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DARTS AND LAURELS
* DART to the Westport, Connecticut, News, and its recently appointed editor, Woody Klein, for journalistic cross-dressing. A full-page ad in the paper's October 14 edition for Ed Mitchell of Westport, the local Burberrys dealer, featured a most unsuitable photograph of the clothier and the editor heartily shaking hands. Mitchell, according to the caption, was wearing "a Burberrys blazer and slacks;" Klein, his "longtime friend," was clad "in a Burberrys navy pinstripe suit."
* LAUREL to the outside-the-Beltway press, for campaign reporting on the inside track. While most of the media stayed fixed on the presidential horse race, the jockeys, the trainers, and the odds, a string of California papers -- most notably, The Sacramento Bee, the North County Blade-citizen, the San Diego Tribune, The Orange County Register, and the Los Angeles Times -- were, in the late 1991 and early 1992, tipping off their readers to the increasing strength of evangelist Pat Robertson in California's G.O.P., and to the the stealthy moves to bring his supporters into winning positions in school board, hospital board, even water board races throughout the state. Spurred on, perhaps, by an April 27 Nation piece, in which reporter Joe Conason detailed a long-range scheme by Robertson and his followers (many of whom, Conason noted, had been "clearly disappointed by David Duke's defeat") to gain control of the White House, other papers -- including The Wichita Eagle, the Houston Chronicle, The Atlanta Constution, and The Denver Post -- soon caught up. By election day, millions of voters had been made aware of the hidden agendas of obscure entries from the secret stables of the Christian right.
* DART to the Decatur, Illinois, Herald & Review, for failing to fill a large ethical cavity. The paper's October 11 edition carried a six-page, four-color "Special Project" on TMJ -- the popular term for various ailments believed by some to stem from disorders of the jaw's temporo-mandibular joints -- which appeared to be a bracing service piece for readers, but was in fact an advertising supplement conceived and paid for by Dr. William R. Martin, Jr., director of the Decatur Cranio-Mandibular Center. The $ 8,000 mouthful of interviews, Q-and-A, and graphics included an 8-by-12 inch photograph of Martin and plugged him by name eleven separate times. In accordance with policies set by the paper's previous management, early layouts of the section had displayed a clearly labeled notice that it had been "Produced by the Herald & Review Advertising Division"; but when Martin howled at such explicit wording and threatened not to pay, all references to "advertising" were yanked.
* DART to the Wilmington, North Carolina, Morning Star, and columnist Jack Harrison, president of The New York Times Regional Newspaper Group, for un-Socratic journalistic methods. Every Friday since July, the paper has been running Harrison's new Q and A column, "Hey, Jack!" featuring questions from presumably curious readers about celebrities and other newsmakers (Sample: "Will Marla Maples and Donald Trump settle down?") which, it is hoped, will draw weekend entertainment advertisers. What readers are not told, however, is that the name of almost every person to whom a question is attributed belongs to an employee of the Morning Star, including the office receptionist, the publisher's secretary, and the newsroom librarian. Nor are readers aware that the questions have been delivered to Harrison on demand, and that those staffers who fail to meet the quota of six to ten posers get a pointed nudge from Personnel. * DART to California's Alameda Newspaper Group, owner of four suburban newspapers in the EasBay area, for adding insult to (repetitive strain) injury. On September 24, two weeks after an OSHA representative had made an on-site inspection -- an inspection prompted by local guild complaints of an alarming number of what appeared to be VDT-related health problems -- a notice appeared on the bulletin boards of all four newsrooms giving the Alameda group a clean bill of health. Bearing the official-looking legend, "State of California, Industrial Relations, Division of Occupational Safety and Health," and noting the date and location of the inspection in the appropriate spaces provided on the form, the one-page report concluded that the Alameda papers had "good program documentation" and were making "good progress toward compliance with OSHA ergonomic standards." As was soon discovered, however, the "OSHA report" had originated not with the government agency but with Alameda management. In fact, as OSHA explained in an October 12 letter to guild chairman Alexander Davis, there is no ergonomic standarand the agency had decided that, on the basis of its investigation and in accordance with its guidelines, no official document was, or would be, issued. Moreover, the letter went on, "If the substance of the notice had been as fraudulent as the format, I would not have hesitated to refer the matter to the Division's Bureau of Investigations with an eye to possible criminal investigation."
