Home > James Ridgeway and Sidney Schanberg Interviewed
Democracy Now! Interview with James Ridgeway and Sidney Schanberg
AMY GOODMAN: Nat Hentoff is still writing for the
Village Voice, at this moment, at least. Jim Ridgeway
now joins us in the studio in Washington, D.C. In
addition to being the paper’s former Washington
correspondent, he is the author of many books. His
latest is called The Five Unanswered Questions About
9/11. Welcome to Democracy Now!, Jim Ridgeway.
JAMES RIDGEWAY: Hi, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. Can you
talk about why you’re no longer at the Village Voice?
How long had you written for them?
JAMES RIDGEWAY: Well, first, before I start that, I
mean, I want to thank my colleagues at the Voice. I
didn’t expect this kind of support. It’s very moving.
And I don’t know. I have written there, I guess, off
and on — I started writing there, I guess, in the
middle ’70s, and then, of course, I wrote with Alex
Cockburn for many years and then carried on by myself.
But the only thing that’s saving me is the union. If I
didn’t have union protection, I would be nowhere. So,
what happened there, you want to know what happened at
the Village Voice?
AMY GOODMAN: Yes.
JAMES RIDGEWAY: Does that mean is that what you want to
know?
AMY GOODMAN: Yes.
JAMES RIDGEWAY: Well, I’ll tell you what happened to
me. I don’t want to get into speculation, and my lawyer
has advised me, as they say, to be circumspect. But I
can say that there was an editorial meeting in the very
beginning, in which Mr. Lacey appeared, and he said
that ’ either there or he told Mark Jacobson that the
Voice was a basket case and I think specifically
referred to the front end of the Voice. And I asked for
a meeting with him to tell him that I would, you know,
support him in any way I could, support the new
management. I was a team player, blah, blah, blah.
He killed my column, and he asked me to submit ideas
for articles to him one by one, which I did, and which
he either ignored or turned down, except in one case
involving the coal mine situation in West Virginia. So,
I mean, I just concluded he didn’t like what I do. I
don’t know what else to say, except that, you know,
they won’t say that I’m fired. I’m supposedly laid off.
So, I don’t know what that means. I’m in some technical
situation, I guess.
But Lacey has talked, I think, not to me, but to
everybody else, about how he wants to do investigative
reporting, more local reporting. I think he doesn’t
want to do, you know, like — he doesn’t want to
retrace things that have been done by the other papers,
the bigger papers. I proposed stories on abortion. He
ignored that. I proposed stories on the Minutemen on
Long Island, who want to protect the Canadian border.
And he said that was old story. Everybody’s done that.
So, I mean, I don’t know. I mean, it seems to me that
the paper, at least from my experience, is kind of
shutting down all its national coverage, but maybe not.
Maybe this is my bizarre take on it.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Jim Ridgeway, could you talk to us
about what it has meant for you over the years to be
able to cover these national stories in the Village
Voice in a way perhaps that other mainstream or
corporate media have not been able to do?
JAMES RIDGEWAY: Well, yeah. I mean, I started writing
about, you know, the Ku Klux Klan and the far right
racist sort of resistance, both the over-ground and the
underground, in the early 1980s. Wayne King of New York
Times did a lot of work on that, but then he left, and
there really hadn’t been much of anybody on the East
Coast that writes about this stuff in any great detail.
There are people in the West in the L.A. Times, Dallas
Morning News, Rocky Mountain and the Kansas City Star,
Trudy Thomas. But, no, I don’t think other people have
written much about that.
I wrote about Haiti from the early moments here when
Aristide was coming back. And one of the things I
really, really tried to do was to write about the
conservative movement in Washington, I mean the new
right in the early 1980s. And I didn’t do it by
attacking people and claiming they were all kooks and
screwballs and stuff, but by trying to understand it
and write articles that basically explain where this
conservative movement was coming from and what it stood
for.
AMY GOODMAN: We are talking to Village Voice, or I
should say former Village Voice reporter, Jim Ridgeway.
