

In fact, what has happened at The Tennessean is in many ways what has happened at newspapers all across America. Countless family-owned dailies with strong ties to their communities have sold out to national newspaper chains that focus on profits, import out-of-town management, and express general lack of interest in creating a vision for the city. While Sutherland is homegrown, many others in the paper’s top management are not. Many Nashvillians feel there is no heady sense of community involvement at The Tennessean. Instead, there is only a seeming lack of understanding of the city.

Change at the paper has been both immediate and gradual. Once a font of liberalism, its editorial voice is now more moderate, less vitriolic. Once an investigative powerhouse, it has taken on few local figures or issues in recent years. Once a behind-the-scenes puller of strings and shaper of policy, the paper is much less inclined to throw its weight around. In essence, critics say that the paper is much more focused on assuring the stability of its circulation by not offending anyone—and making sure the profit picture remains bright.

As the changes take root, many of its old reporters weep genuine tears.

“In the old Tennessean,” says David Halberstam, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author who spent four years—1956 to 1960—at the paper early in his career, “newspapering was an addiction for us. It was like eating. We couldn’t live without it. I’m not sure that’s true of these reporters today. It certainly isn’t evident in the product they put out. It’s disgraceful what is happening.”

These days, Halberstam says, a new type of crusade—namely, “greed”—drives The Tennessean. He says “the paper lacks the space and the resources and energy to cover some hard news stories today, or the federal courts. It’s a form of self-censorship, what they choose not to cover.... American newspapers are given great freedoms, and what does Gannett do with them? Use them to make money. The top management at Gannett considers its real customers [to be] its shareholders, not its readers. So they squeeze every last bit of juice out of the paper. This is not just in Nashville, but all over the country.”

If the words sound harsh, they are. That’s because unlike other Nashville companies that may have sold to outside owners over the last decade, many who work for newspapers consider them a public trust, a vehicle for social good, an instrument for righting wrongs. To the journalistic purist, news organizations should forsake profits in favor of producing a good story. For many who once worked at The Tennessean, or felt connected to it in a meaningful way, this was how it always was. But today, they believe the paper cares less about good journalism and more about marketing and advertising.

The institution that much of this city remembers—the newspaper as champion of the underdog and exposer of evil—is no longer. Today’s is a new enterprise, a clean and well-lit land of cubicles filled with focus groups, cross-departmental communication, and lots of meetings. It’s not a place for frumpy, slightly eccentric reporters with notions of doing good in the world. It is not a place for personalities, the clash of strong ideas, and people intent on changing the world.

At today’s Tennessean, all is changed. Some readers who remember The Tennessean’s crusading years are having trouble adjusting to that.

If there is a convenient date to define when Tennessean carping began, 1991 is as good as any. Not coincidentally, that is the year John Seigenthaler, the paper’s longtime editor and publisher, retired.

“The newspaper lost its soul when John Seigenthaler stepped aside as editor,” says Wendell “Sonny” Rawls, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who started at The Tennessean and went on to The Philadelphia Inquirer and The New York Times. “The current editors,” he goes on to say, “have no soul, no ambition, and frankly, very little pride. The Tennessean should be the conscience of the community. All they are doing now is marketing advertising.”

Seigenthaler, who declined comment for this story, came to run The Tennessean as editor in 1962, lured back to the paper by its publisher, Amon Carter Evans. Having left the paper as a reporter and weekend city editor, Seigenthaler was working at the time for Attorney General Robert Kennedy in Washington; while shadowing the Freedom Riders on civil rights travels in Alabama, he was even injured after being hit in the head with a pipe.

Having written for The Tennessean before working for Kennedy, Seigenthaler jumped at the opportunity to return home to his newspaper. In a few short years, he helped transform what was already a political and scrappy paper into a publication that earned national respect. He did that in large part by lining up on the right side of the civil rights issue. Soon The Tennessean was looked upon as belonging to a small but committed cadre of Southern newspapers that included the Arkansas Gazette, Delta Democrat Times in Greenville, Miss., and Louisville’s Courier-Journal. They all were assisting in the great moral cause of the 1960s. Across the hall, the Nashville Banner railed on about Communist agitators supposedly stirring up the Negroes.

The other way Seigenthaler brought about a perception of excellence in his newsroom was by surrounding himself with the right people—including Sutherland—who carried on the tradition personified by Halberstam. Rarely, if ever, has such an impressive collection of journalistic talent been congregated at a mid-market newspaper. Some of those who worked at The Tennessean from the late 1950s and into the ’70s included legendary reporters and photographers such as Nat Caldwell, Jack Corn, Larry Daughtrey, Al Gore Jr., Fred Graham, Gene Graham, David Hall, John Haile, John Hemphill, Jack Hurst, Saundra Keyes, Bill Kovach, Sonny Rawls, Jim Squires, Jerry Thompson, Wayne Whitt, and Tom Wicker. Among them, the various journalists have won personally, or overseen as editors, a virtual bucketload of Pulitzer Prizes.

