September/October 2000 | Contents

CURRENTS

IN REVIEW

THE PLAGIARISM PUZZLE

A week after columnist Jeff Jacoby was suspended by The Boston Globe for four months for "serious journalistic misconduct" (he recycled, without attribution in his column, the work of others), the Globe's New York sibling acknowledged its own piracy problem. The New York Times admitted in a July 14 Editors' Note that five passages in its June 27 obituary of Vera Atkins, a major British intelligence figure, "closely reflected the phrasing of an obituary in The Times of London." Those passages, said the New York paper, "should . . . have been attributed" to the British publication "or [they] should have been rephrased." The Times thus added to confusion over plagiarism's dos and don'ts by appearing to imply that filching research is acceptable if it is camouflaged.

Actually, as Dan Kennedy reported in The Boston Phoenix, the Times obit, by Douglas Martin, also used passages remarkably similar to material in the London Telegraph. Martin's explanation, according to Kennedy: "Reporters based overseas routinely lift material from local papers and send it to the home office."

Jacoby also invoked what has been called the public-domain defense. How and when information enters the "public domain" is murky; the situation is made trickier for newspaper journalists by scant guidance from news organizations.

The American Society of Newspaper Editors last year collected ethics codes from some thirty newspapers. More than half of the codes ignored plagiarism. Many of the rest treated it simplistically. Ironically, the Globe's policy on attribution is a model.

-- Gil Cranberg

Click here to see the Globe's attribution policy.

A ROMENESKO REPORT

Jim Romenesko's Media Gossip.com became a must-read for press junkies after the former Milwaukee Journal police reporter started it as a hobby. For many it was the fastest way to catch up on media news developments. It wasn't really gossip but a neatly packaged set of links that sent you to the full story. Romenesko acted as the gatekeeper with a brisk narrative and wide-ranging topics.

He was so effective he was hired by the Poynter Institute, and his one-time hobby is now a centerpiece of Poynter's Web site, renamed Media News. It is still a must-read, but while the title has changed from gossip to news, for some reason the Romenesko text seems to be more in the area of gossip now, with lots of personality-based items.

And Media News has on at least one occasion abandoned its gatekeeper role for its own publishing effort, a rather one-sided 11,000-word defense of Mike Barnicle. There may be valid reasons for these trends, but we hope they don't undermine Romenesko's original purpose.

-- H. Valda

DEADLINE'S DEAD RINGER

On May 20, David Protess was kicked back at his home in suburban Chicago watching the Los Angeles Lakers wax the Portland Trail Blazers in the NBA playoffs. A teaser for Deadline, NBC's new fall show, rolled across the screen. It's the story of a New York tabloid columnist who uses his students to investigate stories and right wrongs. Protess, a journalism professor who does exactly that, was incredulous. Then the phone started ringing. "Since then there hasn't been a day that goes by that someone doesn't say, 'Hey, you sold your story,'" says Protess. Rich Foster, the program director at the Freedom Forum's Newseum, says the trailer so reminded him of Protess that he revived his previously unsuccessful attempt to get the professor on a panel about investigative reporting.

But Protess -- who teaches investigative reporting at Northwestern University and who has, along with his students, helped overturn seven murder convictions since 1992, including those of three death row inmates -- has nothing to do with Deadline. And he wants an ad spelling this out to run in publications like The New York Times, because he says the show portrays him in a false and negative light. "They can talk composite all they want," he says, "but the fact is I am the only journalism professor in the country who involves his students in these types of investigations."

Deadline, which debuts October 2, centers on Wallace Benton, played by Oliver Platt (Bulworth, A Time to Kill). An old-school tabloid columnist who teaches part-time at a journalism school, Benton is not shy about breaking rules in the service of truth. His paper, The New York Ledger, is modeled after the New York Post. The show's newsroom scenes are shot in the old Post building on South Street in Manhattan. Plots are built around actual news stories, a formula Dick Wolf, Deadline's creator, and Robert Palm, its lead writer, use with great success in Law & Order. In the pilot, for example, Benton and his students reinvestigate a multiple murder at a fast-food restaurant, much like the one in May at a Wendy's in Queens. By episode's end, they have single-handedly freed two men from death row.

