July/August 2000 | Contents

IN REVIEW

AP'S PULITZER

The Associated Press's investigative story about American soldiers killing civilians in the Korean War was one of the most meticulously edited articles the AP has ever done. In fact, at least one of those involved thought the AP's top editors were stalling and didn't intend to run the piece at all during the seventeen-month period that the story was reported and edited. The effort won a Pulitzer. Then came the report that a key witness hadn't told the truth. It was a staggering blow, though the basic story appeared to hold up. The Pulitzer board affirmed the prize, but a little more journalistic credibility slipped away. Questions about the prize culture were renewed.

Still, we hope that neither prizes nor diligent reporters will be discouraged by the affair. For all the controversy, the Pulitzer and other prizes show the kind of journalism that is possible, setting aspirations that others are challenged by. And tough investigative reporting always has had high risks. The AP is to be commended for taking them. We need more investigative reporting, not less. And with it we need an even more meticulous editing process to insure that we are right in the end.  

SPOILING THE SURPRISE

Fox News features a logo that says "We Report; You Decide" but the fact is that we decide. We the media. When a group of publicity-seeking adventurers play out their million-dollar stunt on CBS's hot show, Survivor, the press rushes in to interview the characters and give intimate details of their lives and thoughts. One detail they don't pursue: Who is the final survivor? (Even though the episodes are unfolding, the event is over and on tape.) Naming the survivor, of course, would spoil the story. We decided.

When ambitious and competitive news organizations reveal exit interviews that show who won an election even before many people have voted, we decide by a different logic. In this case, we reason, we're merely telling the public what all the insiders already know. True enough. But the larger truth is that reluctant voters now have another reason not to cast their ballots. Oh, well. It's only an election. It's not like we're revealing the outcome of a TV show.

THE PRIVACY PROBLEM

Day after day, the media furiously assaulted the South Miami neighborhood. Night after night, the evening news displayed the slightest new snippet of Elián González. Then suddenly, after seven months of relentless exposure, Elián vanished from the public eye.

The six-year-old clearly has more chance to grow up normally if he isn't facing cameras all day. And so his father's decision to go private while the case goes through the courts makes sense. Yet it is unfortunate that the only way to achieve privacy was to completely remove the subject from the scene. Imagine a world in which he didn't have to do that -- a world in which the media restrained themselves to reasonably non-intrusive coverage except at times when great events are really occurring (such as when Elián was being taken by federal agents).

 

THE INVESTIGATIVE ARTIST

At the age of forty-eight, conceptual artist Mark Lombardi at last was receiving the critical acclaim he'd been working toward for years. His penchant for abstraction and obsessive detail had finally found its medium in large, hand-drawn charts of a subject typically seen as downright ugly: international financial and political scandal, from Whitewater to tax-evasion at the Vatican Bank. His piece at the "Greater New York" exhibit this spring at P.S.1 in Queens was a show-stopper, a wall-size chart of corruption that detailed nearly every person and institution mired in the BCCI money-laundering scandal of the 1980s.

Then, on March 22, Lombardi was found dead in his Brooklyn apartment, judged a suicide. In his obituary, New York Times art critic Roberta Smith called him "an investigative reporter after the fact." Lombardi researched the complex connections scrupulously, reading tomes of political exposés, scouring newspapers for corroborating articles, then cataloguing each implicated figure on index cards. Like a seasoned writer, he'd then bring overarching form to the material. He often consulted journalists in Houston, where he lived before coming to Brooklyn two years ago, and as Smith wrote, Lombardi "liked to say that his drawings were probably best understood by the reporters who had covered the scandals he diagrammed."

Lombardi's drawings present elegant loops and curves. Individuals and companies are featured in circles, red entries indicate major lawsuits, criminal indictments, or other legal actions, while broken lines are asset flows and solid lines are paths of influence. At the same time, the drawings are lyrical and airy, like "star maps," comments Christian Viveros-Fauné, co-director of Roebling Hall, a Brooklyn gallery. "That's the magic of Mark's work. Then you get closer and it's a heavy duty conceptual punch."

-- Carly Berwick

Berwick is an associate editor at ARTnews.

