LAURELS
The Darts & Laurels column is written by Gloria
Cooper, CJRŐs managing editor, to whom nominations should
be addressed.
PENAL
MALPRACTICE
When a female inmate at Wisconsin's
Taycheedah Correctional Institution died last February gasping
for air on the dining room floor in an acute attack of asthma
that prison nurses ignored, the question arose whether the negligence
was an isolated incident or part of a hidden pattern. Eight months
later -- after a review of thousands of pages of police, coroner,
and Department of Corrections records on fourteen facilities in
eleven Wisconsin counties; after an examination of virtually every
inmate death since 1994; and after interviews with corrections
officials, medical workers, lawyers, inmates, and inmates' families
-- the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel had the answer. Its three-part
series by staff reporters Mary Zahn and Jessica McBride (October
22-24) documented case after case of dubious decisions made by
questionable personnel while gravely ill inmates, in the throes
of heart attack or appendicitis, asthma or internal bleeding,
kidney disease or lung cancer, pleaded futilely for help. While
noting the inadequacies in staffing, training, and communication
that have conspired to endanger inmates, the series was unrestrained
in criticizing both the shoddiness and the secrecy of official
inquiries into such deaths. By October 25, Zahn and McBride were
reporting on the many remedies being proposed by outraged lawmakers,
in evident agreement with the paper's editorial conclusion: "Wisconsin
is a state without a death penalty in fact; it shouldn't have
one in practice."
FIVE-ALARM
NEWS
Untrained firefighters,
undermanned crews, broken-down trucks, nonworking aerial ladders,
malfunctioning pumper engines, shut-off hydrants, closed-up stations
-- such were the frightening findings of a nine-month Detroit
News inquiry into how well the city's fire department protects
the residents it serves. The headline over the paper's November
series -- out of service -- was hardly overheated. Hampered by
the department's policy of secrecy, reporters Melvin Claxton and
Charles Hurt managed nonetheless to visit all of Detroit's seventy-one
fire companies, analyze thousands of pages of records, interview
some 300 firefighters as well as dozens of federal and state officials
-- and establish, in their four-part exposé, links between
the department's deadly shortcomings and twenty-one deaths in
the past four years. While the series instantly ignited pledges
of major reform, follow-up stories well into January showed that
the link between fatal fires and fire-department failings continued
unabated. And that within the department, irresponsibility --
withholding damaging documents, threatening punishment to whistleblowers
-- raged out of control.
ALTERNATIVE
POWER
Talk about steady coverage! For
more than thirty years, the San Francisco Bay Guardian
has kept an unwavering beam on Pacific Gas & Electric, exposing
the plagues visited on the public by the programs and policies
of the monopoly that provides most of the city's power. Now, as
the Bay Area stumbles around in rolling blackouts while contemplating
ever higher utility bills, Bruce Brugmann's alternative weekly
is more energetic than ever, illuminating the (misguided) arguments
of those who endorse a publicly funded bailout of the (questionably)
near-bankrupt utility and activists pushing for a community-based,
publicly run, nonprofit system. However this crisis turns out,
SFBG readers can rest assured that they'll never be left
in the dark.
MONEY
TALKS
It isn't every day that one public-affairs
program on a national network casts a skeptical eye on the ethics
of another public-affairs program on the very same network. But
that's precisely what Terence Smith, media correspondent for PBS's
NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, did on December 27 when he took
on television's financial-advice shows. Picking up on SEC chairman
Arthur Levitt's recently launched campaign to develop standards
for disclosing conflicts of interest by analysts who make stock
recommendations in print or on TV, Smith highlighted a particular
kind of conflict that goes commonly unnoted -- namely, touting
stock in a corporation that does business with the analyst's own
firm. Such a relationship, Levitt explained, can be corrupting
because in soliciting a corporation's banking business the investment
firm will often promise to get it more publicity. Gathering examples
from CNNfn, CNBC, and PBS, Smith presented as his primary case
in point Louis Rukeyser's Wall Street Week -- the thirty-year-old
show that bills itself as "America's most widely watched and trusted
source of economic and financial advice." One clip showed Rukeyser
talking with a Goldman Sachs analyst pushing IBM -- without mentioning
that the banking firm had handled a public offering for IBM; another
showed him talking with a Bear Stearns analyst pushing Park Place
Entertainment -- again, without mentioning the financial relationship
between the two. The emerging picture of WSW was not a
pretty one; and in comparison with the disclosure policies of
similar programs, it got less pretty still. "Wall Street Week's
executive producer, Rich Dubroff, declined to be interviewed on
camera," Smith reported, "but said this over the phone: 'It should
be the responsibility of the firms and the SEC if they think they
should make these relationships known. The viewers should research
all their investment decisions very carefully, and if they make
those decisions carefully, they will make them on the merits of
the investment.' The host, Louis Rukeyser, declined repeated requests
to discuss the issue."
