It makes sense that it was a legendary muckraking journalist, Upton Sinclair, who coined the truism about how hard it is “to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” And it’s not so surprising after Advance Media’s brutal round of union-busting layoffs at the Plain Dealer last week that the company’s top editor in Cleveland, Chris Quinn, is having a tough time understanding, or pretending not to understand, why everyone is so upset.
With last week’s layoffs having completed a process by which a Plain Dealer newsroom of 350 union-backed journalists has been reduced, over a decade, to 63 non-union reporters under the banner of Cleveland.