Publishing: Apartness in Cincinnati

Although Cincinnati’s two papers, the morning Enquirer and the evening Post & Times-Star, both belong to the Scripps-Howard chain, they stand about as far apart as they can get. Each has its own plant, its own staff and even its own editorial course. In 1958, for example, the Enquirer endorsed Republican C. William O’Neill for Ohio Governor, while the Post plumped for Democrat Mike Di Salle. Separation was part of a calculated Scripps-Howard effort to allay suspicions of monopoly, and to demonstrate that competition can flourish even in a one-ownership newspaper town. Last week Scripps-Howard’s Ohio stronghold was under Government siege. In a suit filed in Federal District Court in Cincinnati, the U.S. Department of Justice’s antitrust division demanded that the Enquirer be severed from Scripps-Howard’s 18-paper chain.

Monopoly by Circumstance. To Scripps-Howard’s executives, Cincinnati had seemed almost the last place where the Justice Department might have been expected to strike. The chain had established its Cincinnati monopoly quite by chance. In 1956, it owned only one of the city’s three competing dailies, the Post. Then the Enquirer, which had been bought from the estate of the paper’s publisher by Enquirer employees, went back on the auction block. Scripps-Howard’s bid topped that of Cincinnati’s other evening paper, the independently owned Times-Star. In 1958, the Times-Star, which was losing money at the rate of $1,000,000 a year, sold out to the Post and vanished into its masthead.

Scripps-Howard was thoroughly aware of the implications of its newest monopoly and set out to discourage the possibility of any Government suit. The Enquirer’s five-man voting trust, set up by employees in 1952 to manage the paper, was perpetuated; the chain contented itself with a minority representation of two. The chain editorials that went out from New York to all Scripps-Howard papers were not even sent to the Enquirer; the chain insigne, a lighthouse, did not shine from its pages. Only last week the Enquirer extended by ten years the lease on its plant at 617 Vine Street—which was not due to expire until 1967.

The Enemy. In challenging Scripps-Howard’s monopoly in Cincinnati, the Justice Department passed over many likelier locales for an antitrust suit. Newspaper monopolies have become the rule rather than the exception in the U.S. Competition exists in only 52 of the 1,434 towns that publish daily newspapers. And where competition has vanished by merger, it has rarely been permitted to survive in spirit, as it does in Cincinnati. In Memphis, for example, another Scripps-Howard monopoly town, the two papers share the same plant and the same ad salesmen.

Then why Cincinnati? Why did the Government wait eight years to file its trustbusting suit? Officially, the Justice Department was not saying, but its strategy seemed clear. “Cincinnati is a practical suit because the papers are easily separable,” said a Justice spokesman. “You can get better practical relief.” What this meant was that in most newspaper mergers, the two joined papers produce so hopeless a tangle—in both production and finance—that even a victorious antitrust suit cannot sort it out.

The Justice Department also hinted that its interest in Scripps-Howard’s Cincinnati monopoly had been revived by a recent “citizen’s complaint”—presumably from someone who had convinced Washington that the chain’s dominance in Cincinnati operated in restraint of trade. As far as the city’s two papers are concerned, it will be a difficult charge to prove. “The situation here is as competitive as I can make it,” said Post Editor Dick Thornburg. “If I could keep the Enquirer from getting the weather, I’d do it.” Nor was his sentiment peculiar to the brass. Said a Post reporter: “We work hard to clobber the Enquirer, and we do. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the enemy.” The “practical relief” logic of the Justice Department, however, suggested that Scripps-Howard might have been less vulnerable in Cincinnati if its two papers had not been so separate.