Field of Schemes

by Neil deMause

  To that end, Cross brought in Mike Murphy of Murphy Pintak Gaulter, the firm that had managed the successful gubernatorial campaigns of such GOP standouts as New Jersey’s Christine Todd Whitman, Wisconsin’s Tommy Thompson, and Michigan’s John Engler. The first thing Murphy told the team, according to Cross, was to “get ready to spend some serious coin.” A typical mayoral campaign will cost around $2 million over the course of a year; the Coalition for a Greater Miami—the political action committee formed by the team to run the pro-arena campaign—would ultimately spend an astonishing $3.7 million in just eight weeks to convince Dade County voters of the rightness of their cause.

  “The next thing we found out from our polls,” continued Cross, “was that Pat Riley’s one of the most popular guys around.” Riley, the longtime NBA coach (and motivational book author) whose contract with the Heat gave him part-ownership of the team, became the centerpiece of the hundreds of TV commercials that all those millions of PAC dollars were buying, with an escalating series of messages (in both English and Spanish) designed to peak in the days right before the election. In the earliest commercials, a smiling, shirt-sleeved Riley, a basketball under his arm, cajoled viewers with promises of “a fantastic waterfront park; a safe, fun place for families to enjoy, with shops, restaurants, and a championship arena” as a computer-generated flyby of the new arena filled the screen.

  By the week before the election, the televised images had changed. The message now “went negative,” explained Cross. Riley’s friendly appeal was gone; in its place were images of vacant lots and a voiceover that intoned, “This is the waterfront the politicians want to save. Broken concrete. A haven for criminals. Dade County deserves better: a safe new waterfront park for all our families. Existing tourist taxes pay the bill, so you don’t have to. But some politicians want to kill the new waterfront park and keep the tourist money for their wasteful spending.” Although Cross says proudly that the team never directly threatened to leave town if the arena weren’t built, the possibility became a less than subtle theme of the ads as well, as residents were depicted reciting the campaign’s new slogan: “Vote No, so the Heat won’t go.”

  The arena campaign, befitting the money and expertise brought to it, was slick, subtle, and convincing. By the week before the vote, the Heat had wooed the support of the mayor as well. (“He realized that driving the local millionaire out of town is not exactly smart politics,” bragged Cross.)

  The final vote was 59 percent to 41 percent, in favor of the Heat. For $3.7 million, the basketball team had bought a 19-percentage-point swing in the polls.1

  Corporate Cheerleaders

  The Heat’s successful manipulation of public opinion points up the difficulty of pinning down “public sentiment” on corporate welfare—it all depends on how you ask the question, and those intent on manipulating the process will always ask the question in the way that will most benefit their interests. “The public” doesn’t, by and large, see the behind-the-scenes maneuvering that Cross described. For most people, the story consists of what appears on TV and in the print media—and that picture often bears little resemblance to reality.

  The media are seldom credited as key boosters of stadium deals, if only because, for the owners and their allies, they can seem like an enemy of their PR attempts, uncovering uncomfortable details of the deal going down. Certainly, much stadium reporting is negative—with all the dirty facts of stadium deals, even a lazy reporter can’t help but stumble over a few by accident.

  Yet a few incisive articles do little to change the premises on which the stadium debate is reported, which often seem lifted straight from the teams’ PR manuals. As media critics point out, a few critical articles can easily coexist with a greater editorial push in favor of a project. “There are so many self-deluded reporters in the mainstream media who sneak the truth into one story out of every twenty they write and think they’ve done their job, because the truth got out,” observes Jim Naureckas, editor of the media-watch magazine Extra! But the impact of news, he notes, is in its repetition, and occasionally showing glimpses of one side of the story can serve to strengthen the apparent “objectivity” of press coverage that is in fact skewed mightily in one direction.

  What’s more important than isolated articles, as far as public sentiment is concerned, is how the media frame the issue. Even when critical of some fine point of a deal, they seldom question the need for a new stadium, invariably editorializing against legislators who “hunker down behind the public opinion polls.” In this context, public opposition is presented as a mere temporary obstacle to the inevitable course of progress, which will ultimately—should ultimately—result in a new sports facility being built.

  In Seattle, for example, after voters had narrowly defeated a proposal to build a new stadium for the Mariners baseball team in September 1995, the Seattle Times—which had provided free ad space for the pro-stadium campaign—editorialized that this represented “a striking affirmation of the region’s commitment to baseball,” adding, “half of King County voters would tax themselves to keep the team there.” (That slightly more than half had voted not to tax themselves wasn’t deemed worthy of notice.) The next day, the paper ran a front-page story headlined “Stadium Not Yet Dead,” in which it suggested ways that the state government could go ahead with the stadium despite the popular vote. One month later, the state legislature would do just that.