Jim Squires went on to become editor of the Chicago Tribune, Kovach editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Haile editor of The Orlando Sentinel, and Hall editor of The Denver Post. Rawls, Caldwell, and Gene Graham picked up Pulitzers, and Jerry Thompson’s undercover infiltration of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1980s was one of the high points of The Tennessean’s glory days under Seigenthaler. The others all had distinguished journalistic careers. Keyes is now editor of The Honolulu Advertiser. And, of course, Gore ran for president—twice.

“When you walked into the newsroom in 1967 at 10 p.m., there would be all kinds of people still there,” Rawls says. “You’d spend your off days there, just hanging around. Nobody ever turned in overtime. We were journalists. We all had ambitions to be the best reporter and beat the other paper. We’d sit around and talk about the great writers of the day, about Harper’s and Willie Morris. You were constantly challenged to do better work. We didn’t sit on the sidelines. We knew we were the public’s court of last resort.”

Bill Kovach remembers the time as glorious. “Working at The Tennessean in the 1960s was like breathing pure oxygen,” he says. “People of my generation were attracted to the paper. We saw journalism as an opportunity to help people who had no representation, who were overlooked by the system.”

Seigenthaler is credited almost universally for being the glue that held it all together.

David Hall says his days at The Tennessean in the early 1960s were “like nothing I have done since. It was a special, special place. The paper was really, really aggressive. It wasn’t a perfect paper, but it was a very good newspaper because it gave a damn. The Tennessean cared about Nashville and about Tennessee. I think Frank Sutherland puts out a very interesting paper, but Nashville has changed a lot in 40 years.”

“It was a confluence of things that brought all those great journalists to The Tennessean,” John Haile says. “The time itself, with civil rights and the war. And with John Seigenthaler there, he was willing to go out and get into things. That attracted a certain sort of reporter. Seigenthaler trusted his staff, inspired us to tackle the big issues of the day.”

Says Saundra Keyes, “We all wanted to do our best, not just for ourselves but for John. It was a rare gift he had.”

The newspaper approached the news in a much different way than it does now. Instead of producing a newspaper that simply held a mirror up to the city, the old Tennessean first figured out what the mirror should reflect.

“We thought we were creating the news,” says former managing editor Wayne Whitt. “It never crossed our minds not to use the paper for social change. Those days, under John Seigenthaler, those were the glory days. Seig ran every news meeting. He was interested in every story. You’d be hearing from John at midnight. If you got beat on a story, John would say, ‘Let’s take that story away from him.’ We liked to think we had a lot to do with the life of Nashville.”

The Tennessean often put a little slant on the news, just to take care of its friends. “Hell yeah, we’d slant the news for our candidates,” says Frank Ritter, a longtime editor and columnist at The Tennessean, who nevertheless says he personally was not guilty of such manipulations.

“It was no secret that we helped the paper’s candidates whenever we could,” Whitt says.

That the newspaper of the Seigenthaler era was comfortable establishing its own agenda in the state Legislature and the Metro Council may not have been so surprising, considering its history. The Tennessean was founded shortly after the turn of the century as an instrument for a political animal, Luke Lea, who got himself elected to the U.S. Senate during his tenure as owner of the paper.

Lea was a miserable businessman and owed some of his circulation success in his early years to the simple fact that his editor was shot and killed in a dispute one day over Prohibition. Coverage of the murder so interested the city that readership skyrocketed and ensured the paper’s survival.

But Lea eventually ran the paper into the ground when its assets were intermingled with those belonging to Caldwell & Co., a massive Nashville investment conglomerate that collapsed in 1930. A wandering Texan and Roosevelt crony named Silliman Evans bought the paper out of bankruptcy. In keeping with the paper’s tradition, and perhaps foretelling its next chapter as well, Evans kept one foot in Democratic Party politics and the other in journalism. He was not afraid to mingle the two.

“My daddy wanted to buy the paper, but he always told me that the Reconstruction Finance Corp. wanted to put The Tennessean in the hands of an avowed and well-known Democrat that had the backing of FDR,” Nashville businessman J.C. Bradford Jr. told the Scene. “That was surely Silliman Evans.”

The Tennessee Valley Authority, the establishment of the Warner Parks, the Nashville airport, and, most important, the longtime campaigns against the state’s poll tax and the Crump political machine of Memphis in the early ’50s were causes the paper championed. It was in the struggle with the Crump machine that the paper created a new political axis in Tennessee. Front-page editorials in what was then called The Nashville Tennessean blasted Crump and ultimately led to his destruction as a political player in the state. As Crump departed, the paper arrived.

