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CONN HALLINAN: HE KNEW WHOSE SIDE HE WAS ON  
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David Bacon
June 24, 2024
Foreign Policy in Focus
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_ Former FPIF columnist Conn Hallinan, who passed away on June 19 at
the age of 81, wrote sharply and passionately about international
issues for five decades. _

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I learned a lot from Conn “Ringo” Hallinan, who passed on June 19.
Ringo had a full life as both a writer and political organizer, and
ran the journalism program at UC Santa Cruz for 23 years. But that’s
not the way I knew him. For me, Ringo was a guide to a path through
the hard knocks of labor and radical journalism.

Ringo was foreign editor at the West Coast People’s World for many
years. I spent a year of apprenticeship there, as it became a national
newspaper, the People’s Daily World. Both were publications of the
U.S. Communist Party, but regularly carried news and analysis that
went beyond, and usually in contradiction to, the mainstream media.
Ringo’s international columns, especially during the Cold War and
the era of national liberation conflicts, were often the issue’s
high point.

Ringo was a voracious reader with an encyclopedic knowledge, ranging
from defense budget figures to the world view of anti-apartheid
fighters in southern Africa. He carried his “Dispatches from the
Edge” into Foreign Policy in Focus
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got his teaching gig at Santa Cruz.

I had no problems with the idea of being, as we called it at the
paper, “profoundly partisan.” I came out of union organizing
drives and factory work, and became a labor reporter at the PW after
getting laid off for a time as an organizer. So, while I shared
Ringo’s general perspective, I had a lot to learn as a would-be
journalist.  The terrible PW pay couldn’t sustain my family for
more than a year, and I then had to go back to organizing work. But
the bug bit me, and eventually I found a way to freelance fulltime
journalism.

Organizing gives you a good grounding in the lives of working people,
but the PW job taught me how to put that into a coherent news or
feature article. Although no longer at the paper, Ringo would often
send me critiques of my articles, and our former editor, Carl Bloice,
and the previous labor reporter, Billy Allan, helped me learn as well.

Ringo had a sense of dry humor and irony about the vicious absurdities
of capitalism that appealed to me. His last column, written many years
after his PW days, still could make me laugh. “But the illusions of
Empire are stubborn,” he wrote. “The US still thinks it can
control the world, when every experience for the past 50 years or more
suggests it can’t: Vietnam, Somalia, Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq.
Indeed, the last war we ‘won’ was Grenada, where the competition
was not exactly world class.”

Or giving unwanted advice to the British about independence for
Scotland and northern Ireland, or the Spanish about Catalonia: “You
can’t force people to be part of your country if they don’t want
to be, and trying to make them is like teaching a pig to whistle:
can’t be done and annoys the pig.”

I could never imitate that sly style. But what I really learned from
Ringo, and what I think he passes on, is his demand that journalists
take sides, recognizing our interest in being participants in a broad
movement for social justice. That includes his sharp analysis of the
relationship between media workers and the people who employ them.

I interviewed Ringo not long after the huge and bitter Detroit News
Strike, which ground on from 1995 to 1997. “The anti-union bias in
the industry is very deep,” he said.  The strike put that on
display, but Ringo warned that the bias went beyond violent efforts by
corporate owners to break the Newspaper Guild (as we were then
called—the NewsGuild now). That bias is evident in the content of
the papers and media, which gives it enormous political power in our
world.

“So how is that produced?” he asked. Although corporate class
interest certainly leads to overt censorship, media workers themselves
share responsibility, he argued. Thousands of us belong to unions and
care a lot about our salaries and working conditions. “And there
were real efforts by dedicated newspaper union activists to challenge
the suppression of the news from Detroit. But most media workers
didn’t feel a strong sense, not just of personal, but of class
responsibility to report it.”

Journalists are taught, Ringo observed, both by their education and
the rules of the corporate newsroom, that they must not participate in
movements for social justice, especially organizations on the left
that challenge the established order. “Many reporters internalize
the ban on being participants,” he explained, “and believe it
would compromise their supposed neutrality and objectivity. For
reporters and editors, if they don’t already know about something,
it’s not news. But the neutrality rule says you can’t cover a
story if you know about it from your personal experience, because
it’s a conflict. And of course, behind this lies the knowledge of
what you need to do to please your boss and get ahead.

“The objective persona is like the tooth fairy—it doesn’t
exist,” he added. “It not only makes reporters unwilling to be
participants, but it keeps them from being good journalists. Was I.F.
Stone neutral on Vietnam and Korea, or Mike Quinn on the San Francisco
general strike? The point isn’t to be objective and neutral, but to
be fair and accurate. Neutrality destroys independent reporting—no
one but reporters believes in it.”

Belonging to the union can provide important job protections for
journalists who challenge corporate power. But union membership
doesn’t automatically lead to better coverage of workers and
communities of color, or international stories where U.S. foreign
policy demands agreement. “For that, unions need to actively educate
their members and appeal for loyalty to the labor movement and
struggles in working-class communities. Some of the stories most
hostile to workers during recent strikes and organizing drives, were
written or aired by union members,” Ringo charged.

“Look at the class origin of reporters and editors. Seventy-five
years ago, they were overwhelmingly working-class people. Today
they’re largely middle class. Yes, corporations own the newspapers.
But if reporters bit and screamed more, they could change a lot.
Newspapers have to rely on them to produce the copy. Sure, publishers
and editors have a class stance, but so does the average reporter,
even if they belong to the Guild.”

Ringo demanded political independence, both to know what side you’re
on, but even more important, to give working people what they need to
make social change. “We need an analysis of the system in this
country that reflects the reality of our lives,” he said.

_The media talk about our economic system in black-and-white terms.
Communism is dictatorial and repressive. The free enterprise system is
the savior of all people. The media says our economic system allows us
the freedom to do wonderful things, but there’s no discussion of how
this system really works, and its true impact on working people._

I took Ringo’s call to heart. When the United States bombed the
headquarters of Serbian television during the Yugoslav war, media
workers in other countries voiced outrage.  But the U.S. journalism
profession generally remained silent. I wrote a letter to our union
newspaper, the Guild Reporter, with his words in my ear.

“We need independent international relationships, based on mutual
working-class interests, free from the defense of U.S. foreign policy
which characterized so much of labor during the cold war,” I warned.

_The Guild has to find ways to support our right to independence from
the bias of the corporations we work for, and the efforts by our own
government to enforce political conformity. Independence means a
culture of solidarity, identifying our common interests with other
journalists and workers internationally and here at home._

The letter stirred up the predictable controversy, and I still
remember the “Right On!” note I got from Ringo. We all stand on
the shoulders of those who came before us and fought the battles that
make our own work possible. Ringo’s were pretty broad.

* Conn Hallinan
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