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Darts and Laurels
* LAUREL to The Seattle Times and aerospace reporter Byron Acohido, for landing squarely on a story that affects the public safety -- and the public image of the company in that company town. In the wake of the September 8 crash of a USAir Boeing 737 twinjet near Pittsburgh in which 132 people lost their lives, the Times jumped quickly on board with a series that revealed, among other things, that some 2,200 other Boeing jets currently operate with potentially malfunctioning parts similar to one that might have caused the Pennsylvania crash. Based on a review of more than 500,000 Service Difficulty Reports filed by airlines from 1974 through August 1994, Acohido's articles documented the troubled history of the malfunctioning part, the recent move by the FAA to require that airlines replace it, and the resisting winds of industry economics that ultimately prevailed, allowing a five-year span in which to install the safer units. Acohido's series also quoted a Boeing spokesman's claim that such improved parts had been retrofitted on the entire fleet of more than 2,600 737s, including the doomed USAir twinjet -- a statement that, as Acohido's subsequent report made clear, turned out to be untrue. Meanwhile, investigations into the crash continue on their way, as do those 2,200 vulnerable planes.
^ DART to The New York Times, for ignoring a crucial bit of monkey business. In a June 14 bylined profile filed from Yugoslavia, reporter Roger Cohen went positively ape over one Vukosav Bojovic, director of the Belgrade zoo, pointing to his affable demeanor, inimitable devotion, and superhuman strength in "turning the zoo into one of this city's most admired institutions." Seeing and hearing and saying only good things, the piece overlooked some fundamental facts reported by, among others, Reuters and The Associated Press: that Bojovic had been indicted for his alleged participation in an elaborate 1990 scheme to deliver six baby orangutans from the Indonesian rainforest to a quasi-government trading company in Moscow in return for two baby siamang gibbons; that both orangutans and gibbons, being among the most endangered species on earth, are protected from such commercial trade; and that, in the eyes of the United States, Cohen's "jolly . . . folk hero" is a fugitive from justice.
* LAUREL to the Springfield, Massachusetts, Sunday Republican, and reporter Jack Flynn, for giving full court press to the unbalanced relationship between the city and its basketball Hall of Fame. Ten years after a deal in which the city agreed to provide a new $11.4 million prime riverfront home to the old sports museum across town in exchange for a share in its future profits, Flynn revealed, not a single penny had dribbled its way into the city's coffers; his two-part analysis (beginning June 12) told why. Based on a review of thousands of pages of city and museum records and on interviews with dozens of participants in the deal, the articles pointed to low interest on the part of the watchdog commission, which dissolved itself in the late 1980s; high expenses (notably the director's salary and perks) on the part of the museum; and wide management lapses on the part of city hall, which made no effort to extract payment or to monitor the project. By the end of August, Flynn was reporting that city officials had ordered a long-overdue audit and were negotiating with e museum for better terms.
^ DART to the Reno, Nevada, Gazette-Journal, for playing roulette with its credibility. In its July 30 edition the paper announced that the Promus Cos., Inc., parent company of Harrah's Casinos (one of the biggest businesses in Reno), had elected to its board of directors Susan Clark-Jackson, senior group president of Gannett's Pacific Newspaper Group and president and publisher of the Reno Gazette-Journal (which covers gaming and Harrah's on a regular basis). "Susan Clark-Jackson brings a unique perspective to our board of directors," Promus chairman Michael D. Rose was quoted as saying, presumably with a poker face. (The ethics section of the paper's employee's handbook includes the following rule: "Employees will not have any outside interest, investment, or business relationship that dilutes their loyalty to the company or dedication to the principle of a free and impartial press.")
