Legendary Times Union photographer Bernie Kolenberg took this iconic image of Albany County Democratic boss Dan O'Connell — the embodiment of backroom Democratic power for decades.
When the Times Union moved its newspaper plant and more than 1,000 employees out of downtown Albany to a former pumpkin farm near the airport, the Hearst Corp. raised a symbolic middle finger to Albany’s entrenched and corrupt Democratic political machine.
Hearst’s 1970 pullout from the capital city followed a bitter dispute over a small parcel of land, exacerbated by years of enmity between the paper and the machine’s two most powerful personages, party boss Daniel P. O’Connell and Mayor Erastus Corning 2nd. The exodus was the culmination of a series of clashes between the machine — with a modus operandi that featured obfuscating its activities, squelching dissent and consolidating power — and the newspaper’s core Fourth Estate responsibility to seek the truth and report it fully.
Mayor Erastus Corning 2nd and Dan O'Connell in1961: Separated by class background, united by a desire to maintain political control.
“My father felt that newspapers had to stand up for the people when they were being manipulated or lied to, and he believed deeply in the mission of the press to educate, elucidate and expose,” said Victoria McGoldrick, whose father, Gene Robb, became the Times Union’s publisher in 1953. Perhaps more than any other individual, Robb was responsible for aggressive coverage of the machine’s corruption.
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It was a marked change from generations in which the newspaper’s leaders employed a more laissez-faire attitude. Frank Robinson, author of the seminal 1973 book “Albany’s O’Connell Machine,” said his research left him “struck by how politically partisan the newspapers were in the 1920s. They ran news stories that read like ads for political candidates.”
Robinson came to Albany in 1970 and recognized the stark contrast between those practices and the Times Union’s coverage during the Robb era.
“The machine didn’t worry about what the Times Union wrote for a long time because they controlled the voters,” Robinson said. “But when the newspaper turned on the machine, they countered with nasty intimidation tactics.”
Robb ended decades of chumminess between the paper and the Democratic pols, whose tactics included putting staffers on the city payroll: One reporter moonlighted as a Corning speechwriter.
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The late Francis “Doc” Rivett, who started at the paper in 1943, told me during interviews for my Corning biography that the machine bought off reporters. “They put the old-timers who covered City Hall on the pad,” Rivett said. “It wasn’t much, from what I heard — beer money or a little help with their kids’ college tuition. There was a clear agreement that they wouldn’t write negative stories. The editors knew about it, but it was a different time.”
Corning even fixed reporter’s parking tickets, which members of the media slyly slipped him during the mayor’s weekly City Hall press conferences — a practice that continued until 1971, when Times Union photographer Roberta Miller blew the whistle.
The publisher’s hand was strengthened considerably when the Hearst Corp. bought the city’s struggling afternoon daily, the Knickerbocker News, from Gannett in 1960 and gave Hearst a two-paper monopoly in Albany. Robb took the gloves off.
“I remember my dad saying he could now go head-to-head with the machine,” said McGoldrick, who worked during her college summers in the early 1960s at the paper’s Sheridan Avenue plant. “My mom used to say, ‘We may go down, but we’ll go down with flags flying.’ It was an interesting way to grow up, thinking somebody out there was trying to take us down.”
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Gene Robb, the Times Union's publisher, with McGeorge Bundy, a special advisor to President John F. Kennedy, in October 1963. Robb backed the newsroom's efforts to puncture the Democratic machine's armor through the 1960s.
Robb demanded a new standard of investigative reporting and watchdog journalism. He led Hearst’s fight in hitting back against the machine’s dirty tricks, such as pulling hundreds of thousands of........