LAURELS
The Darts & Laurels column is written by Gloria
Cooper, CJR's managing editor, to whom nominations should
be addressed.
WORTHY OF THE NAME
Who
says the alternative press has sold its birthright for a mess
of personal ads and restaurant reviews? Even amidst the increasingly
thin gruel of its usual fare, one can find morsels of good old-fashioned
criticism of the big boys in town. To wit:
Featured
in the March 13 issue of The Village Voice was "the mob
story New York dailies won't print." And no wonder. Unlike other
investigations pursued over the years by the Post, the
Times, and the Daily News into the involvement of
the city's crime families in various businesses, the one at hand
would seem to be too close for mainstream-journalism comfort.
As close, in fact, as the powerful Newspaper and Mail Deliverers
union, where, according to a recently reopened criminal racketeering
case that may soon come to trial, goodfellas are firmly ensconced
in the driver's seat. Tracking the role of gangsters in newspaper
distribution from the recruitment of thugs by anxious publishers
in the early 1900s, when the NMDU was founded, to its current
efforts to avoid a deal with prosecutors that would bring in an
outside watchdog to monitor its members, Voice writer Tom
Robbins focused on the star exhibit in the prosecution's case:
one Doug LaChance. The complicated, long-term relationship between
the Times and the colorful LaChance -- a former NMDU president
who was sentenced to twelve years in prison for racketeering and
tax evasion; who now, as an over-the-road trucker, has a $200,000-a-year
lifetime guaranteed job delivering the paper; and who even today
is referred to by some at the Times as its "second most
powerful man" after Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. -- makes intriguing,
if unwholesome, reading.
In
a five-part series that began on April 26, the weekly Nashville
Scene took a long, hard, scrupulously fair look at The
Tennessean, going so far as to seek expert advice about the
ethics of reporting on a competitor and to hire the respected
Gene Foreman, formerly of The Philadelphia Inquirer, to
serve as the project's final editor. A year in the making, the
24,000-word marathon by the Scene's Willy Stern traced
the paper's evolution from the epic social crusades of the past
led by the legendary editor and publisher John Seigenthaler; through
the blandness of its present mission -- in essence, to assure
stable circulation by not making waves -- under Gannett; to the
effect of that mission on the city's future. As the Scene's
Bruce Dobie observed in an introductory editor's note, "We felt
we were diving into an intensely local story, but one taking place
newsroom by newsroom, and city by city, across the country." Read
it and weep.
In
its May 9 issue, Tampa's Weekly Planet took a leaf from
the most-censored-national-stories book and published its own
version of cover-ups by the local Tampa Bay media. First in line
was the St. Petersburg Times, whose reporting on this spring's
race for mayor, the Planet showed, tilted distinctly toward
Rick Baker, the winner. Missing from the coverage, according to
the Planet, was a reminder of the 1990 federal case against
the Baker family's aircraft-parts business, in which two of his
brothers had gone to jail for, among other things, defrauding
the U.S. military. Also missing was the history of significant
business ties between Baker and his law firm and the paper and
its owner, the Poynter Institute.
MEDICAL
COVERAGE
The
renowned Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in downtown Seattle
is the largest bone-marrow transplant center in the world, a "Mecca,"
as one leukemia expert puts it, to which the desperately ill bring
their hope, their money, and their trust. But, as The Seattle
Times recently discovered in its surgical probe of the center,
that trust may be dangerously misplaced. Following up on an inept
federal investigation in 1995 that gave "The Hutch" a technically
clean bill of health and a state investigation in 1996 that commissioners
later buried alive, Times reporters Duff Wilson and David
Heath conducted more than 100 interviews and analyzed some 10,000
pages of records obtained (when the center refused to cooperate)
under the Freedom of Information Act. Their five-day series "Uninformed
Consent" (March 11-15) scanned the twenty-five-year history of
the life-saving institution, examining in dramatic detail two
clinical trials. Among the findings: that doctors were bypassing
other treatments with a higher likelihood of success in favor
of those using certain drugs -- without fully informing patients
that those drugs had never been tested on animals, had caused
the deaths of humans on whom they'd been tried, and were owned
by companies in which the doctors themselves (including a 1990
winner of the Nobel Prize in medicine) had stock, advisory positions,
and/or jobs. In short, the interests of patients were in literal
mortal conflict with the interests of the center and its doctors.
That conflict, of course, is hardly unique to The Hutch. One can
only hope that the paper's series is on the agenda later this
year when Congress considers policy prescriptions for improving
the nation's health.
