Orlando Sentinel editorial board overestimated its ability to sway its peers

The editorial board of the Orlando Sentinel seemed to think that it could rally broad support behind its call for a new FAMU president. But more than two weeks after it said it wanted James H. Ammons to go, the only other state editorial board that has fallen in line is the Tampa Bay Times, which already despised Ammons.

It really looks like an appropriate symbolism. The Sentinel editorial board has started walking down the same low road that its peers at the former St. Petersburg Times have taken for years on FAMU issues.

But while the Times editorial board doesn’t pretend to be committed to even-handed treatment of FAMU, the Sentinel’s opinion editor has expressed concern about the fact that many FAMUans think his position on Ammons is unfair.

Maybe there’s still hope for the opinions staff at the Sentinel. At least at this point, it doesn’t appear to be a completely lost cause in the way that the Times editorial board is.  

Florida editorial boards had many good reasons to think twice about jumping on the Sentinel’s bandwagon. A big one is that this isn’t a time when they want to explain a decision to hold FAMU’s president to a different standard than the University of Central Florida’s.

2012 is a big election year and there is lots of money at stake for newspapers. Florida is a major battleground in the White House race and the incumbent president's reelection campaign will hire many FAMU alumni to management positions in its organization within this state. There are also many local candidates who are looking for African American voters.

These political campaigns will be forced to consider reducing the amount of cash they spend on advertisements in a local newspaper if its editorial board has outraged the municipal FAMU National Alumni Association chapter that contains many precious votes.

The sentiments of FAMU alumni voters also influence other historically black college and university (HBCU) alumni in the state. HBCUs are constantly in a struggle against the odds. When one HBCU is being treated unfairly, it is a threat to all the other HBCUs.

The editorial boards of the Tampa Tribune, Lakeland Ledger, Sun-Sentinel, and Tallahassee Democrat all rightfully criticized FAMU’s lack of administrative control over the Marching 100. But they also wisely avoided demanding Ammons’ ouster at a time when they haven't asked the same for a UCF President whose lack of administrative control over his football program has left it with a string of NCAA violations and a $10M wrongful death negligence verdict on its hands.

Even the editorial board of the Palm Beach Post, which dislikes Ammons about as much as the Tampa Bay Times, knew better than to stumble into that pitfall. It came close to the edge of the cliff, but didn’t jump off.

The Orlando Sentinel editorial board should sit down and consider whether it really wants to go the route of the Tampa Bay Times. Holding FAMU to a different standard than UCF and other state universities is wrong and doesn’t make much sense at the business-level.