We’re going to break. When we come back, he will be
joined by our guest in the New York studio, Mark
Jacobson, who has written a piece about what has
happened to the Village Voice, and Sydney Schanberg, a
Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to former Village Voice
reporter Jim Ridgeway in our Washington studio. And
here in New York we’re joined by Sydney Schanberg, the
former press critic at the Village Voice, Pulitzer
Prize winner. He resigned in February, following the
sale of the paper. He won a Pulitzer Prize for
reporting in Cambodia during the 1970s. His story
inspired the film The Killing Fields. We’re also joined
by Mark Jacobson. He’s a reporter with New York
Magazine. In November, he wrote a major piece on the
Voice-New Times merger, entitled "The Voice from Beyond
the Grave." He’s a former writer at the Village Voice.
And I also want to say, we did try to reach Michael
Lacey, who is the new Executive Editor of the Village
Voice and co-founder of New Times Media, as well as
Christine Brennan, the Executive Managing Editor of the
Village Voice, but they did not return our calls. And
New Times Media is now called Village Voice Media.
Sydney Schanberg, you attended a meeting in early
February with Michael Lacey and the whole Village Voice
staff. What happened?
SYDNEY SCHANBERG: What happened was very sad. Mr. Lacey
came in and very quickly told the staff that he was
disappointed and appalled by the fact that the front of
the book was all commentary and that he wanted hard
news. He said if he wanted to read a daily or regular
critiques of the Bush administration, he would read the
New York Times, and that’s not what he wanted in the
Village Voice. He was insulting to the staff. He
figuratively or in effect called them stenographers. He
said they had to stop being stenographers. When I
objected to that, because that was so insulting, and I
said that you can criticize any news staff in some
ways, but the one thing that you couldn’t call the
Village Voice staff was a staff of stenographers,
taking notes from public figures and just passing them
on.
And I said it was unfair, and he said, ’So, I’m
unfair.’ And then he added, he said, ’Look, I don’t
care what rouses you, even if it’s getting pissed off
at me.’ And I said, ’I’m not pissed off at you. I don’t
even know you.’ And he really had this huge one-ton or
two-ton chip on his shoulder. And I think he walked
into the room thinking that the people in the room
didn’t welcome him and didn’t like him and, you know,
and hated him. And he was totally insecure. And he gave
the impression that he didn’t understand the Voice and
he didn’t understand New York, and he didn’t want to.
He didn’t like it, even though he was born here, I
understand. I mean, he was born in Brooklyn.
And he said a lot of other things. He told the staff
that they better prepare themselves to say goodbye to
some of their friends. He picked a fight with Nat
Hentoff, which was disgusting.
AMY GOODMAN: What about the mentioning of other media
in the Village Voice?
SYDNEY SCHANBERG: Oh, he said, when he picked that
fight with Nat, he was referring specifically to a
story in which Nat had led off one of his pieces
praising an ABC television investigative report. And
Lacey said that was unforgivable and that wasn’t good
journalism, and that he in the future never wanted to
see ever again a story in the Voice that referred to
work done by another publication or media organization,
which is kind of astounding. I don’t know how you can
do it, if you don’t recognition the media as a power
center in America.
My assumption was he didn’t want to cover the press.
His other papers, other New Times paper, don’t have a
press column. He’s not interested in that. And he
really made me think that he really didn’t want to have
the Voice talking about national issues and have a
national focus. He didn’t understand that people in New
York pay attention to those things, huge percentage of
people in New York. And he didn’t want a press column.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Sydney, in terms — this whole
idea of a weekly concentrating on covering news, when
we’re basically dealing now with cable news, 24-hour
cable news, channels in addition to the daily
newspapers, there’s no way that the Village Voice or
any weekly could compete in terms of news coverage. In
fact, the Village Voice’s trademark has always been the
interpretive commentary behind-the-news kinds of
stories that require more of an involvement or the
identity of the writer coming out in the writing, so it
seems to be totally contradictory to the entire history
of the Voice.