Benton and Protess differ in many ways. Protess is a professor, not a Breslinesque tabloid columnist. Benton is a heavy drinker. Protess says he is not. In a version of the pilot script, there is clear sexual tension between Benton and one of his female students. (Palm says the tension will not be a running theme.) In nineteen years at Northwestern, Protess has never been accused of unprofessional behavior in his relationships with students. "My concern," says Protess, "is that when I come to teach on Tuesday mornings, my students, the majority of whom often are female, will wonder if that was the real me they saw on TV the night before. 'Is he drunk?' 'Is he going to hit on me?'"

Wolf says Deadline doesn't portray Protess at all. "The genesis for the show is an amalgam of many reporters I have known over the years," Wolf claims via e-mail. "The two most prominent being Mike McAlary and Jimmy Breslin, with a little Murray Kempton and Jack Anderson, too. I have never met David."

Wolf may not know Protess, but last year, when Wolf was gathering ideas for Deadline, Protess and his students were front-page news after they helped free Anthony Porter from death row in Illinois, where he had spent sixteen years for a murder he didn't commit. Wolf did not answer a question, posed through his publicist, about what influence Protess's story had on his decision to include students in his show.

Lawyers for Protess and the show's production company, Studios USA Television, began talking in mid-July. By early August, nothing had been resolved. Protess says he does not want to sue the production company, but will consider it if he can't get a disclaimer.

The script Protess got through his lawyer, dated January 14, 2000, contains similarities to the Porter case. Both involve wrongfully convicted defendants on death row whose execution dates are looming. In both, the professor and his students recreate the crime and determine that the eyewitness could not have seen what he said he saw. Then they find the real killer. When Porter was released, he hugged Protess. Benton, too, is hugged by one of the men he frees. Wolf did not respond to questions about the similarities.

It's not that Protess is fundamentally opposed to a little prime-time publicity. Had Wolf consulted him about the show, he says, he would have listened. "I am not naive enough to believe that it isn't important to reach a mass audience," Protess says. "But to fictionalize what I do and create a character who, in my view, is unsavory, without even contacting me, is reprehensible."

-- Brent Cunningham
Cunningham is cjr's associate editor.

A REAL NO-NEWS TOWN

Utica, New York, a small upstate city that has endured decades of economic decline, recently survived a hardship of another sort. Thanks to Mayor Edward A. Hanna, a seventy-eight-year-old millionaire, readers of Gannett's Observer-Dispatch routinely got half the story.

From December to May, Hanna required reporters to file written questions to department heads. The written replies could be delayed, terse, or nonexistent. No interviews. No direct access to city officials. For a while, city hall even eliminated the police blotter.

Why? Hanna says he cut the news flow to minimize the risk of reporters' mangling the truth. First Amendment experts called this extreme.

At first, the paper fought back carefully, attributing statements to a city official's written response and leaving it at that. Donna Donovan, Observer-Dispatch publisher, says Gannett lawyers urged the paper not to seek injunctive relief. No one, she says, knew Hanna's restrictions would drag on. "We were trying to turn the other cheek," Donovan says. "Next time we'd be much more aggressive."

By spring, the paper did turn up the heat. Stories listed missing facts and quoted citizens enraged by the lack of information. Editorials raged under headlines such as: "In Darkness of Silence, Uticans Suffer." One caption devoted a sentence to the obvious fact that a car had smashed into a supermarket and another to the list of unanswered questions, including who was driving and whether anyone was hurt.

The mayor, in turn, purchased public-access radio and television time to slam "the lousy monopoly newspaper." Hanna posted handbills at his own expense, declaring "Inaccurate Reporting is Worse than No Reporting at All." Lawsuits flew both ways.

