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DARTS AND LAURELS
* DART to WTSP-TV, the ANC affiliate in the Tampa-St. Petersburg market, and news director Mike Cavender, for being a journalistic spoilsport. A few days before the station's rival, NBC affiliate WFLA, was to begin telecasting the Olympic Games from Barcelona, Cavender signaled his sports staff to stress in their early evening newscasts throughout the events "U.S. losses and-or disappointments." The game plan? "If someone is expected to win a medal and doesn't or someone is expected to go gold and ends up with a broze," ran Cavender's July 22 memo, "I want it played in the sportscast." The goal? "The more disappointment that we can tell the viewers about the more they may not be inclined to watch as much prime time coverage on Channel 8 [WFLA]. And that is good news for us." On July 24, the memo showed up in the St. Petersburg Times; later that day, WTSP's president and general manager, Steve Maudlin, showed up on his station's six o'clock news, which an apology to viewers.
* DART to the Columbus, Indiana, Repubic, for its less than divine coverage of the Clyde Dupin Crusade. Inspired by the program of prayer meetings, youth marches, and ladies' teas emphasizing, as the evangelist told The Republic, "a lifestyle that belongs to Christians, one that's different from the Murphy Brown lifestyle," the paper apparently made a decision for Dupin: his crusade begat more than 130 column inches of copy, comprising some nine separate stories (five, including a banner story, on the paper's front page), plus eleven photos featuring Dupin and his team. One particular headline not likely to get The Republic into journalistc heaven: DUPIN SET TO DEAL CHRIST'S BEST HAND.
* DART to the San Francisco Chronicle, for overrunning the base. When San Francisco Giants owner Bob Lurie announced on August 8 that he had made a deal to sell the franchise to a group of Tampa Bay investors and that the team would be moving next season to the greener fields of the Florida Seacoast Dome, the Chronicle swung into a desperate campaign to keep the Giants at home. Its pitch included a page-one, above-the-masthead " call . . . for a late-inning rally" -- namely, that the business and civic community support the Floridians' $ 113,000,000 bid -- and a plea to Lurie to "go the extra mile"; "Save the Giants' coupons for readers to mail in with expression of love for the team; participation by the Chronicle's executive editor, William German, in strategy-planning meetings with the mayor's representative; and the spiking of a column by sportswriter Bruce Jenkins and the reworking of another by sportswriter Glenn Dickey, on the offbase theory, apparently, that their hostile response to Lurie's announment would not be helpful to the cause. Even Herb Caen, the paper's star columnist, got tagged; he was asked, and agreed, to revise the tone of his "Black Friday" piece to reflect not despair, but hope; in similarly curved editing, the headline over a story about the effect of the Giants' departure on Mayor Frank Jordan's political future was change from JORDAN WILL GET THE BLAME to A LATE RALLY COULD STILL SAVE JORDAN. Reviewing the "censoring of our coverage" play-by-play in an August 24 memo to city editor Dan Rosenheim, political writer Susan Yoachum summed up the score: "I was forced to draw the conclusion that the Chronicle's corporate and monetary interests were influencing its Giants' coverage -- the type of conflict of interest story that interests us every day. Shame on us."