  This type of reporting, in which the stadium campaign is itself portrayed almost as a sporting event where the paper roots along with the home team, is endemic to stadium coverage. Two days before the public vote on that team’s new football stadium, a San Francisco Examiner headline read: “49ers drive toward goal as clock ticks down.” In this “pennant-race” coverage, stories become more focused on who’s winning or losing than on digging out the truthfulness of the two sides’ arguments. The day before the 49ers referendum, a San Francisco Chronicle columnist led off his column on a debate between San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown and California state senator Quentin Kopp over the new 49ers stadium by writing that Brown had “won on points,” beneath the headline “Brown Wins With His Jabbing.” It was left to the readers’ imagination whether or not the debate had revealed anything of substance.

  “Who Are You Guys?”

  As with elected officials, there’s no shortage of possible reasons that the media are so owner-friendly.

  The most straightforward theory was summarized by Beth Hawkins of the Minneapolis City Pages in her analysis of that city’s media coverage of stadium deals: “Sports editors and writers freely acknowledge the symbiosis that exists between the news media and pro sports. Newspapers create excitement among fans, who drive up ticket sales. And while pro teams themselves don’t create a lot of advertising, a thriving franchise attracts readers to the paper who might not otherwise pick it up.” In Seattle, Hawkins reported, press runs of newspapers the day after a game are increased by anywhere from 10 to 20 percent, depending on which team played and whether it won or lost.

  But newspapers, especially newspaper owners, have a stake in stadiums and other development projects that goes beyond mere sales figures. Modern media enterprises are themselves major corporations, whose publishers often share team owners’ interests in promoting public subsidies of business interests and downtown development. In many cities, including Cleveland, Seattle, Milwaukee, and Minneapolis, local newspaper publishers have helped fund pro-stadium lobbying efforts, or even registered as lobbyists themselves to press legislators on their hometown team’s behalf.

  The most egregious example of media self-interest may be the Minneapolis Star Tribune, whose then publisher, John Cowles Jr., raised $10.5 million to help city officials buy land for the Metrodome in the late ’70s—in exchange for the right to develop some two hundred acres of land surrounding the site. (Star Tribune staffers later took out a full-page ad disassociating themselves from the paper’s Metrodome coverage.) Following Cowles’s death in 1983, his successors
at Cowles Media continued to carry the flame for the Twins’ stadium dreams, making unspecified donations to the team’s lobbying arm. The donations are well worth the gamble: If a new stadium is built, the paper stands to cash in on the parking lots that would rise on the downtown property that it acquired in the Metrodome deal.

  Media owners are quick to deny that these interlocking business deals represent a conflict of interest. They claim that their papers maintain an impenetrable wall between reporters and management and furthermore point to the critical stories they have published on stadium projects (often alongside pro-stadium editorials). The Seattle Times went so far as to cite its coverage of its own gift of free ads to the Mariners’ pro-stadium campaign as a sign of its impartiality: Executive editor Michael Francher asserted in an editorial that “it was a safe bet” that such a story would never have been published in “a newspaper whose reporting is affected by the publisher of the editorial page.”

  But the experience of numerous reporters has been that the division between management and editorial, far from being an impenetrable wall, is instead more like a thin screen, across which publishers can subtly influence news coverage while staying technically out of sight. One of the most insightful looks into the inner workings of journalistic self-censorship is Fear and Favor in the Newsroom, an hour-long documentary produced by California Newsreel. In it the filmmakers compiled the stories of various reporters who were forced out of their jobs when their zeal for journalism grew stronger than their willingness to toe the corporate line. They cited the example of an award-winning consumer reporter being accused of “bias” for correctly predicting that a nuclear power plant was driving its parent company into bankruptcy, and told how a veteran newsman was fired by NBC for trying to report on Iraqi civilian casualties of U.S. bombing during the Gulf War. In story after story, journalists told how, despite claims of a hands-off policy, on “controversial” issues, management can easily make its wishes known—and carried out.

  60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman, for example, while insisting that he has been able to get unpleasant truths across on his program, told the filmmakers, “It’s never been as heavy-handed as someone saying, ‘You can’t do that story.’ But I think it’s understood that when you get into that area that you are in a dangerous area.”

  Sydney Schanberg, the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, had his New York Times career ended when he stepped on one too many toes. “It happens sort of by osmosis,” he explained in the documentary. “There are no notes posted on the bulletin board. Senior editors usually do not tell desk editors like the city editor, ‘We don’t want you to cover this, we want you to cover that instead.’” Nonetheless, Schanberg found out the hard way that there are lines not to be crossed; when he used his column to criticize the Times and other local papers for focusing on soft news like restaurant openings rather than exposing government wrongdoing, he was shoved out the door.

  Schanberg’s mistake, according to his former colleague John Hess, was in trying to cover New York City in the same way he would Cambodia. “The paper finds it really hard,” Hess told the filmmakers, “to tolerate this kind of hard, controversial journalism about the people the publisher is eating with every day.” Although the desired slant is seldom phrased in terms of pleasing corporate sponsors, that is still the hidden message, explained Wendell Rawls Jr., an Atlanta Constitution staffer who quit when a popular muckraking editor was forced out in favor of a new chief brought in from USA Today. “This attitude pervades the entire newspaper, that we are trying to make people feel better about themselves somehow, rather than letting them hold up a mirror to themselves.”2

  Perhaps it’s this kind of unstated pressure that produces in journalists what Frank Rashid of the Tiger Stadium Fan Club calls “studied incompetence.” New reporters coming onto the stadium beat, he says, seemed ignorant even of their own newspaper’s previous coverage of the story. “You’d think at least that person would have the intelligence, especially in this computer age, to go back and check the stories that had been written before. I don’t think that ever happens. We were having to reorient reporters into the story consistently.”

