Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Children at play on the Times editorial board

It probably isn’t the best strategy for a newspaper teetering on the edge of fiscal solvency to patronize readers and speak to them as if they were children, as the Seattle Times editorial board occasionally does; I’m not saying, of course, that this has something to do with the fact that four of the Times seven editorial board members are female. But this is what Times editorial page editor Kate Riley implied when she told Brock and Salk—in an impertinent, condescending tone—that someone had to be the “adult” in the room in regard to the discussion of bring back professional basketball to Seattle. Riley called the sports radio program to defend the editorial in the Sunday paper that was an unrelievedly negative portrayal of the proposal by a private investor to build a new arena in the SODO district, putting three major sports facilities in the same general area. There was the expected complaints about traffic issues, which didn’t seem to be much of an issue when the football and baseball stadiums were built side-by-side. These questions have already been answered, but the Times needed to resurrect old arguments for the sake of the quantity of their argument, rather than then its quality. There was also the complaint concerning Key Arena and the demand that any team brought back to town should be required to play there; the editorial board knows very well that this is a non-starter, yet it feels it must add this to equation just for padding its “argument.” This is the argument of "children."

Another piece of “padding” is the argument that the city will potentially be left “holding the bag” for costs; however, the “memoranda of understanding” makes it plain that Chris Hansen and his fellow private investors (who include the Nordstroms and Microsoft’s Steve Balmer) will be responsible for any financial shortfalls. The only “new” argument against the return of the NBA is the “finite” entertainment spending available. What is the Times talking about? Is it trying to say that people will be conflicted over whether they want to watch a basketball game or a ballet performance, or a Fifth Avenue show? Does it believe that the NBA is a “niche” sport that has a very limited audience? Is it ignoring the fact that Howard Schultz and his right-hand man, Wally Walker, destroyed the team by wasting draft picks year after year on seven-foot stiffs who were at best “projects” who never panned-out? Under the Schultz regime, the Seattle Supersonics passed on superior talent that would have both maintained the competitiveness of the team, and its financial viability. The Times’ board ignores the fact that a successful NBA team has far more positive fiscal and jobs impact on the city than more “cultural” activities that have a very limited audience, such as the opera and symphony, which rely heavily on private philanthropy for their survival.

I have one caveat: To me, what prevents Seattle from being a “first-class” city is not its lack of a professional basketball team, but its lack of a respectable natural history museum. I’m not talking about the Burke “museum” which takes ten minutes to walk through, but something that you can lose yourself in examining the natural wonders of the Earth. Apparently, the only museum of any note in the Pacific Northwest is the Royal British Columbia Museum, which seems to be a bit too much trouble to visit. Now, I would think that such a project would interest some of the local billionaires for the sake of culture (it certainly doesn’t interest local politicians or the Times editorial board), so I would say that in the lacking of such motivation, the Times and local whiners about what Hansen and his partners are doing for a project they seem willing to risk a great deal of their own money on, should be seen as a positive—not a negative—example of civic pride.

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