 

BLASTING THE BOSS IN BOSTON

Reporters rely on whistleblowers. What happens when a reporter becomes one? You could ask Robin Washington of the Boston Herald, though he's no longer talking publicly about the odyssey he endured this spring. Still, it's a tale worth exploring.

On April 27, an E&P Online story detailed claims by newsroom employees at the Herald that the tabloid "censored stories to placate a major advertiser." The story said that Washington, the paper's consumer columnist, had been told to stop writing about the planned merger of Fleet Bank and BankBoston, New England's largest banks. Washington had written critically about the merger in three columns in early April, contending, among other things, that 700,000 bank customers would pay higher fees. E&P said further that sixty-eight Herald journalists had signed a petition to protest "the unethical influence of advertisers and business interests" over the Herald.

The day after that, Washington was widely quoted in The Boston Globe, which prominently covered the flap, and elsewhere. He said he had been told not to write more about the merger, and that he had been demoted to general-assignment reporter when he persisted.

Herald publisher Patrick Purcell issued a statement saying it was "ridiculous" to accuse the paper of being influenced by the bank. The context did not necessarily strengthen his case: the new bank, to be known as FleetBoston, figures to be a big advertiser; Fleet Bank holds a $20 million mortgage on the Herald building; sources at the Herald say that Purcell is a personal friend of the top two executives at the new bank; and a Fleet spokesman acknowledged complaining twice to Herald editors about Washington's columns.

On Sunday, April 30, Washington was suspended indefinitely without pay. The Newspaper Guild filed a grievance and, on Tuesday, there was a demonstration outside the Herald building in support of Washington. The four-year Herald veteran is the only black news reporter at the paper and was president of the Boston Association of Black Journalists at the time. He's also Jewish. These connections helped rally support; consumer activists and readers also chimed in. Harvard Law School professor Charles Ogletree, a prominent scholar, agreed to advise Washington.

On May 5, the Herald backed down. After serving a two-week suspension, Washington was back on the job, writing, of all things, about the FleetBoston merger.

So what happened here, and what does it mean?

First of all, it's important to understand that the conflict started before it became public. According to several sources, the chronology goes like this: Washington was said to have been told by Herald editor Andrew Costello on April 11 that the FleetBoston story had "run its course" after the three published articles. (Costello and Purcell did not return phone calls.) Washington kept pitching merger stories, however, and three more were shot down. He was beginning to irritate his editors.

They moved beyond irritation when the writer from Editor & Publisher called Costello and managing editor Andrew Gully on April 25, asking about staff complaints regarding coverage of the bank merger. The editors summoned Washington, who admitted complaining to a friend at E&P. He claimed that he did not do it to initiate a story. But the editors didn't buy that, and they didn't seem to appreciate finding themselves on the other end of a news story. The Boston Phoenix reported that Gully and Costello erupted into an "obscenity-laden tirade" that ended with Washington's demotion.

The son of an African-American father and a Jewish mother, Washington, forty-three, grew up in a Chicago home steeped in social activism. Vanessa Williams of The Washington Post, who has worked with Washington on the board of the National Association of Black Journalists, says he is someone "who thinks that if you believe in something and believe you're right, that's what is most important."

What about going public with those convictions even if it embarrasses your employees? Yawu Miller, who edits the Bay State Banner and used to work for Washington, argues that "when they took him off that beat, I don't think he had any choice. Whether or not he got his job back, at least he's on the record as saying that the reason he lost his job wasn't the quality of his writing."

Washington is well regarded at the Herald, but not everyone is sure he took the right course in going public. One critic argues that criticizing the paper was a dumb decision that "helped no one."

It certainly was a shame for the Herald, a worthy competitor to the larger Globe and a paper that has gone after lots of stories with more tenacity than its broadsheet rival. That includes the FleetBoston merger, the biggest recent consumer story in New England. Thanks to Washington's early coverage the Herald led the way on that story, at least for a while.

-- Stephen J. Simurda

Simurda writes often for CJR.