With Silliman Evans (decried as “Silly Man” by his critics) as publisher, the character of the 20th-century Tennessean soon began to form. He created a joint operating agreement with the Banner in 1937 to reduce costs. (While the news operations remain separate in so-called JOAs, such agreements call for the sharing of circulation, advertising, and printing costs, and thus benefit both parties.) His Democratic politics drew a stark contrast to Jimmy Stahlman, the segregationist, Red-baiting publisher of the Banner, who was nevertheless a dedicated newsman. And in 1955, Evans died just as The Tennessean’s circulation was starting to surpass that of the afternoon rival. In 1961, control of the paper passed to Amon Carter Evans, Silliman Evans’ son, and the next year the young publisher hired Seigenthaler.

If the ’60s were a socially unsettling time, they were a Nashville reporter’s paradise. Many of the desegregation efforts were based here, and with the Banner blasting outside agitators, The Tennessean became a refuge for socially conscious reporters. There were other victories. During the 1962 elections, the paper crusaded against Gene “Little Evil” Jacobs, a flamboyant and corrupt South Nashville politician. In the state Senate in 1965, young reporter Bill Kovach, who also covered Jacobs, refused to leave a legislative committee room, which ultimately resulted in a federal court decision favoring the paper and the writing of the state’s so-called “Open Meetings Law.”

The paper also received national attention for its investigative series, written by Wendell “Sonny” Rawls, on abuses in the walking horse industry. Around the same time, Seigenthaler sent Nat Caldwell undercover into a nursing home to expose abuses of the elderly. And it was under Seigenthaler that Sutherland uncovered the abuses in a local mental hospital.

Amon Evans makes clear that the aggressive investigations were by design. “During the many years John Seigenthaler and I were down there, we worked hard to espouse just and conscientious opinions. There’s a different ball game today than 25 or 30 years ago. Times have changed. John and I made a lot of economic judgments and a lot of political judgments. Some were approved of and others not. But there never was any doubt where The Tennessean stood on the issues of the day.”

The Banner was sold to the Gannett Co. in 1972. That same year, Seigenthaler and Evans renamed the paper The Tennessean to reflect an image of statewide prowess. Relations between The Tennessean and Gannett were poor. Gannett could turn a serious profit only if the Evans family, the majority partner in the JOA, made a large profit as well.

“Gannett was not satisfied with the profit margin, and this manifested itself in many ways,” Seigenthaler said in the recent business history Fortunes, Fiddles & Fried Chicken by local author Bill Carey. (Carey will begin working as a Scene reporter on June 1.) “But Amon and his mother were perfectly happy with it.” Amon Evans so despised Gannett representatives that he would only communicate with them through Seigenthaler.

By the late 1970s, Evans faced liquidity problems at the paper. He also faced alimony problems, married as he was to his fifth wife, former Gannett CEO Al Neuharth points out in his book, Confessions of an SOB. So Evans sold the paper to Gannett in 1979, and Gannett sold the Banner to three local businessmen. Gannett officials wanted to own The Tennessean rather than the Banner because it was the larger, more profitable newspaper.

Despite the fact that Seigenthaler passionately railed against Gannett specifically and newspaper chains in general, he eventually agreed to work for Gannett. The company guaranteed him continued editorial control of the paper, and offered him a contract through the age of 65.

Under Gannett, and with Seigenthaler at the helm, the paper continued its aggressive streak of tackling the big stories.

The paper undertook an exhaustive investigation into the failed chain of banks controlled by the Butcher family in Knoxville. Reporters were dispatched to Switzerland and the Cayman Islands in an unsucessful effort to track down secret bank accounts. The FBI was one step behind the newspaper and bought 50 copies of The Tennessean’s series to help in its own investigation of the Butcher imbroglio. One reporter crusaded, day after day during the legislative session of 1984, for higher payments for poor mothers receiving Aid to Families With Dependent Children payments. He won.

But if the paper’s crusades had merit, The Tennessean had difficulty adapting to a new era of journalism when editors didn’t swing their weight around so much. If Seigenthaler was often considered one of the most powerful men in the state, his involvement on the sidelines of virtually every major civic activity often called into question his objectivity as a journalist.

Many believed that Seigenthaler spread himself too thin when he became editorial page editor of USA Today in 1982, while at the same time editing Nashville’s daily. “The Tennessean got neglected when John was in Washington, and John was away a lot,” recalls former Tennessean investigative reporter Joel Kaplan, now chairman of the newspaper department at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. “The day-to-day stuff really suffered. But I still would have preferred John part-time to most editors full-time.”

To be sure, Seigenthaler had his critics but, by and large, they haven’t come out of the closet. “The perception in many corridors of power was that John Seigenthaler had power, and it was real,” says Middle Tennessee State University journalism professor Ed Kimbrell. “They had to deal with John or get him on their side, and it wasn’t that far a drive from the paper’s newsroom to the state Capitol. At his height in the 1970s and into the 1980s, John was not just one of the most powerful people in Nashville, but [one of the most powerful people] in the state of Tennessee.”

