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Darts and Laurels
^ DART to the Milledgeville, Georgia, Union-Recorder, and to the New York Post, for want of professional manners. The Union-Recorder's November 10 story on how a local U.S. attorney had intervened in a state criminal investigation to get a longtime district attorney off the hook for alleged sexual harassment gave not so much as a nod to the Fulton County Daily Report, a legal paper in Atlanta, which, after finally winning its open-records fight with Georgia authorities, had published reporter Emily Heller's highly detailed exposŽ on November 7. Similarly, the New York Post's November 18 shocker that "Thousands of leftover meals are poisoned and discarded daily by the city's public schools" avoided any reference to Elizabeth Trostler's page-one special report in the November 11 Riverdale Press -- a report that the Press had sent around to New York's major dailies in an effort to rouse concern. (The Post was roused enough to slug the story post exclusive.)
^ DART to the Waterbury, Connecticut, Republican-American and to the Springfield, Illinois, State Journal-Register, for electing to take the low road in the 1994 campaign. In a red-baiting page-one story on November 5, three days before readers would go to the polls, the Republican-American breathlessly bannered the sinister findings of an intense round-the-clock investigation -- namely, that Democratic gubernatorial candidate Bill Curry (then leading against Republican John Rowland, the paper's favorite) had once been involved in a U.S. political action committee of the "Soviet-supported" nuclear freeze movement. Meanwhile, the Journal-Register had given its hearty endorsement to Republican Representative Karen Hasara in an editorial published on October 17 -- two days before her Democratic challenger was scheduled to meet, at the paper's invitation, with its editorial board. "Your staff tells me that the editorial was mistakenly published before I had the opportunity to interview with your paper," Ellen Schanzle-Haskins wrote in a letter to the editor published on October 20. "That tells me the interview would not have mattered, as the endorsement had already been written. I had thought newspapers were supposed to be fair and consider both candidates before making an endorsement."
^ DART to Sonja Hillgren, Washington editor of Farm Journal and vice president of the National Press Club; Bob Quinn, farm reporter for WHO radio in Des Moines; Nancy Dunne, of Financial Times; and Dyanna Decola, of Ag Day, a daily farm program produced by WNDU-TV of South Bend, Indiana, for spreading ethical blight. They and some half-dozen other "selected members of the media" accepted an invitation from Olchak Market Research to participate in a "new learning methodology" designed to "help DuPont" develop new public relations policies for pesticides; "after the research session," the invitation promised, "there will be a press conference where you will be privileged to the nature [sic] of these DuPont goals." (It also promised that participants would reap a reward of $250, to be donated to a designated charity or provided to the journalist "in cash for any purpose you wish to use it for, professionally or personally.") According to the newsletter Environment Writer, which unearthed the story in its February issue, the research session involved, among other "methodologies," reporter-teams creating before a one-way mirror dramatic plots based on the proposition that, as one remorseful participant put it, "DuPont makes very wonderful chemicals and no one needs to worry."
* LAUREL to the Cleveland Plain Dealer and reporters Joel Rutchick and Timothy Heider, for a bullish approach to the political marketplace. When in the course of last fall's campaign for Ohio's Tenth Congressional District seat the incumbent, Republican Martin Hoke, accused his challenger, Cuyahoga County Treasurer Francis E. Gaul, of mismanaging public funds, Rutchick and Heider didn't write off the charges as low-interest political rhetoric; instead, they checked them out. The result of their inquiry, which involved retaining the services of a university business professor and a computer-assisted analysis of some 1,800 transactions in the treasurer's $1.8 billion investment pool known as the Secured Assets Fund Earnings (ironically, SAFE), was a page-one story in the Friday, October 7 PD. It revealed, among other things, that Gaul and his staff of inexperienced, unschooled, and untrained appointees (the chief investment officer, for instance, had previously worked as a supermarket stock boy and shipping clerk) had exposed hundreds of millions of public dollars to risk by borrowing against bondholdings to buy other securities; had concealed more than $185 million in such leverages from auditors and consultants; and had been engaged in a trading frenzy that turned the portfolio over ten times in one year and netted local brokers more than $2 million in fees at a time when the bond market was in its worst downturn in half a century. By Tuesday, October 11, Heider and Rutchick were able to report that county commissioners had shut down the SAFE program, had brought in a team of experts to manage all investments, and were crediting the PD with staving off financial catastrophe. For contrast, consider the case of Orange County, California, where last spring similar predictions of impending financial doom were being fired into the political air by John Moorlach, the (losing) candidate for county treasurer, and where bearish local news organizations chose not to follow the smoke. Perhaps an analysis of the situation, published in The Orange County Register on December 11, five days after the county had fallen into bankruptcy, tells the story best. As an editor's note points out, the piece had been written earlier, "before the county admitted its investment pool had dropped $1.5 billion in value." The note does not point out, however, that the paper had had the piece in its possession since October, at which time Moorlach had submitted it for publication without the courtesy of a reply.
^ MINI-DART to the Los Angeles Daily News, for forgetting that a rose by any similar name may, journalistically speaking, stink. Consider the headline topping its October 26 report on the controversial endorsement by state Superior Court Judge Lance Ito (then presiding over the preliminary proceedings in the sensational O.J. Simpson double-murder trial) of deputy district attorney James R. Simpson (an old friend of Ito's who was then campaigning for a judgeship on Glendale's Municipal Court and whose name, as the story stressed, had acquired a certain recognition value): ito attends fund-raiser for simpson.
* 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 typical column by the relentless Pat Calhoun, "someone might have figured out a little sooner that problems of disastrous proportions plagued the new airport."
^ DART to 60 Minutes's Mike Wallace, for ambushing his own troops. Picking up on a story by free-lance journalist Karon Haller about a 1991 assisted suicide that had run last August in Connecticut magazine -- a story that had taken on added dimension when The New York Times reported in October that Haller had voluntarily turned over to prosecutors notes and tapes of her non-confidential interviews with the man who was subsequently charged with second-degree manslaughter for helping his terminally ill father die -- Wallace asked if the journalist would give him a hand with his research and drop by his office for a talk, a request she readily agreed to so long as she would not appear on camera. That condition notwithstanding, as a tip to The Washington Post soon made clear, the Wallace-Haller talk was in fact taped, without her knowledge and in obvious violation of basic journalistic practice, by tiny cameras hidden in the office drapes. "I thought it was strange," the betrayed Haller told Howard Kurtz of the Post, "that he would have makeup on his hands and face and it was only 10:30 in the morning." (According to Electronic Media, Wallace, who claimed he had intended to get Haller's permission later, was reprimanded by network bosses; the tape, never broadcast, has been destroyed.)
^ DART to the Journal American, Bellevue, Washington, for playing Santa to a department-store advertiser. So stirred was the paper by the vision of the reopening of a newly expanded Nordstrom's that it heralded the event in a four-day celebration marked by page-one plums, inside goodies, and full-page, four-color "shoppers' guides" to the eateries, escalators, merchandise, and restrooms. As the Puget Sound Business Journal later revealed, so delighted by the coverage was the company that, as publisher Peter Horvitz put it in a jubilant memo to the staff, "At the opening breakfast Jim Nordstrom, co-chairman of Nordstrom's, remarked that the Journal American's advertising and news cooperation and support was as good as they've ever seen."
