A blog run by former employees of the Hartford Courant is reporting that Susan Campbell, Rick Green and Helen Ubinas will no longer be columnists at the paper, but will continue on in the general assignment/analysts category.
FIC has tangled with all three of them in the past. Susan Campbell, in particular, was our longest-running journalistic foe, though one of our last mentions of her ended the matter on a high note. We had a battle royale with Rick Green last year that concluded with this June 8, 2010 email to our members:
The Courant today published Peter Wolfgang’s letter responding to Rick Green’s attack on FIC. Green has already launched another salvo, saying we only responded to him for our own nefarious fundraising purposes. In fact, Green is a distraction. It is precisely because we are not who Green thinks we are that we intend to give this matter no further attention.
Conservatives throughout the state are celebrating the demise of these columns and what they believe to be the impending demise of The Courant itself. The former is understandable. The latter is, arguably, not conservative.
It is conservative in the sense that The Courant oftentimes presents liberal propaganda as objective reporting, with a simple “this is the way it is” attitude that hides from its own readers controversy around what is being presented as normal. (This was The Courant’s idea of a Father’s Day article.)
But FIC does not view with glee the potential demise of one of Connecticut’s oldest institutions, a newspaper so venerable that the Declaration of Independence was once a breaking story for it. If liberal bias ends up burying the nation’s oldest continuously published newspaper, let it be said now that it did not have to be that way and that FIC did not want it to be that way.
Six years ago FIC published an analysis of The Courant that The Courant itself called “recommended reading for anyone dissatisfied with the paper.” It is worth re-reading in its entirety but I want to draw your attention to one point in particular:
The problem at the Courant is not that they have staff with unacknowledged liberal worldviews. The problem is that those folks seem to make up the entire staff. There is no ideological diversity at the Courant. All the columnists are social liberals…Is there any columnist at the Courant who worships at a conservative evangelical church? Who homeschools her children? Who is opposed to the legalization of abortion and same-sex “marriage?” Who is opposed to contraception and practices natural family planning? Who belongs to a conservative Catholic lay group like Opus Dei or Regnum Christi? Who believes sex outside of marriage is sinful and something society ought to discourage?
If the Courant could do one thing—just one thing!—to address its bias problem, I recommend this: hire a social conservative columnist, one who can answer “yes” to the questions I listed above. Break the liberal monopoly that has a stranglehold over your staff of regular columnists. I don’t mean someone who will appear occasionally on the op-ed page. I mean someone who will appear in the paper as often as Helen Ubinas or Susan Campbell.
To this day, this concern has never been addressed. If The Courant wants to save its newspaper, if it wants to give more state residents a reason to be a paid subscriber in the competitive age of free internet content, that is way to do it.
For all our disagreements with them, FIC never called for the heads of Campbell, Green or Ubinas. We never boycotted The Courant and we have no interest in dancing on its grave. Democracy functions best when there is a healthy fourth estate monitoring the workings of government. In our perfect Connecticut, The Courant would still have a large staff that could report on every board of education and board of finance and board of you-name-it meeting in every town in the state.
But it would be an ideologically diverse Courant that represents more than just the viewpoint of the state’s liberal elites. It is not too late for that, at least. And addressing that problem could be the first step toward building The Courant back to what it should be.
For the sake of Connecticut and for The Courant and for a potential readership that is not being served by it, we hope the state’s largest newspaper has not given up on columnists altogether. We only ask that our voice be included among them.
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