New York Times Punk’d By Anti-Union Plant (Updated)

By Keith Olbermann

Original at FOK NEWS, Keith Olbermann’s Official Not-for-profit blog 
[print_link] Posted on February 28, 2011

FEW NEWS STORIES better spoke to the destruction of union solidarity and the realization that even those public employees collectively bargaining in Wisconsin were going to have to give something back, than the New York Times’ piece a week ago tomorrow titled “Union Bonds In Wisconsin Begin To Fray.”

The by-line was shared by no less than Arthur G. Sulzberger, the son of the publisher and official carrier of the Times’ family name. The piece ran prominently on the front page. Sulzberger himself interviewed the main ‘get’ in the piece. Beyond the mere reporting was the symbolism of the Times – even the sainted liberal media Times – throwing in the towel on the inviolability of unions, conceding that an American state could renege with impunity on a good faith contract with anybody, and that maybe the Right is right every once in awhile.

Problem is, A.G. Sulzberger’s featured disillusioned unionist interviewee…wasn’t in a union.

JANESVILLE, Wis. — Rich Hahan worked at the General Motors plant here until it closed about two years ago. He moved to Detroit to take another G.M. job while his wife and children stayed here, but then the automaker cut more jobs. So Mr. Hahan, 50, found himself back in Janesville, collecting unemployment for a time, and watching as the city’s industrial base seemed to crumble away.

Among the top five employers here are the county, the schools and the city. And that was enough to make Mr. Hahan, a union man from a union town, a supporter of Gov. Scott Walker’s sweeping proposal to cut the benefits and collective-bargaining rights of public workers in Wisconsin, a plan that has set off a firestorm of debate and protests at the state Capitol. He says he still believes in unions, but thinks those in the public sector lead to wasteful spending because of what he sees as lavish benefits and endless negotiations.

“Something needs to be done,” he said, “and quickly.”

Compelling, damning, overwhelming words, and from such a source!

Except the source, Rick Hahn, now admits that while he worked in union factories, he was never, you know, in a union per se. So why did the Diogenes of the Times, Mr. Sulzberger, believe he had found his honest union man? Because Hahn “described himself to a reporter as a ‘union guy.’”

And yes, Hahan/Hahn’s deception, intentional or accidental (and if you noticed the multiple spelling, yes, Mr. Sulzberger of the Times also got the guy’s name wrong) sat out there in the alleged newspaper of record for four days, during which nobody bothered to correct the sloppy, destructive reporting of the Family Heir. When they finally did, editors buried it inside.

‘Buried it inside’ is newspaper lingo, in case A.G. Sulzberger isn’t familiar with it.

We know about this Times disaster from last Tuesday because the paper finally got around to correcting it in Saturday’s edition. The mistake got page 1A. The correction got a little box “below the fold” (somebody explain that term to Mr. Sulzberger, too) on 2A, which is read about as thoroughly as the drug interaction warnings that come with aspirin:

A front-page article on Tuesday about reaction among private-sector workers in Wisconsin to Gov. Scott Walker’s effort to cut benefits and collective-bargaining rights for unionized public employees referred incorrectly to the work history of one person quoted, and also misspelled his surname. While the man, Rich Hahn (not Hahan) described himself to a reporter as a “union guy,” he now says that he has worked at unionized factories, but was not himself a union member. (The Times contacted Mr. Hahn again to review his background after a United Auto Workers official said the union had no record of his membership.)

This clear picture of a bunch of agendas happily coinciding – ‘Sulzberger! Find me a Wisconsin union guy who agrees with the Governor!’ – and to hell with the facts or the fact-checking or the spelling, with the truth coming to light only from – gasp! – an actual union guy (from the devil UAW itself!), has been reduced to a “PS, the publisher’s kid kinda screwed up on the most important domestic news story of the moment” instead of serving as the springboard for something fair, or even useful – maybe a front-page piece about the disinformation war being waged by Governor Walker and the Koch Brothers and the Tea Party in Wisconsin and whether or not this Hahan/Hahn was part of it, intentionally or inadvertently.

