An Open Letter to the Hoiles Family

 

June 28, 2007

 

Dear Hoiles Family Members:

In my 19 years writing editorials for The Orange County Register, I enjoyed working for your family. There aren’t too many places where someone with my political beliefs in free markets and limited government can earn a salary.

Indeed, my relationship with Freedom Communications goes back further than you might know. I went to Hillsdale College in 1975 and there met Barbara Smith, then the head of the school’s Center for Constructive Alternatives and the daughter of Roy Smith, then the publisher of the Colorado Springs Gazette-Telegraph. Roy Smith was a benefactor of Hillsdale. After I graduated in 1977, Roy Smith hired me as a cub reporter at the Gazette.

I was young, so I joined the U.S. Army in 1978, serving four years as a Russian linguist. After the Army, I was a journalist in Washington, D.C. for five years.

I came back to Freedom Communications when I was hired as an editorial writer at the Register by then-Commentary Director K.E. Grubbs Jr., whom I had befriended in Washington. So my work for your family goes back 30 years.

When I was at the Register, people all around Orange County often told me how important our principled opposition to government waste and abuse was to Orange County. Every government official knew that any proposed tax increase or foolish new program would be opposed by the Register.

Last fall the Register bought out about 100 employees. Some buyouts were voluntary, some forced. Two of my Commentary section colleagues, Commentary Art Director Jocelyn Leger and cartoonist Mike Shelton, were forced to take buyouts – just as their exciting new animated cartoons were going gangbusters. (Shelton’s cartoons sometimes still appear in the Register because they are syndicated.)

But my buyout was voluntary. At 51, I wanted to go for a freelance career before they wheeled me into the veterans’ home.

I still have great fondness for the Register and was dismayed by the recent turmoil over the publisher’s position. When Marti Buscaglia was named, I was the first to discover that she was not a devotee of the Freedom Philosophy, as we on the editorial page always called R.C. Hoiles’ principles. Instead, she favored heavy abridgements of free market rights and property rights. I reported that news on my Orange County blog (since merged with this blog).

Her recent withdrawal from the post gives Freedom Communications an opportunity to make sure the Freedom Philosophy lives and thrives at the Register. Given that you survived the battle with the part of the family that broke away, you clearly are holding onto the company to advance the Freedom Philosophy. Otherwise you would have sold the paper long ago.

There are three ways to hire a publisher compatible with your family’s deeply held beliefs.

The first and best way would be to make a family member publisher of the Register. Don’t doubt yourselves. You have the talent. Even some of the younger family members could do the job, and indeed might better understand the challenges of the Internet age. Henry Ford II took over Ford Motor Co. in 1945 when he was just 28 and rescued it from disaster. In the news business, H.L. Mencken became managing editor of the Baltimore Herald at 25.

The second way would be to promote the true libertarians in the company to management positions, including publisher.

The third way would be to get someone from a libertarian think tank, such as the Mises Institute, the Independent Institute, or the Cato Institute. They would make sure the Freedom Philosophy survives and thrives.

What about the changes at the Register in the early 1980s, which got rid of the “word list” and other more direct libertarian influences on the newsroom? (The word list included words and phrases compiled by R.C. Hoiles that, for example, called public schools “tax-supported schools,” actually a more accurate description.) Maybe that change worked in the early 1980s, a time of strong circulation and advertising advances. But this is the Internet 2000s, when newspapers have to differentiate and compete with the almost infinite pages of the Web.

The libertarianism need not be overt. The news coverage simply could be redirected from the fluff that has taken up so much space in recent years to more hard-hitting investigative reporting of the multitudinous state and local government outrages, from property seizures to police brutality. The Register already has some crack investigative teams, which produce great stories. It needs more of that, focused like a searchlight on the dark crevices of corrupt and inefficient government.

People will read news if it is compelling. Make them anticipate news on a new government scandal or outrage every morning when they sip their java opening their morning Register or clicking on the paper’s Web page.

It’s worth a try, isn’t it? I’m reminded of Muhammad Ali at the end of his career. He still kept punching. He was a fighter, and went down fighting. That’s who he was. And you are Hoiles family members with ink in your blood – righteous, libertarian ink.

Maybe Freedom Communications won’t survive the Internet age. Maybe no newspapers will. Maybe they’ll all go down the way the mighty railroad companies all went down when air travel was dominated by new companies.

But maybe a way will be found for Freedom and other newspapers to survive the transition. The only way to find out is to keep on punching.

Yours in freedom,

John Seiler