Baltimore eliminates arts coverage
NewsThe Baltimore Sun today scrapped its features department, reassigning its remaining writers to the news department.
This leaves the 30th-ranked US city without any reporting on its busy music scene, museums, galleries and performing arts spaces.
Although the Sun’s music critic Tim Smith got out a while back, the Baltimore Symphony will now struggle even harder to make itself heard at home, let alone anywhere else.
Bad news day.
This is unfortunate, given how amazing the orchestra continues to sound under its new music director. And some sharp programming during the current season. With the orchestra in its typically-excellent form, hope people don’t miss out on the excitement.
What it tells you that predatory hedge fund owners are just out to squeeze the last buck out of the newspapers they acquire. Witness the closing of the recently built printing plant on the harbor. Disgusting.
The current deal in Baltimore is that the Sun was taken over and is essentially being gutted by billionaire conservative David Smith – the same David Smith that tried and failed to buy the mayorship by funding ex-mayor and convicted felon Sheila Dixon back into office.
Luckily for us in Baltimore, we have the nonprofit Baltimore Banner, which consist of many of the best former reporters from the Sun, doing excellent journalistic work.
Unfortunately, for those of us in the BSO (the Baltimore BSO), there isn’t much in the way of daily arts reporting. We do occasionally get a nice write up in the Washington Post for one of our weekly performances at Strathmore in Bethesda, but that’s about it these days.
The Baltimore Symphony gives every classical program at least one performance at Strathmore Music Center, which is less than two miles from the Washington Beltway. I wish-hope that Washington Classical Review online would start noticing them again.
I’m not from Baltimore but it is my understanding that there are many media alternatives, including print alternatives, there to the Sun itself, which is under new and evidently not beloved ownership. Thus I am not sure it is correct to say that this development leaves Baltimore “without any reporting” on music and related cultures. Perhaps actual residents of that area can and will enlighten us further.
No surprise here, as The Sun is jointly co-owned by the right wing commentator Armstrong Williams and David Smith, the former CEO of Sinclair Broadcasting, which leans Republican in its news broadcasting. The Baltimore Sun Guild, which represents employees, said in a statement Monday that for “… the first time since at least 1888 the newspaper won’t have even one reporter dedicated to covering the city’s cultural life.”
Local newspapers covering local orchestras often lack credibility due to their embarrassing servility or blatant conflict of interests. I can’t speak for the Baltimore situation but in Chicago that is certainly the case.
In the Second City, Kyle MacMillan reviews the CSO on the Chicago Sun Times; but he is also a regular writer on the official CSO website. His reviews lack any credibility in the mind of a reasonable reader. This sad and unsettling state of affair is only compensated by the Chicago Classical Review who has shown throughout the years an admirable degree of objectivity and independence, for example by not hesitating to criticize Muti’s tenure as a music director. Muti was so angry at reading their reviews, that he tried to deny free tickets to one of the Chicago Classical Reviews most competent critics.
But alas, as soon as Muti adventures outside and go to even a relatively friendly city, the harsh, naked reality emerges. Here are excerpts of a review of his Philadelphia Verdi Requiem concert from the past week-end, published on Backtrack and titled “Requiem for a heavyweight: Riccardo Muti in Philadelphia”, a performance that was rated two stars out of five
(https://bachtrack.com/de_DE/review-philadelphia-orchestra-riccardo-muti-verdi-requiem-october-2024)
“Don’t meet your heroes, Flaubert once cautioned – they often have feet made of clay. […]
.. although Muti has lived with this work for decades and has a thorough pedigree as an opera conductor, the performance lacked a sense of musical variation and narrative drive ..
… The orchestral musicians played consistently well for Muti, though he seemed intent on goading them to keep things loud and fast…
… Muti’s preferred dynamics sacrificed the emotional core of the work for a few thrilling moments …
…With the orchestra and chorus essentially operating at one speed throughout the performance, the progression of the work lacked a total impact …
…As a performance […] it felt as if we were laying flowers at feet of clay…”
This sentiment is pretty much what Chicago audiences have felt for a dozens years about Muti and the key reason why the orchestra ticket sales have cratered (along with deteriorating orchestra quality and very, very bad programming).
We would not have known this by reading Kyle MacMillan.
Bad news day and it won’t be the last. The demise of American newspapers is ongoing and hardly finished. There are many reasons that all came together to cause the problem: the rise of the internet, cable TV news, newspapers too often becoming a voice of the Democrat party, citizens not reading – anything, high labor costs to run a paper, diminishing revenue from the want ads…the list goes on. The largest paper in my state stopped covering classical music and other arts and lost many readers as a result. Then they cut out half of the comics, the food editor an are now in a Doom Loop into extinction. It didn’t help that the editorial staff is almost all liberal, left and wouldn’t be able to write an honest or fair column if their lives depended on it. There’s one conservative but he only gets one column every two weeks. So you turn off half of the population. I would assume that reviewing or promoting the upcoming music director search at the symphony is of little importance.
“newspapers too often becoming a voice of the Democrat party”
It seems that Baltimore locals in the comment section said that the newspaper was taken over by billionaire conservative David Smith!
The general rule for newspapers in places where there is only one newspaper, is for that newspaper to be close to “neutral” and to try to reflect the broad veiws of the place which it is reporting on. Anything else is commercial suicide.
Heartbreaking