|
<advertisement>
|
 |
 
|
|
media search: |
 |
Darts and Laurels
* DART to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and sportswriter Mike Fisher. After routinely covering for the past ten months the bruising contract negotiations between the Dallas Cowboys and its star running-back Emmitt Smith, Fisher traded his privileged position on the sidelines to relay a signal of compromise from Smith's agent to the owner of the team. Then, when a deal was finally announced, Fisher -- with the apparent goal of picking up points with the public -- arranged to have another reporter at the press conference ask Smith's agent if "an intermediary" had been involved. Blocked by the agent's public denial, Fisher tackled him in private and got him to acknowledge, as Fisher victoriously reported in a September 17 piece, that "a Star-Telegram reporter . . . deserved some credit for getting the ball rolling." To most journalists, however, credit wasn't quite the word: for example, Mike Blackman, editor of Fisher's own paper, told Dallas Morning News sports columnist Barry Horn that, "Our policy, like at most newspapers, is not to get involved and be the ones that make the news." And, as Horn observed, "Blackman was simply repeating what every would-be journalist learns on the first day of school."
* DART to the Journal Newspapers of suburban Washington, D.C. Readers of the June 1 business section were undoubtedly touched by a sympathetic feature on Fresh Value supermarkets ("an overlooked gem") headed GROCERY CHAIN OWNER VOWS TO SURVIVE. Their reaction might have been somewhat different if they had also been privy to the indiscreet boast by associate publisher Brenda Roy in the July 1 company newsletter. "A team effort on the part of [editorial and advertising] departments resulted in Fresh Value supermarkets advertising every week in our full-run dailies and select weeklies," Roy crowed. "Ken Courter initiated contact with Richfood Distributors and opened the door for Greg Warner and Bob Saupp to finalize the Fresh Value sale. Editorial staffers wrote a profile about Fresh Value Supermarkets that drew fifteen responses at their Germantown store alone."
* LAUREL to Scripps Howard News Service, assistant managing editor of investigations Andrew Schneider, and chief political correspondent Peter A. Brown, for underscoring the wisdom of Polonius's financial advice to Hamlet -- particularly if the government gets into the act. In the four-part series called "FDIC: Protector Turned Predator," Schneider and Brown documented how, in its mindless haste to liquidate the remaining assets of the hundreds of banks that collapsed in the 1980s and early '90s, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation had called in the loans and mortgages of thousands of borrowers who had never missed a payment, seizing their homes, farms, ranches, and businesses and leaving their lives in ruins -- and then, turning a deaf ear to their pleas and offers and lawsuits, sold the properties for pennies on the dollar to shrewd investors who promptly resold them at profits of 300 percent. The result of a ten-month inquiry that included an analysis of 65,000 documents and interviews with 680 people in 22 states, the October 24-27 series gave a full account of why the FDIC -- the independent agency created by FDR in 1933 "to calm the fears and consternations of panicked depositors" -- had sixty years later, in the minds of thousands of American borrowers, come to stand for, as one headline in the series put it, FEAR. DECEPTION. INTIMIDATION. CHAOS.
* DART to Clinton Collins, Jr., columnist for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, for ethical principles that run only skin deep. In an abrasive August 18 piece on the failure of the local news media to employ "different hues of folks" in important jobs, Collins, a black lawyer and legal affairs commentator, put the blame on "the R word" and offered among his examples WCCO, which he said had been unresponsive to his inquiries about "its dismal record hiring radio personalities of color." Indeed, he warned, "stations like WCCO [the most popular talk radio station in the state], if they do not change the complexion of their on-air people, will likely have some very serious explaining to do come license renewal time." The moral force of such eruptions was considerably undercut, however, when on August 25 the Star Tribune published WCCO's response, in which it was revealed that Collins's conversations with WCCO had actually revolved around his request that he be hired as an on-air host -- and that, the day after his column had appeared, Collins had again contacted WCCO's station manager, referred to the column, and asked if he was now ready to talk about a job. (WCCO also pointed out that Collins had chosen to ignore some relevant realities, including three highly visible members of minority groups in on-air positions at local television stations, the relatively small percentage of African-Americans in Minnesota's population, and WCCO's ongoing program, jointly designed with the NAACP, to train and develop members of minority groups for future positions in the news media.) That same edition carried a mea culpa column by Collins acknowledging the conflict of interest and explaining that, after much soul-searching, he had concluded that his mistake would make him a better columnist and that he would therefore not resign. His column was accompanied by a note from the editors explaining that the paper's relationship with Collins as a regular contributor was regretfully at an end.
