404 Media, Part 2
This is part 2 of an essay about Media in Atlanta to coincide with 404 Day. Part one was posted April 4th.
Names and Nondisclosures
While the recent Mother Jones profile of Fergie Chambers featured criticism from AJC writers, the Cox scion goes mostly unmentioned in the paper itself. And rarely anywhere else in Atlanta media.
A search of AJC archives for “Fergie Chambers” yields nothing while “James Cox Chambers” returns his father’s name as survivor in obituaries for Robert and Anne Cox plus brief mention of his part ownership of the Atlanta Hawks.
Chambers does turn up in searches for “Jim Chambers” with the earliest mention a 2014 article about protests in response to police killings of unarmed Black men.
“Later, the crowd converged on the Atlanta City Detention Center after reports that Occupy Atlanta organizer Tim Franzen had been arrested Thursday on old warrants for criminal trespass and jaywalking. Activist Jim Chambers said he understood that more charges had been added during the day.
‘We are trying to find someone to tell us what the charges are and for a judge to set a bond,’ Chambers said. ‘We will bond him out.’”
It doesn’t include the identifier “Fergie” or his middle name of Cox. It also has no disclaimer that he’s related to the paper’s owners. The casual reader, let alone a regular subscriber, would have no way of knowing.
Indeed, of the over one hundred search results for “Jim Chambers” in the AJC archives the bulk are from a Tucker, GA resident and frequent writer of letters to the editor who shares the same name in its generic version.
Chambers was even more active in organizing Atlanta-area protests after the death of an unarmed black man named Anthony Hill in Dekalb County in 2015, but the paper still quotes him as “Jim Chambers” with no disclosure of the Cox connection.
While the Cox family Communist may be the most extreme example of a newsworthy Cox connection that gets blacklisted from its news pages, and by extension those of most other Atlanta outlets, it’s not the only one.
Donald Trump’s various legal battles have become major areas of news coverage with the AJC itself dedicating whole podcasts and newsletters to those with Georgia ties.
But the drama surrounding Truth Social and the countersuits between Trump and co-founders Andy Litinsky and Wes Moss are being downplayed or ignored.
Moss is a host on Cox Media’s WSB radio and was a longtime columnist for the AJC. Cox outlets have been promoting his career dating back to his appearances on The Apprentice but have gone mum over the Trump travails now.
The Power of Cox City
Atlanta needs alternatives to Cox media if only to cover Cox when it’s newsworthy. Non-profits would be the logical place to turn, but both our public broadcasters, first Georgia Public Broadcasting and now WABE, have allowed themselves to become extensions of the Cox media empire rather than maintain and build on their independence. To the detriment of their overall credibility.
Just last week WABE launched an explanatory series on Georgia’s powerful but often opaque and currently unelected Public Service Commission. It’s a welcome project but to me was undermined by WABE again promoting the AJC on one of its own programs, this time an interview with longtime Cox anchor, now at the AJC, Monica Pearson.
Pearson is certainly a local “icon” but she’s a Cox lifer and the quintessential commercial news anchor and frequent paid spokesperson. Fellow Cox lifer WSB radio anchor Scott Slade even did advertorials for Georgia Power.
Which newsroom is WABE’s priority? And will explaining Georgia Power’s lax regulation include its connections to local media?
Even one of the Commissioners is a Cox radio star. As Public Service Commissioner Tim Echols bio notes “Tim has a weekly radio show called Energy Matters airing on Cox Media Group and in four other Georgia media markets.”
Win Awards but Don’t Fundamentally Change Anything
In 1988 after a tumultuous tenure as editor of the AJC Bill Kovach quit. Hired from the Washington bureau of the New York Times and with a mandate to transform the provincial papers into one of the nation’s best, he’d angered both business and political leaders with more aggressive, adversarial coverage.
From a NYTs story about his resignation:
“Another series of articles this year disclosed details about a grand jury’s investigation of the state’s largest utility, the Georgia Power Company. Since 1969, Georgia Power had been almost immune from criticism from the state’s largest newspapers. In that year, Eugene Patterson lost his job as editor after one of his columnists attacked the utility over a proposed rate increase.”
Kovach did win accolades from national media thought leaders and the paper’s first Pulitzer nominations in years, but the city’s boosters desire for a “world-class newspaper” to go with the Major League sports teams it’d lured and symphonies and museums it could build fund with philanthropic dollars had a catch.
Journalism isn’t boosterism and if it’s really any good it’s supposed to create change.
The NYT’s, his previous employer and a then competitor to the AJC as owner of the Gwinnett Daily News, played up the story pointing out Kovach’s clashes with publisher David Easterly:
“Mr. Easterly moved to Atlanta in 1982 as president of the newspaper division of Cox Enterprises, the nation’s 12th largest newspaper publishing concern. In a memorandum to the staff soon after his arrival, Mr. Easterly declared, ‘The Atlanta newspapers should be good for Atlanta.’ He has often publicly admired USA Today, which is known for its brief articles and bright graphic style.
“Mr. Kovach said yesterday that Mr. Easterly had often suggested to him and other staff members that The Journal and The Constitution emulate that newspaper’s more upbeat approach to the news.”
(Easterly’s daughter is Jennifer Dorian, the current CEO of WABE which gave the AJC its own branded radio show last fall after GPB cancelled an unbranded previous iteration.)
Kovach had fans in Atlanta, novelist Pat Conroy foremost, but also critics who saw him as elitist. To that end, the martyred editor retreated to Harvard to head its Nieman Lab offering important thought leadership on journalism. Meanwhile in Cox City, the Atlanta Way remained wholly intact.
For extreme leftists like Fergie, this is all evidence that American Oligarchy can’t be reformed but must be overthrown.
I remain highly skeptical that a Marxist Revolution will take hold in the U.S. or turn out well if it did. Still, it’s hard not to see the Atlanta Way as a kind of corporate feudalism with its major media outlets a priestly caste.
Especially if the 404 can’t even talk openly about it all.
