Perhaps it was the spirit of holiday charity. Christmas week passed without Puerto Rico’s largest paper saying anything unkind about the island’s governor, and vice versa.
“Nah, he’s not doing anything; he’s staying out of the public eye,” Luis Ferre Rangel, co-editor of El Nuevo Dia, said Friday about Gov. Pedro Rossello.
Ferre is not someone I would reflexively feel sympathetic toward, especially after realizing how many, many years later he’d attended the same tony college (Amherst) as I did.
Ferre is 31, bright, very good looking, well-heeled and runs a 235,000-circulation, family-owned daily with his sister. Dad was the editor and is the longtime publisher and, thus, big heat on the island.
In addition, the family controls a cement company, which has real estate operations and is involved in the ever-exciting world of manufacturing multiwall paper bags and polypropylene bags.
They don’t quite fit a mold, be it set in concrete or not, of anti-establishment gadflies.
But the suave co-editor has had to drop by Washington because of his now-obligatory subservience to an unavoidable elite: lawyers. In fact, many Washington lawyers will make money representing both sides of a squabble that may remind us of the power of government, even in an age in which it’s supposedly declining.
Just over 30 percent of Puerto Rico’s citizens still work for the government. Writing about government is inevitable for the paper, as are resulting tensions, which may well explain an unusual lawsuit just filed by the newspaper against the governor and top aides.
Rossello is in his second term and not happy about the treatment he has received from the brother-sister duo, whose grandfather founded the newspaper, Rossello’s New Progressive Party and was once the island’s governor himself.
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Not long after his 1996 re-election the paper raised questions about his performance in areas ranging from privatizing parts of the health-care system to education reforms.
A broad overview of the first 100 days of his second term was critical (he declined to be interviewed for it). A companion piece on the first 100 days of the mayor of San Juan, a woman who is a Rossello rival, was more upbeat (she did consent to an interview).
The paper also wrote about an investigation of a major supplier to the state-run phone company. It turned out the supplier was headed by a fellow who was a big donor to Rossello’s party and had not paid taxes in many years. The phone company’s chief quit the day the paper disclosed a Justice Department inquiry into alleged phone company financial irregularities.
Moreover, the paper suggested that the government was careless in selling off large pieces of agricultural land and in using the large sums received in the deals. And it alleged that Rossello’s chief of staff played a role in steering insurance business to his brother-in-law.
But it was “Enter the Renewal and the Controversy,” the April 13 overview of Rossello’s second term, that seemed to strike a nerve.
The substance was far from earth shaking. It recited the problems at the phone company, raised doubts about the governor’s legislative performance and intimated that his health wasn’t the greatest.
On April 14, a funny thing happened.
A total of 17 government agencies “which had routinely advertised with El Neuvo Dia canceled previous commitments on space or stopped their regular advertising,” according to the just-filed complaint written by Bruce Sanford of Washington’s Baker & Hostetler.
For example, “On April 14, 1997, Publimer (an ad agency) informed El Nuevo Dia that the Solid Waste Authority and the Electric Power Company were withdrawing advertising in a supplement that was scheduled for publication on April 16, 1997. On April 10, 1997, Publimer had called El Nuevo Dia to confirm the order.”
The governor said that ditching what amounts to $6 million in yearly ad revenues to the paper, or about 3 percent of its total ad revenues, had simply to do with placing ads in a more cost-effective way.
By one traditional index, the paper is the most economical for print advertisers in Puerto Rico. Further, yanking of ads came at the same time as other actions: government investigations of the cement company, a tax audit of the newspaper and the freezing out of the paper’s reporters.
Having had enough, the newspaper sued, alleging a pattern of harassment and retaliation against the paper and cement company. I could not get comment out of the governor’s office.
Such litigation might seem farfetched, at least to the layman. Any group, public or private, should have the right to advertise where it wishes, regardless of its motive, right?
Well, it’s more complicated. And as Washington’s Sanford pursues the matter, he has one interesting precedent in his favor.
It involved the sheriff of Broward County, Fla., and a business publication, the Broward Review. It wrote a critical article (“Navarro Failed to Act on Corruption Warnings”) and he promptly called from a Bahamas vacation and ordered that the county’s paid legal notices be pulled from the paper.
The publication, represented by prominent New York attorney Floyd Abrams, responded with a lawsuit that turned on Section 1983 of the Civil Rights Act. That bans anybody “under color of state law” from depriving somebody else of their civil rights.
For sure, it was a Reconstruction Era statute whose real subject was law enforcement officers who were lynching blacks. And while Abrams knew full well that the publication didn’t have a right to get the legal notices, he contended that it had a right that they not be yanked due to the exercise of 1st Amendment rights. The ads had run for 20 years.
The publication won at a lower court as a federal judge awarded it $22,700 in damages and $220,924.20 in legal fees. The sheriff appealed and lost before a three-judge federal panel in Atlanta, by which time the legal fees had risen to about $300,000.
“That case is a direct corollary,” Sanford said Friday during a holiday calm in a curious Puerto Rican storm. “There was a correlation between news coverage and retaliation.”
Stairway to success
Listen closely. The big sucking sound you hear is not jobs heading to Mexico, as Ross Perot warned. It’s members of the public policy and media elite hobnobbing with Bill and Hillary Clinton.
As of Sunday, more than 1,000 split to Hilton Head, N.C., for Renaissance Weekend, a symposium-filled bash for self-appointed overachievers. It runs through New Year’s Day.
OK, I was invited but declined. Run to Hilton Head to see some of the social-climbing back-stabbers I loathe? Give me a bottle of Jack Daniels and C-Span reruns of “Booknotes.”