LAURELS
The Darts & Laurels column is written by Gloria
Cooper, CJR's managing editor, to whom nominations should
be addressed.
HOME
DISPROVEMENTS
Long
before Bill Clinton picked a Harlem office building as the place
to hang his post-presidential hat, real estate in that historic
New York neighborhood was attracting press attention of an entirely
different kind. In a front-page story on November 26, The New
York Times reported on three investigations currently under
way into a scheme in which speculators allegedly exploited a federal
program designed to encourage affordable homeownership in the
nation's inner cities. And, as the Times noted diligently,
the scam had been exposed more than a year earlier by City
Limits, a 4,000-circulation magazine that focuses on New York
urban affairs. Indeed, from "The Harlem Shuffle" in November 1999
to "Empty Promises" (January 2001) and "Loan Injustice" (February
2001, following the indictments), contributing editor Kemba Johnson
exhaustively deconstructed, brick by brick, nail by nail, and
realtor by lender by appraiser, the whole shaky house of cards.
Taking advantage of an FHA program (banned to for-profit investors)
that combines purchase and rehab loans in one insured mortgage
package, predatory speculators bought up for peanuts hundreds
of dilapidated turn-of-the-century brownstones, "flipping" them
to nonprofit groups (some of them fronts) at jacked-up prices
and leaving "spectacular wreckage" in their wake: a string of
uninhabitable houses, unaffordable mortgages, suddenly homeless
tenants, unpaid suppliers and workers, and tens of millions of
dollars in defaults. In a recent editorial about the local scandal
and the too many others like it in other cities, City Limits
editor Alyssa Katz hammered away at the need for tougher government
oversight, particularly of the banks.
MINING
THE FACTS
The
distinction of producing -- and exporting -- the dirtiest air
in the nation belongs to the great state of Ohio, home to twenty-five
coal-burning power plants and shortsighted resistance fighter
in the thirty-year war against the Clean Air Act of 1970. The
battles and the casualties of that still-raging war were dramatically
illuminated by the Akron Beacon Journal in early January.
Written by investigative reporters Margaret Newkirk and Bob Downing,
the four-part series, "Power to Pollute," drew on hundreds of
interviews with experts on both sides of the environmental issue,
thousands of documents from the Justice Department, the EPA, the
state's Public Utilities Commission, the governor's office, and
-- last but not least -- campaign finance records. Naming the
high-powered names and disclosing the dirty deals, charting the
illegal emissions and describing the callous deceptions, confronting
the avoidable loss of miners' jobs and the problematic effect
of trading pollution credits -- after all those depressing figures
and facts, Newkirk and Downing ended nonetheless on an optimistic
note that, in the light of later developments, can be read only
as ironic. In a January 10 sidebar listing the many factors that
could lead to tighter pollution laws, the reporters included incoming
president George W. Bush.
TELLING
TALES
The
thing about "Ten Things," a standing feature in Smart Money
magazine, is that it really does smarten up its readers about
the things they spend their money on -- and it does it in a smart
and snappy way. Take, for instance, prescription drugs: among
the "Ten Things Your Pharmacist Won't Tell You," Smart Money
says, is that "your medication is stale" and "I count on kickbacks."
What your restaurant is loath to reveal is that "your meal came
in the mail" -- and by the way, "we may have a different definition
of 'vegetarian.'" Your online broker would rather you didn't know
that "our computers are often down . . . and you'll never reach
us on the phone." The list goes on: antiques dealers, headhunters,
hospitals, private schools -- every enterprise has its dirty little
secrets, and Smart Money has made it its business to air
them, elaborating on each such disclosure with real-life particulars.
Hasty generalization notwithstanding, Smart Money's "ten
things" add up to a more informed, sophisticated public.
THERAPEUTIC
JOURNALISM
Finally,
after too many years of the press's superficial, though sympathetic,
coverage of AIDS -- the appalling descriptions, the ghastly predictions,
the incomprehensible inertia of the powers that be -- an article
has come along that pushes the issue to a deeper level, one impossible
to ignore. "How to Solve the World's AIDS Crisis," the 7,500-word
cover story by the New York Times editorialist Tina Rosenberg
in the January 28 Sunday magazine, examines the improbable success
experienced by Brazil in containing the spread of the deadly virus
through a combination of prevention, education, and state-of-the-art
drug therapies produced in generic form at minimal cost. Stripping
from the public face of the pharmaceutical companies the protective
gauze of patent law and a "one planet, one price" strategy --
a strategy which, with the help of donation-hungry politicians
in Washington, has kept the therapies unconscionably beyond the
reach of millions -- Rosenberg describes the loopholes through
which other poor countries might legally follow Brazil's inspired
example.
