Covering the world‐class downtown: Seattle's local media and the politics of urban redevelopment

Abstract

Local disputes over land use and urban development generate some of the most heated struggles in American politics. Yet the role of local media organizations in covering debates over urban development has been woefully understudied by media scholars. To address this soft spot in the critical media literature, this article offers an investigation of how the local press covered a particularly bitter debate over one urban redevelopment proposal in Seattle during the mid‐1990s. Drawing on Hallin, who predicts that reporters will abandon professional codes of neutrality and balance when they perceive the political field to be unified around a single position, an examination of sourcing patterns in the Seattle case suggests that local reporters cover debates over urban development from a spurious assumption of “consensus”—an assumption that privileges the voices of downtown business leaders and pro‐development public officials. A concluding section offers suggestions for future investigation into the intersection of local media and urban development politics, drawing particularly on Bourdieu's notion of “symbolic capital” to explore how such presumptions of consensus are cultivated, maintained, and contested within the local public sphere.

Notes

Timothy A. Gibson is Assistant Professor in the Communication Department at George Mason University. Correspondence to: Communication Department, Mail Stop 3D6, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA 22030‐4444, U.S. Email: [email protected]. A previous version of this article was presented at the 2003 Annual Meeting of the Eastern Communication Association. The author would like to thank Richard Gruneau, Cindy Lont, the editors of CSMC, and the journal's anonymous reviewers for their feedback and support.

An expanded version of this section (Case Description) was published first by the author in Gibson (2003).

Keyword searches included: Westlake Park, Rhodes, Klutznick, Nordstrom, Downtown Seattle Association, Pine Street, Friends of Westlake Park, Aramburu, Daniel Norton, Peter Steinbrueck, John Fox, Jordan Brower, Seattle Displacement Coalition, and Frederick & Nelson. Rhodes and Klutznick were the primary developers of the project, while Aramburu, Norton, and Steinbrueck were the most prominent opponents of re‐opening Pine Street to traffic. John Fox and Jordan Brower are long‐time critics of publicly‐subsidized downtown development, and worked to derail the project prior to Nordstrom's demand to re‐open Pine to traffic.

A chi‐square goodness‐of‐fit test confirmed that the differences between downtown business, public officials, advocacy/non‐profit, and academic/citizen sources were statistically significant (chi square=302.41, p<.01, df=3). The goodness‐of‐fit test assumed that one would expect an equal distribution of sources across the four categories.

Four chi‐square goodness‐of‐fit tests confirmed that the differences between downtown business, public officials, advocacy/non‐profit, and academic/citizen sources were statistically significant in all eras of the debate except, importantly, Era 3 (election). The results were as follows. Era 1: chi square=295.58, p<.01, df=3; Era 2: chi square=52.54, p<.01, df=3; Era 3: chi square=3.03, p=ns, df=3; Era 4: chi square=61.19, p<.01, df=3. Again, the goodness‐of‐fit test assumed that one would expect an equal distribution of sources across the four categories.

The administration was behind the Rhodes Project from the beginning, and pushed hard to have Pine Street opened (Downtown Task Force, personal communication, March 24, 1999). The city council voted 9‐0 in favor of the final agreement to publicly subsidize the Rhodes Project and voted 7‐2 to re‐open Pine Street to traffic (Erickson, 1995; Higgins, 1995b).

There were also “official” sources waiting to be tapped as well, if reporters were willing to look beyond city hall. For example, federal housing officials in the Seattle office of the Department of Housing & Urban Development (HUD) were leery about using a HUD development loan to help developers purchase the vacant Frederick & Nelson building. This local resistance was overcome when Washington State Senator Patty Murray lobbied the national HUD office on behalf of the Rhodes Project and its supporters (Collins, 1995).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Timothy A. Gibson

Timothy A. Gibson is Assistant Professor in the Communication Department at George Mason University. Correspondence to: Communication Department, Mail Stop 3D6, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA 22030‐4444, U.S. Email: [email protected]. A previous version of this article was presented at the 2003 Annual Meeting of the Eastern Communication Association. The author would like to thank Richard Gruneau, Cindy Lont, the editors of CSMC, and the journal's anonymous reviewers for their feedback and support.