A Silver lining

       Ron Silver died Sunday.

Even for an actor, he had an unusual range. In his art, he stretched from Broadway productions of gritty David Mamet plays to silly TV sitcoms such as “Rhoda” and from film versions of true-life characters such as ferocious lawyer Alan Dershowitz and learned Secretary of State Henry Kissinger on one end to showoff tennis champ Bobby Riggs and ’60s rock-concert promoter Bill Graham on the other. In his active political life, he headed the stage union Actors Equity Association and helped out on Council on Foreign Relations committees. Supported Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama … and Republicans Ronald Reagan and Rudy Giuliani.

So it maybe it makes sense that he also co-founded The Creative Coalition, a nonprofit social and political advocacy group dedicated to educating arts-community leaders on public issues related to First-Amendment rights, arts advocacy and education - and mobilizing them.

Actors know that creative people  need to speak the truth, no matter which side of the political line or what unnerving  human experience it comes from. They know it because they play all of us – all the tangled, dark, bright and blithe characters that we humans are - and find something that matters in every one of them.

So I hope they and the rest of us can carry on Silver’s work and keep creatively crossing the lines between opposites until we find we have linked the encampments with our daring steps.

Rosenberg’s rebuttal

This isn’t about starting a business, but it is about an issue with implications for all news and opinion outlets, including Geniocity.com. As discussed in this blog a few months ago, on Sept. 29 and 30, former Plain Dealer Music Critic Donald Rosenberg was demoted this past fall from his longtime position as the newpaper’s chief reviewer of the Cleveland Orchestra because The Plain Dealer’s top editor said his reviews had become predictably negative about orchestra musical director Franz Welser-Most.

The editor and the orchestra’s executives reportedly said a lot of other things about Rosenberg’s conduct as a critic that can only be described as ridiculously untrue by those who, like me, know him and his work well.

To prove that point, Rosenberg filed suit yesterday against The Plain Dealer; its executive editor, Susan Goldberg; the orchestra’s parent company, the Musical Arts Association; and its leaders including executive director Gary Hanson.  

Rosenberg claims, in essence, that the Musical Arts Association and its leaders defamed him and conspired with The Plain Dealer and its editor to remove him from his job, further defaming and lying about him in the process and depriving him of his good reputation as well as his chosen and deserved livelihood.

It’s an interesting lawsuit, even to those of us who aren’t lawyers. It challenges the public to consider what the proper role of a critic is; whether newspapers and their editors are bound to abide by the First Amendment and their own ethics rules about free speech, fair comment and journalistic responsibility  when it comes to personnel matters; and whether an employee’s community standing and personal honor can somehow legally be separated from his status as an employee in the event that he is publicly disciplined by his employer. 

Not being learned in the law whatsoever, I’ll leave the evaluation of the case’s merits to Geniocity’s Peter Friedman, if he cares to undertake it. But as to the journalistic implications of Rosenberg’s demotion, I will say this: 

A democratic society cannot function or survive without public sources of reliable news. Those public sources cannot shrink from publishing verifiable facts and honest opinion about public figures, institutions, events or issues without creating the appearance of protecting special interests and so losing the public’s trust.

Frankly, I can’t wait to see what Judge John Sutula of Cuyahoga County’s Court of Common Pleas makes of this. To read the case file, click on this: filed_complaint1.