Darts November/December 2000

November/December 2000 | Contents

DARTS

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

PIECE OF PLASTIC

"Visa -- It's everywhere you want to be," is the credit-card company's familiar slogan. And where Visa wanted to be this summer was on the op-ed pages of the nation's press, trying to marshal public opinion against a Justice Department lawsuit charging Visa (and MasterCard) with stifling competition. So it came to pass that just such a piece, written under the byline of Susan Molinari, appeared in the New York Post, the St. Paul Pioneer Press & Dispatch, The Des Moines Register, and The Dayton Daily News. In all four papers, Molinari, a former Republican congresswoman from New York, was identified as "the national chairperson for Americans for Consumer Education and Competition." Left unnoted: that Molinari is a registered lobbyist for ACEC, and that the founder and major funder of ACEC is . . . Visa. (The conflict of interest was later reported to readers by the Register and Daily News, but readers of the Post and Pioneer Press had no such luck.)

THE INS & OUTS OF GATEKEEPING

Infinite is the variety of answers to the eternal question, "What is news?"

To the Northwest Arkansas Times -- bought last year by Community Publishers, Inc., whose majority stockholder is the son of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton -- news is a Wal-Mart circular tucked inside the paper, deemed sufficiently worthy of a page-one notice, right up there next to the Times's flag.

To the Tallahassee Democrat, it's an enthusiastic forty-six-column-inch (including three four-color photos) report in its Sunday, August 13, metro section promoting an "Ultimate Yard Sale" at the mall, a money-making enterprise sponsored (and advertised) by the Tallahassee Democrat ("Individual Booth -- $35").

And to The Miami Herald, news is a starry-eyed, sixteen-paragraph, three-photo profile, written by Paul Anger, publisher of the paper's Broward edition, of its new advertising sales manager -- her family background, schooling, career highlights, hobbies, and favorite authors (Herald columnists Carl Hiaasen and Dave Barry, over whom she laughs "out loud.") An accompanying box was headed how to reach her.

On the other hand, to Radio Marti, the Miami-based station funded by the U.S. government to provide propaganda-free news to Cuba, the federal raid to seize Elián González from the home of his Miami relatives was such unwelcome news that for four long hours, it wasn't. (According to later disclosures by Miami's alternative New Times, station director Roberto Rodriguez-Tejero had made himself scarce rather than participate in chronicling an act he disapproved of, leaving the abandoned staff in a state of temporary paralysis.)

SCANDALOUS QUESTION

To "moderate," according to Webster's, is to "keep within bounds." That definition, however, can hardly be applied to the performance of NBC's Tim Russert in his role as moderator of the September 13 televised debate between the Democratic and Republican candidates for the U.S. Senate from New York. Twenty minutes into the hour Russert pitched a question to Hillary Clinton that was breathtakingly out of bounds. Confronting her with a replay of her interview on the Today show in January 1998 -- an interview in which the first lady had loyally backed her husband's initial denials of an affair with Monica Lewinsky and suggested that right-wing enemies were orchestrating the scandal -- Russert first asked the senatorial candidate, "Do you regret misleading the American people?" then went on to challenge her thusly: "In that same interview you said that those who were criticizing the president were part of a vast right-wing conspiracy. Amongst those eventually criticizing the president were Joe Lieberman. Would you now apologize for branding people as part of a vast right-wing conspiracy?" So gratuitous was the exhumation of an incident that most of the American people had long laid to rest; so specious was the logic of lumping together "critics," "Joe Lieberman," and "vast right-wing conspiracy"; so inappropriate was the question to the event at hand, that a viewer could only puzzle over Russert's judgment in raising the issue. In any case, whether Clinton or Lazio won that debate was anybody's guess. Far more obvious was that Russert -- and journalism -- lost.

DETECTIVE STORIES

Media alert! Be on the lookout for a male free-lancer, writing under the byline Mark Crawford, suspected of journalistic counterfeiting. Last seen in Cleveland; priors in Sacramento and Madison, Wisconsin, and, as he brags in his story pitches to editors, three other cities as well. M.O.: writer lands assignments with publications all around the country for a story on the local private investigations business, then delivers to each editor the same, ever-so-slightly adapted piece, apparently hanging local names on amazingly identical quotes. Typical telltale clues: "'Clients have a preconceived notion about surveillance from TV -- it's not just sitting around in a car eating chips and drinking coffee,' laughs Gary Meech" in Cleveland Free Times, February 23-29, 2000; ". . . laughs Mike Atwood" in Sacramento Magazine, January 1999; ". . . says Henry Curran" in Madison Magazine, July 1997. "'Attorneys who use PIs win more cases than those who don't,' states PI Ron Gleisser," (Cleveland Free Times); ". . . says PI June Waugh" (Sacramento); and -- a particularly nice touch -- ". . . one PI" (Madison) who spoke "on condition of anonymity." And so on.