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DARTS AND LAURELS
* LAUREL to the New York Daily News, for not sitting on its behind-the-ad probe of "MD Tusch" (otherwise known as Dr. Jeffrey Lavigne), a local physician whose promises of painless laser treatment for hemorrhoids, fissures, and anal warts had been appearing in virtually every subway car in New York -- and, with a soothing $ 150,000 effect on its annual bottom line, in the Daily News as well. Documenting the piles of allegations against the doctor (some forty-nine in all) of gross incompetence, gross negligence, unprofessional conduct, and fraud, the four-part series by Andrew Kirtzman and Heidi Evans (September 15-18) confronted a number of itching questions -- among them, how Lavigne, whose license previously had been revoked or limited in four other states, had managed to get one in New York, and why the current investigation by New York State's health department was taking so long. The story also noted that, pending a ruling from the health department board, the News would not be running Lavigne's lucrative ads. On September 23, Kirtzman and Evans were able to report that the city's Metropolitan Transportation Authority was kicking Tusch's ads out too.
* DART to The Washington Post, for a journalistic equivalent of the self-serving ineptitude that marked the Senate Judiciary Committee's handling of the sex harassment case against Supreme court nominee Clarence Thomas. On Thursday, October 10 -- a day before testimony by Anita Hill (let alone her four corroborating witnesses) had even begun, the paper carried across the top of its op-ed page a six-column piece headed OPEN SEASON ON CLARENCE THOMAS in which staff writer Juan Williams vented his moral outrage over the liberals' "mob action" and "indiscriminate . . . smear," and asserted, with seemingly authoritative dismissiveness, that "[Hill] had no credible evidence of Thomas's involvement in any sexual harassment, but she was prompted to say he had asked her out and mentioned pornographic movies to her." Unbeknownst to readers of Williams's piece; and unbeknownst to viewers who on the following day (Friday, October 11) happened to catch him expounding his views in conversations with Peter Jennings on ABC; and unbeknownst to listeners of the widely syndicated radio talk show hosted by Rush Limbaugh, who on October 10 read the column over the air; and unbeknownst (presumably) to Thomas's arch-defender, Republican Senator Orrin Hatch, who on Saturday, October 12, in tones of pious wonderment read into the record for the benefit of the American people the words of the "great journalist" Williams -- unbeknownst to all those countless millions, Williams himself had two weeks earlier become the subject of an internal inquiry into allegations of sexual harassment by several female colleagues. What's more, Williams's personal interest in the issue of sexual harassment would be unbeknownst to us still, if newly appointed Post executive editor Leonard Downie, Jr., had had his way: upon learning that media writer Howard Kurtz (who had been alerted to the rage among women in the newsroom) was preparing to write a story, he ordered Kurtz to stop. Not until the committee hearings had ended -- and not until television station WRC, in Washington, D.C., had broken the story on its six o'clock newscast on Monday, October 14 -- did the Post decide its readers were entitled to the facts behind that immeasurably influential column. On Tuesday, October 15, the story Kurtz had tried to write four days earlier finally appeared, along with a page 3 "Note to Readers." Acknowledging that the paper's normal practice of keeping confidential personnel matters involving the privacy of its employees was superceded by the public interest in this particular case, the note explained that news editors had failed to inform the editors of the editoral pages about the inquiry into the allegations against Williams. (In its lead editorial in that same edition, the Post argued that Thomas deserved to be confirmed.)
* DART to Diario Las Americas, a Spanish-language daily ie of being abused or ignored. If sanity is to be brought back to the American legal system, those of us in the legal profession must restore the function of litigation as a method for Columbia Journalism Review, November, 1991 resolving legitimate disputes rather than as a means of extortion. Finally, Lewis properly raised the question of press responsibility in the wake of Sullivan. the loaded language (which Diario later claimed was due to human error and not intentional) prompted Cuban officials to contact the unsuspecting O'Connor at her Havana hotel, confront her with the displeasing story, and, despite her explanations, assign a foreign-ministry "minder" to keep her in check.