^ DART to The Toronto Sun, The Toronto Star, and The Brantford Expositor, for steering their readers down a narrow one-way street. When the Green Lite Information Corporation, a phone-in consumer service that provides subscribers with car-dealer invoice costs on new cars and average trade-in prices on used cars, approached the papers about placing an ad, they flatly refused -- afraid, according to a June 29 story in The Globe and Mail, of wrecking their good relations with car dealers. Meanwhile, several smaller papers did give the go-ahead to the Green Lite ad; at last report, their relations with dealers were rolling along without the slightest dent. So much for defensively driven advertising practices; for a more offensive model, consider the letter that Brian L. Long, director of advertising for The Tribune-Democrat in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, sent to local car dealers who were boycotting the paper following publication of a July 9 column in which editorial-page editor Bruce Wissinger shared the lessons he learned from his bumpy experience in shopping for a car. "I'd like you to know that few people at The Tribune-Democrat support (or endorse in any way) the sophomoric, petty, foolish, wiseacre ramblings of a would-be editorial-page columnist," wrote Long. "I'm certain that tens of thousands of other Cambria and Somerset Countians share my sentiments. They are not likely to lend much sympathy to a writer who airs his misguided impressions about shopping for a product or service in the newspaper. For them, the newspaper is a source of information."
* LAUREL to the Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Sun-Sentinel and reporter Larry Keller, for keeping an eye on the ball (and chain). Never forgetting his 1990 story about the (denied) request for a retrial by one Christopher Clugston, who after two hung juries and a conviction in a third was serving a life sentence for a murder he claimed he did not commit; and learning early this year that the governor was (reluctantly, in this anticrime political climate) considering Clugston's appeal for clemency, Keller reopened his investigation, detailing the inconsistencies and contradictions that from the beginning had marked the case. By July, the story had been picked up by NBC Now, a new witness had come forward to support Clugston's claim, and the governor's mercy had become unstrained. After eleven years at the Madison Correctional Institution -- during which he acquired the HIV virus, the result, he says, of a rape -- Clugston was free to go home.
^ DART to the Vineyard Gazette, Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, for an oh-so-heavenly book review that circled around the son. In a 900-word assessment of Galileo: A Life, free-lance writer Mark Alan Lovewell praised the "great skill" of the biographer, the "fascination" of his subject, and the "staying power" of the work. The reviewer also went out of his way to find a local angle: "You ask what the Vineyard connection is?" he wrote. "The author, James Reston Jr., is a longtime summer visitor to the Vineyard. And there is another, grander connection. Anyone who has ever marveled at the beautiful skies this Island offers on a cool dry night will understand that our own window to the universe opens through the science of astronomy." Other "grand connections" were out of sight: Mary Jo Reston, the paper's publisher and general manager; Richard Reston, its editor and publisher; and Sally Fulton Reston and James Reston, chairmen of the board.
^ MINI-DART to the Victoria, British Columbia, Times Colonist, for clinging to the notion that a headline must be clever, no matter how sticky the subject. The Times Colonist's grabber of May 14: TEFLON'S INVENTOR SLIPS OFF AT AGE 83.
* LAUREL to Free Times, an alternative weekly in Cleveland, and to Westword, an alternative weekly in Denver, for remembering what they are supposed to be an alternative to. In the September 14 edition, Free Times assistant editor Mark Naymik provided an unsettling look at how, with more than a little help from their friends in the news media, Cleveland's business leaders rebuilt its image from national joke to the place to be. Tracing the flood of "slobber and gush" articles from the time that Tom Vail, then publisher of the Plain Dealer, began the New Cleveland Campaign, through the targeting of journalists in New York, Washington, and other media centers, and the encouragement of articles, opinion pieces, ads, and advertorials in outlets ranging from USA Today and Fortune to CBS This Morning and PrimeTime Live, Naymik concludes that "by counting news clips, new buildings, and tourists, Cleveland clearly emerges as a Comeback City. But by counting poverty rates, population, and job loss, and considering the state of city services, Cleveland is on a downward spiral. Just ask the city residents who live there."
Similarly, while the planned new Denver International Airport sent most of the local media straight up to Cloud Nine, Westword has, month after month and year after year, kept its feet on the ground, reporting on the studies that correctly predicted the problems, prodding the major papers to face the facts, scolding this anchor and that for lending their images to DIA brochures and their voices to the DIA people-mover. "If [the media] had done their jobs," ran one column by the relentless Patricia Calhoun, "someone might have figured out a little sooner that problems of disastrous proportions plagued the new airport."
^ DART to the Crystal Lake, Illinois, Northwest Herald, for overzealous application of traditional terminology when describing a certain type of sexual orientation. Headline over a September 5 story about the negative reaction of some World War II veterans to the Smithsonian's treatment of the historic flight of the Enola Gay to Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945: ATOMIC BOMBERS CRITICIZE ENOLA HOMOSEXUAL EXHIBIT.
