In a move that’s sort of surprising, sort of not — more on that in a second — the San Diego Union-Tribune editorial board on Friday came out against the Chargers stadium ballot measure:
Could [San Diego Mayor Kevin] Faulconer, [Chargers owner Dean] Spanos and others negotiate a better deal than either measure on the ballot now? Clearly.
To earn our support, that deal must be negotiated with all sides, including hoteliers if it involves hotel taxes, with a specific design so San Diegans know what the venue would actually look like and, of course, with a public financial contribution spelled out and capped.
This board chooses to be optimistic, and it urges San Diegans to reject C and D and send everyone back to the bargaining table.
It’s indeed unusual for a city’s major paper to editorialize against a measure that’s backed by both the mayor and the owners of the local sports team, but this is an unusual ballot measure: The local hotel industry, which would be taxed to pay for the project, is dead-set against it, and even the project’s proponents aren’t holding out much hope that it will win a necessary two-thirds victory. So really, there isn’t too much political risk here for the U-T: It can call a crappy deal a crappy deal, and at worst it might get a few phone calls saying, “Jeez, we know we’re down, did you really have to kick us too?”
If you want to be really conspiracy-minded, you could even see the editorial as a backdoor way for Spanos to come up with a Plan B once the ballot measure loses: If everyone goes back to the negotiating table, that at least gives him a San Diego option to keep from having to slink north to Los Angeles and accept whatever Los Angeles Rams owner Stan Kroenke will offer for the Chargers to be his tenant. This is a long, multi-sided game of chicken being played here, and it’s not yet clear who’s going to go off the cliff. At least it’s not likely to be San Diego taxpayers next month, anyway, so thank goodness for small favors?
After it became obvious that their proposal wasn’t going to pass, it seems like the Bolts started planning on this – “let’s just get at least 50% of the vote, then we’ll go back to the bargaining table.” Faulconer knew this, made a pretty tepid endorsement, so he’s in the clear; the U-T now gets to slide onto the renegotiate bandwagon, (after being the biggest cheerleader for the $1.5B boondoggle), everything’s just rosy, isn’t it? I think the only realistic, (and passable by voters), option is renovate Qualcomm or pack your bags.
Why would a newspaper care what a lame-duck mayor and a sports team owner want?
I guess you might sell fewer papers / get less web traffic if there was no local team to cover, but the Tribune company (I mean Tronc *snicker*) now owns both the LA Times and San Diego Union-Tribune so it’s a wash.
Even at that I figure don’t be quite so cynical. It’s a bad measure and they endorsed appropriately.
Because they traditionally do care, a lot. Old article here, but all of its conclusions remain true today:
http://fair.org/extra/throwing-the-game/
There’s a bit of a laundry list in the there.
Some call out sports reporters for their reporting, but this is the editorial board making election endorsements not a sports desk story.
Some call out ownership relationships, but none exist here.
Some call out that “newspaper companies are usually major local corporations with other investments in the region” which certainly applied and then some in the dark days when the U-T was owned by Doug Manchester. However, now it’s owned by a national media company with few ties to San Diego.
Ownership relationships help to encourage favorable coverage, sure, but they’re by no means necessary. For a large number of reasons including lack of resources to fear of being accused of “bias” to plain old lobbying (when’s the last time you met with a newspaper editorial board? that’s not true for Dean Spanos, I’m sure), daily newspaper coverage is overwhelmingly skewed toward what local power brokers see as common wisdom. So this editorial is very unusual, and almost certainly is the result of the business community being split on the proposal.
See way more examples here, if you’re so inclined:
https://www.fieldofschemes.com/category/misc/the-sports-media-complex/
Well, the first few are about Adelson, who owns the paper and could be considered Doug Manchester on steroids.
Anyways, I guess I agree to a point but I’m not sure Spanos ranks highly in what could be considered “the power brokers.”
Anyways, I’m wondering if there is much precedent for saying anything either way. Outside of California, most of the time the public doesn’t get to vote for stadium deals anyways. It’s our unique system of direct democracy out on the left coast. There just aren’t enough data points to tell what editorial boards do when they have to say “ok, what endorsements are we going to make for President, Senate, the House, the death penalty, plastic bags, condom use in porn and a new stadium.”
Dean will never get a stadium down there, poor bastard. I say it all the time, we hung him out to dry. Really, Stan did. The rest of the pack just followed the loudest, most threatening dog. Dean gets nothing except an option to partner with the guy who hosed him in a city he doesn’t want to be in. You could sprinkle arsenic on his Cheerios and he’d probably enjoy it more than his current predicament.