  On one occasion, Rashid recalls, he wound up calling the Detroit Free Press to complain about an inaccurate story about the Fan Club. He pointed out to a city desk editor that the reporter had printed inaccurate statements by the group’s opponents about the Fan Club, statements that the reporter himself had to have known were untrue.

  The editor, according to Rashid, replied with indignation, “What do you expect? Monaghan has made money. He’s paid his dues. Who are you guys?”

  “I really appreciated the honesty,” says Rashid. “But, damn! None of us is disreputable. We’re all people who are solid citizens, but we don’t have money. Solid citizens without money don’t count as well as somebody who’s got a big corporation. So it doesn’t matter that we worked for several years on the issue, or established a track record of being credible, or anything like that.3”

  The Usual Suspects

  Finally, no picture of the urban power structure would be complete without the group that the Seattle Times referred to as “The Civic Power Brokers No One Elected.” They are the bond lawyers who are called in to give legal authorization for deals between cities and banks when major bond issues are involved, and they are part of the massive network of profit makers that has been making money off urban debt—especially major deals like new stadiums—for decades.

  In Seattle the law firm of Preston, Gates & Ellis stands to make a cool $145,000 for its role as legal counsel in the city council’s authorization of $336 million in bonds to pay for a new home for the Seattle Mariners. The firm, “the king of bondsmakers in Washington State,” according to the Times, handled 60 percent of the state’s bond work in 1996.

  It is up to their attorneys to declare bonds legally enforceable. If they do, and the bond issue is approved, they collect a fee, sometimes topping $1 million. The role that bond lawyers play in encouraging municipalities to go into debt over massive construction projects may be largely behind the scenes, but it’s hardly a secret. Jordan Brower, a Seattle activist, told the Seattle Times, “These guys take council members and ‘educate’ them about finances. ‘Here’s a nice building that you can be remembered by.’”

  How influential are bond lawyers and the huge firms they represent? The Sports Facilities Finance conference in New York was officially the Municipal Issuers’ & Sports Franchises’ Symposium on Sports Facilities Finance—note the “issuers.” Hobnobbing among the representatives of professional sports teams and urban governments were lawyers and representatives of some of the country’s biggest Wall Street law firms. The convention wouldn’t have happened without them.

  One Dollar, One Vote

  For owners and their political allies, money provides a way around not just the media but the public as well. Having learned from the experiences of franchises like the Heat, teams will seldom go into a public vote without a multimillion-dollar budget for TV commercials and other PR strategies. The biggest spender of all: Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, who, in a rush to get a football-stadium referendum on the Washington state ballot before his option to buy the Seattle Seahawks expired, simply offered the state $4.2 million to avoid the time-consuming signature-gathering phase usually required to put a proposal on the state ballot. The state legislature happily took him up on the offer, and Allen went on to spend another $5 million (in six weeks) on lobbying the public for a positive vote.

  When Minnesota’s Metropolitan Sports Facility Commission began hearings on publicly funding a new stadium, says activist Ricky Rask, they were careful to exclude the public in every way possible, shifting meeting dates at the last minute and denying time for public comment. The third or fourth time Rask showed up at a “public hearing” and was denied time to speak, she says, “I stood up and I said, ‘Excuse me, but if you’re not going to allow public testimony, then you need to retract this statement. Do one or t
he other, but make it clear about what you’re going to do.’” The commissioners tried to silence Rask—“Oh, gee, they were mad!” she recalls—but with TV news cameras on the scene (at Rask’s invitation), they had little choice but to open the meetings to public testimony.

  Frank Rashid and Kim Stroud had a similar experience at the Wayne County hearings on allocating public money for a new stadium for the Tigers. “It was supposed to be a public hearing,” Rashid says. “We heard about it a day before. Kim called up and said what time is the hearing, and they said it begins at noon. We stayed up all night, worked on materials—we knew that they were going to approve it, but we thought we had at least to go down there.”

  When the Fan Club activists arrived at the county building, they were told that the hearing had in fact started at 9 a.m., though it was continuing through the afternoon. Rashid put his name down to speak, and they settled in to wait for the public comment section. “Finally we got an agenda for the afternoon session, and there was a vote scheduled—and after the vote, there was public comment.” Only one “member of the public” did get to speak before the vote, he notes wryly: Denise Ilitch Lites, Tigers owner Mike Ilitch’s daughter.

  The Carrot and the Stick

  There are cities, of course, where the coalition doesn’t fall neatly together, where a stubborn politician, or a particularly skeptical press, stops a deal for the time being. But mayors and editors come and go, while businessmen such as sports owners stay on—and if the wait is too long for an impatient owner, he can always sell at a profit to someone else who will play the stadium game in his place.