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DARTS AND LAURELS
* DART to the Los Angeles Times, for the unfurled hype (and furled self-interest) in its saturated coverage of "The Umbrellas of Christo," a $ 26 million project in which some 1,760, 488-pound, twenty-foot-tall yellow umbrellas were sprinkled along an eighteen-mile stretch of highway through California's scenic Tejon Pass. As had been accurately forecast in the October issue of Los Angeles Magazine, the Times provided a most favorable climate for the Bulgarian artist and his bumbershoots -- some thirteen articles and nine photos in the twenty days between October 8 and October 27 (when one of the umbrellas, uprooted by wind, caused a fatal injury, bringing the exhibit abruptly to a close), and some five more accident-related stories and five more photos between October 27 and November 1 (when a worker was electrocuted during the dismantling of Christo's sister project in Japan). Despitse the deluge, however, nowhere in its coverage did the Times see fit to mention that 30 percent of the stock of the Tejon Ranch Company -- on whose 270,000 acres of investable, developable land half of the umbrellas were installed -- happens to be owned by the Times Mirror Company, the paper's parent. Nor did it report on the prescience with which a TRC vice-president had told Los Angeles Magazine, ["Christo's Umbrellas] will bring us the kind of publicity we couldn't pay for."
* DART to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, for rolling out a barrel of censored speech. When political editor Steve Luttner drafted a Sunday column in which he questioned the value to the city of the Budweiser Grand Prix and criticized the mayor for spending too much time and money keeping sports promoters happy while letting less frothy problems brew, PD editore Thom Greer had the column dumped. (The paper has been a regular sponsor of the annual summer race.)
* LAUREL to The Washington Times and reporter Patrick Boyle, for "Scouts Honor," a well-prepared series on the sexual abuse of children by volunteer Boy Scout leaders. Picking up on a recent lawsuit involving a scoutmaster who had molested a Virginia boy, Boyle pursued a paper trail of more than a thousand newspaper articles and tens of thousands of pages of court records -- and discovered a disturbing pattern of similar cases in all fifty states. Indeed, while the organization's officials acknowledge from two to ten reports of sexual abuse each year, Boyle found that on an average of once a week over the past two decades, somewhere in America a Cub Scout, Boy Scout, or Explorer has reported being sexually abused by his leader. Six months in the making, Boyle's investigation also drew on painstaking computer analysis and painful interviews with victims and their families, as well as with molesters, scout officials, sex-abuse experts, and lawyers. His May 20-24 series comprised some thirty-six stories and charts, including a state-by-state listing of the 416 cases between 1971 and 1990 in which leaders were arrested or banned from scouting for the sexual abuse of scouts. The series also reported on the organization's current efforts to improve volunteer selection and educate the troops.
* DART to the Huntsville, Alabama, Times, and another to the Arizona Daily Star, for the indiscriminate use of discriminating facts. The Times's November 15 headline over its front-page lead story about an offer by the Huntsville city council to two Huntsville residents in settlement of a 1989 police brutality case: BLACKS GET $ 100,000 FROM CITY. The Star's gratuitous detail in an October 28 piece on how Korean immigrants are bringing new competition to the retailing scene in Nogales, Arizona: "The city's established business community [is] composed mostly of chain stores and Jewish-owned shops. . . ."
* DART to KIRO-TV, Seattle, for paying too much attention to the roar of the crowd -- and fumbling the journalistic ball. The station's two-part investigative series on the University of Washington's football team was kicked off in good style on November 20, with reporter Mark Sauter scoring the low graduation rate of UW players (three out of ten, according to latest figures, putting it at the bottom of the Pacific 10 Conference). The segment also carried a commentary by Lou Guzzo criticizing the university for refusing to tackle the issue and calling on the state's board of regents to investigate the "disgrace." The second part of the series, however, which was to deal with outstanding warrants against seven present and former Huskies for such unsportsmanlike actions as driving without a license and failing to make restitution to a victim of assault, almost didn't get off the ground. First, on November 21, news director John Lippman sidelined it temporarily after the station received a flood of angry phone calls from Huskies fans concerned about the negative impact on team morale just days before a crucial play-off game. Next, on November 22, station c.e.o. Ken Hatch retired it from the lineup after a huddle with top university officials, including the president, on the UW campus. (Hatch also turned his producer's research notes over to the university.) Finally, after newsroom morale had dropped to an unprecedented low; after Sauter had resigned; after yards of unfavorable publicity in such other area media as the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Tacoma Morning News Tribune, Hatch suddenly changed signals: on November 27, he aired the second half of the series.
