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Darts and Laurels
* LAUREL to the Philadelphia Business Journal, for instructing the good gray lady in the ways of a woman of the world. In its June 3 edition, the weekly revealed that (1), on three separate occasions, The New York Times had carried articles portraying the Delaware River Port Authority in a most attractive light (on May 15, an appealing profile of the authority's executive director; on February 27, a celebratory retrospective of the authority's twenty-five-year history; on November 21, a salute to one of the ports under the authority's authority); that (2), each of the articles had appeared under the byline of one Sally Friedman; and that (3), said Sally Friedman is also an employee of the p.r. firm that holds a $100,000-a-year contract to promote the Delaware River Port Authority. Conceding in a June 5 Editor's Note that "had the Times known of Ms. Friedman's affiliation it would not have accepted the articles," the paper shamelessly insisted that it had found in those articles "no indication of favoritism or bias." In short, it had been led down the garden path, but its virtue was intact. Or could it simply be that love is blind?
^DART to Journal Communications, owner of the Milwaukee Sentinel and The Milwaukee Journal, for giving new definition to the concept of human resources. With circulation in continuing decline management this spring began to keep a little list of those employees who did -- and those who did not -- subscribe to the papers at home. (Employees are given copies at work but are not allowed to take them out.) As revealed in the July issue of Milwaukee magazine, the deadbeats were subjected to memos and meetings that pointedly urged them to put their money where their jobs were. The resulting sense of intimidation and invaded personal privacy by what came to be known as the "subscription police" led Newspaper Guild chapter president Jack Norman to register a formal complaint. "This," he wrote to the bosses of the papers, "is nuts. Please stop immediately." Soon after, the innovative circulation campaign came to an end.
^DART to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, for a rather limited news menu. On St. Patrick's Day 1993, when 150 people became acutely ill after eating take-out corned beef from a popular local restaurant, the paper dug right in, dishing up the details in a page-one story that, court order notwithstanding, identified the eatery by name and noted, as the city's health director put it, that "We have to talk about it . . . because there may be other individuals who may be suffering . . . and are not aware of the fact that they may need some physician assistance." One year later, when sixty-three guests at a catered party given for advertising and p.r. executives at the PeeDee's new printing facility were similarly afflicted, the story went into the deep freeze. As reported by the alternative newsletter Point of View, not until fifteen days after the incident, with a local TV station sniffing around, did the paper notify the county board of health and not until five days after that did it finally comply with official requests for a list of the paper's guests. By that time, of course, all the clues had turned to garbage, leaving public health detectives with an empty plate.
^DART to California's Orange County Business Journal and editor Rick Reiff, for laboring under an ethical handicap. In an inside page of the June 6 edition the weekly carried Reiff's twenty-paragraph testimonial to the "golfers' paradise" recently opened in Cabo del Sol by the Koll Company, the county's major developer and the corporation that, as Reiff was careful to disclose, paid for his entire trip (and that, as the piece did not disclose, is a major Journal advertiser and its landlord as well). That same June 6 edition also sported a four-color photograph of the 17th hole of the Cabo del Sol course on the Journal's page 1, a black and white aerial photo of the Cabo del Sol's 18th hole on the paper's page 2, a half-page enlargement of the page 2 photo on page 17, and a four-color photograph of the Cabo del Sol's 17th tee on page 23.
*LAUREL to Newsnight Minnesota, a production of Twin Cities Public Television station KTCA, and reporter-producer Melody Gilbert, for lifting the fog. In an eye-opening series (beginning June 8) Gilbert revealed that for extended periods in 1953 at the height of the cold war, Minnesota residents unwittingly took part in an Army experiment that purported to be a harmless effort to develop a smokescreen to keep cities hidden in the event of atomic attack -- but which in fact was a dangerously toxic test of how chemicals would disperse during biological warfare. Based on data unearthed in the Army's own archives, the series pinpointed the numerous sites -- including a public elementary school in south Minneapolis -- that, with the patriotic blessing of the city's then mayor and the city council, were subjected to the day and night sprayings. Although initial Army response to the series was less than forthcoming ("The Army did not lie about [the sprayings]; it just didn't tell the whole truth"; "People would have gotten more exposure from a carriving by"), it later agreed to release all related documents and to cooperate in studying the health effects of the secret experiment. (In the 1970s, the mixture, zinc cadmium sulfite, was identified as a probable carcinogen.)
