Stanley R. Tiner Biography
Stanley Ray Tiner, also known as Stan Tiner, is the former executive editor and vice president of The Sun Herald newspaper in Biloxi-Gulfport, Mississippi, a post he held from May 2000 to August 31, 2015. He previously served briefly as the executive editor of The Daily Oklahoman in Oklahoma City and as editor of the Press-Register in Mobile, Alabama.
The Sun Herald under his editorship, won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for public service because of its coverage of Hurricane Katrina. Tiner dedicated the Pulitzer gold medal to the people of South Mississippi for their perseverance in the wake of such massive adversity.
Stanley R. Tiner Age
Stanley R. Tiner Family
Tiner was born on August 22, 1942, to Elmer Ray Tiner (1908–2010), an oil refinery worker, and the former Nannie Lea “Nancy” Randolph (1918-2011). Ray Tiner(his father) was a native of rural Tyro in Lincoln County in southeastern Arkansas, a son of John Bunyan and Lula Mat Tiner. John Bunyan Tiner, Stanley Tiner’s grandfather, operated a gristmill and blacksmith shop with other family members.
His father attended the University of Arkansas at Monticello, then later he attended Arkansas A&M College, where he played football and captained the Boll Weevil basketball team. On the university’s centennial in 2009, Ray Tiner served as grand marshal of the homecoming parade.
Stanley Tiner was brought up in Cotton Valley, where he was the first-grade reporter for The Cotton Valley Wildcat, and after 1950 in Shreveport in Caddo Parish, the largest city in north Louisiana. In 1960, he graduated from Fair Park High School. He has a sister, Betty T. and a brother-in-law, Don Fulgium of Shreveport.
Tiner served in the United States Marines and fought for thirteen months in the Vietnam War. He was trained at Parris Island, South Carolina, and was a combat correspondent with the 3rd Marine Division. Having been reared in a segregationist society, he recalled having been “thrown together in boot camp, black and white people from the South. All of that made a very profound impact on me, to see black Marines getting shot and dying for their country. I came back with the very clear idea that something’s not right about this, that it was time to change how we did things in this country.”
In 1969, he received his bachelor’s degree in journalism from Louisiana Tech University in Ruston. He was the editor during his senior year of The Tech Talk, the student newspaper, and studied under journalism chairperson Wiley W. Hilburn, who instructed him to bring current political issues into the newspaper. A long-time editorial writer for The Shreveport Times, Hilburn was subsequently inducted into the Louisiana Political Museum and Hall of Fame in Winnfield because of his expertise in Louisiana politics.
Tiner was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Also is a former chapter president of the Society of Professional Journalists, formerly known as Sigma Delta Chi. As the student newspaper editor, he tapped Reginald Owens as the first African-American staff member. Owens now heads the Tech journalism department.
Stanley R. Tiner Wife
He is married the former Veronica Jo “Vickie” Thibodeaux (born June 23, 1947) His children include Mark Gerard Tiner of Washington, D.C., Jon Stuart Tiner, a Gulfport attorney born in 1970 in Shreveport, and Heather Nicole Tiner Liles of Baton Rouge (born ca. 1973). They have four granddaughters. Currently, he resides in Gulfport.
Stanley R. Tiner Career
A political reporter
After moving from the military, Tiner began his newspaper career at the since defunct afternoon daily, the Texarkana Daily News in Texarkana. Also the Minden Press-Herald, a small daily which specializes in local news, in Minden, the seat of government of Tiner’s native Webster Parish. He was the Press-Herald managing editor from September 1969 until March 1970, when he left to join the staff of The Shreveport Times.
At The Times, he became the newspaper’s chief political correspondent and covered the 1971–72 gubernatorial campaign from which Edwin Edwards became the dominant political figure in Louisiana for the remainder of the 20th century. Edwards, after having barely secured the Democratic nomination over then State Senator and later U.S. Senator J. Bennett Johnston, Jr., of Shreveport, faced a stronger-than-expected Republican challenge waged by the then Metairie lawyer and later U.S. Representative and Governor David C. Treen. Tiner soon became, like the late John Maginnis (author of The Louisiana Hayride) one of the resident experts on the flamboyant Edwards and Louisiana politics in general.
