|
<advertisement>
|
 |
 
|
|
media search: |
 |
DARTS AND LAURELS
* DART to The Associated Press, for selective memories. In a sentimental Thanksgiving story on the "haunting" death of a homeless Vietnam veteran who had lived on the sheltered sidewalk outside the building that houses, among other organizations, the AP's Washington bureau, the wire service retraced the unfortunate man's history while recalling his dignity, neatness, and taste for pizza, as well as his reassuring presence to others on the street; it also recalled that he had once been forced away from the door of the building because tenants had complained. The piece forgot to mention that the source of those complaints had been The Associated Press.
* LAUREL to The Philadelphia Inquirer, for showing how absentee ballots made the vote grow fonder. In the wake of the special November 2 state senatorial election in the city's second district -- an election that machine tallies initially gave to Republican Bruce Marks but which later swung to Democrat William Stinton in an absentee-ballot landslide -- the Inquirer sought, and found, an explanation for the curious outcome. By knocking on door after door in the district's Latino neighborhoods, reporters learned from immigrant residents (many of whom had little or no English and even less understanding of their new country's voting regulations) how Democratic campaign workers had taught them about "la nueva forma de votar" -- the new way to vote in the safety and comfort of their homes and under the helpful eye of those caring campaign workers. Some new-way voters were so confused by the application and ballot that they voted more than once; others thought they were signing up for home improvements; still oers, marking their X at the designated spot, voted for candidates they did not support. Based as it was on anecdotal testimony and with the ballots themselves impossible to trace, the Inquirer's story did not prevent Stinson's bitterly contested (and hastily arranged) swearing in; it did, however, prompt a series of state and federal investigations, currently under way.
* DART to The Wall Street Journal, for an identity crisis on its op-ed page. In his October 13 piece criticizing the Supreme Court's refusal to review a trademark infringement case involving Quaker Oats, Kenneth Starr was identified as "a former federal judge and President Bush's solicitor general;" not until October 28 did readers learn from a letter to the editor that Starr is a partner in a law firm that now represents Quaker in the trademark litigation. Similarly, in his September 24 piece endorsing the lifting of barriers to telephone company entry into the cable field, Thomas W. Hazlett was identified as a professor of telecommunications policy; not until October 19 did readers learn from a letter to the editor that Hazlett was an expert witness for Bell Atlantic in federal proceedings -- and not until November 23 did they learn from a letter to the editor from Hazlett himself that he had noted his Bell connection in his original draft and that the reference had been removed by Wall Street Journal edits "at their discretion, and over my objection." The "inference that I am not forthcoming," Hazlett went on, "should hereby be corrected." (Inferences about the forthcomingness of the Journal are something else again.)
* DART to NBC's Now and to The New York Times, for misplaced mockery. In a December 1 update on the 1991 murder of a California woman who had been smothered in her home -- a still-unsolved crime to which the women's talking parrot could conceivably yield a clue -- the TV newsmagazine found the circumstances of her death so entertaining it could barely keep a straight face. Introduced and wrapped up by a smirking Tom Brokaw and narrated in stagey melodramatic tones by reporter Keith Morrison, the segment combined shots of the scene of the grisly murder (for which the victim's business partner is now on trial) with rolling footage and theme music from "television's old Falcon Crest . . . which also involved a bird." Although the killing had occurred "while the prized parrot peered from its perch," Morrison concluded cutely, "the winged witness" would not be testifying and had, "probably wisely, refused to comment." Similarly, on September 28, after five robbers armed with automatic and submachine guns invaded fancy food market on Manhattan's Upper West Side minutes before its midnight closing, ordering forty terrified employees to lie on the sawdust floor and forcing the manager to open the safes, the Times could not resist. Although the robbers seemed "oblivious to the finer points of kohirabi and fresh poblano peppers," wrote Robert McFadden, "the robbery itself -- during which four of the suspects fled with $ 10,000 while a fifth was captured by police -- "was not just a piece of carrot cake." On the morning after the holdup, McFadden went on with unseemly relish, "epicures and the merely curious ducked in for a glimpse of the looted safe, a whiff of North Sea smoked salmon or a tidbit of gossip on who stood where or cried hysterically when the guns came out." One wonders if those forty terrified employees were equally amused.