SYDNEY SCHANBERG: It’s contradictory to my religion,
which I think is journalism. And the mainstream press
and television, certainly, do a very soft job of
covering the press, either as corporate entities or as
news organizations. Absolutely soft coverage. And that
includes the New York Times. They have always — and
they’ve admitted it privately to me and others that
they don’t want to do this, and not making a clear
explanation why. And so, the Voice has always, as an
alternative paper, has always understood that that was
part of their role, and I think it should be of any
alternative paper.
AMY GOODMAN: Mark Jacobson, we were not able to reach
Michael Lacey, but you did. You interviewed him in your
piece. Can you talk first about why the Village Voice
and what happens to it is a national story?
MARK JACOBSON: Well, the Village Voice is for people,
especially in New York, sort of a religion of sorts. In
other words, if you grew up in New York City, you were
reading the Village Voice, if you were of a certain
kind of liberal mentality. If you grew up in sort of a
place like Queens, like I did, the Village Voice was a
little bit of a life raft for you that could be
extended in the sea of the New York Times and all of
this kind of stuff like that, which was like your
parents’, and you didn’t want that. So, therefore, you
had the Village Voice and you’d read people like Jack
Newfield and Lucian Truscott, all of these kind of
hallowed names, and they would give you this other view
of things. And that’s what the Village Voice was.
Now, I would say the most functional word here is
’was,’ because, you know, when I talked to Lacey, who
was going to be obviously — I don’t want to appear
here to be the apologist for Michael Lacey, who is
like, you know, I personally enjoyed hanging around
with him, because he’s a good-time guy of a sort. He
enjoys drinking and carousing, which is kind of a
change of pace from the former management. But the
paper, as itself, the Village Voice, has been on fallow
times for many years. It’s not just since this guy
arrived two months ago. This paper has been in eclipse
now for 20 years or something like that.
So I don’t want — and I’m sure Mr. Ridgeway, who is a
very good friend of mine, and the idea that I wrote a
— like not uncomplimentary piece about Mr. Lacey, the
idea that he comes and fires my good buddy Ridgeway is
like appalling to me, because Ridgeway is not the kind
of guy you would want to fire. The Village Voice
doesn’t need deletion. It needs addition, because
there’s nothing in there really. You need more stuff,
not less stuff. And so the idea that this is a kind of
glorious, kind of like fantastic journalistic
enterprise, which is now being wrecked by these
barbarians from Phoenix is just not the case.
AMY GOODMAN: We are also joined on the telephone by Tim
Redmond. He is the executive editor at the San
Francisco Bay Guardian. Tim, why is this a story that
you feel is a national story? We’re talking to you from
New York.
TIM REDMOND: I’ll tell you why it’s a national story.
It’s a national story, because the alternative press
has always been kind of feisty, independent,
challenging the status quo, and the alternative press
has always been about independent media, has been about
independent voices. And, you know, it sounds kind of
hokey, but I got into this business 25 years ago,
because, you know, I thought I could help change the
world. And I’m not saying the alternative press has
changed the world, but I think the Village Voice has
made a huge difference in New York, and the Bay
Guardian, where I work, has made a huge difference in
San Francisco, and that’s something.
And what the folks from New Times, now known as Village
Voice Media, want to do, they want to buy up
alternative papers all around the country and make them
all the same. You know, I don’t think anyone should own
17 alternative papers. And I particularly don’t think a
company run by people who despise activism, who are not
activists and don’t think of themselves
journalistically as activists, who don’t endorse
candidates, who don’t take stands on issues, who
haven’t even come out against the war, should be taking
over the Village Voice. It’s really sad. I mean, the
Voice was always part of the activist tradition of the
alternative press. And, you know, in the same way that
a few big chains like Gannett have bought up and
control most of the daily newspapers in the United
States and a few big corporations like Clear Channel
control an awful lot of the radio, a few big
corporations control most of the TV, if we go that way
in the alternative press, it’s going to be very sad,
particularly, as I say, when it is an operation that
doesn’t believe in activist politics. That’s not what
the alternative press has been about.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Tim, a question. New Times has a
reputation, supposedly, for hard-hitting local
investigative stories in many of their other chains.
How do you reconcile that "reputation" with their
current moves, in terms of the Village Voice?