The good news from Utica is that people seemed to miss the reporting. One afternoon, all the rush-hour commuters interviewed on Genesee Street, regardless of how they felt about the Observer-Dispatch or the mayor, said they felt cheated by the dispute. "Everyone's being cut off and I can't see why," said Valerie Smith. "I see fire trucks, paramedics, and ambulances come into my neighborhood after an incident and I want to know why."

In May, Hanna mysteriously lifted the controls. June brought an epilogue: two current and two former male employees announced plans to sue Mayor Hanna for allegedly sexually harassing them, charges he denies. In July, he left office abruptly, citing an eight-year-old heart condition. He resumed his silent treatment toward the press, this time as a civilian.

-- Jane Gottlieb
Gottlieb is a writer based in Albany.

AN L.A. ACCENT

John Carroll, the new editor at the Los Angeles Times, is moving quickly. He installed a new managing editor, Dean Baquet, in August. Baquet was the well-respected and well-liked national editor at The New York Times, and in hiring him Carroll helped even up the score with the New York paper, which has lured away many L.A. Times journalists in recent years.

Carroll also made a smaller change that the paper's many Spanish-speaking readers will surely appreciate: from now on, when a Spanish name or word uses a tilde (that little squiggle over an "n"), the Los Angeles Times will too. Carroll met with a group of the paper's reporters and editors, who are interested in improving coverage of the Latino culture and community. They pointed out that the tilde is no mere accent, but something that turns an "n" into another letter altogether. Thus, to leave it out is to misspell the word. In Spanish, its absence can change meaning.

To produce a tilde required several keystrokes on the Times's aging computer system. Until the system is updated, those keystrokes will be made.

-- Kimberly Yuen
Yuen is an intern for cjr.

PREVIEW

NEW OWNERS, NEW CHANCE

These are dramatic times for newspaper ownership. The Tribune-Times Mirror megamerger was the largest newspaper acquisition in history, but the sale of The Arizona Republic and The Indianapolis Star to Gannett, and Hearst's purchase (finally) of the San Francisco Chronicle change the journalistic landscape. All these deals underscore that in the digital age newspapers remain valuable, particularly when dominant in their marketplaces and the prime source of local news.

It seems pointless in the new millennium to wring our hands about local ownership. We are not going back to that. Rather, this could be an opportunity for the new owners to address community needs by investing in the editorial content that helps produce those nice multiples. Hearst has taken the unique step of keeping all 217 Examiner journalists to add to the 378 already in the Chronicle newsroom. That's a lot of people. Properly deployed, they could bring the Chronicle to the front ranks of newspapers.

Gannett has tended to take the cookie cutter approach to its newspapers, but it has never owned a local paper in a market the size of either Phoenix or Indianapolis. Gannett has shown that it knows how to produce a good paper: USA Today. Its new c.e.o., Douglas McCorkindale, could break new ground by letting the two papers maintain their own voices, both in their unique editorial pages and in their coverage. It didn't happen that way in Louisville and Des Moines, but with a new century and a new c.e.o., why not?

-- H. Valda

TAILWIND: STILL IN THE AIR

The controversy over CNN's June 1998 "Tailwind" exposé won't go away. Jack Smith, its co-producer, sued CNN in Atlanta on June 30, charging that network executives fired him in July 1998, not for shoddy journalism, as claimed, but as part of a cave-in to U.S. government, civilian, and military officials. The eighteen-minute report, shown on CNN and published in different form by Time magazine, was about an alleged covert U.S. military mission -- codenamed Operation Tailwind -- in Laos during the Vietnam war. Smith's lawsuit expands the allegations that his fired co-producer, April Oliver, raised in her own suit. CNN and Oliver settled earlier this year. The terms are sealed. Oliver, now a law student at George Mason University, says she still plans to finish a book under contract about her Tailwind experience. Smith, a veteran newspaper and TV journalist who is teaching at Loyola University and DePaul University in Chicago, is using some material in his suit that was developed in Oliver's litigation. CNN sources have declined to comment on Smith's suit.

-- Steve Weinberg