* LAUREL to New York Newsday and the Allentown, Pennsylvania, Morning Call, for an all-too-rare display of professional pachydermia. When financial writer Allan Sloan sent out his syndicated June column, the two Times Mirror subscribers did not flinch, running intact all of Sloan's 1,100 negative words on how the Times Mirror company structured the recent $2.3 billion sale of its cable TV business to Cox Enterprises in a way that penalized its minority stockholders (of which Sloan disclosed he is one) and that benefitted its controlling stockholders (the Los Angeles Times's famous founding Chandler family). The Times, however -- the Call and Newsday's older west coast sibling and the third of Sloan's three regular Times Mirror subscribers -- exhibited much thinner skin: there, where the Chandlers hold such longtime local interest, Sloan's column never saw the light of day.
^DART to Connecticut's Greenwich Time, for one picture worth a thousand words on the subject of editorial pettiness. Although the paper's May 24 story about a speech on sex-crime prevention made by a Manhattan prosecutor at a Greenwich club was certainly well detailed, the accompanying four-by-six-inch photo of the event was less so. Missing from the microphone in front of the speaker on the dais were the call letters of radio station WGCH, blotted out by the Time.
^DART to National Public Radio, for a sign of confused allegiances. On March 28, the Washington-based weekly Legal Times revealed that Democrat Thomas Downey and Republican Vin Weber, who regularly provide political commentary on the network's Morning Edition program, had been identified accurately but inadequately as former members of the House of Representatives, rather than as the lobbyists and consultants that in fact they are; as a case in point, Legal Times reporter T.R. Goldman cited a recent discussion on welfare reform in which Downey pushed the position of the Center for Law and Social Policy, an organization that two weeks earlier had hired him as a consultant. On June 7, the media monitor Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting complained that labeling Downey and Weber as lobbyists was far too vague; as a case in point they cited continuing discussions on health-care reform in which both commentators pushed the positions of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, United Healthcare Corporation, and Merck Pharmaceutical Company -- companies that support the "managed competition" approach to health care and that support Downey and Weber with consultants' fees. On June 27, Ralph Nader, picking up on a routine June 24 announcement in National Journal's CongressDaily that Downey and Weber had been named honorary co-chairmen of the Alliance for GATT Now, challenged NPR "to resolve the journalistic conflict of interest." NPR, however, would not be moved, responding to Nader, FAIR, and other critics with pious claims of balanced coverage on all such controversial issues, and with promises to clearly identify Downey and Weber's clients in future shows. Meanwhile, as of July, the dynamic duo could still be heard on taxpayer-supported radio, selling their stuff.
* LAUREL to The Associated Press and its countless professional colleagues around the country, for proving the truth of that saying about discretion and valor. Faced with a choice of riveting the world's attention on a high-stakes human drama -- young, attractive, American girl-reporter abducted at gunpoint by a band of ransom-hungry thugs and held for twenty days in the wilds of Somalia -- or keeping a lid on the story while working for her release -- the AP got its priorities straight. With the cooperation of such news outlets as the Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, Reuters, The Washington Post, and USA Today, among others, and with the assistance of the U.S. government, Somali intermediaries, and representatives of three unidentified countries, the AP managed, in an atmosphere free of the pressures of publicity, to get the reporter, Tina Susman, safely home. It also managed to get her there without giving in to any of the kidnappers' demands, thus discouraging would-be kidnappers from subjecting other journalists to similar ordeals.
