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Darts and Laurels
* LAUREL to the Minneapolis Star Tribune and reporters Sharon Schmickle and Tom Hamburger, for an exposŽ of the most honorable kind. In a page-one series "Who Owns the Law?" (March 5-6), Schmickle and Hamburger revealed that over the past twelve years seven Supreme Court Justices, including four (O'Connor, Stevens, Scalia, and Kennedy) still on the bench, as well as a number of federal justices around the country, had enjoyed first-class, all-expenses-paid winter trips to luxury resorts in Hawaii, California, Florida, and the Caribbean, where they gathered to select the winner of the $15,000 prize awarded annually to a judge for "Distinguished Service to Justice" by West Publishing, a Twin Cities-based company that is the major printer of court opinions as well as a frequent litigant in copyright cases; and that, over those same twelve years, those very same judges heard cases involving the company which were decided invariably in favor of West. Supported by such evidence as reproduced photocopies of letters from, among others, Justice Lewis Powel in which he suggested that "Caneel Bay [a posh Virgin Islands resort] is a place my wife Jo and I have always hoped to visit" (and which indeed turned out to be the site selected for the committee's next meeting), and by a graphic timeline in which names, dates, and destinations of the golfing and tennis-playing justices were juxtaposed against dates of the outcomes of cases affecting their host, the series was further augmented with judiciously balanced sidebars on the (disapproving) reaction of ethicists, the (disingenuous) response of West, and summaries of each of the various cases in which the Court's rulings allowed West to retain near-monopolistic dominance in its highly lucrative field.
^ DART to the Butte, Montana, Standard, for programmed news. When Micron Technology announced in December that Butte was on the short list of thirteen cities being considered for the company's new $1.3 billion computer-chip plant, the paper got right on line. Under the direction of editor Norm Lewis, who promptly became a member of the local development group's Micron Task Force, the paper logged in with favorable stories and fawning editorials, accentuating the positive (thousands of new jobs), mostly eliminating the negative (further depletion of the area's already seriously threatened water supply), and barely messing with anything in between. In place of fair examination of the Micron proposal, the Standard published welcoming posters for readers to mount in the windows of their offices, shops, and homes, as well as page-one We Want Micron pledges to be signed and sent to the paper. "One of the factors that will determine where Micron decides to locate its new manufacturing plant is community acceptance," an editor's note explained. "You can do your part." Certainly the editor was doing his.
* LAUREL to The Boston Globe and reporters David Armstrong and Shelley Murphy, for "Risky Ride," a stomach-lurching trip through the downside of elevator/escalator safety. Based on a four-month investigation, the three-part series (December 4-6) rang the alarm on the many ways the public's safety has been shafted, documenting the lax inspections, irresponsible management, cozy relationships between manufacturers and inspectors, and inadequate regulations, as well as the rising incidence of malfunctions and maimings, freefalls and fatalities, in Massachusetts and beyond. "I don't like elevators or escalators," public safety commissioner Larry F. Giordano was quoted as saying. "I use the stairs." On December 2, after warning state officials of the Globe's impending series, Giordano announced that he would be stepping down.
^ DART to Oregon Public Broadcasting, for a strangely developed sense of viewer sensibility. So alert were station executives to the disturbing power of a Nova documentary on America's Grand Canyon that they apparently felt obliged to introduce it with a warning of possible offense -- but whether that offensiveness lay in the evolutionary message of the canyon's rocks, as one viewer suspected; or in the frightening turbulence of its rapids, as the president of OPB attested in a letter to the viewer; or in the two-second rear-view shot of a male geologist skinny-dipping in its river, as the program director told cjr -- was anybody's guess. (Maybe it was all those "dams.") Oddly enough, however, the program immediately following on OPB that February 28 night, Frontline's illuminating "Rush Limbaugh's America," elicited no similarly protective impulses from station executives, who evidently saw nothing potentially objectionable in the vacuum-suction sound effects of a Limbaugh "caller abortion"; in his "safe talk" microphone sporting a condom ("Yes, it is lubricated. Yes, my hands are greasy"); in the crude advice on "how not to get AIDS in America if you're a man: you do not ask another man to bend over and make love at the exit point"; or in the misogynistic explication of the origins of feminism (". . . so that unattractive ugly broads could have easy access to the mainstream. . . . Bunch of cows!"). What manner of viewer, one wonders, could OPB have had in mind when it saw a need to issue a warning not against such ideological ordure but against the enjoyment of nature in a birthday suit?
