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DARTS
BOOK REVIEWING AIN'T BEANBAG
While the American Society of Newspaper Editors was evaluating the results of its million-dollar project, "Building Reader Trust," the nation's top newspapers were providing yet another example of why such a project is needed. The newly published book, The Hunting of the President, by Joe Conason and Gene Lyons, clearly called for attention, but one of the book's major themes -- how and why mainstream news organizations, notably The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times, aided those who were bent on destroying Bill and Hillary Clinton -- posed an uncomfortable challenge, to say the least. The response to that challenge was telling. The New York Times assigned a review to Neil A. Lewis, a member of its Washington bureau, who completely ignored the book's mountain of negative evidence against the Times, singled out the book's one favorable mention of his paper, and judged the authors' "theory" not "plausible." The Wall Street Journal took an even safer route, assigning its review to senior writer Micah Morrison, who co-edited with Robert L. Bartley the five-volume collection of WSJ opinion pieces on Whitewater, pieces that figure prominently in Conason and Lyons's case against the press. Taking the offensive, Morrison concluded, unsurprisingly, that the book was "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." The Washington Post went farther afield -- but not far enough, assigning its review to one James Bowman, film critic for The American Spectator, the publication whose Scaife-funded Arkansas Project, among its other tricks, was designed to dig up dirt on Clinton. The book contains twenty-four references to The Washington Post; in Bowman's review, the Post appears not once. (At the Los Angeles Times the only mention of the book, as of mid-June, has appeared on its best-seller list.) For contrast, see The Denver Post ("On the Clinton scandals, this is the book by which to judge all others"); The Boston Globe ("the most damning indictment yet written of the partisan forces who fueled [the] scandal rumors . . . . The greater story of how so many false stories were treated as truth for so long has yet to be told."); and Newsday ("[The authors'] extensive research yielded evidence of a behavior pattern among disparate Clinton haters who found financial angels to initiate litigation, spawn damning videos, bankroll magazine articles, etc., etc.") Question: How do editors explain to already distrustful readers why favorable reviews of The Hunting of the President could be found only in papers not cited by the authorsin their "most damning indictment" of the press?
INFORMATION, PLEASE
(With apologies to Comden and Green:)
Why, O why, O why-O, Why do they mock the F-O-I laws in O-hi-o?
Consider: when The Columbus Dispatch, set to launch a story about Governor Bob Taft's fund-raising follies on Sunday, March 15, learned that it would likely be scooped on the story by the rival Plain Dealer in Cleveland, it raced furiously to match the P-D's publication on Saturday, March 14. Then, still more furiously, the Dispatch tried to hunt down the mole who had tipped the Plain Dealer to the Dispatch's story. The paper's weapon of choice: Ohio's public-records law. As revealed by Columbus's alternative Other Paper, Dispatch reporters invoked (some might say perverted) the public-records law to ask political and government officials to provide, among other things, the phone records of the chief suspect. As the P-D's statehouse bureau chief noted dryly, "That's an interesting use of resources." An even more "interesting use of resources" emerged in April -- from an opposite camp. In its response to The Plain Dealer's perfectly legitimate request for review of, among other records, the city's complaint investigation unit, the Office of Mayor Michael R. White announced that henceforth every news organization would be notified automatically of every request for public records. What's more, those records would be made available not only to the news organization initiating the request, but to all the other media as well. Whether this unusual new policy will "minimize staffing costs and preparation time," as the mayor's office claims, or whether it will make reporters hesitate to use the law lest they alert the competition, as some journalists fear, remains to be seen. Meanwhile, information on the city council's community development block grant budget, which had been requested by Roldo Bartimole of the alternative Free Times, was released to other outlets, including the P-D; while five pounds of information relating to the mayor's club memberships showed up at a local television station before copies arrived at the P-D, the originator of the request. Where will it all end?
FUTURISTIC NEWS
If you read about the local Lions Club's annual pancake fundraiser in the Wichita Business Journal, you learned that members, reveling in the "afterglow of 2000's successful Pancake Day," were tired from their work "before and after" the feed, and that the "hungry customers," who "began lining up before 7 a.m., . . . didn't quit coming until way after sunset." But if you read about the event in The Wichita Eagle, you were served a less syrupy story. "Wind, sleet, and snow," the Eagle reported, had "kept the crowd light"; the hall had been "largely empty" in the morning, though "diners had trickled in the rest of the day," and the total number of people served was 1,700 less than last year. How to account for the stack of discrepancies? The weekly Business Journal, which went to press the morning of the event, cooked the story in advance, while the daily Eagle's piece came right from the griddle.
The Darts & Laurels column is written by Gloria Cooper, CJR's managing editor, to whom nominations should be addressed.
