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Top Investigative Journalist Fired, Prize-Winning Writers Resign Following Merger with New Times Media

The Village Voice were one of the paper's top investigative reporters has been fired and two of its prize-winning writers have resigned.

The shake-up is taking place just months after the Voice merged with the New Times Media - a chain of weekly newspapers based in Phoenix.

In this week's issues, about 20 staffers wrote an open letter protesting the dismissal of James Ridgeway - the paper's Washington correspondent and one of its chief investigative reporters covering national news. Ridgeway had written for the paper for over 30 years.

Major changes have already been seen at the paper since February 1 when the new owner and executive editor of the paper Michael Lacey first traveled to New York to meet with Voice staffers. After that initial meeting the Voice's prize winning press critic Sydney Schanberg quit.

According to one account of the meeting, the new owner criticized the news section of the Voice because it was full of commentary and criticism of the Bush administration. That same week the new owners cancelled the Voices" online blog called "The Bush Beat." Then last week Jennifer Gonnerman resigned.

On Wednesday, we reached longtime Voice reporter Tom Robbins who is leading the effort to get management to re-hire Ridgeway.

• Tom Robbins, reading letter signed by 20 Village Voice reporters calling on management to "reverse discharge" of James Ridgeway.

We also reached Nat Hentoff at his home in New York. He has been writing for the Village Voice since 1957. We asked him about his thoughts on the firing of Ridgeway and about the new management.

• Nat Hentoff, longtime Village Voice columnist.

For more on the Village Voice, we are joined by three guests:

• James Ridgeway, in addition to being the paper's former Washington correspondent he is the author of several books. His latest is titled: "The Five Unanswered Questions About 9/11." He also runs a website on video journalism at Ridgewayng.com
• Sydney Schanberg, former press critic at the Village Voice. He resigned in February following the sale of the paper. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting in Cambodia during the 1970s and his story inspired the film "The Killing Fields."
• Mark Jacobson, a reporter with New York Magazine. In November he wrote a major piece on the Voice-New Times merger titled, "The Voice From Beyond the Grave." He is a former writer at the Village Voice.
• Tim Redmond, executive editor at the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

TOM ROBBINS: This is a letter that we sent to Village Voice management that was printed in this week's Voice.

“For 30 years, James Ridgeway has, in his person, his politics and his writings, defined what makes the Voice a special publication.

“From Three Mile Island to 9/11, Ridgeway has provided some of the nation's most incisive and insightful coverage of government misfeasance and malfeasance. He was one of the first journalists in America to spotlight the threat posed by a resurgent racist and neo-Nazi movement, an issue he hammered away at in the pages of the Voice years before anyone ever heard of Ruby Ridge or Timothy McVeigh. His reports on escalating environmental abuses exposed corporate law-breakers and bureaucratic indifference.

“Ridgeway’s writings on conflicts from Bosnia to Baghdad to Haiti have always provided the otherwise unreported flipside of the world according to the mainstream media, in short reporting that jibes precisely with the exact mission of the Voice. Over the past few years, Ridgeway expanded onto the web, filing regular nuggets of breaking news and even posting video reports on the 2004 elections.

“In light of this distinguished track record, the decision last week by the Voice’s new ownership to terminate Ridgeway is shameful. It also sends a terrible message as to the sort of coverage that the new ownership portends. We call on Voice Media Executive Editor Michael Lacey and Chairman and CEO Jim Larkin to reverse his discharge.” And it's signed by 20 staff members of the Village Voice.

AMY GOODMAN: Tom Robbins, a union steward at the Village Voice, reading the letter that appears in this week's Village Voice. We also yesterday reached Nat Hentoff, who has been writing for the Village Voice since 1957. He would join us today, but he’s on a train to Yale. This is what he had to say.

NAT HENTOFF: You know, it's very hard for me to understand what management anywhere does in most instances, but this to me is inconceivable. I don't know another reporter we've had at the Voice who is so widely knowledgeable about so many areas of government and all kinds of important areas and who does such consistent, comprehensive research. And for him to get fired is inexplicable. It makes no sense at all.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you think is happening? And do you see this as a part of media consolidation in the country, crackdown on criticism of the Bush administration?

NAT HENTOFF: One thing I have learned over the years, I don't make generalizations. I try to be an empiricist. So I’m waiting to see what else is going to happen at the paper. Meanwhile, I keep doing what I do, and nobody has told me otherwise. And, for example, I’m doing a series now on the surprising, it seems, change in the Supreme Court maybe with John Roberts joining a concurring opinion that indicates, although they didn't take the Padilla case, that the next time the government tries to put him back as an enemy combatant, it's not going to work and it may be the end of that classification of people as enemy combatants. So I’m proceeding, as I always do, and I’ve been through all kinds of changes of management. But I do believe that whatever the future holds, to lose Jim Ridgeway is an enormous loss for the paper.

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.

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