January/February 2001

January/February 2001 | Contents

LAURELS

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

THE FAIRNESS FACTOR

During the interregnum -- when much of the press stayed fastened on the photo-finish horse race or made a bow to "balance" with parades of predictable spinners or took the public's pulse in meaningless call-in polls -- several news organizations distinguished themselves by uncovering facts that helped explain the stop-the-presses news. The New York Times, for example, revealed in a page-one story on November 17 that, according to a Times analysis of the vote in Duval County, Florida, thousands of votes in predominantly black precincts had been invalidated because of misguided instructions by Democratic party workers, who had told many of the first-time voters to "be sure to punch a hole on every page." In a November 29 story the paper revealed that, according to another Times analysis, the majority of Florida's black, overwhelmingly Democratic voters lived in poor precincts that used a punch-card system, demonstrably more susceptible to error, miscount, and thrown-out votes than was the optical scanning system used in white, more affluent precincts. In a page-one story on November 30 the Times revealed that for various reasons -- overwhelming turnouts, flawed registration lists, late delivery of registration cards, jammed phone lines, lack of computers -- many blacks in Florida had not been able to vote. And a Miami Herald report on December 3, based on an analysis of voting patterns in each of Florida's 5,885 precincts, revealed that, had the balloting been free of glitches, even by the most conservative estimate Gore would have won.

As these news organizations were documenting such systemic unfairness, The Washington Post's ombudsman, Michael Getler, was deploring unfairness of a different, if no less pernicious, order -- the "slashing attack," as he put it, on the personal appearance of Katherine Harris, Florida's secretary of state, published November 18 on the front page of the paper's Style section. (Among staff writer Robin Givhan's numerous complaints about Harris: "Her lips were overdrawn . . . Her skin had been plastered and powdered to the texture of pre-war walls in need of a skim coat. And her eyes, rimmed in liner and frosted with blue shadow, bore the telltale homogenous spikes of false eyelashes. Caterpillars seemed to rise and fall with every bat of her eyelid, with every downward glance to double-check -- before reading -- her most recent determination . . . . Why should anyone trust her?") Weighing those words, along with the defensive comments of writer Givhan, Style editor Eugene Robinson, and executive editor Len Downie, who argued that printing "strongly voiced views . . . is a proper role for the newspaper," the ombudsman sided with the many readers who viewed Givhan's strongly voiced views of Harris as "a classic example of the arrogance of journalists that undermines people's confidence in the media." In his column two weeks later, Getler took on the section itself, warning against the risky philosophy -- approvingly described by one Post writer as "snide, catty . . . robust cynicism" -- that has become the hallmark of Style.

NEWS AS AMMUNITION

Among the countless groups of every calibre weighing in this fall in the presidential election campaign was Handgun Control Inc., a lobbying organization that spent $1.65 million of its hard-earned soft money on a thirty-second political spot targeted for TV stations in battleground states like Missouri. The ad, which took aim at George W. Bush's record on concealed-gun-toting in Texas, was accepted by twenty-five of the targeted stations, including three in St. Louis; it was refused, however, by one -- St. Louis's KMOV. As the St. Louis Post-Dispatch observed in a scolding September 11 editorial, KMOV "happens to be owned by the Dallas-based Belo Corp. [whose] chief executive officer [Robert Decherd] counts Mr. Bush as a friend." All this triggered the interest of the KMOV news staff, and whatever the relationship between their boss and the Republican nominee, it cut no ice with them. In a straight-shooting report on September 12, KMOV covered the controversy involving itself. The segment opened with the rejected ad, in all its thirty informative seconds.

WHEELS AND DEALS

The United States Grand Prix auto race, held in late September at the Indianapolis Speedway and attended by some 220,000 fans, got plenty of mileage on most of the city's local television stations. But over at WTHR, it was a different story. There, Jacques Natz, news director of the NBC affiliate, was denied credentials for covering the event when he put the brakes to a license agreement promising to carry, unedited, a daily two-minute "highlights" video produced by Formula One Management, Grand Prix's organizer. The agreement also required local affiliates to turn over to FOM any of their original footage. "This kind of regulation may work well in communist countries, it may work well in European countries where the First Amendment doesn't exist," Natz told Abe Aamidor of The Indianapolis Star, "but in America . . . we should be ashamed of broadcasting what is essentially censored material." (The ABC, CBS, and Fox affiliates signed the agreement to steer the news.)