* DART to The New York Times, for transmitting an ethically scrambled signal. In its lead editorial of July 19, the paper sounded off against a "troubling" deal between Continental Cablevision and ABC, newly negotiated under the terms of the 1992 federal cable law (under which a television station can demand to be carried on a cable system or can refuse to be carried unless it receives compensation). "The deal [which calls for Continental to pay ABC to create a new cable sports channel in return for permission to continue to retransmit the network's signals for free] should help the ABC network," the Times allowed. "But local affiliates come away with no money. . . . Viewers will also lose if local broadcasters don't come away with cash. . . . Over-the-air TV," the Times concluded, "is an important social glue that binds Americans together." Whatever the merits of that lofty message, the editorial chose not to interrupt it with the fact that five Times Company television stations were then engaged in negotiations with cable companies over retransmission-consent compensation, that two of those stations are ABC affiliates, and that one of those affiliates was seeking retransmission-consent compensation from Continental Cablevision at the time the editorial was published.
* LAUREL to The Tampa Tribune and staff writer Lisa Demer, for fostering better care of the thousands of children caught at any one time in Florida's foster care system. Demer's four-part series on the failures of that system centered on the terrible traumas suffered over the past eighteen years by one anonymous Jane at the hands of unstable parents, abusive guardians, irresponsible social workers, and bureaucrats more interested in protecting their files than in protecting defenseless kids. Pieced together from court and police records, from dozens of interviews -- and, most significantly, from documents provided to Demer in what Health and Rehabilitation Service officials regarded as a serious violation of state law and of HRS secrecy rules -- the August series had by October produced some gratifying moves toward reform. It also resulted in Jane's reunion with her baby sister Lucy, from whom she had been separated by the system eleven years before.
* LAUREL to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and reporters Thom Gross, Carolyn Tuft, and Daniel R. Browning, for a feeding frenzy of a wholesome kind. With the spread of deadly illness elsewhere in the country linked to tainted restaurant food, the Post-Dispatch checked out the system in place for protecting local diners -- and found it far from satisfying. Its "Restaurant Report Card" -- based on a three-month computer-assisted study of city and county health department records for restaurants, delis, and pizza parlors that had been inspected at least six times during the last three years, as well as on on-site visits with an official sanitarian to eateries in the area -- filled nearly five full pages in the paper. It described the inspection process, explained the ratings system, named the names of the worst violators, and detailed the repeated critical violations -- ranging from toxic items near food, to rats in a walk-in cooler -- that somehow never earned a health department rating lower than A. "Restaurant Report Card," which also included a section on "advice for the wary diner," appeared in the September 24 edition. At last report, a special advertising section -- planned by the Missouri Restaurant Association and scheduled to run in a future issue -- was no longer on the Post-Dispatch's menu.
* DART to the Los Angeles Times. When the Times's Scott Harris took on as the subject of his November 18 column some of the sillier absurdities of the paper's newly effective guidelines on ethnic, racial, sexual, and other identification -- guidelines that outlaw, for example, the use of the word "deaf" ("say that an individual can not hear") and of the term "Dutch treat" ("considered an offensive reference to sharing expenses"), his editors killed the column, explaining later to The Washington Post that it would not have interested "people on the street." Harris had underscored his point by interviewing such interested people as the director of program development for the Greater Los Angeles Council on Deafness (to the contrary, she said, deafness is "the preferred term") and the Los Angeles Consulate of the Netherlands ("Would we scratch "Dutch treat" from your book? No."). Orwell! Thou shouldst be living at this hour!