* LAUREL to the News & Record, Grensboro, North Carolina, and reporters Justin Catanoso and Taft Wireback, for "Burning Issues," an unfiltered report on what America's major tobacco companies -- most of them headquartered in the paper's backyard -- knew about the deadly effects of smoking, and when they knew it. Sparked by the recent Supreme Court ruling that cigarette makerscan be sued for fraud if they concealed from the public damaging information about their product, the three-part series (September 26-28) revealed that, as an accompanying editorial put it, "the tobacco industry's cynicism may go even deeper" than its public posture already suggests. In 1970s, for example, twenty-six bioscientists who were studying the link between smoking and disease were suddenly fired by R. J. Reynolds after company lawyers had collected their laboratory reports; the research was never made public and was never resumed. And as early as 1946, P. J. Lorillard, according to a confidential internal memo, was warned that nough evidence has been presented to justify the possibility of a presumption [of tobacco's contribution to cancer]." Waving away the puffs of loyalty to local business that too often choke a newspaper's voice, the News & Record offered some pretty harsh advice: "The tobacco industry should come clean about the dangers of smoking and what it knew about them. . . . And people in this region whose livelihood depends on growing or manufacturing tobacco had better be taking stock."
* DART to Joseph McNaughton, publisher of the Effingham, Illinois, Daily News, for a curious concept of community service. After the paper had won a community service award from the Illinois Press Association, for stories faulting the local hospital for violations of state-required procedures that might have saved the life of an out-of-town man who died in its emergency room; and after the town's power-that-be, upset by the hospital stories, had formed a secret Community Support Group to pressure the paper's reporters to watch their negative words; and after other discomfiting stories -- on child abuse, sexual abuse, white-collar crime -- had brought subscription cancellations and advertising boycott threats; and after the publisher had expressed his support of the critics by firing the executive editor (his son-in-law), theassistant publisher (his daughter), and the managing editor (firings which prompted his wife to banish from their house to a room in a garage); and after the publisher had tried to buy uall of the local copies of a report in theChicago Tribune about the newspaper family's feud; and after hiring back his daughter as acting editor and his son-in-law (without a title) -- after all that, two days after the paper an a page-one story on its community service award, the publisher fired his daughter and son-in-law again, this time, he said, for good. As McNaughton explained to the Chicago Tribune, with no apparent irony "Your newspaper has to project the community and, if you don't do that, you have problems."
* LAUREL to The Kansas City Star and reporter Joe Stephens, for an investigative gamble that quickly paid off. With the prospect of legalized casinos on Missouri's horizon, Stephens researched the history of the state's $200 million-a-year charity-sponsored bingo games -- and showed that, contrary to laws barring involvement in the games by convicted felons, such criminals were indeed heavily involved. Focusing on one Bernard "Blacky" Black, a shadowy millionaire and twice-convicted felon whose illicit activities the police just couldn't pin down, Stephens shoed that Black was managing nicely to plowhis profits from bookmaking and prostitution into the "nonprofit" bingo games, skim the revenues from the games to build lucrative massage parlors, and then use the proceeds to bankroll high-stakes casinos in nearby states. The late-summer series -- which drew on thousands of pages of corporate documents, tax returns, banking reports, and court transcripts, as well as on confidential interviews with Black assoates in fear of their lives -- was followed by September reports on proposals by lawmakers for sweeping reforms in bingo laws and on criminal investigations of Black in four states.
* DART to The Cincinnati Enquirer, for an overdeveloped piece of real estate news. To mark the move from its historic downtown home on Vine Street to seven leased floors in a twenty-six story skyscraper four blocks away at 312Elm, the paper on July 5 brought out (in addition to a page-one story) an eight-page special section celebrating the virtues of its new address and the benefits it would bestow on readers, advertisers, and employees. Crowdedwith congratulatory ads, the section included a floor-by-floor outline, with photos, of how the space would be used, statistics on such details as the number of square yards of carpet installed an gallons of paint applied, testimony from the publisher on the advantages of having new equipment, phones, and furniture, an eighteen-by-thirteen-inch photo of 312 Elm, and a description of the vistas to be enjoyed from within. Omitted was a fact revealed by the Cincinnati Business Courier on June 22: as an incentive to get the Enquirer to sign a long-term lease in the fafrom-fully-occupied building, 312 Elm Street's owner had agreed to share net profits with the paper.
* DART to the Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Daily Reporter, for casting a wicked headline over a perfectly straightforward AP story on the announcement by the special prosecutor in the Iran-contra scandal that he was bringing his investigation to a close and would be seeking no further indictments, to wit: WALSH WILL FINALLY END WITCH HUNTS.
