Let’s remember when the Seattle Times gave Rob McKenna’s gubernatorial campaign $75,000 in free advertising, on this day in 2012
The Stranger called it “the weirdest thing to come out of Seattle Times headquarters in a long time.” It caused a lot of badwill with employees and readers and their guy didn’t even win. But nonetheless, seven years ago today, the Seattle Times announced they were giving a free, full-page ad to GOP candidate for governor Rob McKenna, the former attorney general.
Joel Connelly wrote in the PI at the time:
The Seattle Times will boost Republican gubernatorial candidate Rob McKenna with $75,750 worth of ads on its own pages, paid for by the newspaper, according to a filing made by the Times with the Washington State Public Disclosure Commission.
The ads will be to “support” McKenna, who is running against Democrat Jay Inslee in the state’s marquee election race.
The Times is beginning to get some blowback. Dan Ritzman, a top Sierra Club staffer in the Northwest, wrote on his Facebook page: “I just cancelled our Seattle Times subscription and will donate it to Jay.”
The Times long ago endorsed McKenna, as it usually does with Republican candidates for governor, but announced Monday it will run ads for McKenna “to demonstrate the power of newspaper advertising for political campaigns.”
It is also making “an in-kind donation of ad space” to the campaign for Referendum 74, the same-sex marriage measure on Washington’s November ballot.
The Times has not formed its own political action committee. One political activist, a Western Washington University student named Patrick Stickney, suggested in jest that it be called “FanniePAC.”
(Washington Teamster Editor Ed Donohoe, years ago, created the enduring nickname of “Fairview Fannie” to describe the self-important Times.)
Eli Sanders, in The Stranger, reported late Wednesday that a protest petition is brewing in the Times newsroom. It would be almost without precedent, “almost” in that Seattle Post-Intelligencer writers in 1972 took up a collection and bought an ad in the P-I supporting presidential candidate George McGovern. The paper had endorsed Richard Nixon.
A strong critique of the family that owns the Times came Thursday from San Sperry, once Fairview Fannie’s city hall reporter and later a deputy editorial page editor at the Post-Intelligencer.
The McKenna ads are “a throwback to an earlier Blethen predilection” and “a cheapening . . . of the code of keeping an arm’s length” between newsroom reporting and management, Sperry e-mailed a friend, adding:
“This new corporate initiative is reminiscent of the original Blethen, the infamous ‘colonel’ who openly and brazenly used the S. Times to advance his editorial and personal financial agenda. The current publisher, Frank Blethen, suffers from similar delusions of arrogance and influence.”
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