* DART to the Newport, Rhode Island, Daily News, for a less-than-lofty lesson in situational ethics. In a November 5 column, editor David B. Offer self-righteously (albeit rightly) explained why, as past ethics chairman of the national Society of Professional Journalists, whose ethics code he had helped to write, and as present vice-chairman of the National Ethics Committee of the Associated Press Managing Editors Association, he could not accept -- as thousands of other journalists had accepted -- an invitation to an all-expenses-paid fun-filled weekend to celebrate a Disney World birthday. Two days later, his paper's front page carried a glowing account on the great success of the Newport County Convention and Visitors Bureau in enticing New York travel writers to the area with a "low-key" pitch that included a luncheon at the New York Yacht Club, gift bags of local wine, and an open invitation to visit Newport at no expense. "Last year," the article reported with evident satisfaction, "a similar program led to major stories and photo layouts on Newport in several major magazines" which, had they been paid for advertisements, would have "cost" more than $ 1 million. On this local exercise in journalistic seduction, ethicist Offer was silent.
* LAUREL to the Wilmington, Delaware, News Journal and environmental reporter Merritt Wallick, for an industrial-strength investigation of the Wilmington-based Du Pont company and its less-than-pure record over the past fifty years in overselling the safety and underplaying the dangers of the chlorofluorocarbon known as Freon 113, the most popular refrigerant/solvent in the company's multibillion-dollar CFC line. Drawing on thousands of pages of documents, as well as on interviews with Du Pont officials, scientists, regulators, lawyers, and workers, Merritt's four-part series (August 25-28) showed how Du Pont had misrepresented the facts behind its claim of safety for a product that was, in fact, killing people. The series also revealed that while, in accordance with recent legislation, CFC production will cease by the year 2000, the company is pushing a replacement product which poses a potential threat to the environment -- but which is cheaper for Du Pont to produce than a less harmful alternative. For a contrasting approach to covering the company in a company town, see The Omaha World-Herald's page 1 story (Sunday, June 9) on the Nucor Corporation, the highly productive, highly profitable Wall Street darling whose two Norfolk, Nebraska plants make it the community's largest employer. In an explicit response to earlier reports in The Charlotte Observer, the Chicago Tribune, and The Wall Street Journal on the alarmingly high accident-related death rate among Nucor's workers -- the highest in the steel industry since 1980 and more than double the industry average -- the World-Herald weighed in with an image-polishing piece on the benevolence of the company, the contentment of its workers, and -- notwithstanding an OSHA finding against Nucor to the contrary -- the carelessness of an employee who (the piece strongly implied) has caused his own accidental death.
* DART to the Contra Costa Times, for watered-down news. In the midst of California's unrelenting five-yeawr drought, a list of the top 100 residential consumers of East Bay Municipal Utility District's water -- most of whom turned out to live in the affluent suburbs of Contra Costa county and to have been using more than fifteen times the 325 gallons used by the average EBMUD customer -- was reluctantly released by the utility on October 3 (thanks to a lawsuit filed by the Oakland Tribune). But while the Trib and other area news media played the story straight, the Times diluted it with a defensively skeptical twist, headlining its page-one story CONTRA COSTANS DOMINATE, BUT MAY NOT BE WASTERS. The lead of the piece referred to "complaints of inaccuracy and invasions of privacy"; one pulled quote planted the possible excuse of a "leaking pipe" while another maintained "It's not right to disclose what someone is using. It is the customer's home and their property."" And one rather interesting fact did not surface in the piece at all: that the twenty-ninth name on the list, with usage of 5,000 gallons a day, was that of Dean S. Lesher, publisher and chairman of the Contra Costa Times.
CORRECTION (ran in March/April 1992 issue):
A Dart in the January/February issue to the Contra Costa, California, Times,
for a "defensively skeptical" front-page article on the release of a list of the
area's top 10 water users, inaccurately stated that the paper had failed to note
that one of the largest users on the list was Dean L. Lesher, the paper's
publisher. In fact, Lesher's name did surface in a back-page sidebar listing
the top 30 users. (His affiliation with the Times, however, did not.)
