New owner plastered Baltimore Sun newsroom with motivation . . . and misquotes
Copy editors? Apparently not deployed on the boss’s vanity photo display, the newsroom union says
Above: This photo hung by Baltimore Sun management in the newsroom includes one of the quotes most commonly misattributed to Mark Twain. (@baltsunguild)
When the Baltimore Sun’s new owners moved the staff into office space in Harbor East late last year, they hung photos on the walls emblazoned with pithy quotes from famous deep thinkers: Cicero, Hannah Arendt, Benjamin Franklin and the like.
The generic shots of sunsets and lighthouses were signed “David Smith,” indicating they were taken by the Sun’s majority owner, the conservative executive chairman of Sinclair Broadcast Group and avowed amateur photographer.
But the journalists noticed something else:
Many of the quotes were misattributed, misspelled and, in various ways, wrong.
“We found some attributed to the wrong person, others paraphrased, still others with punctuation and spelling errors aplenty. And some were never even uttered by the person quoted,” the Baltimore Sun Guild pointed out yesterday on X.
Union leaders reached this conclusion after consulting with a historian and conducting their own research.
They showcased the boo-boos and sloppy copy in an online thread.
Several quotes, for example, by founding father James Madison were mistakenly attributed to Thomas Jefferson.
On the walls of the Baltimore Sun newsroom, management appears to have attributed one quote to two founding fathers. (@baltsunguild)
This quote, superimposed on Smith’s close-up photo of maple seeds, is attributed to Mark Twain:
“If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you are misinformed.”
Turns out, it’s one of the quotes most commonly misattributed to Twain, as the Guild discovered after running it by The Center for Mark Twain Studies.
Cringeworthy typo in the Hannah Arendt quote: “. . . lies have always been regarede [sic] as justifiable tools in political dealings,” (@cassidymjensen)
Staff vs. Owner
The union is not pulling any punches these days.
They’ve been calling out changes in the paper’s editorial standards and practices under Smith and co-owner Armstrong Williams, which they say are unprofessional.
When a reporter who criticized these changes in an internal message group was fired, they criticized management as “cowardly” and filed a formal grievance.
Seeking the first across-the-board raise in 12 years in contract talks that have been stalled and contentious, the Guild has been conducting informational flyering events. One of them featured a lengthy confrontation with Smith himself.
• Brandishing fliers that call David Smith a union buster, a Baltimore Sun journalist confronts newspaper owner (12/21/24)
Now they’re clearly savoring these multiple screw-ups.
Quotes said to be from the Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero give his birth and death dates as 106BC to 43 AD – a lifespan of 149 years.
“Maybe [the questionable quotes] were lost in translation or from him speaking from the grave,” the Guild mused on X:
Long live Cicero!
Sun reporters and photographers have been riled about the new owner’s use of wall space for his hobbyist’s snapshots rather than the staff’s professional work product.
They’ve gained some ground, but, as with the contract negotiations, not much.
“The Sun did hang some of our historic front pages,” a staffer told The Brew. “But they are outside the newsroom in the hallway.”