DARTS & LAURELS
Darts
& Laurels is written by Gloria Cooper, CJR's deputy
executive editor. Nominations: gc15@columbia.edu,
212-854-1887
DART TO ROLLING STONE for
a journalistic mugging. Back in November, an impressive special
report appeared in the Philadelphia Daily News. The result of
a six-month effort that involved the Freedom of Information Act
and drew on court transcripts, medical bills, police and prison
records, and numerous interviews, the report retraced the course
of a 1999 random shooting on a southwest Philadelphia street in
order to tally the cost of the incident, both to the people directly
affected and to Pennsylvania taxpayers. The News’s findings
were summed up in its title: The $2 Million Bullet. Four months
later, in the March 6 issue of Rolling Stone, a piece appeared
entitled “The Bullet and the Damage Done.” Similar in
concept and set in the same Philadelphia neighborhood and the
same Philadelphia hospital, the Rolling Stone piece offered among
its examples various facts and conclusions about the same random
shooting and the “$2 million bullet” that had been revealed
in such hard-won detail by the local paper. Conspicuously not
offered by the national magazine, however — editors had taken
it out — was any acknowledgment of the source of its loot.
DART TO THE WEEKLY STANDARD
for cutting out the middle man. On March 11, the hot neoconservative
magazine was featured in a New York Times article that drew on
a range of comments solicited from Washington observers —
among them, the liberal critic Eric Alterman, whose meticulously
credited statements included this one: “Reader for reader,
it may be the most influential publication in America.” On
March 24, the Standard began publishing a promotional house ad
that prominently featured Alterman’s words — prominently
attributed to “The New York Times.”
LAUREL
TO THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, for
examining some of the more pathological symptoms of the nation’s
failing health care system. First, on March 13, Lucette Lagnado
exposed, through the case of Quinton White, a struggling seventy-seven-year-old
working-class widower in Connecticut, the inhumane practices followed
by hospitals in collecting patients’ debts. Although twenty
years have passed since the death of White’s uninsured wife,
the distinguished not-for-profit Yale-New Haven Hospital had been
continuing its relentless pursuit of payment for her treatment.
Tactics, not untypically, included putting a lien on White’s
modest house, attempting to seize all his meager savings, taking
him to court to increase the monthly repayment plan he somehow
managed to meet, and tacking onto the original $18,740 bill —
most of which by now he’d actually repaid — a crippling
$39,000 in additional fees and interest. Next, on March 17, Lagnado
exposed, through the case of twenty-five-year-old Rebekah Nix,
a magazine fact-checker in New York, the grossly inequitable practices
followed by hospitals in calculating patients’ bills. After
an emergency appendectomy two years ago at the not-for-profit
New York Methodist Hospital in Brooklyn, the uninsured Nix was
presented, again not untypically, with a crushing bill for $14,000,
plus doctors’ fees — a far cry from what it routinely
bills for the same procedure to Medicaid ($5,000), Medicare ($7,800),
and HMOs ($2,500). In the wake of Lagnado’s inquiries, New
York Methodist cut Nix’s bill to $5,000; Yale-New Haven ended
White’s ordeal by wiping away his debt, and later announced
changes in some of its more heartless collection policies. But
clearly the very deep sickness in the system itself is not so
easily cured.
DART TO WALTER CRONKITE, MORLEY SAFER,
AND AARON BROWN, for suspending their disbelief. The
vaunted skepticism of experienced journalists was in short supply
when each of the stars signed on to a lucrative deal with a public
relations outfit to act as host, on a make-believe news set, in
what they say they were told were educational news breaks relating
to matters of health — but which, as Melody Peterson reported
in the May 7 New York Times, were in fact sophisticated infomercials
promoting drug companies and their products. As one too-easily-duped
employee at a public television station that regularly carries
similar videos candidly told Peterson, “They offer them to
us for free, so I don’t go digging around for any other information.”
Other stations, however, have refused such gifts because of their
promotional nature. (Cronkite and Brown have since bowed out of
the deal; Safer is asking that the hundreds of his widely distributed
tapes be taken off the air.)
DART TO INTERNATIONAL LIVING,
for cheapening the profession. In its latest come-on to footloose
schnorrers, the monthly travel and life-style newsletter, put
out by Agora Publishing, dangles a dazzling vision in which “for
a limited time…before the doors close,” you, along with
only 1,999 others, can, for the specially discounted price of
$298, become an “Agora International Correspondent”
with your very own Press Pass — that “valuable document”
that could get you, like other members of “accredited”
news organizations, to the destination of your dreams at a cost
of “next to nothing.” As just one enviable bargain among
many in his eighteen-page e-mailed pitch, Agora’s president,
Bill Bonner, shamelessly cites his three-week trip around the
Pacific — “all expenses paid!” — sponsored
by tourism interests that “wanted good press to get more
business.” He also cites cjr, which reported on the “$298
credentials” in 1999. “Even the prestigious Columbia
Journalism Review,” Bonner boasts, “felt compelled to
discuss it (without knowing quite what to make of it).” Memo
to Bonner: The prestigious Columbia Journalism Review knows exactly
what to make of it: it’s a truly tacky travesty of what real
journalists, with real press passes, are all about.
Enjoy
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Darts
& Laurels is written by Gloria Cooper, CJR's
deputy executive editor. Nominations:
gc15@columbia.edu, 212-854-1887