* LAUREL (belatedly) to the Minneapolis Star Tribune and reporters Joe Rigert and Maura Lerner, for "Safeguards That Kill," a disquieting four-part series (December 2-5, 1990), raising grave doubts about the safety of those restraining belts, vests, and jackets which -- contrary to more humane, and more effective, practices in Europe and Canada -- are used every day on some 500,000 elderly Americans, many of them in nursing homes: at least 200 people a year, the series revealed, are strangling or suffocating in the very devices intended to protect them. Two days after the series ended, the FDA announced that it would begin an investigation of the deaths it had previously ignored. Over the next eighteen months the the agency issued medical alerts for caution in use of the restraints, decided that prescriptions for the device would hencefore be required, and, on June 2, proposed new warning-label rules. The agency also put out, on June 16, a press release summarizing its earlier actions. Not coincidentallyperhaps, the summary was issued only hours before NBC's Dateline was scheduled to air its segment on the subject. Wrapping up her graphic report, NBC correspondent Michele Gillen asked, "What does the federal government plan to do about this? The FDA told us that, effective immediately, all manufacturers of restraints are going to have to prove -- this for the first time -- that the restraints are actually safe and effective . . . the FDA says, in part, because of the body of evidence we've brought forward." Much of "the body of evidence brought forward," however, appears to have been prompted by the Star Tribune's series (a copy of which had been requested by an NBC producer some six months before), and relied on one of the series'prime consultants as its key on-camera source. To be sure, the paper got a credit for providing "production assistance." But as Star Tribune executive editor Tim McGuire observed in a July 1 letter to NBC News president Michael Gartner, "The text of the proposed new FDA rule, wch was faxed to the Star Tribune by the local office two days before the NBC broadcast 'announced' it as that day's news event, cites the star Tribune's project 10 times in its list of 34 reference materials that have been placed on display in Washington in support of the proposal. . . . There no mention of NBC or any other news organization."
* DART to John Gates, editorial page editor of the Winston-Salem Journal, for lending his professional credibility to a journalistic smokescreen. The July issue of Choice, "The Journal of the Smokers' Rights Movement," published by R. J. Reynolds, the company in Gates's North Carolina company town, focuses on the burning question of how to use the media to build support for its cause, primarily through letters to the editor. Along with admiring profiles of tobacco-stained epistolarians, Choice's glossy, four-color pages were fully packed with an appeal to join Reynolds's letter-writing club (goal: 1,000 published letters a month); the names and addresses of some targeted newspapers, broadcast stations, and magazines; suggested points to be included -- and from Gates on improving the chances of seeing your letter in print.
* LAUREL to The Miami Herald, and to WTVJ-TV weathercaster Bryan Norcross, for becoming real ports in a storm. Slammed by the awesome winds of Hurricane Andrew, its staffers unsure of the fate of their families and homes, the Herald miraculously managed to stay on top of the story of the worst natural disaster in the nation's history. Bringing out an extra edition under next-to-impossible conditions in the early hours of the morning after Andrew struck; distributing, with the help of the paper's top executives, free copies in English and Spanish -- some 40,000 a day, for two post-Andrew weeks, to every house that looked in; presenting an organized mass of news about the storm and its aftermath, along with column after column of practical help with essential human needs, the Herald provided a beacon of light to its many readers. At the same time, the paper's television critic, Hal Boedeker, went out of his way in an August 30 column to focus attention on the strong performances by local reporters and ancho at station WSVN and WPLG and, most memorably, by WTJV's Norcross, who stayed on the air for twenty-three consecutive hours, counseling terrified listeners and dispensing life-saving information. "Now is the time to find a closet in the inside of your home and get everything out of it," the meteorologist warned his listeners. "The last-resort place you're going to be is the back of that closet with a transistor radio and a mattress over the top of you, and we'll tell you when it's okay to come out." They went. He did. And, as Herald staff writer Tracie Cone, clearly speaking for millions of Norcross fans, put it in a September 20 feature on the "Hurricane Hero," "We can't thank him enough."
* DART to WBRC-TV, Birmingham, Alabama, for monkeying around with its credibility. Outfoxing the competition -- most notably, WBMG-TV -- which in recent months had produced biting reports on serious management problems at the Birmingham city zoo, WBRC came up with a plan to change the institution's spots. In an April 28 letter to zookeeper Jerry Wallace, WBRC president Craig Millar proposed a "joint marketing plan" whereby his station would provide, among other things, editorials in support of the zoo; animal of the week segment in its noon and 5 p.m. newscast; commercials for the zoo parroted by the station's "talent"; weathercasts live from the zoo "when there is a particular event we feel we should plug"; and a station-driven flock of mailings, telethons, and fundraising fairs. And what would the station expect in return? "To be the only station with programs and features produced at and with the zoo. . . . In other words, exclusivity." The seal was put on the contract in June. In a September 4 articlin the Birmingham Post Herald on the "caging" of the public zoo, Millar was reported as denying that the agreement would have any effect on its news coverage. (Was that the sound of a hyena, laughing?)