TIM REDMOND: New Times has some good journalists, and
they have done some good stories. I’ve never doubted
that. But they don’t believe in providing progressive
community leadership on issues. They’ll do some
investigative reporting, and there’s nothing wrong with
that. But when it comes to the role the alternative
press has always taken, which is to provide activist
leadership, they don’t believe in it.
Besides, you know, I don’t care if Mike Lacey wants to
run a kind of neo-libertarian paper down in Phoenix and
say whatever he wants to say and do whatever he wants
to do. But once he tries to take papers all over the
country and make them all the same, you know, it’s kind
of like the Borg. They sweep into town, they take over
a paper, and they remold it in their own image so it’s
exactly like all of the other New Times papers. If you
go from city to city to city, you know, Denver,
Phoenix, you go around, Houston and Miami, they all
look the same. They all have the same voice. They all
have the same tone. And that’s not good for the
alternative press, and I would say that’s not good for
the United States. It’s not good for progressive
politics. This is not what the alternative press is
about.
AMY GOODMAN: Sydney Schanberg, what did Michael Lacey
— and again, we wanted to have him on, were not able
to reach him or Christine Brennan, another executive,
management in the Village Voice — what did they say
about covering President Bush?
SYDNEY SCHANBERG: Well, as I said before, he said, ’If
I want to read regular criticism or bashing of the Bush
administration, I’ll read the New York Times. I don’t
want it in this paper.’ And I agree with Redmond about
them doing a cookie-cutter job. This was a wrecking
crew. And I just don’t believe that you have to come in
when you want to change things and tell people —
insult them. I just don’t — I mean, if you believe in
journalism, you don’t come in and insult good
journalists. And there’s something inside Lacey that
led him to think this was an adversary group, this was
a group that was adversarial to him, before he actually
ever had a serious conversation with members of the
staff.
And I asked him afterward. I said I had one question,
and how could you have — how could we have a press
column if we can’t write about other work done in the
press? And he said, ’Did you hear what I said in
there?’ And I said, ’Yeah, you were quite clear. But
that doesn’t answer my question.’ ’Just listen. Just
remember what I said.’ And I shook his hand, and I
walked away and I walked out of the place.
The fact is that there is something wrong with people
who come into a newspaper and insult journalism. And
I’ll disagree with Mark Jacobson. It’s very easy to say
that something is a shadow of itself, and it may be
true in some senses. There may be people who once were
there that, you know, critics and others, but most of
the people he’s talking about were writing commentary,
as well as news. And the fact of the matter is the
Voice still provides the majority of investigative
coverage of New York City and New York state. And if
Mr. Jacobson can tell me anybody else who is doing a
serious job on this, I’d be glad to listen.
I should mention, by the way, so that people can say I
was motivated, he called it the once lively press
column. But I don’t judge myself by what someone says
in another piece.
[. . . ]
AMY GOODMAN: What about fact checkers at the Village
Voice, speaking of which?
SYDNEY SCHANBERG: As I understand it, Lacey has
dismissed all of the fact checkers.
AMY GOODMAN: Jim Ridgeway is still with us in
Washington, D.C. Jim Ridgeway, former Washington
correspondent for the Village Voice. There are a lot of
issues you think are worth covering. Your latest book
is The Five Unanswered Questions About 9/11: What the
9/11 Commission Report Failed to Tell Us. What do you
think needs to be covered, if you were still writing in
the Village Voice?
JIM RIDGEWAY: Well, I suggested to Lacey that, you know
— he said he was very into this, what he calls,
magazine writing, which means you find some guy and
trace his life, I guess, until something happens to
him. But I suggested investigation of like the New York
ports and the security in the New York port system by a
team of reporters and, you know, in terms of terrorism.
And I have suggested over and over again ways — and
written about ways of looking at this hurricane
situation, in terms of the way the government has
responded to the hurricane stuff. And I was told by the
acting editor at time, under Lacey, he called me up,
and I wrote an article in which I attributed something
to a document that the Washington Post printed. And he
called me up and he said, that article you wrote, that
is exactly what he doesn’t want.