* DART to the Memphis, Tennessee, Commercial Appeal, for playing politics with the news. According to the NAACP, which on September 5 publicly accused the administration of the white incumbent mayor, Richard Hackett, of diverting an mismanaging more than $ 100 million in federal Community Development Block Grant funds earmarked for the economic revitalization of the inner city; and according to a documented story in the weekly Tri-State Defender on September 14, in which reporter Calvin L. Burns looked into the charges, The Commercial Appeal decided to withhold a series by Stephen G. Tompkins exposing the CDBG scandal until after the October election. The excuse that editor Lionel Linder reportedly gave his staff: it would be improper to run a series critical of the Hackett administration in the midst of his reelection campaign. No such sensitivity appears to have been at work, however, in the paper's ongoing coverage of similar problems at the Memphis Housing Authority, which, as it happens, is run primarily by blacks. (Hackett's opponent, Willie W. Herenton, is black.) Notwithstanding The Commercial Appeal's suppression of the story since July, and notwithstanding its formal endorsement of the incumbent on September 29, Hackett was defeated by Herenton in the October 3 election, by 172 votes.
* DART to Tulsa World and its book editor, Ken Jackson, for a more-than-dubious assignment to a less-than-disinterested writer. In a Sunday, August 25 "World of Books" piece on an upcoming novel, Jackson fawned over the book's jacket designer -- a man who happens to work at the World -- for having done "beautifully" by the book; praised the novel's publisher for putting it into an "easy-to-carry format" and for holding down the price"; quoted local critics as being variously "stunned" and "entranced" by the "captivating," "wonderful," "insightful," "powerful" book that was "destined to become a classic"; noted the stores where it could be bought and where the author and the jacket designer would be signing copies; and revealed -- in the very last sentence -- that the author of the book was himself.
* LAUREL to Washington Jewish Week and reporter Larry Cohler, for a series of damning reports on how American companies participate illegally in the Arab boycott against Israel -- and how the U.S. government blesses that participation by conveniently averting its eyes. Following up on The Wall Street Journal's earlier disclosure of a memorandum suggesting an unholy alliance between Baxter International, the world's largest hospital supply firm, and the government of Syria, Cohler dug deeper. Over the ensuing months he produced documented reports showing that Baxter had conspired with Syrian officials -- one of whom, Cohler revealed, had written a book denouncing Jews for murdering Christian children to use their blood for baking matzos -- to get off the Arab League's blacklist by promising to build a plant in Damascus for military use and by providing Syrian miliitary officials with copious documentation to prove it had cut all business ties with Israel -- actions illegal under U.S. law and loudly denied by Baxter. Cohler went on to discover that the Commerce Department had granted export licenses allowing American of the Hougan, Kutler, and Colodny-Gettlin books? More than a year after Secret Agenda's publication, free-lancer Phil Stanford wrote an article for the Columbia Journalism Review (March/April 1986) titled "Watergate Revisited." Stanford wrote that "no one from any of the major news organizations has made an effort to test any of Hougan's findings. This seems odd, if only because the Watergate affair is one of the most important political and journalistic events of our time, and because, if Hougan is s. For its part, Baxter announced in June that the criticism had forced it to abandon its plan to build the Damascus plant.
* DART to WMUR-TV, Manchester, New Hampshire, and six o'clock news anchor Karen Appel, for mortgaging their credibility. The station recently closed a deal with the Bank of New Hampshire to jointly produce a series of thirty-second, three-times-a-day "informational spots" (as the bank's advertising agency, which assists with editorial content, likes to call them) in which Appel issues helpful banking-services hints on, for instance, small-business financing and saving for college -- the final hint being the Bank of New Hampshire's full-screen logo. (According to The Wall Street Journal, operations manager Tom Bonnar sees no ethical problem in WMUR's commercial bond with the bank. "I look at [the spots] as consumer tips," he said.)
* DART to the Staten Island, New York, Advance, for making a mockery of its name. In a disjointed July 5 piece that took one small step (backward) for mankind and one giant step (backward) for itself, the Advance offered for its readers' enlightenment one man's ravings about women and the way they dress. Nostalgic for the "femininity" of the house dresses worn "in my Mom's day" and offended ("Ugh!") by the "eccentric or masculine-looking" women who, by "flaunting . . . pants, trousers, or slack in public," become "almost sideshow freaks . . . with bodies [like] that of a tub or stack of corn," the writer went on to lick his chops over the "gorgeous c this year, in the May/June issue, CJR published "Picking the Pulitzers." The subhead read: "Potential conflicts are everywhere: friends judging friends, enemies judging enemies. And those are just the conflicts we can see."
