Cleveland Orchestra Critic, Despite Losing Lawsuit, Feels He Had His Say

Forget the old, overblown Cleveland jokes -- the mistake by the lake, the mayor whose hair caught on fire, the mayor's wife who passed up an invitation to the White House because it fell on her bowling night. The Cleveland Orchestra is the real deal. It puts its host city on the cultural map in the same way that the Cleveland Clinic makes it a health care destination.

Clevelanders who have never been to Severance Hall, the orchestra's elegant east side home, take pride in knowing they have a world-renowned cultural asset in their city. So it comes as no surprise that "The Cleveland," as it is known in classical music circles, is something of a sacred cow.

Even so, in a city often distracted by professional sports -- Browns loyalists in their "dawg pound" and Cavaliers fans scorned by Lebron -- the lawsuit of a music critic at odds with the orchestra's leadership and fighting for his reputation was not exactly the talk of the town.

Don Rosenberg, a 58-year-old journalist, covered the orchestra for 16 years for The Plain Dealer, a prize-winning newspaper, until he was reassigned in 2008 after a series of negative reviews targeting conductor Franz Welser-Most. The orchestra's governing body, the Musical Arts Association, complained to the paper about reviews that it read as persistently negative, even though the Cleveland musical group maintained its place among the top five orchestras in the country, if not the world. Eventually, The Plain Dealer agreed, and Editor Susan Goldberg pulled Rosenberg off the beat in 2008, retaining him on staff as an arts and entertainment reporter.

Rosenberg sued -- it was an "enormous humiliation," he said -- charging his newspaper with age discrimination, and the arts group with defamation and interference with his employment.

"I felt I had to stand up for what I believe as a critic," Rosenberg told me. "It is necessary for critics to have the freedom to express their honest views without interference from outside sources. And there's no way I was going to stand by and allow my integrity to be questioned."

But he lost. After a four-week civil trial in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court, an eight-member jury found for The Plain Dealer and the Musical Arts Association. "I don't regret a moment of it," Rosenberg said. "I did what I needed to do"-- which was to hold his own critics accountable for their actions. "The jury just didn't agree."

What it means for the future of legitimate criticism -- a critic taking on a powerful cultural institution in a community they both serve -- is not clear. The Plain Dealer, or PD as it's called in Ohio, and other media outlets have the right to assign and reassign critics and reporters as they see fit. The question is whether a newspaper "caved in" -- as Rosenberg's lawyer put it -- to pressure from the orchestra's governing body and whether the trial outcome will inhibit sharp criticism in the future.

The Plain Dealer's lawyer, David Posner, doesn't quarrel with a critic's right to call it as he or she sees it. Posner said reader complaints about Rosenberg's reviews and the growing sense that his reports were unfair and biased against conductor Franz Welser-Most led to his reassignment. "He would write a review that the orchestra was great, but yet the musical director was terrible." Posner argued that Rosenberg, in his passion for a great orchestra, became "too close" to the story. He decided Welser-Most was a bad fit and wouldn't give him a "fair shake," the lawyer said. Rosenberg kept his job at the paper, but was replaced by a much younger reporter, a fellow he had once mentored as an intern.

"Don is paid to give his honest opinions," his lawyer Steven Sindell said Monday. "There wasn't one person who testified that they believed he was dishonest in his opinions. Our claim was the PD made a judgment based upon what they were told by the Musical Arts Association, not consulting with any music critics anywhere" about the quality of Rosenberg's reviews.

No decision has been made on whether to appeal, Sindell said.

The case became a cause célèbre among music critics, according to The New York Times. Rosenberg is president of the Music Critics Association of North America, which supported his cause. But it was not a galvanizing issue in The Plain Dealer's modern newsroom on the eastern edge of downtown Cleveland. "The newsroom had a quiet interest in the case," said political reporter Mark Naymik. "While some reporters debated some of the journalistic issues at stake in the courtroom, reporters I confer with did not display much emotion about the proceedings." Rosenberg's reputation was harmed, said retired Plain Dealer reporter Jim Lawless, but he didn't lose pay and was not defamed in the newspaper.

Harlan Spector, unit chairman of Local 1 of the Newspaper Guild, said the union backed Rosenberg when he was reassigned but did not file a grievance because the move did not appear to be a violation of the collective-bargaining agreement. The Guild had a "lively membership meeting" about Rosenberg's situation, Spector said, and asked for an "open forum" about the matter with Goldberg, which was granted.

The Plain Dealer, to its credit, covered the story and gave it space on the pages of Ohio's largest newspaper. Jerry Austin, a nationally known Democratic political consultant and Plain Dealer reader for 40 years or so, said that if it hadn't been for the newspaper's coverage, few in Cleveland would have even known about the case.

Still, Austin said: "I don't remember there being any outcry from anybody about his reviews other than from the orchestra . . . What kind of leeway do you give a critic who basically writes what he sees, what he feels?"

And there's your bottom line.

As a Plain Dealer political reporter who covered the Statehouse in Columbus and then worked in the paper's Washington bureau for many years, I was never aware of being called off a story because of pressure from an advertiser or an interest group. But it happens -- it has always happened.

"I hope it doesn't have a chilling effect on criticism," Rosenberg said. "I think criticism is very important and necessary in allowing the public to take part in the debate. It is important from the standpoint of the subjects covered and important for the public to have some kind of gauge to balance against their own views."