Last March, the Poynter Institute for Media Studies quietly bought a sizeable chunk of property from All Children's Hospital. The purchase fit into Poynter's long-time strategy of acquiring most of the land in a three-block area that includes the journalism think tank's opulent home at 801 Third St. S.
The St. Petersburg Times, which is owned by Poynter, never reported or discussed the acquisitions — nor was it required to. However, the land lies in a neighborhood involved in a bitter community debate: the future of Albert Whitted Airport. City voters will decide on Nov. 4 whether to keep the city-owned airport or to close it and turn it into a waterfront park.
In its editorials and arguably even in its news coverage, the Times has pushed for elimination of the airport, first suggesting that the property would be better used as an urban village and now supporting the waterfront park.
Which raises some questions.
How does a newspaper reconcile its legitimate private interest with its broader responsibility to fully inform the public about a hotly contested political issue? Is the Times, with its parent company's property affected by the Albert Whitted outcome, obliged to cover both sides of the debate? Further, should the Times have disclosed Poynter's holdings and acquisitions when it stands to gain from a new waterfront park?
Local real estate experts agree that replacing Albert Whitted with a park will enhance property values in the nearby blocks. Other loud anti-airport voices own valuable tracts near Albert Whitted. Architect Tim Clemmons, a board member of Citizens for a New Waterfront Park, owns a development in progress called Charles Court with his partner Dar Webb. George Rahdert, a downtown real estate investor and the Times' most high-profile attorney, is a director, along with Clemmons and Webb, in the Charles Court Homeowners' Association. Rahdert has donated money to Citizens for a New Waterfront Park.
But these people are not the Times, the city's dominant newspaper, with the clout to greatly influence the referendum's outcome.
"The newspaper has a special burden, in an issue in which they stand to benefit, to make sure readers understand that interest," said Danny Schecter, executive editor of MediaChannel.org, a media watchdog website. "I think they also have a further obligation to seek another point of view and give it some prominence, perhaps on the Op Ed page. If they fail to do that, then in a sense they're using the power of the press to promote their own power. And clearly, people (at the Poynter) who set themselves up as arbiters of journalistic ethics have an added burden when it comes to their own activities."
Ted Glasser, director of the graduate journalism program at Stanford University and a member of the ethics board of the Society of Professional Journalists, prefaced his opinion by saying that he had not read any of the coverage. Responding "in the abstract," he said via e-mail, "I'd prefer to see the paper not editorialize on an issue in which it has an interest. But if it is going to comment, it should go out of its way to solicit and publish competing commentary."
Fred Brown, co-chair of the SPJ ethics committee, responded to our e-mail query with this: "Without having seen the coverage it's difficult for me to comment on how well or how ethically [the Times] has covered this issue. Generally, though, I would say that the Times has an ethical obligation to report on its financial stake on this issue every time it writes about the referendum. This needn't be a full-fledged disclosure every time, but it should at least be a mention that the airport is (close) to the Poynter Institute, which owns the St. Petersburg Times."
Media critics see a trend of large newspapers advancing their own interests without adequate disclosure. "It's a pattern," Schecter said: "Media companies operating in ways that are not transparent, thus not really being accountable for the ways they achieve their economic goals and gains."
The Poynter Institute owns nearly all of the land bordered by Third and Fourth streets and Eighth and 11th avenues South — roughly three acres for its office/educational facility and four additional acres. (All Children's retains the right to use the parcel it sold to Poynter for another two-and-a-half years.) The land sits right under the east-west flight path of Albert Whitted Airport.
Andrew Barnes, CEO of both Poynter and the Times, says that some of the additional property will likely go toward expanding the institute, and some of it will "one way or the other probably end up being used by [the University of South Florida at St. Petersburg]."
As for the Times not disclosing Poynter's property holdings, he said, "In all candor, I hadn't thought about it. It doesn't strike me as germane to the point. We're not getting rich on it."
Poynter president Karen Brown added, "We own the Times and they have an obligation to report about us. Is this a story in itself? I don't think so. Is there a specific story about how (the airport issue) affects Poynter? Maybe a little one."
The institute's property value is likely to increase if the airport is bulldozed, and it will enjoy other benefits as well. "We have a beautiful garden area designed for teaching that we seldom use," Brown said. "We get in the middle of a good teaching session and an airplane goes over and disrupts it. We also have a collection of award-winning photographs that are never quite straight on the wall. Someone told me it's the planes; they shake them a little bit."
Times news coverage of the Albert Whitted issue has repeatedly discussed the inconvenience the airport causes USF and nearby hospitals. But it never mentions that the Poynter itself is also hampered. This is just one example of subtle obfuscation and bias in the paper's news reports. Another instance: When Albert Whitted staged an air show a few weeks ago, the Times printed a story on the front of its City/State section that gave voice to the anti-airport side, which alleged the event was a political rally and the presenting organization was breaking the law by not registering as a Political Action Committee. The paper covered the air show's entertainment aspect with one small paragraph in its Weekend section.