The Shreveport Journal
In 1974, Tiner, then thirty-two, was recruited from The Times to become the editor of the afternoon daily, The Shreveport Journal, published by Douglas F. Attaway. The Journal was the smaller of the two Shreveport papers and was struggling to remain competitive. He was seen as the “new blood” the paper needed.
In 1976, the Attaways sold the paper to the Shreveport industrialist Charles T. Beaird, an intellectual and a philanthropist. Beaird, a liberal Republican, and Tiner, a liberal Democrat, moved The Journal to the political left, far from its previous conservative and segregationist editorials, many penned by the former editor George W. Shannon during the Attaway tenure.
While at The Journal, he offered an editorial position to former Mayor James C. Gardner, later the president of the first city council under the mayor-council government and also the vice-president of the Southwestern Electric Power Company. Gardner turned him down because of salary and retirement considerations, but Tiner often held up Gardner as his idea of a “model” public official. He wrote a lengthy editorial on Gardner’s legacy as “Mr. Shreveport” when the councilman decided not to seek reelection in 1982.
Tiner stayed with Beaird until the fall of 1987, when he resigned as The Journal editor to mount an unsuccessful campaign to capture Louisiana’s 4th congressional district seat. After the congressional race, he became a public relations spokesman for a natural gas company. The Journal closed in 1991 but operated as an editorial page within The Shreveport Times until the last day of 1999. Beaird died in 2006.
Edwards
Tiner was known for his inside sources in the Louisiana political world. For instance, after the 1983 gubernatorial race in which Edwards unseated Treen to win a third nonconsecutive term, he reported on a controversial conversation that he had with the Louisiana legend. He found three books in Edwards’ possession: a Bible, a copy of Playboy magazine, and Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville.
He asked Edwards, a Roman Catholic who had once been a Nazarene preacher, if he believed in the Christian concept of Jesus Christ sacrificing Himself for the sins of mankind, undergoing crucifixion on a Roman cross, and then resurrection from the dead. Edwards replied that he did NOT believe in the essence of the Christian faith and that he doubted that he would go to heaven after death. “I think Jesus died, but I don’t believe He came back to life because that’s too much against natural law. I’m not going around preaching this, but He may have swooned, passed out, or almost died, and when He was taken down, with superhuman strength, after a period of time He may have revived Himself and come back to life,” Edwards told Tiner.
Reports of Edwards’ revelations, however, surfaced after the 1983 campaign, and the disclosures, which angered many conservative Christians, did not stop him from winning yet a fourth term eight years later.
Tiner’s campaign
Tiner ran for the U.S. House in a special election held on March 8, 1988, the same day as the presidential primaries. The opening developed when Roemer vacated his Fourth Congressional District seat to become governor. Roemer endorsed Tiner as his preferred successor.
In his statement of candidacy, Tiner declared that people were looking for a “non-politician” to serve in Congress. He continued by saying he would not follow the old rules. Rather he was going to do everything in his power to bring change to the state. Additionally, he was willing to risk his fortune and future on behalf of that ideal. “… The politics of our state is corrupted by far too much money. … I will neither collect money from political action committees nor will I pay out money to political organizations in order to receive endorsements or election day campaign favors.” he added.
With his aberrant approach to Louisiana politics, he ran third with 19,567 votes (16 percent).
One of his controversial editorials ran in 1987, when he had publicly praised David O. Connelly (born ca. 1952), a native of Ohio and the arts critic of The Shreveport Journal for having declared Connelly’s homosexuality in a newspaper column at a time before such disclosures became common. Tiner added that he could recall no other “person of standing” making such a declaration in Shreveport, which he noted in 1865 had briefly been the last capital of the Confederate States of America and hence a symbol of southern conservatism. He said that Connelly’s declaration could be helpful in fostering awareness of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.
Stanley R. Tiner Net Worth
His primary source of income is being a successful Journalist, his Net Worth as of 2019 is estimated to be between $1 Million – $10 Million.