* DART to the Los Angeles Times, for catered coverage. The page-one entree to its Thursday, January 6, food section -- already printed on January 4 -- was a meaty piece, prepared by staff writer Daniel P. Puzo and decorated with a colorful 12-by-12-inch picture of eggs, fish, and other suspect foods, whose headline asked the question, "Unsafe at Any Meal?" and whose subhead took note of the fact that "In 1993, Americans came face to face with the hazards of the national food supply. It was the year of eating dangerously." However, when the paper's major supermarket advertisers -- who were presented with advance copies of the section by the Times's marketing department -- found that choice of language far too tough to swallow, the front page of the 1.2-million copy press run was scrapped. The blander substitute Times readers were served: "America's Food Supply: What Consumers Need to Know to Cook and Eat Safely."
* LAUREL to the New York City weekly Village Voice and reporter Russ W. Baker, for walking a lonely beat. After a relentless year-long investigation into the inner workings of the powerful, 20,000-member Patrolmen's Benevolent Association -- founded a hundred years ago to help the widows and orphans of slain police officers and operating today with $ 63 million a year in taxpayer funds and union dues and with virtually no accountability -- Baker on December 7 delivered his indictment. Among the 17,000-word bill of particulars: disturbing associations between PBA leaders and leaders of the mob; foiled investigations of crooked cops; missing or misappropriated funds; grossly extravagant payments to lawyers, lobbyists, consultants, insurance brokers, and labor negotiators (producing less-than-extravagant benefits for the rank and file). With the searchbeam currently focused on the city's new mayor, his new police chief, and their promises of reform, Baker's expose compellingly showed why genuine reform wouldave to include the PBA. (Baker, it should be noted in the interest of full disclosure, occasionally writes for CJR). In the following week's edition, the Voice expanded the indictment to include New York's daily papers, which, as an editorial put it, had reacted with "deafening silence" to Baker's piece. Suggesting that such silence might be attributed to the fear of alienating PBA officials who in large measure control journalists' access to police, the Voice concluded that, "If so, the PBA is even more above the law than we had thought."
* LAUREL to the Troy, New York, Record and reporter Dawn Fallik, for telling tales out of school. Fallaik's four-month examination of the city's multi-million-dollar asbestos removal project -- focusing, in particular, on a $ 400,000 contract for asbestos consulting services awarded by the Enlarged City School District to one Failsafe Risk Management Alternatives Inc. -- taught readers plenty they didn't know. Drawing on documents obtained under the state's Freedom of Information law, the four-part series(November 14-17) revealed that the no-bid contract with Failsafe was routinely costing the district at least twice as much as what other districts were paying for similar services on even larger projects; that the offspring of two top district officials were employed by Failsafe; and that, contrary to conflict-of-interest regulations, Failsafe was financially linked to the company that was paid to remove the asbestos the Failsafe claimed to have found. So inflamed by the Record's report -- and by the scho board's November 23 decision to hire an independent firm -- was Failsafe president James Thomsen that he put up a dozen anti-Record billboards, sent out anti-Record mailing to district taxpayers, offered $ 100 inducements to Record advertisers to switch to the competing Times Union, and threatened to bring a libel suit that, he told the alternative weekly Metroland, he hoped would put the Record out of business. As for Thomsen's own business, he seemed burned out on asbestos and is pinning his hopes instead on lead-control regulations now being developed by the EPA. "We'll be opening up a lead-abatement center here," he told the Record. "I'm waiting for the pot of gold to drop out of the sky."
* LAUREL to the Woodland Hills, California, Daily News, for earthshaking journalism. With its newsroom destroyed, its printing press dead, and the personal lives of its staff turned upside-down, the Daily News managed to make good on its name, producing (with the neighborly help of several Copley papers) a special ad-free edition on January 19, thus missing not a day of publication. Here is how editor Bob Burdick opened his January 18 story recalling that memorable day: "At 4:29 A.M. Tuesday, 23 hours and 58 minutes after the Northridge earthquake, I heard a car out front and leapt from my bed. It was my Daily News. I unwrapped it -- in all its 12-page glory -- as I walked back inside. . . . Then, for the firs time since my father died in 1982, I wept."