You know, I mean, and Izzy Stone said, ’There’s good
journalism and bad journalism.’ It has nothing to do
with some formulaic crap about, you know, some
prototype about magazine writing or whatever, you know?
So there’s that.
There’s the whole 9/11 thing about the responsibility
of the airlines in 9/11. I mean, yesterday, there was a
great deal of — you know, everyone is terribly upset
about this 93, Flight 93. But, I mean, why did Flight
93 ever get off the ground? I mean, you know, it got
off the ground after two other planes hit. Why didn’t
somebody call all these pilots and tell them to stop or
close their doors? Why didn’t these things happen? What
is the responsibility of the airline industry? So, I
mean, there are issues like that that seem to me that
people in New York City would like to know about. I
mean, maybe the reporting will be wrong, but, I mean,
they would like to know about it. I can’t imagine
anybody doing journalism in New York City and not
talking about politics. What, are they crazy or
something?
AMY GOODMAN: What about Zacarias Moussaoui and the
latest news?
JIM RIDGEWAY: Well, I mean, to me, Zacarias Moussaoui
is, you know, a horrible guy, and he’s a nut probably.
But, I mean, he serves a very interesting political
purpose here, because he covers up stuff that — the
activities of the F.B.I., and the F.B.I., you know, ran
this absolutely incredible, ridiculous operation before
9/11, in which they, you know, overlooked hijackers
living in California — living openly in California,
renting apartments from their own, you know, informant.
I mean, all this stuff is fortuitously thrown down the
hole, because everybody concentrates on what a bastard
Moussaoui is. I mean, I don’t doubt he’s a bastard, but
I just think that the business of having an inquiry
into 9/11 is a really big deal, having an open, decent
inquiry that will answer questions that all Americans
have. I don’t think it’s some conspiracy theory deal or
anything like that. But I don’t understand why the
Village Voice wouldn’t be in the forefront of doing
something like that. I mean, what’s going to happen? Is
there going to be another 9/11 type thing in New York,
some suicide bomber or something, and the Village Voice
editorial is going to turn around and say, ’Oh, let the
New York Times do it. They do a better job’? I can’t
believe that.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And, Sydney Schanberg, the Voice, of
course, has been through many owners since Norman
Mailer and his fellow co-conspirators started it. Even
under Murdoch, it maintained some degree of political
independence. And your sense, especially when I hear
that, for instance, a young reporter like Jennifer
Gonnerman who has done fantastic coverage of the
prison-industrial complex has left, as well, your sense
of its future?
SYDNEY SCHANBERG: Well, Jennifer Gonnerman is a very
good example of Lacey saying one thing and meaning
another. He said he wanted narrative journalism. And in
that meeting, he praised her. He said you seem you know
what you’re doing. She wanted to know exactly what kind
of pieces. And he said, ’I don’t think I have to tell
you, because you’re already doing it.’ And yet, he
refused to put her on the staff. She obviously — I’m
guessing now from what she said when she left. She said
she hoped that they would use the staff to better
advantage. And my guess is she wanted to be a full-time
staffer, and they said no. They wanted to keep her on
this, you know, penurious freelance basis.
So, I don’t necessarily believe Lacey. I think when he
talks about investigative journalism, he talks about
isolated cases without connecting the dots. I believe
in connecting-the-dots journalism. That’s how we’re
finding out about what’s happening in Iraq and how this
war was conceived. And people like Jim Ridgeway and Nat
Hentoff and others, and I’d like to think myself, did
that kind of thing and have enough experience and have
seen enough of things happening in the world that we
can connect those things for any audience, especially
the New York audience that has an interest in national
affairs.
I just think it’s a sin to do certain things in
journalism. I think, for example, that firing Jim
Ridgeway is a journalistic sin, just as when the New
York Times let Russell Baker go. You don’t do things
like that, just because somebody is older or whatever,
you personally don’t like their stuff, because the idea
of a newspaper is to let all voices ring, let them all
be heard. And that’s not what he’s saying. So I don’t
have any — you know, I don’t have any — I don’t know
this man, Mike Lacey. But I don’t have any respect for
how he’s behaved or how he’s conducted himself at the
Voice.