Robert Sherborne, who joined The Tennessean in 1977 and now runs the paper’s investigative unit, says Seigenthaler was feared inside 1100 Broadway. “Your phone would ring at 7:30 a.m. and you’d wake up, maybe hung over, and you’d hear Mrs. Gardner’s voice. She was Seig’s secretary. She’d say, ‘Would you please hold for Mr. Seigenthaler?’ You knew right then that you’d gotten beaten on a story or fucked up somehow. Nothing pleasant would happen to you for the rest of the day.”

After Seigenthaler left the paper in 1991, he founded the First Amendment Center with original funding from Gannett’s foundation and continues in his role as journalistic elder statesman. By the end of 1991, editor Sutherland and publisher Craig Moon had assumed total control of the paper. In 1998, the Banner ceased publication. The afternoon paper had been in a steady circulation decline for some years. The owners of The Banner agreed to dissolve the JOA in exchange for a substantial payment. That left the morning paper with a virtual monopoly as far as daily print publications in Nashville go.

But it didn’t take long for stagnation to set in. As Bill Turque, Newsweek Washington correspondent and author of the recent biography Inventing Al Gore, puts it, “It’s clear that The Tennessean is no longer the political player in town that it was during the Seigenthaler era.”

There is always a tendency to look back at a newspaper’s history with rose-colored glasses. But no one can argue that the paper of yesterday once held to the idealistic notion that, even if it was a for-profit enterprise, its mission was greater and more majestic. It fought for what it believed in.

“I remember years ago,” Kimbrell recalls, “when Seigenthaler was editor of the paper, he came to a class of mine and somebody asked him what The Tennessean stood for. He paused, then shot out his answer. ‘We’re against big oil. We’re against atomic power. We’re in favor of civil rights.’ Deep down, John knew what he stood for.

“Today, nobody has any idea what The Tennessean stands for. Nobody at Gannett could go after John Seigenthaler. He had that wonderful national reputation. But when John walked away, that power walked with him.”

Tom Wicker, former Tennessean editorial writer and New York Times columnist who taught at MTSU in 1999, agrees the contrast is stark. “I had my MTSU students read The Tennessean for class. There just wasn’t much investigative stuff there, and it wasn’t very forward or incisive in its local coverage.”

Not only that, but some of those who were once part of Seigenthaler’s murderers’ row—who went on to huge careers in the field—are out of journalism today because, they told the Scene, they couldn’t take it anymore. Squires says he couldn’t stomach the constant demand for high profits while editing the Chicago Tribune. Kovach says the same. Both told the Scene that they got fed up working for chain-owned newspapers, picked fights with their bosses, and essentially fell on their swords. If there was any good that came out of it, Squires wrote a book, Read All About It!, about his experience, and Kovach went on to run the vaunted Nieman Foundation at Harvard University and has co-written two recent books on journalism. Rawls returned to Middle Tennessee, where he teaches at MTSU, and, true to form, has been critical of the new journalism era.

Sadly, these proud men, who were once important actors on journalism’s national stage, are outsiders today. They complain about a business they do not like but cannot change.

“The difference between journalism then and journalism now is that the system today favors editors who see business interests first and tailor the news department’s goals with those needs in mind,” Kovach says.

Says Halberstam, “I’m very unhappy about what is happening at The Tennessean. I like Frank Sutherland as a person, but I dislike the paper he publishes. The problem is that he and editors like him around the country have financial incentives to do bad journalism.”

Seigenthaler, meanwhile, has confided in many of his intimates who were former staffers at The Tennessean that he’s been disappointed in what’s happened to his paper. John Morton, a national media consultant, says it’s easy to understand why. “Gannett is pure corporate America. They make a product and expect that product to produce a certain level of profits. This means the paper’s quality can suffer.”

Sadly, these proud men, who were once important actors on journalism’s national stage, are outsiders today. They complain about a business they do not like but cannot change.

“The difference between journalism then and journalism now is that the system today favors editors who see business interests first and tailor the news department’s goals with those needs in mind,” Kovach says.

Says Halberstam, “I’m very unhappy about what is happening at The Tennessean. I like Frank Sutherland as a person, but I dislike the paper he publishes. The problem is that he and editors like him around the country have financial incentives to do bad journalism.”

Seigenthaler, meanwhile, has confided in many of his intimates who were former staffers at The Tennessean that he’s been disappointed in what’s happened to his paper. John Morton, a national media consultant, says it’s easy to understand why. “Gannett is pure corporate America. They make a product and expect that product to produce a certain level of profits. This means the paper’s quality can suffer.”