The official topics were the debt limit, energy policy and the end of federal covid-relief funding, but that’s not what many people wanted to talk about on C-SPAN’s morning call-in program this week. They wanted to complain about C-SPAN — specifically, about one of its board members, Allan Block, and his connection to a labor dispute at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which was not exactly the stuff of national headlines. The calls were part of a coordinated campaign by a labor union, the NewsGuild, to call attention to Block, a C-SPAN board member for more than three decades, and his role in resisting a strike against the Post-Gazette, which his family-owned company publishes.
The NewsGuild is seeking to compel a journalist to give up his communications with his sources, as well as his correspondence with a former New York Times columnist. The move is part of an ongoing legal battle between the guild, the largest journalism union in the country, and Mike Elk, a former member and independent labor reporter.
Reporters at the Toledo Blade and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette said Friday that the right-wing views of the papers’ owners are hindering their ability to accurately cover President Donald Trump and Wednesday’s Capitol riot.
At a time when so many local newspapers have been gobbled up by budget-slashing, profit-minded corporations, many journalists have yearned for the days when local families owned the papers and managed them with a sense of civic commitment. And yet the most toxic relationship in American media right now may be between Post-Gazette journalists and its publisher, whose family has owned the paper for nearly a century.
Exclusives
When the Pittsburgh Post Gazette pulled reporter Alexis Johnson off coverage of protests triggered by George Floyd’s death, nobody anticipated it would lead to a staff revolt and become a national story, part of an extraordinary week where the news media’s sluggishness in promoting diversity became part of the national conversation.
A black reporter from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette was told she could not cover the city’s protests over the death of George Floyd because of a tweet, and now dozens of […]
