The Options Option--May/June 2000

September/October 2000 | Contents

DARTS

The Darts & Laurels column is written by Gloria Cooper, CJR's managing editor, to whom nominations should be addressed.

TIMESWATCH

Are editors nodding at The New York Times? The June 11 Arts & Leisure section carried a lively feature on the popular appeal and educational benefits of such real-life television series as Paramedics, Maternity Ward, and Trauma: Life in the ER. But the piece neglected to mention that those shows are produced and co-owned by The New York Times Company.

A June 14 Bulletin Board item about a rally held the previous day to pressure state lawmakers to increase the education budget noted that Harold O. Levy, the New York City schools chancellor, had appeared as one of the speakers. But the report was evidently based on a press announcement of plans that the Times failed to confirm: in the event, the chancellor never showed up.

Meanwhile, a report by Fox Butterfield, the paper's national crime correspondent, seems to have fallen unnoticed into the recycling bin. As revealed by Heather McDonald in the Summer issue of City Journal, Butterfield's analysis of urban crime control, published on March 4, at the height of the public outrage over the police shooting of Patrick Dorismond, bore striking similarities -- including some duplicate sourcing and quotes from police officials and criminologists -- to Butterfield's analysis of urban crime control at the height of the public outrage over the police shooting of Amadou Diallo, eleven months before.

LOW-FLYING JOURNALISM

In May, three first-class newspapers allowed themselves to be downgraded to business class by a United Airlines publicist. The company was ready to release the news of a proposed superjumbo merger with US Airways but wanted to keep control of the story as it landed on the nation's doorsteps. Would The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal get on board a publicist's plan to give the papers exclusive details of the deal in return for their promise not to load on any outside comment? You bet. As it turned out, however, the self-censoring plan became inoperative when the Financial Times took off with the merger story, posting it on its Web site and e-mailing subscribers. As Simon Waldman observed in his London Guardian column, "A great result for the FT, in a market where minutes can literally mean millions, and (hurrah!) a potentially crushing blow for cushy deals between journalists and p.r. types." Roger that.

TACKY, TACKY

Now that that string of Thomson papers has moved into Gannett's stable, you'd think that Gannett would bring to a halt the previous owner's practice of mucking up the front page with ads. You'd think so -- but you'd be wrong. If anything, the deal appears to have spurred on Gannett to follow the Thomson track. In a June 9 memo, Ed Manassah, president and publisher of the once-proud Louisville Courier-Journal, advised the staff thusly: "On Monday, June 12, we will begin having a one-inch-high promotion across the bottom of the front page. This promotion will continue for a couple of weeks. At the end of June we will introduce advertising in that space . . . ."

DOUBLE STANDARD

When a campaign debate scheduled at a Cranston, Rhode Island, library during the Democratic primary suddenly evaporated because three of the four candidates for a district seat in Congress refused to cross a picket line of unionized police, The Providence Journal gave the story page-one, above-the-fold play, observing in its lead that the episode was "a demonstration of labor clout." But the very next day, when a panel discussion at a health-care forum, jointly sponsored by the paper and Brown University, had to be called off because three of the panelists -- a state senator, the lieutenant governor, and the attorney general -- refused to cross a Newspaper Guild picket line against The Providence Journal, itwas an entirely different story: that cancellation got a mere sliding mention in the final paragraph of the paper's twelve-paragraph story about the conference at the bottom of page 3.

DRUG LIFT

In a June 8 article, Niles Lathem of the New York Post presented a richly detailed account of the rising role of women in international drug rings. But he failed to give even a wave of the hand to Hariette Surovell, author of an original, richly detailed Webzine report she gathered over the past four years and that she called queenpins of the cali cartel. Posted on the Exquisite Corpse Web site on April 14, Surovell's report had set down the concept, as well as innumerable facts and phrases, that appeared in Lathem's piece, queenpins: the women who run the cocaine business. (cjr's calls to Lathem and Ken Chandler, editor of the Post, were not returned.)

DRILLING FOR DOLLARS

Organizers of the Permian Basin International Oil Show, to be held in Odessa, Texas, in October, have been busy for months with plans for what a October 1999 press release described as "a technical program geared toward the interests of oil and gas producers throughout the world." Leading that program is John Paul Pitts, who, when he's not being chairman of the show's science and technology committee, is so-called oil editor at Hearst's Midland Reporter-Telegram, based twenty miles from Odessa.