Chris Satullo at WHYY: Solution or problem?

First, the good news: After 11 years at the helm of WHYY, Bill Marrazzo has finally hired someone to oversee the public broadcaster's radio, TV and Internet news operations— a move that raises hopes that his stations will finally get serious about creating local programs instead of merely transmitting other stations' programs.

Now for the bad news: The new position will be filled by the Inquirer's former editorial page editor and columnist, Chris Satullo.

What, you ask, could possibly be wrong with Chris Satullo? The man is a seasoned professional journalist with nearly 20 years at the Inquirer under his belt. In his Inquirer columns and editorials since the dawn of the millennium, Satullo has consistently positioned himself as the avuncular voice of reason and good sense— the "Center Square" (as he called his column), the man of the middle, the mouth of the mainstream, the soul of the suburbs. As editor, he spearheaded the Inquirer's unprecedented entry into civic engagement ventures like "Citizen Voices" and Penn's "Project on Civic Engagement," which brought hundreds of Philadelphians to public forums about the mayoral races and other issues.

Although I never met Satullo personally during my long stint as a non-staff Inquirer op-ed columnist (1978-96), I found him consistently cordial and professional in our occasional telephone dealings. Marrazzo himself characterized Satullo as "a three-fer: an outstanding journalist with a track record in civic engagement who understands this community like the back of his hand."

No, the problem with this appointment is that Marrazzo, in the course of hiring someone to complement his own journalistic shortcomings, has actually hired someone very much like himself.

Two decent, capable fellows, but…

As I suggested in this space last month, Marrazzo is a decent and capable administrator who tends to operate WHYY as a public utility rather than as a producer of TV and radio programs. Satullo, by the same token, is a decent and capable fellow who tends to approach journalism as a social worker. Marrazzo adores "civic engagement" projects; so does Satullo. You've heard of two-man teams who function as Yin and Yang? Marrazzo and Satullo will be more like Yin and Yin.

In his new job, I think I can safely predict, Satullo will organize many public forums that may inspire those who attend them but will have nothing to do with stimulating or provocative TV programming— which, lest we forget, is the prime mission of a public broadcasting operation and the one area in which WHYY has long been woefully deficient.

Telling Bill Clinton to resign

Satullo is perhaps best remembered as the author of the Inquirer's September 1998 editorial calling for Bill Clinton to resign in the wake of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Writing anonymously under deadline on behalf of a divided editorial board, Satullo argued that Clinton should resign because he had "dishonored his presidency beyond repair," because resignation "is his best hope to preserve shards of sympathy and respect from the verdict of history," because otherwise "his once-glittering agenda of centrist change faces a devastating setback," and because "it is the honorable thing."

The editorial neglected to address the larger implications of its logic. Is everyone who lies about his sex life unfit for public office? If presidents should resign whenever they lose the public's trust, would we not be better off with a parliamentary system and its periodic votes of confidence? And if Clinton failed to take the Inquirer's advice, what then? Would the Inquirer keep calling for his resignation throughout the remainder of his term? (He didn't, and the Inquirer, having boxed itself into a corner, didn't raise the issue again.)

I know, I know: What do you expect from a daily newspaper— a doctoral thesis?

Excessive caution on suburbia and the "'Center City jogger'

My qualms about Satullo's journalistic instincts had actually been raised somewhat earlier, by his response to two Inquirer columns I wrote in the mid-'90s, when he was deputy editorial page editor. My role as an Inquirer op-ed columnist was originally conceived as that of a devil's advocate who would stimulate thought by afflicting the comfortable. In that capacity, in 1995 I wrote a deliberately provocative column about a phenomenon I called "suburban paranoia." I presumed it would generate a healthy dialogue. Satullo did publish my column, but not before composing his own defense of suburbia that appeared side-by-side with mine. That is, his first instinct was not to afflict the comfortable but to comfort the Inquirer's suburban audience. God forbid someone in Lafayette Hill should choke on his coffee while reading the morning Inquirer.

A more egregious case occurred a year later, when Kimberly Ernest, aka the "Center City Jogger," was raped and murdered during her customary early-morning jog through town. Police quickly arrested two street punks and extracted confessions from both of them. After studying the evidence, I wrote a column pointing out that the confessions made no sense. (For example, the two men described themselves as breaking into parked cars on Pine Street at 6:30 on the morning of the murder, yet two hours later one of these alleged killers showed up— in suit and tie and seemingly unperturbed— at a court hearing in Doylestown.) Since both men's confessions were obtained separately, and since both were identical and demonstrably wrong, I suggested that the confessions may have been coerced by the police.

Satullo killed the column, contending I was making judgments best left to a jury. This was no great loss to me: My column subsequently appeared in the Philadelphia Forum. But it was, I would argue, a loss to the Inquirer's readers, who were deprived of insight into the case by the paper's excessive cautiousness, as represented in this instance by Satullo. (A year later, a jury agreed with my theory, acquitting both men. Kimberly Ernest's killers were never caught.)

I stress again that, based on his career so far, Satullo is a reasonable man. But as George Bernard Shaw observed, "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." WHYY desperately needs gutsy, provocative, stimulating, controversial local programming. Let us hope that, in this next phase of his career, Chris Satullo discovers his inner unreasonable man.





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