Forty years ago this month, when the veteran Baltimore Sun editor Paul A. Banker invited me to lunch and offered me a job as metro columnist, I decided to invoke a little history before discussing career options.
“Mr. Banker,” I said, “I grew up in this town. From the time I was a child, I heard rumors that The Sun was anti-Semitic.”
Banker paused for the merest heartbeat. “A lot of people at The Sun,” he said, “have died.”
He wasn’t denying a shameful piece of the newspaper’s history, but he was declaring that a new day had arrived and he wanted me to be a part of it.
I spent the next 25 years at the paper, and I cannot recall a single instance when I sensed any kind of institutional prejudice. And I’d hate to think that such a time had returned – but by corporate extension, some doubt has now arrived.
Writing for National Public Radio and its website, David Folkenflik, a former Sun TV critic who has been with NPR for more than a decade, reports this week about a meeting of top executives of Tribune Publishing Co., which owns The Sun and the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times.
Folkenflik is a first-rate reporter and analyst. He’s NPR’s media correspondent and host of “On Point.” His sources tell him that Michael Ferro, Tribune Publishing’s former chairman and still its biggest investor, blamed a “Jewish cabal” for some of the corporation’s problems.
The alleged remark goes back to a 2016 dinner meeting in Chicago of Tribune’s corporate leadership, “including executives from the Tribune, the L.A. Times and the Baltimore Sun,” Folkenflik reported. “Ferro railed against those who he felt were impeding him – including perceived rivals and competitors. Among them: the Southern California billionaire and civic leader Eli Broad, whom Ferro called part of a ‘Jewish cabal’ that ran Los Angeles.”
Folkenflik said that his account of the evening comes from two people who were at the meeting and spoke to him separately.
A spokesman for Ferro vehemently denied the incident and described the claim as “reckless allegations.”
Whom to believe?
As Folkenflik reported, “Early this year, Tribune Publishing made the first in a series of secret payments totaling more than $2.5 million to avert a threatened lawsuit filed by a fired newspaper executive, according to three people with knowledge of the deal. That had the effect of keeping Ferro’s anti-Semitic slur out of the public spotlight.
“The payments, reported here for the first time,” Folkenflik wrote, “are stark embodiments of the consequences of Ferro’s actions that contributed to a series of crises at Tribune Publishing.
“The L.A. Times has been sold. Tribune Publishing has put itself on the auction block and is reviewing bids from potential buyers.”
And The Sun, shrinking in circulation and advertising revenue, has now abandoned its longtime Calvert Street offices for smaller offices in South Baltimore’s Port Covington – all part of the diminishing profile of daily newspapers in American life and obviously not the result of any “Jewish cabal” machinations.
Ferro no longer controls day-to-day corporate operations. He stepped down as chairman in March after sexual harassment accusations arose involving his conduct outside of Tribune Publishing. Still, he owns 25.6 percent of Tribune Publishing, making him the largest stakeholder in the publicly traded company.
Ferro’s alleged “Jewish cabal” remarks were made two years ago. It’s taken this long for them to surface in public. The Sun’s anti-Semitic reputation lingered long after “a lot of people died” at the paper. It’s an awful mark against you, no matter how long it lasts.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” was re-issued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
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