AMY GOODMAN: Sydney Schanberg, I wanted to go back to
Tim Redmond, executive editor at the San Francisco Bay
Guardian. The Bay Guardian filed suit against the San
Francisco Weekly, the East Bay Express and the New
Times newspapers, charging that the nation’s largest
alternative news weekly chain had illegally sold
advertising below cost in an effort to put the family-
owned Bay Guardian out of business. Can you talk about
this suit and how it relates to the discussion we’re
having now?
TIM REDMOND: Sure, it relates to the discussion,
because it demonstrates that Mike Lacey and the folks
from Phoenix don’t believe in a diversity of voices.
They don’t believe in newspaper competition. They don’t
believe in independent press. What they did in San
Francisco is they came into our market, they bought a
locally owned competitor, the S.F. Weekly, which at
that time was owned by a local guy. They bought it, and
they immediately started selling ads at less than the
cost of producing them, basically losing money, and
they have been losing money every year in San
Francisco, a lot of money, but it doesn’t matter
because they’re a big chain and they can draw on their
profits from other markets. Their goal is to put us out
of business, because they want the market to
themselves. That’s how these guys operate. These are
monopolist anti-competitive people, the same way all of
the big national news chains and the mainstream press
that we’re also critical of operate. They came into San
Francisco. As I say, their goal is to have the market
to themselves.
Now, San Francisco, like New York, is a very political
market, and we have always been a newspaper that is a
part of that. We’re a part of the San Francisco
community. We try to make the city a better place.
They’re not interested in that. Their politics are very
cynical. Nothing is ever good enough for New Times,
which is now Village Voice Media, sad to say. And their
modus operandi is to dominate and control markets.
That, again, goes against the whole grain of what the
alternative press has been about. If these guys have
their way, they would like to buy up every alternative
newspaper in the country and make them all exactly the
same. And that’s a problem in San Francisco. It’s a
problem in New York. It’s a problem nationwide, where
there are alternative newspapers serving their
community. And that’s what these guys are about.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to end with Jim Ridgeway in
Washington, D.C. We’re talking about the print paper,
the Village Voice, but it also has a web component that
you have been very successfully writing in. Can you
describe that, as we wrap up?
JAMES RIDGEWAY: Yeah, I mean, I think the web is the
future of the alternative press, to tell you the truth.
And I spent a lot of time and really worked as hard as
I could — I’m not very technologically gifted, but, I
mean, I worked as hard as I could to put stuff on the
Voice web, from spot news to investigative, whatever.
And I wanted to introduce videos, you know, verite
video, which I was able to do for a certain period of
time. And then, you know, the support wasn’t there.
But Lacey said he didn’t care about the web. I said,
’Look, I’m filing maybe three or four stories a week on
the web, on a daily basis almost.’ He said, well, you
know, he didn’t care about that. He said cut it back.
You know, and I just don’t know what to say about this,
except that the future of this alternative — there’s
no point in saying that alternative journalism is dead
or anything like that, because it’s going to survive
and it’s going to survive very, very well on the web.
That’s the future of this thing. And if guys like Lacey
and Larkin and others, I’m sure, want to turn these
things into like, you know, like shoppers, they want to
turn these newspapers into shoppers that don’t have
anything in them and just use them to sell advertising,
I mean, you know, they can do it, because the
journalism will just plain move on. That’s all.
AMY GOODMAN: Jim Ridgeway, I want to thank you for very
much for being with us, Washington correspondent —
former Washington correspondent for the Village Voice.
His latest book is called The Five Unanswered Questions
About 9/11: What the 9/11 Commission Report Failed to
Tell Us. We have also been joined by Sydney Schanberg,
Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, resigned from the
Village Voice after Jim was forced out. Mark Jacobson,
who writes for New York Magazine and wrote a piece on
what’s happening to the Village Voice called "The Voice
from Beyond the Grave." And in California, thanks to
Tim Redmond, who has joined us, executive editor at the
San Francisco Bay Guardian. We will continue to follow
this and hope that Village Voice Media, which is the
new name for New Times Media, will also agree to join
us at a future point.