Fortunately the Times fulfilled its literal journalistic obligation. The “Mr. Hahan, a union man from a union town” of the original piece, is now safely corrected for all time (except in all the versions that ran in the Times and other papers like The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) into “Mr. Hahn, a man who has worked at unionized factories.”

This is as if an article about whistle-blowing at Fox News was predicated on quotes from me and erroneously identified me as a former Fox News host, but had been corrected to ‘Mr. Olbermann, the news commentator who has worked at Fox.’ It is literally true. I used to work at Fox. Fox Sports. I went to visit a friend in the Fox News basement bunker once, in 1999.

I am not just injecting myself gratuitously into this important flagging of the Times for getting hosed by a union guy who never belonged to the union. I read recently in the same paper that early in my career I had been fired by UPI Television. I never worked for UPI Television. If you read the first of these essays you know I also wasn’t fired by UPI Anything (although a drunken boss tried – and was – Oh, Irony! – stopped by the union). The best part is that until I read the piece, I don’t think I’d ever heard of “UPI Television.”

The obvious point about Sulzberger’s story is that, at best, the Times made a terrible mistake rendering fraudulent a featured piece on imperiled American freedom in the middle of an info-war over that freedom by a reporter whose name is synonymous with its power structure and then tried to whitewash itself (or, at worst, it wasn’t an amazing coincidence, and the Times got played like the proverbial three-dollar banjo and then tried to whitewash itself).

Seems to me the Times could start with finding out exactly who Mr. Hahan/Hahn is. There appears to be a “Rich Hahn” involved with “staffing and recruiting” for a company called “PSI” in the “Janesville/Beloit area” in Wisconsin. Is that Mr. Sulzberger’s “union guy”? I’d try to tell you before, but that shred of possibly irrelevant information required me to expend nearly one entire calorie of brain heat performing a google search that kept me hopping for 30 seconds. I just did more research than the Times did and I need a nap.

Maybe they could talk to Gabrielle Union. She must have an important point of view on organized labor. Man, what if she liked Walker’s proposals! That’d be some story, huh? That’d get the Right Wing off our backs for eight seconds? Am I right? Sulzberger? Sulzberger? Hello?

But the larger issue here is that while the Times and the supposed other members of the liberal media plot to turn the America of 2011 into, I dunno, the America of 1976, are flooding resources into stories in Libya and Oman – vital stories to be sure, but hardly likely to be as resonant with and impacting of generations of middle class Americans yet unborn – they can’t be bothered to assign a fact-checker back in the newsroom in New York just to make sure Arthur G. Sulzberger can separate the ‘guys who are members of a union’ from the self-proclaimed ‘union guys who are expressing a philosophical attitude towards unionism that may or may not be deliberately misleading.’

A million dollars to decide how to spell Gaddafi, Khaddafy, or Qadafi – but not a penny to make a call about Rick Hahan. Or Hahn. Fitting that they added the extra “a” in Hahn’s name, isn’t? Read the original first sentence aloud and you can put enough spin on the syllables to pronounce it “Hah!-an.”

To prove true to the premise of equal pub for corrections, that penultimate sentence originally read “fitting that they added the extra ‘h’ in Hahn’s name, isn’t?” I corrected it when a reader pointed out how dim my bulb was during the composition of that sentence and how it got past my copy editor and research team (me).

Updating:

I am reminded by a colleague that this story had already spilled over into real world consequences long before the Times’ malfeasance was identified. Courtesy Michael Moore’s website: Governor Walker had already clipped and saved the story of the phony union man Hahn – and even boasted about it to the guy he thought was his puppet-master David Koch:

SCOTT WALKER: The New York Times, of all things—I don’t normally tell people to read the New York Times, but the front page of the New York Times, they’ve got a great story—one of these unbelievable moments of true journalism—what it’s supposed to be, objective journalism—they got out of the capital and went down one county south of the capital, to Janesville, to Rock County, that’s where the General Motors plant once was.

FAKE DAVID KOCH: Right, right.

SCOTT WALKER: They moved out two years ago. The lead on this story’s about a guy who was laid off two years ago, he’d been laid off twice by GM, who points out that everybody else in his town has had to sacrifice except for all these public employees, and it’s about damn time they do and he supports me. And they had a bartender, they had—every stereotypical blue collar worker-type, they interviewed, and the only ones who weren’t with us were ones who were either a public employee or married to a public employee. It’s an unbelievable—so I went through and called all these, uh, a handful, a dozen or so lawmakers I worry about each day, and said to them, everyone, get that story and print it out and send it to anybody giving you grief.

