Dan Morain is a former Los Angeles Times reporter as well as Sacramento Bee editorial page editor. His forthcoming book is about the mental healthcare system. This article originally appeared on Morain’s Substack page.
Photographs in simple black frames lined the walls of the editorial board's meeting room on the third floor of the old Sacramento Bee building. There were maybe two dozen photos, all of them portraits, and they told a story of endurance and values. As it happens, they were fragile.
Only one photo was of a woman. Only one was in color, though it was faded.
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I was fascinated, inspired and a little intimidated by those photos during my time working for The Bee, starting in 2010 as an editorial writer and columnist and as editorial page editor for five years ending in 2018. Each person in the photos brought their concerns to the editorial board in some capacity over more than 100 years. I tried to identify each one, though there were a few I never could place.
The woman was Eleanor McClatchy, matriarch of the Sacramento Bee and its sister papers in Modesto and Fresno. She died in 1980, after turning the family business over to her nephew C.K. McClatchy. C.K., who died in 1989, regularly attended editorial board meetings and brought The Bee to new journalistic heights.
Miss McClatchy, as she was known, was the granddaughter of James McClatchy, an orphan who sailed to America from Ireland at age 17 in 1841 aboard a ship called the Independence.
James became an apprentice to Horace Greeley, the abolitionist editor of the New York Tribune, and heeded Greeley’s advice, “Go West, young man.” After a few less than stellar enterprises and a stint in jail, James founded The Daily Bee in 1857 in California’s new capital.
Golden State staff
An editorial on Page 2 of that first edition described the owner’s lofty goal: “The object of this paper is not only independence, but permanence,” author Steve Wiegand, a former Bee reporter, recounted in his book, “Papers of Permanence: The First 150 Years of The McClatchy Company.” Jim McClatchy, C.K.’s brother, told Steve that as part of a redesign of the building and homage to The Bee’s history, he encouraged that the photos be displayed.
Nothing is permanent, as Chatham Asset Management made clear earlier this month. The New Jersey-based hedge fund purchased the chain of newspapers that includes The Sacramento Bee out of bankruptcy in September 2020. Chatham bought the McClatchy name but had no use for McClatchy’s soul, and Chatham’s leaders definitely saw no value in a bunch of old photographs.
Two of the photos were of Black men — Desmond Tutu, the Anglican bishop who battled apartheid in South Africa, and Booker T. Washington, the author and educator who battled America’s version of apartheid and died in 1915. I am guessing that The Bee was one of a very few newspapers that gave Booker T. Washington a meeting.
Theodore Roosevelt’s photo was on the wall, as was Roosevelt’s running mate on the Bull Moose ticket in 1912, Hiram Johnson, the progressive governor and senator who brought the initiative process to California.
Paul Thornton
Wisconsin’s progressive senator, Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette, was on the wall. So was Earl Warren, the California governor who became chief justice of the Supreme Court. John F. Kennedy’s photo was there too.
The photos made clear that the editorial pages were not mine. I was their steward. My job was to try to meet the high standards of ethics, accuracy and independence established by my predecessors, Stuart Leavenworth, who hired me, David Holwerk, Peter Schrag and others who came before them.
During my eight years as part of The Sacramento Bee’s editorial board, we hosted many of the people who in some ways were the successors to the people whose photos hung on the walls.
Then-California Supreme Court Chief Justice Tani G. Cantil-Sakauye recalled growing up near a house of prostitution in a Sacramento alley and attending McClatchy High School.
Gavin Newsom goofed off with Jack Ohman, our great editorial cartoonist who won a Pulitzer in 2016, by showing him the finer points of how politicians use hand gestures to illustrate their points.
Jack couldn’t attend an editorial board meeting with Kamala Harris because he had a trip planned with his wife, Mandy. Harris left a warm note on Jack’s desk in his very cluttered office wishing him and Mandy a “long life together filled with love, laughter and good food!”
Robin Epley
Dianne Feinstein spent an hour detailing the importance of water legislation she was advocating, turning to an aide only once to ask about some obscure fact. Jerry Brown requested strong black coffee.
President Obama’s Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, the former Iowa governor, detailed the importance of food stamps to Californians. University of California President Janet Napolitano became annoyed when a reporter – we often invited reporters to sit in board meetings, though not to ask questions – tweeted as she discussed UC. She didn’t like the distraction.
A Kennedy family member – I don’t remember which one or what the visit was about – commented on JFK’s photo. It wasn’t Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
RFK Jr. did lobby The Bee’s editorial board and me in 2015 as part of his failed attempt to kill legislation by then-state Sen. Richard Pan, now running for Congress, to expand the requirement that public school children get vaccinated. We enthusiastically endorsed Pan’s legislation, which Gov. Brown signed into law.
Now, six years after buying the McClatchy name and as it uses artificial intelligence to produce news stories, Chatham Asset Management has imposed brutal layoffs. Among the 90 journalists sacked across the already thin Chatham-owned chain were five men and women who produced The Sacramento Bee’s opinion section.
One, Tom Philp, won a Pulitzer Prize in 2005 for editorials urging that Hetch Hetchy Reservoir in Yosemite National Park be drained and the valley restored.
On Monday, The Bee ran the first in a five-part series by Philp about the plight of Califia Carlisle, a homeless woman who struggles with schizophrenia and meth addiction, and her father’s determination to save her. Friday is his and his colleagues’ last day on the job.
Marcos Breton, Philp’s editor and probably The Bee’s last opinion editor, said he never has had contact with Chatham. Gil Durán, Marcos’ predecessor and author of the new book “Nerd Reich,” said he received only one Chatham directive: Ahead of the 2020 election, do not endorse in the presidential race between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, no matter that a Californian, Kamala Harris, was Biden’s vice presidential candidate.
Chatham Asset Management’s website describes its money-making strategy this way: “Long/short, opportunistic credit strategy focused on exploiting dislocation between asset prices and their intrinsic values.” And: “Private debt strategy seeking to take advantage of illiquidity premiums available across capital structures.”
I don’t know what either statement means. But I’m told that no Chatham executive ever sat in an editorial board meeting. Nor did anyone from Chatham see the photos on the wall or contemplate their significance.