* LAUREL to The Denver Post and staff writer Paul Hutchinson, for a journalistic touchdown. When the Denver Broncos football team kicked off a pre-Christmas campaign for a new football stadium -- a stadium to be paid for by extending the sales tax levied in 1990 to build baseball's Coors Field -- Hutchinson tackled the proposal by looking at the record books. His front-page January 3 report recapped in behind-the-scenes detail the four-year history of the ballpark, play by sorry play -- from the misguided arguments for its necessity to the broken promise of its size, from the huge concessions to its owners to the ugly betrayal of its design, from the wildly optimistic predictions of revenues to the hopelessly underestimated cost to taxpayers, now swollen from an original $50 million to a since-revised $97 million to a current $200.3 million and counting. With the new stadium proposal shaping up as an issue in the coming election for mayor of the sports-crazy city, Hutchinson has given voters a handy scorecard for following -- and betting -- the stadium game.
^ DART to the Orange County, California, Register, for unholy journalism. Under the byline of one Chris Meyer and accompanied by a photograph credited to one Ron Londen, the Register of Monday, November 28 offered in the page-one, above-the-fold spot of its Metro section an inspirational piece on a fund-raising campaign of a local church. What was not revealed is that both Meyer and Londen attend the church and are Register editors too.
^ DART to Chemical & Engineering News, published by the American Chemical Society, for pouring contaminated oil on troubling journalistic waters. Getting wind of the news that staff writer Wilbert Lepkowski's year-long investigation into the dismal history of Ashland Oil and its legal and environmental woes was just about ready to erupt, Ashland vice president John Brothers flew from company headquarters in Ashland, Kentucky, to Washington, D.C., where he and ACSexecutive director John Crumb had a little chat. Did the v.p. remind the director that the image of the industry might get a little stained? Or of the large number of CEN subscribers employed by Ashland Oil? Whatever was said, following that meeting the Ashland piece was sunk. "To continue work on the article would not have been in the long-term interests of the magazine," editor Michael Heylin later explained to Corporate Crime Reporter. The question of whether it would have been in the best interests of the public didn't seem to come up.
^ DART to James J. Cramer, columnist for Smart Money magazine, for lowering the stock of financial journalism while making a killing for himself. As revealed by Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz, between the time Cramer prepared the copy for his February column and the time the magazine reached its 550,000 subscribers, Cramer -- who also heads the New York money-management firm of Cramer & Company -- added to his holdings with some 200,000 shares of three "orphan" stocks he named that "cry out to be purchased," thereby profiting, at least on paper, by some $2 million when readers predictably rushed to adopt them as their own. Compounding this apparent conflict of interest was, among other journalistic fans, The New Republic, which in a March 20 editorial dismissed those who dared to question Cramer's actions as being "overwrought" or "envious" or "stupid." For one thing, the apologia noted, Cramer is an "extraordinarily graceful writer" who does "articles for us two or three times a year"; for another, "he is an investor of his and other people's funds, including some of us at TNR." Reflecting on the episode in a March 28 op-ed piece in The Washington Post, James K. Glassman, who currently writes the Post's Big Money column (and who, "as a former publisher of The New Republic," he disclosed, "briefly participated in a Cramer fund in the late 1980s"), predicted that it is precisely on such "irreconcilable activities" as Cramer's that "the next great American scandal" will center. "Members of the press just don't apply the same ethical standards to their peers that they apply to politicians, judges, and business big shots," Glassman observed. "Some day soon, that kind of moral ignorance and arrogance will have consequences far, far worse than the Cramer affair." (Cramer, it should be noted, also wrote for cjr in the early 1980s, but to the best of our recollection offered no investment advice to the editors, presumably knowing a dry hole when he sees one.)
