January/February 2001

January/February 2001 | Contents

DARTS

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

THE LAST WORD

Who? "A man"; What? "committed suicide"; When? "early Wednesday"; Where? "in front of The Idaho Statesman building" -- the first four Ws were more or less accounted for in that paper's cryptic page-one local news brief on September 21. For the fifth W -- Why? -- readers had to turn to the alternative Boise Weekly. There, they learned the dead man's name -- Manuel Granata, a name long familiar to Statesman readers for his passionate letters to the editor (most of them critical of homosexuality). And there, too, they learned his reasons for his place of choice for death. "Why did I decide to leave this world at The Statesman?" Granata's 582-word statement, dated September 15, began, then went on to explain that he was doing so as a protest of the Statesman's "censorship" of his letters to the editor. His farewell statement concluded, "I would have liked to continue the debate about the gay life-style until facts and beliefs on both sides were clarified -- which is the purpose of free speech -- but that is difficult with media-imposed restrictions." Not even Granata, however, could have anticipated the final, terrible irony -- that none of this would make it into the Statesman's pages.

HE SAID, SHE SAID

Doctoring a quote is one thing, but a sex-change operation is another story altogether. Tiffini Theisen, workplace reporter for The Orlando Sentinel, was pleased to see that her feature, "How to Spot and Blunt the Sharp Edge of the Workplace Backstabber," was picked up by The Montreal Gazette. But she was far less pleased to see that in one of her piece's many anecdotes -- this one offered by an organizational psychologist as exemplifying "industrial psychopaths" -- a treacherous high-tech male manager identified as "Dave" was transformed into a female "Julie."

HOME TRUTHS

For a bylined, front-page feature in the real estate section of Hills Newspapers (a string of California weeklies owned by Knight Ridder), correspondent Scott Fitzgerrell had plenty of space (fifty-four column-inches, including three four-color photos) to detail in depth the history and design of a $2.9 million estate for sale in the area -- down to the number of bottles that could be stored in the wine cellar, the height of the doors of the three-car garage, and the name and phone number of a local broker. One particular detail, however, Fitzgerrell left out: the broker is his wife.

CONFIDENCE AND CONFIDENTIALITY

After The New York Times responded so famously to criticism of its coverage of the Wen Ho Lee episode, some readers dared to hope that the paper would follow with a similarly responsible "From the Editors" note examining its own equivocal role in the Charles G. Bakaly story. Alas, that was not to be; indeed, even in reporting on Bakaly's eventual acquittal on October 6, the Times was somewhat less than candid.

Bakaly, it will be recalled, is the former spokesman for Kenneth Starr who was charged with criminal contempt for falsely denying he was a source of the politically strategic page-one bombshell that appeared while the Senate was considering Clinton's impeachment: starr is weighing whether to indict sitting president. Attributing the information to "Mr. Starr's associates, who spoke on the condition of anonymity," the bylined story by Don Van Natta, Jr. (January 31, 1999) made it abundantly clear that Bakaly was not one of those associates. "Charles G. Bakaly 3d, the spokesman for Mr. Starr, declined to discuss the matter," Van Natta wrote. "'We will not discuss the plans of this office or the plans of the grand jury in any way, shape, or form,' he said." Subsequent developments, including Bakaly's testimony that he did in fact provide the Times with at least some related material, raised provocative questions. Were observers correct, for example, in assuming that the quote in Van Natta's story was a deliberate lie, planted for Bakaly's protection? If a finding of guilt or innocence contradicted the facts that the Times knew to be true, would the paper step forward -- or would the safeguarding of sources override such niceties? Such challenges (from, among others, Michael Kinsley, Tom Rosenstiel, and Howard Kurtz) notwithstanding, the Times confined itself to covering Bakaly's prosecution in its news pages and denouncing that prosecution in its opinion pages, while the elephant in its newsroom sat there, ignored.

Ignored, too, in the Times's October 7 report on Bakaly's acquittal, were pointed comments by Judge Norma Holloway Johnson in her fascinating fifty-page opinion -- an opinion that laid bare in intimate detail the entire anatomy of the story. After considering Van Natta's use of some related quotes, the judge had written thusly: "Quotes were lifted verbatim out of [a historical memorandum] and falsely described as present-day debates within the OIC. The misimpression that this journalistic sleight of hand produced is quite troubling. [T]he fraudulent attribution . . . could have had an impact on the Court's determination [as to] whether the OIC should be held to answer, under the penalty of contempt of court, for possibly leaking information that may include matters occurring before the grand jury . . . . The use of [the historical memorandum] in the Times article demonstrates how easily the parties and a court can be led astray by an inaccurate and misleading attribution." The Times did, however, find room in its report on the acquittal for a parting shot at its tormentors: "Public officials, politicians, and lawyers routinely make information available, or confirm it discreetly," the news story concluded. "In Washington, it is highly unusual for someone to face a serious threat of prison for doing so."