This is the first time I’ve agreed with Governor Walker: An unbelievable? Indeed, it is an unbelievable!

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ADDENDUM: The original piece critiqued above

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The New York Times

Union Bonds in Wisconsin Begin to Fray

By A. G. SULZBERGER (below) and MONICA DAVEY

Published: February 21, 2011

JANESVILLE, Wis. — Rich Hahn worked at the General Motors plant here until it closed about two years ago. He moved to Detroit to take another G.M. job while his wife and children stayed here, but then the automaker cut more jobs. So Mr. Hahn, 50, found himself back in Janesville, collecting unemployment for a time, and watching as the city’s industrial base seemed to crumble away.

Narayan Mahon for The New York Times

Pat Welhitz says ending collective bargaining is “pretty drastic even for a staunch Republican.”

ROOM FOR DEBATE

Wisconsin’s Blow to Union Power

Will the governor’s war on public employees’ collective bargaining rights sweep the nation?

Related in Opinion

• Editorial: Spreading Anti-Union Agenda (February 23, 2011) 

MaryKay Horter, an occupational therapist, supports the governor’s proposal: “I don’t get to bargain in my job, either.”

Among the top five employers here are the county, the schools and the city. And that was enough to make Mr. Hahn, a man who has worked at unionized factories, a supporter of Gov. Scott Walker’s sweeping proposal to cut the benefits and collective-bargaining rights of public workers in Wisconsin, a plan that has set off a firestorm of debate and protests at the state Capitol. He says he still believes in unions, but thinks those in the public sector lead to wasteful spending because of what he sees as lavish benefits and endless negotiations.

“Something needs to be done,” he said, “and quickly.”

Across Wisconsin, residents like Mr. Hahn have fumed in recent years as tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs have vanished, and as some of the state’s best-known corporations have pressured workers to accept benefit cuts.

Wisconsin’s financial problems are not as dire as those of many other states. But a simmering resentment over those lost jobs and lost benefits in private industry — combined with the state’s history of highly polarized politics — may explain why Wisconsin, once a pioneer in supporting organized labor, has set off a debate that is spreading to other states over public workers, unions and budget woes.

There are deeply divided opinions and shifting allegiances over whether unions are helping or hurting people who have been caught in the recent economic squeeze. And workers themselves, being pitted against one another, are finding it hard to feel sympathy or offer solidarity, with their own jobs lost and their benefits and pensions cut back or cut off.

“Everyone else needs to pinch pennies and give more money to health insurance companies and pay for their own retirement,” said Cindy Kuehn as she left Jim and Judy’s Food Market in Palmyra. “It’s about time the buck stops.”

In Madison, the capital, which has become the focus of protests, many state workers and students at the University of Wisconsin predictably oppose the proposed cuts.

But away from Madison, many people said that public workers needed to share in the sacrifice that their own families have been forced to make.

The effort to weaken bargaining rights for public-sector unions has been particularly divisive, with some people questioning the need to tackle such a fundamental issue to solve the state’s budget problems.

But more often the conversation has turned to the proposals to increase public workers’ contributions to their pensions and health care, and on these issues people said they were less sympathetic, and often grew flushed and emotional telling stories of their own pay cuts and financial worries.

Here in Janesville, a city of about 60,000 an hour southeast of Madison, Crystal Watkins, a preschool teacher at a Lutheran church, said she was paid less than public school teachers and got fewer benefits. “I don’t have any of that,” she said. “But I’m there every day because I love the kids.”

In Palmyra, a small village bounded by farmland and forests, MaryKay Horter remembered how her husband’s Chevy dealership had teetered on the brink of closing after General Motors declared bankruptcy, for which she blamed unions.

Ms. Horter said she was forced to work more hours as an occupational therapist, but had not seen a raise or any retirement contributions from her employer for the last two years. All told, her family’s income has dropped by about a third.

“I don’t get to bargain in my job, either,” she said.