KOSOVO ON A BUDGET

Kelley Lynn spends his days as a beat reporter at the Kentucky New Era, in Hopkinsville, covering the nitty-gritty of county government. He also covers a second beat for the 15,500-circulation daily: Fort Campbell, a sprawling nearby Army base that is home to the 101st Airborne Division, a tradition-rich group whose soldiers fly into battle aboard helicopters. "I see how the soldiers train, how they live," Lynn says. "I see everything -- except I don't see the end result, how they actually do their job." That changed this spring, when Lynn took the third airplane ride of his life (his first overseas), to Skopje, Macedonia. There he boarded a military bus to Kosovo and covered the troopers of the 101st as they patrolled the province as a part of Task Force Falcon. The only hitch? The Army paid his way.

Press ethicists tend to look askance at junkets. "A newspaper gives up some of its journalistic independence when it accepts these offers," says Bob Steele, director of the ethics program at the Poynter Institute. But Lynn doesn't see it that way.

The trip was part of an Army program called Regional Media Trips to the Balkans, aimed at reporters for small media outlets. Lynn, thirty-one, was picked for the trip by Army planners. The only substantial cost to the New Era came from getting him to and from Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, where the trip began. Margaret McBride, an Army public affairs officer, says the program has sponsored nearly two dozen trips to the Balkans since 1996. McBride says the Army takes a hands-off approach. "We don't prep the soldiers and we don't prep the journalists. They can talk to anybody they want, about anything they want."

"My newspaper was able to cover a real-world deployment," Lynn says. "For our readers, seeing an overseas story by a reporter whose byline they know means something.

"I saw a part of the world, a culture, I never would have seen otherwise," he adds. "Once you are there, you aren't just a kid from Kentucky anymore."

-- Wayne Svoboda

Svoboda teaches at Columbia.

 

PREVIEW

A NATION, NOT A NICHE

At the upcoming Republican and Democratic national conventions, CNN will be sending more than 400 people to provide extensive live coverage, while the Fox News Channel goes live several hours per night, and C-SPAN goes gavel-to-gavel. There will be new Internet Alleys for all the dot-coms covering the action. But -- while NBC plans to have Tom Brokaw and Tim Russert anchor three hours per night of live coverage on MSNBC, the network's cable channel -- the Big Three broadcast networks, sources say, may do even fewer hours in prime time than in 1996 (one hour per night, with two hours on the final acceptance-speech evening). Rather than interrupt pre-season football, ABC will squeeze convention coverage into halftime.

The migration of convention coverage -- and a lot of live political talk -- to cable and the Internet is a sign that we in the media are in danger of encouraging a politics that is a game for the political junkies. With voter participation at all-time lows, it cannot be good for democracy to have politics trending towards programming for the already interested.

Of the twenty-two primary debates and town hall meetings this campaign season, ten were sponsored or co-sponsored by CNN, and all but two were carried on cable. (The exceptions: ABC's Nightline and NBC's Meet the Press.) The problem is this: The audience for cable and the Internet is minuscule compared to the broadcast networks, and even PBS (which promises extensive convention coverage) reaches far fewer viewers.

Broadcasters have an obligation to inform the general public, and it would be bracing to hear one of their owners say, "This thing only comes around once every four years. Let's cover the hell out of it, with all kinds of innovative reporting on the issues to get around the parties' attempts to turn it into a big photo op." Wild-eyed romanticism? With broadcast news losing so many viewers to cable and the Internet, maybe it's pragmatic.

-- Jane Hall

Hall is an assistant professor in the School of Communication at American University.

CHEATWOOD WATCH

Keep an eye on your local CBS station. Will Joel Cheatwood, recently installed vice-president for news at CBS's sixteen owned-and-operated stations, encourage the kind of stunting that earned him a reputation for tabloid TV elsewhere (Miami, Boston, Philadelphia)? Cheatwood was at WMAQ in Chicago in 1997 when the station hired Jerry Springer to deliver commentary -- a move that caused WMAQ's respected anchor team of Carol Marin and Ron Magers to quit on principle. Possible early warning signal: Cheatwood also serves as news director of the flagship WCBS in New York. His first order of business is to salvage the station from its news-ratings swamp.

--Neil Hickey

Hickey is CJR's editor at large.

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