But Frank Blethen, publisher of The Seattle Times, stood his ground. The dispute was big news, and the city's major paper was going to cover it.

When another Seattle-based corporation, Boeing, pressured the Times to remove a reporter the company didn't like, Blethen refused. The reporter later won a Pulitzer Prize.

Blethen's willingness to take tough stands on issues such as these made him a good candidate for this year's Ruhl Lecture, which takes place in conjunction with the Payne Awards for Ethics in Journalism.

In his lecture, entitled "American Democracy at Risk," Blethen spoke out against the increasing concentration of media ownership. He warned an overflow crowd in the Knight Library Browsing Room that the greatest threat to America comes not from terrorists or foreign governments, but from the loss of our free press through accelerating consolidation of media.

He pointed out that the concentration of ownership is happening so fast that we are only beginning to realize its danger. Because media consolidation mirrors the nation-wide business trend, he said, the threat has been hard to discern.

"We may already have lost so much of our independent journalistic voice that we are unable to inform, engage and excite our citizens about this threat," he warned, adding that the media's own silence about the issue has led to ignorance and apathy on the part of our political and civic leadership. He predicted that because of this trend, the 1990s would go down in history as the "least constructive and most self-absorbed" of decades.

"Yes, we made incredible technological and economic advances during that decade," he said. "But we lost our ethical grounding. We lost much of our sense of community and our sense of compassion for each other. We became beguiled with personal wealth and material possessions."

The transformation of media ownership in the 1990s has led to less diversity, poorer quality news and less investment in and coverage of local communities, he said. Papers such as The Seattle Times, which the Blethen family has run for five generations, are becoming rare. Prior to the 1990s most of the papers that won Pulitzers for public service were locally and family-owned. Though Blethen offered The Washington Post and The New York Times as examples of successful family newspapers, he lamented the loss of hundreds of smaller independent papers.

The culprits in the consolidation trend, according to Blethen, are corporate media's lobbying of Congress, the FCC's loosening of cross-ownership regulations, and increasing institutional, rather than family and local ownership of media.

"Public newspaper and media company CEOs are not compensated for winning Pulitzer Prizes or for groundbreaking investigative journalism or community service," he said.

He called for legislation to limit the concentration of ownership of newspapers and electronic media. He also argued that the federal "death tax" is responsible for driving out local ownership and should be abolished.

"The only hope of our newspapers fulfilling their responsibilities under the Constitution is for the trend of financial ownership and concentration of control to be halted and reversed," he said.

Blethen has received a number of awards honoring his commitment to diversity and public service in the newsroom. Proud magazine selected him as one of its Most Notable Ambassadors of Diversity in 2001, and he received the Asian Business Ventures' CEO Advocate of the Year Award in 2000. For nine consecutive years, Working Mother magazine has listed The Seattle Times as one of the nation's top 100 companies for working mothers.

His lecture marked the 25th anniversary of the Ruhl Symposium for Ethics in Journalism. The widow of the late Robert W. Ruhl, longtime editor of the Medford Mail-Tribune, established an endowment for the symposium in 1973 to create a forum for the discussion of journalism ethics.