And in nearby Whitewater, a scenic working-class city of 15,000 that is home to a public university, Dave Bergman, the owner of a bar, was tending it himself on Sunday. He has been forced to cut staff and work seven days a week.

“There are a lot of people out of work right now that would take a job without a union,” Mr. Bergman said.

By some measures, Wisconsin, a state of 5.6 million people, has not suffered as much as other Midwestern states in the recession, according to Abdur Chowdhury, an economist at Marquette University.

Its unemployment rate, 7.5 percent in December, is lower than the nation’s. But a significant percentage of jobs lost in Wisconsin during the recession were in manufacturing, and this is a state where the proportion of the work force in manufacturing is among the nation’s highest.

Meanwhile, some of the state’s well-known companies — Harley-Davidson, Kohler, Mercury Marine — have recently sought concessions from their workers.

The battle over public workers has changed the tone in a state that prides itself on Midwestern civility. A growing number of homemade bumper stickers are popping up with messages like “Fire Them — Democrats Too.”

Among the state’s political leaders, the partisan gulf seems to have widened further. Traditionally, the state is nearly evenly split between Republicans and Democrats (along with a third group of independents) — making it a perennial battleground in presidential elections, with margins of victory that have sometimes come down to a matter of a few tenths of 1 percent. Wisconsin is the state that gave birth to government unions in the 1950s, but also to Joseph McCarthy, who railed against people he accused of being Communists.

“The Republicans are really Republicans here, and the Democrats are really Democrats, so the candidates who come out of primaries reflect that,” said Ken Goldstein, a political scientist from the University of Wisconsin.

Two years after the state elected President Obama by a wide margin, it elected conservative Republicans — some of them supported by Tea Party groups — to the state legislature, the Senate and the governor’s office.

The flip has emboldened Mr. Walker, the new Republican governor who has proposed the cuts to benefits and bargaining rights, arguing that he desperately needs to bridge a deficit expected to reach $3.6 billion for the coming two-year budget.

Union leaders have said they would accept the financial terms of Mr. Walker’s proposal. The more controversial provisions, though, would strip public employees of collective-bargaining rights.

In Whitewater, Ben Penwell, a lawyer whose wife is a public employee, said he saw no reason to strip away workers’ bargaining rights if they had agreed to benefit cuts.

“They’re willing to do what’s necessary fiscally without giving up rights in the future,” he said.

And Pat Wellnitz, working in his accounting office on Sunday, wondered why such bargaining provisions were needed if the real problem was simply saving money.

“That’s pretty drastic even for a staunch Republican,” he said.

But others suggested that unions had perhaps had outlived their usefulness. Carrie Fox, who works at a billboard advertising company, said she hoped that the battle would encourage other governors to rein in public- and private-sector unions.

“I know there was a point for unions back in the day because people were being abused,” she said. “But now there’s workers’ rights; there’s laws that protect us.”

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This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 26, 2011

A front-page article on Tuesday about reaction among private-sector workers in Wisconsin to Gov. Scott Walker’s effort to cut benefits and collective-bargaining rights for unionized public employees referred incorrectly to the work history of one person quoted, and also misspelled his surname. While the man, Rich Hahn (not Hahan) described himself to a reporter as a “union guy,” he now says that he has worked at unionized factories, but was not himself a union member. (The Times contacted Mr. Hahn again to review his background after a United Auto Workers official said the union had no record of his membership.)

OF ARTHUR GREGG SULZBERGER, Gawker says:

Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, son of NYT publisher Pinch Sulzberger, got a real co-byline in the newspaper today! Apparently the Times has assigned the 28 year-old heirreporter some journo-chaperones.

Arthur writes under the byline “A.G. Sulzberger,” going by his initials, as is the style in certain parts of the journalism world (New York). Perusing a list of his stories so far, we see:

—Most of them are entries on the City Room blog, as you would expect.
—A large percentage of his stories are co-bylines shared with either Jennifer 8 Lee or Sewell Chan, the two stars of the Metro desk.

So he’s learning from the best that the Times has to offer! We look forward to following the young man’s progress as he grows into a full-blown metro reporter, then is eventually allowed to write fake trend pieces, and finally takes over the company. These are the three steps to success, AG.