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Illinois newspapers are lining up against Gov. Rod
Blagojevich’s controversial gross-receipts-tax plan, a stance the
governor’s office blames on pressure from “big business.”
The boards of directors of the Illinois Press
Association, which represents about 600 newspapers, and the Illinois Press
Foundation last week voted unanimously to oppose the tax plan, which the
governor says will generate $6 billion more per year in state income.
The tax, which would be levied on businesses with
more than $1 million in annual revenue, would fund an ambitious proposal
for universal health care, as well as public education and capital
improvements. Many health-care and education groups back the
governor’s proposal; business interests, including the Illinois State
Chamber of Commerce, are strongly opposed. IPA board members decided that they had to take
sides, says executive director Dave Bennett. “There was almost instant unanimity about the
threat the gross-receipts tax poses for communities and retail merchants on
whom we rely,” Bennett says. Among newspapers that editorialized against the
governor’s proposal are the Chicago
Tribune, owned by the Tribune Co., and The Southern Illinoisan, of
Carbondale, and the Herald & Review, of Decatur, both owned by Davenport, Iowa-based Lee
Enterprises. “It’s disheartening,” says Becky
Carroll, a spokeswoman for the governor’s budget office, of the IPA
opposition. “Publishers are feeling pressure from their
advertisers, which just goes to show that big business will stop at nothing
to pressure everyone from newspapers to legislators to other associations
that rely on them in one form or other because they don’t want to see
[the gross-receipts tax] passed.”
But, Bennett insists, in deciding to oppose
Blagojevich’s proposal, “the IPA board was careful not to mix
the business interests of newspapers with the editorial responsibilities of
reporting on the proposed tax plan.”
The governor’s spokeswoman is skeptical about
newspapers’ ability to distinguish the public interest and
self-interest. “It’ll be interesting,” says
Carroll, “to see what kind of influence publishers try to yield over
their editorial staffs in the coming weeks.”
Do newspapers, which advocate for the public’s
right to know, have an obligation to tell readers how the proposed tax will
affect their bottom lines? Ronald Yates, dean of the College of Communications
at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, thinks so. However,
Yates adds, the larger question is whether the tax might be construed as
infringing on a newspaper’s ability to do its job and affect the
cost of covering the news Disclosure of such information would only be
necessary in the presence of a conflict not readily apparently to people,
says Charles Wheeler, a former reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times and currently
a professor of public-affairs reporting at the University of Illinois at
Springfield. “It would be insulting to readers to say,
‘Oh, by the way, we’re not a not-for-profit operation.’ That would be a
waste of space,” Wheeler says. Although he has encouraged member papers to write
about the impact the gross-receipts tax would have on the communities they
serve, the IPA’s Bennett says it’s up to each paper to decide
whether to disclose how its own bottom line is affected. “Any story should strive to be as inclusive as
possible,” he says. “We’re in a unique position to
disseminate information, and if it were my paper, I would want to tell
people that I have a vested interest in this and that it may hurt my
ability to report the news.”
Editor’s note: Illinois
Times, a member of the Illinois Press
Association, has not taken a position on the governor’s tax plan and
does not publish editorials.
Contact R.L. Nave@illinoistimes.com
This article appears in Mar 22-28, 2007.
