Mediaboss Marketing

The name of William Woodward (Hootie) Johnson, who died last week at 86, is not likely to be widely familiar. He was the scion of a South Carolina banking dynasty, and something of a civil-rights pioneer in his home state: Recruiter of African-Americans in the family firms and local politics; supporter of integration in South Carolina's schools and colleges; the first white Southerner to serve on the board of directors of the Urban League. He was also an avid golfer, and chairman of the Augusta National club, home of the Masters tournament, between 1998 and 2006.

It was that last association that transformed Johnson into an involuntary recruit in the culture warsand revealed the potentially corrosive, and corrupting, power of the press.

In 2002, a left-wing gadfly and publicist named Martha Burk, head of the National Council of Women's Organizations, wrote a letter to Johnson, noting the fact that the famously exclusive and expensive Augusta National had no female members. Burk, of course, did not write to Johnson to inform him of a fact he already knew. Her letter, which was simultaneously delivered to the media, contained an ill-disguised threat: "We urge you to review your policies and practices in this regard," she said, "and open your membership to women now, so that this is not an issue when the [Masters] tournament is staged next year."

If Johnson had been, say, the president of Yale, and not chairman of Augusta National, he would have moved swiftly to appease Burk and prevent what any public-relations counselor would have warned to be bad publicity. But Johnson's response was complicated by the fact that the New York Times, edited at the time by Howell Raines, took up Burk's cause as its own.Therein lies a lesson, and the reason why Hootie Johnson's gothic family nickname briefly became a household term.

Howell Raines was, and remains, a left-wing southerner with something of a reputation as a newsroom zealot and bully. In his brief, volatile reign as the Times's executive editor (2001-03)he was brought down by misconduct in the Jayson Blair scandalhis politics and temperament inspired a special vehemence about certain genteel institutions in the South: Augusta National and Southern Living magazine, among others. He was also famous for employing a sports analogy"flooding the zone"to describe his professional instinct to harass targets, splash stories, and hector readers.

Prompted by his ideological comrade-in-arms, Martha Burk, Raines proceeded to flood the zone around Augusta National. In the next few months, the New York Times published literally dozens of stories on the subject (many on the newspaper's front page) and deployed his newsroom consigliere, the late Gerald M. Boyd, to scratch publication of dissenting arguments from Times sports columnists.

For his part, Johnson proved equal to the challenge. He answered Burk's extortionate terms with a polite, but pointed, message. He understood, of course, that Burk would "attempt to depict the members of our club as insensitive bigots and coerce the sponsors of the Masters to disassociate themselves under threatreal or impliedof boycotts and other economic pressures." But he also reminded her, and Raines, of the right of free association in America, and the perils of a powerful, and capriciously politicized, media.

Johnson assumed that the Masters' corporate sponsors would surrender to the threat of political pressure and unwelcome coverage but he also knew that Augusta National's affluent membership was uniquely prepared, and largely disposed, to resist coercion: "There may well come a day when women will be invited to join our membership," he wrote, "but that timetable will be ours and not at the point of a bayonet."

In the meantime, the Times-abetted spectacle played itself out. For a couple of pleasant seasons, the Masters was broadcast on television without commercials, as Augusta National opted to dispense with ads rather than put sponsors in a difficult position. The Times endeavored regularly to paint Johnson as an unreconstructed bigot, and when Burk arrived in Augusta in 2003 to stage a public demonstration, the protesters were heavily outnumbered by reporters. That was the same year Raines lost his job, and the Times dropped the story, moving on to other crusades.

All of which leads to two instructive postscripts. Five years ago, with Hootie Johnson as sponsor, Augusta National welcomed its first female members, one of whom is former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. And last week, Johnson died. It is worth noting that his New York Times obituary"Hootie Johnson, 86; Fought Admission of Women at Masters Site"was not just churlish in tone (see above headline) but devoid of any mention of the Times's leading role in the farce.

And of course the Times gave Burk the last word on Johnson: "'I think history will remember him as the Lester Maddox of golf,' referring to the segregationist governor of Georgia who refused to serve blacks in restaurants." In truth, of course, in the civil rights-era South, Hootie Johnson was the exact opposite of Lester Maddoxas Burk and the Times well know, just as the Times failed to mention the party affiliation of the "segregationist governor."

Philip Terzian is a senior editor of The Weekly Standard.

See the original post here:
Remembering Hootie Johnson, Survivor of the Culture Wars - The Weekly Standard