A lot of folks in corporate America won’t be excited to acknowledge this. But old-school, afflict-the-comfortable journalism isn’t dead yet.
In an industry clearly about as vigorous as a clearcut Douglas fir, a handful of pesky, patriotic American journalists still cling to the cascading branches and get the job done, anyway.
To wit:
For consecutive Sundays, Seattle Times aerospace reporter Dominic Gates and colleagues Paige Cornwell and Lauren Rosenblatt filled pages of their newspaper with more of what the Times excels at: unparalleled insight into the goings-on at Boeing, formerly of Seattle.
Their first reports on Aug. 25 provided a remarkably detailed account of final assembly of a Boeing 737 Max 9 that would become the scene of a brush-with-death Alaska Airlines flight out of Portland on Jan. 5. A follow-up piece last Sunday gave readers a look at the present disaffected worker culture behind Boeing’s giant rolling doors, with machinists themselves expressing stress about production errors.
The coverage is remarkable in its damning specificity. The fact that it is really nothing new at The Times, thanks historically to the dogged reporting of Gates, makes it even more impressive.
The various angles of Boeing’s incessant corner-cutting would not be measurable without the intensive and expensive sleuthing of that hometown paper’s reporters, editors and visuals crew, all producing work long ago deemed too costly by hedge fund-owned media chains.
The reporting on the troubled-since-conception 737 Max paints a stunning picture of Boeing’s modern keep-the-line-moving mantra — an embarrassing departure for a company that once put safety above all, to the great pride of generations of skilled Puget Sound-area workers.
The paper provided an hour-by-hour account of a stretch of days in September 2023 when that plane destined to flirt with tragedy by losing a fuselage part crept down a Boeing assembly line in Renton a year ago.
It’s another bite out of the few remaining shards of credibility of Boeing, its once-proud commercial-airlines division’s reputation already darkened by 346 preventable deaths in 737 Max crashes in 2018 and 2019 in Indonesia and Ethiopia.
Fast forward to the recent grounding of the newest 777s, then the humiliating NASA acknowledgment of “multiple failures” of Boeing’s Starliner rocket.
Strike … five?
Among the public, The Times’ deep reporting raises the larger question: What other corners has (and does) Boeing cut, where, and how often? What other bugs lurk in planes now likely reaching failure points?
A less-obvious question about truth and consequences: In the long run, does this sort of damning coverage lead to change, at least by providing government regulators with a model of how not to do things?
Don’t hold your breath; history argues otherwise.
As someone who watched coverage of this corporate sellout unfold from inside the newsroom at The Times, where I worked in various capacities for 32 years, here’s one plea: Please don’t suggest “nobody could have known” about the level of unscrupulousness taking hold at Boeing in the 1990s, when seeds of its current crop rot were sown.
Fact is, everybody did — or should have, had they been paying attention.
The gutting of Boeing by bean counters was, in fact, documented in painstaking detail over a long period by The Times and other news organizations. (I often wrote about it myself in a cantankerous Sunday column, ultimately drawing a caution from a top Times editor that I — a Seattle-area native whose late father was a proud lifelong Boeing machinist — seemed to be taking the company’s sellout “too personally.”)
As Boeing was employing automation to effectively quadruple the production rate of 737s in Renton, my former paper quoted countless Boeing machinists who predicted the end of the quality assurance that once gave the world confidence stepping onto an air frame with a “made-in-Seattle” stamp on the doorframe.
Those emergency flares were largely dismissed as whining from workers seeing their pensions stripped and their jobs pushed to the proudly nonunion South — all part of the ongoing obsession with maximizing stockholder value, our true national credo.
My disconcerting takeaway: The boldest reporting by a free press can only go so far in exposing malfeasance — and ultimately saving lives. In this case, even laying the situation bare failed to produce public pressure sufficient to get the government off its ass and prevent wholly predictable disasters.
The public was told. A few harumphs were issued. Nobody really acted.
All of us know, at some level, why: Corporate America doesn’t care because it doesn’t have to. The insidious, corruptive influence of money in U.S. politics now enjoys unchallenged supremacy. (Remember the quaint days of true FAA oversight, or congressional ethics and campaign-finance reform?) There’s a reason lobbyists outnumber journalists in the Other Washington by about 100-to-1.
In the get-yours-and-cash-out culture, the predictable fallout of corner-cutting clearly is already built into the stock prospectus. In spite of Boeing’s latent stock dip, it all works extremely well for Wall Street.
The rest of us, not so much. There’s not a single lobbyist for the Global Order of Guinea Pigs.
So let’s pause for a moment and offer huzzahs to the folks who nonetheless still stand on the front line of truth-telling, an increasingly lost art. But let’s also acknowledge that information only translates to action through energy and activism from We, the People.
Within days of the Times’ blockbuster 737 report, with details such as a key assembly line worker having previous experience only at fast-food outlets, the piece was bumped from more pressing concerns on the paper’s online most-read list, including the juicy news of a “popular Portland burger chain inching closer to Seattle.”
Serious reporting only goes so far with a non-serious body politic.
Bon appetit, fellow travelers! And by all means, keep that seatbelt loosely fastened.
Ron Judd's column appears weekly; ronjudd@cascadiadaily.com; @roncjudd.