Times editorials have been pointed and shrill. They've dismissed the airport as a private club where "177 owners can park their airplanes on the downtown waterfront,'' while not examining the economic impact — including 300 jobs — of Albert Whitted. Editorials have accused the St. Petersburg City Council of being shills for the airport cause and rigging the referendum with confusing language — language that we at the Weekly Planet find perfectly clear.
(See the essay on p. 21 for a more detailed analysis of the Times' news and editorial coverage.)
The Times' hidden interest has not been the only distortion in the airport debate.One of the biggest fears circling the issue is high-rise condos. It's been well established that, at this point in history, the people of St. Petersburg do not want a wall of high-rise condos on their downtown waterfront. Ironically, both sides of the airport debate claim to safeguard the city from such a scourge — the park people because, well, they're advocating green space; the airport people because they're protecting citizens from the park people, who (in the pro-airport view) are actually a bunch of sneaky condo developers itching to get their mitts on that land.
This bone of contention has actually gotten a bit silly. The chance of high-rises being erected directly on airport land in the near future is all but nil. The city's regulatory master plan, the fact that Albert Whitted sits in a flood zone, and the need for a referendum to sell city-owned waterfront land are pretty good guarantees in the short haul. The distant future is harder to predict.
But what of the blocks just west of Albert Whitted? Could that area host condos that blot out a view of the bay?
"Most of that property is owned by institutions — universities and hospitals," said Clemmons, the architect. "They're not in the habit of building true high-rises — more mid-rises in the five-, six-, seven-story range."
Even so, no airport means no more Federal Aviation Administration height restrictions on nearby buildings. The Poynter property, for instance, can now max out at around 60 feet (probably five stories). Barnes said his company has no intention of erecting tall buildings.
But what if a developer wanted to build a skyscraper in the neighborhood once the airport is gone?
It could be done. Most of the property just west of Albert Whitted is zoned CBD-2/Central Business District, which has no set height restrictions. Building height is governed by a set of ratios and bonuses, but the basic rule is the bigger the lot, the higher a developer can go.
Even if airport-based height restrictions do vanish, St. Petersburg zoning official John Hixenbaugh does not see a rush to build big towers in the section. "I think it depends on your definition of a high-rise," he said. "This is downtown, some of which is being developed with buildings in the 20- or 30-story range. There's nothing that tells us the market will support any more than that. There's this fear of the sort of canyonization that you have in Miami Beach, where you can't even see the ocean. We've put zoning in place in the last three or four years to keep the buildings stepped back and spaced apart, the corridors open."
Most local real estate experts agree that skyscrapers are not imminent just south of downtown, although it's interesting to note that developer Grady Pridgen currently has a residential tower on the drawing board just eight blocks north of Albert Whitted. It's projected height: 42 floors.
Felix Fudge, president of Bridgeport South Realty Advisors in St. Petersburg, conveys an unshakeable reality of urban growth: "We live in a densely populated area. The growth has to go up. There's no place to grow out. You have to put more (residential) units on top to increase the tax base."
Condos or no condos, high-rise or no-rise, property values just west of Albert Whitted are bound to go up if the airport is replaced by a park. "Does anybody specifically say 'I want my residence near an airport, near a landfill'?" Fudge asked. "If you look at that area in terms of residential use, there's a higher value in being away from an airport and near a waterfront park."Walt Smyth, a commercial realtor with the Premier Group and chairman of the board of the Pinellas Suncoast Association of Realtors, echoed, "The park would be considered a community enhancement in that area and positively affect residential development."
Does the Poynter Institute anticipate a windfall if Albert Whitted Airport goes away? Both Barnes and Brown conceded that life at Poynter will improve if a park prevails, but said they hadn't really thought about the issue in terms of fiscal benefit. "We're not land speculators or traders," Barnes added.
In the end, land values in and around Albert Whitted Airport will take some time to shake out. Remember, even if voters opt for the waterfront park, the airport stays until 2011.
In a broader sense, the decision over Albert Whitted is a referendum on how we envision the future of downtown. Does it emphasize residential comfort, the sort of bucolic environment with no place for the buzz of planes overhead? Or does it allow for a certain urban bustle that comes with keeping transportation options open?
As the Planet has previously stated, we favor keeping the airport.
The St. Petersburg Times wants it gone. This has been its stance for decades. The paper has weighed in heavily on the matter. It will be interesting to see whether voters agree.
Senior Writer Eric Snider can be reached at 813-248-8888, ext. 114, or at eric.snider@weeklyplanet.com.
This article appears in Oct 30 – Nov 5, 2003.