The Press: Cincinnati Fracas

Employees of the Cincinnati Enquirer (circ. 202,951), led by Reporter James H. Ratliff Jr., made U.S. press history three years ago by raising the cash to take over their own paper (for $7,600,000) to save it from being sold to the rival Taft-owned Cincinnati Times-Star. For his leadership, Ratliff won front-page stories, became vice president and secretary of the company. Last week the Enquirer ran another story on Ratliff on page six. He had been “removed” from those jobs, thereby touching off a new and bitter fight for control of the city’s most prosperous paper.

Ratliff was fired as an officer (but not as a columnist and board member) by the company board. It is headed by 61-year-old Roger Ferger, who held the same top job under the old regime, the McLean estate, and was also a key figure in the paper’s purchase by its employees. Ratliff himself gave the most outspoken statement of the board’s reasons: “They say I was fired for ‘disloyalty, conspiracy to undermine normal channels, attempts to stampede and coerce, persistently fomenting discord . . .’ I deny these charges.” Instead, the veteran newsman accused the paper’s top management of feathering its own nest at the expense of the 4,200 stockholders.

“Lynching Bee.” Ratliff aired his own accusations at an employee meeting where City Editor Jack Cronin also charged that “the ruthless collusion of unprincipled men” had “betrayed the ideal for which we fought in 1952.” Ratliff’s chief charges were that : 1 ) board members voted themselves stock options, which, at his insistence, they finally dropped, except for Ferger; 2) Ferger and Assistant Publisher Eugene S. Duffield together paid themselves an estimated $135,000 in a year when the whole company earned a $349,000 profit and paid its stockholders only $78,000 in dividends; 3) Ferger and Duffield negotiated secretly to merge the paper with the Times-Star.

Assistant Publisher Duffield, onetime top assistant to the late Navy Secretary Forrestal (and who helped edit the Forrestal Diaries}, then rose to defend himself: “I will enter here a categorical denial that I have been guilty of dishonesty or mismanagement . . .” When Ratliff demanded whether there had been negotiations for a merger with the Times-Star, Gene Duffield evaded the question. “Say yes or no.” cut in City Editor Cronin. “You’ve been double-talking all afternoon.” Duffield still hedged. “May I rephrase the question?” asked Ratliff. “Has a juncture of the Times-Star and Enquirer been mentioned?” Admitted Duffield: “In that broad sense, yes.” “Teapot Tempest.” While the employees met. Publisher Ferger was spending the Thanksgiving weekend in New York “on business”; before leaving Cincinnati he had summoned them to a meeting on the Ratliff charges, then called it off at the last moment so that “nothing rash would happen.” He had also put the company books under armed guard. To Ferger the whole fracas was “a tempest in a teapot” and his major accuser “emotionally unstable.” As to company finances, Ferger said that the paper had not been expected to pay dividends at all until its big debt was paid off, but it had paid them anyway from the first year of the regime. As for the stock option, Ferger said it gave him the right to buy 9,000 shares at $10 a share—a price the stock has yet to reach. Under his management, he said, the Enquirer had hit an all-time high in circulation and earnings, had already paid off $1,000,000 of $6,000,000 borrowed to swing the 1952 deal. The publisher has shared in the prosperity.

Though his base salary is $35,000, his pay plus bonus was never lower than $55,000, reached $75,000 last year, and will come to “about $100,000” this year.

Back in Cincinnati, after hearing Ratliff’s side of the story and Duffield’s denials, the employees’ meeting (attended by 200 of the paper’s 900 workers) voted overwhelmingly to organize for action. In 1952, when trying to buy the paper, the employees called themselves the Committee to Save the Enquirer. Last week they began calling themselves the Committee to Save the Enquirer Again.