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DARTS AND LAURELS
^ DART to ABC, for its misguided love of star-crossed news. In a desperate (pre-Disney) yen to be first in the hearts of TV's Hollywood sources, Good Morning America -- which only this spring left the soft and squishy bosom of the network's entertainment division for the more demanding arms of ABC News -- publicly proposed a rather dangerous liaison. A full-page ad in the July 10 edition of Daily Variety declared its intentions thusly: "This summer's #1 movies all have one thing in common -- each opened on America's #1 morning show. Coincidence? We don't think so. Because at Good Morning America we give movies the star treatment . . . . (Just ask Tom Hanks, who practically took over our studio.) So if you want to open big, work with us. We're big fans."
^ DART to the Halifax, Nova Scotia, Chronicle-Herald, for turning on plenty of heat -- but less than adequate light. Editorializing about a contract dispute affecting the price of coal between a longtime supplier and the Nova Scotia Power company, the paper left little doubt that its warmest feelings lay with the NSP. The editorial failed to mention, however, that Herald publisher Graham Dennis's wife Gay, daughter and editorial board member Sarah, and son and Herald sportswriter William together hold some 8,000 shares of Nova Scotia Power. Oddly, NSP's address of record for all three stockholders is The Chronicle-Herald, in care of one Patricia Devine, the paper's vice president.
^ DART to the CBS Evening News; to The Dallas Morning News; and to Barron's, latest candidates for membership in the Curious Coincidences Club. A December 11 segment on the Evening News about the dramatic effect of new fiber-optic technology on life in rural America kept its eye on the same Nebraska region, interviewed some of the same Nebraska residents, and evoked the same coming-of-the-railroad simile as a November 11 story by staff reporter Bill Richards on The Wall Street Journal's front page. On April 27, three days after free-lance writer Steve Miller had faxed to The Dallas Morning News his manuscript about an off-beat rock-'n-roll barber, recently relocated from New York, who provides fifties-style haircuts in a retro setting while Elvis singles blare, the paper sent its own reporter to interview the barber and in May ran its own brief item. (Morning News editors denied ever having seen Miller's submission, although, he says, he had called to confirm its receipt.) The June 26 issue of Barron's featured a column on electronic investing by mutual-funds editor Eric J. Savitz that displayed a certain amount of mutuality with Gary Weiss's cover story on on-line investing in the June 5 Business Week.
* LAUREL to the Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, Press-Enterprise, for an unsettling series that literally hit home. Moved by the tragic death of five Bloomsburg University students in a fraternity house fire, the Press-Enterprise last fall opened a full-scale inquiry into the town's off-campus housing industry, knocking on every door of every student dwelling, interviewing tenants and landlords, compiling a database of information from public records, and photographing every one of the 185 officially regulated properties, home to some 2,000 students every year. Published over a seven-day period (beginning May 13) and spanning some forty full pages of (increasingly dear) newsprint, the findings revealed that some $3 million a year is generated in rents for a handful of landlords, some of whom had filed a federal lawsuit to stop the town council from imposing a $50 licensing and inspection fee on their properties; that the town's former housing inspector had filed only three citations against landlords in the last three years; and that the town council had failed to spend a $30,000 grant allocated to help the new housing inspector follow through on his job.
^ DART to the Nashville Banner, and publisher Irby Simpkins, for mishandling excess personal baggage. When Simpkins's wife Peaches was appointed deputy to newly-elected governor Don Sundquist last fall, the publisher publicly assured readers and reporters alike that her job would in no way affect the integrity of the Banner. However, as was subsequently revealed by the alternative weekly Nashville Scene, an investigative story last March, documenting Sundquist's use of the state plane for personal and political trips, was ordered grounded by Simpkins and never took off. Further tracking of the Banner on Scene's journalistic radar suggests a somewhat disturbing pattern -- a report on the issue of the governor's newly amended rule requiring his appointees, but no longer their spouses, to disclose significant financial holdings, pointedly stayed clear of any reference to Peaches or her husband; while cloudy stories on the state administration are blessed with silver-lining headlines. In one example cited by Scene, a front-page story examining the possible effect of proposed campaign finance reform on the governor's personal political fund was cast in this sunny light: new loophole is no temptation for sundquist: personal political fund 'always followed letter of law.'
^ DART to the Tallahassee Democrat, for an unbecoming want of modesty. When Leadership Tallahassee, a local booster organization, bestowed its Lifetime Leadership Award on a prominent banker, its Emerging Leader of the Year Award on a prominent consultant, and its Distinguished Leader of the Year Award on Carrol Dadisman, prominent president and publisher of the Democrat and member of its editorial board, Dadisman's paper responded with an editorial -- "In Praise of Some Dedicated Souls" -- that included in its praise Leadership Tallahassee, which in honoring the "highly deserving" three, "chose wisely."
* LAUREL to Community Media, Inc., a four-paper chain of weeklies in Rockland County, New York, for making the First Amendment its weapon of choice. When Community Media decided to support the challenger to the powerfully entrenched county executive in the 1993 election, Community and its candidate were threatened by district attorney Kenneth Gribetz with possible indictment -- the candidate, for charges never specified; the papers, for allegedly accepting payment not to report certain facts damaging to its candidate. Fighting back in a civil-rights lawsuit, Community won: "You have no right to chill the editorial judgment of this newspaper," the federal judge told Gribetz. Soon after, Community began investigating Gribetz's activities, relentlessly reporting over the next two years on its findings. A federal investigation of Gribetz and his cronies followed, as did coverage by the New York area media, which for the most part had either ignored or discounted or failed to follow up on Community's reports. Gannett's Rockland Journal-News, for example, in its editorial endorsement of Gribetz's reelection, had concluded that "Gribetz . . . has been in the post so long that an entire generation connects no other name to the seat. He has been a leader . . . in undertaking investigations irregardless [sic] of political connection. . . . While there have been allegations of wrongdoing in his office by a local weekly, at this point we find no basis to be concerned." On May 3, the reelected Gribetz -- who before the investigation had been considering a run for attorney general -- was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of theft of federal funds and tax evasion.
^ DART to the New York Daily News, for giving new definition to the concept of hands-on journalism. So struck were the editors by the dramatic thrust of a photograph showing losing Yankee pitcher Jack McDowell giving the finger to the booing stadium crowd as he walked off the mound that they nailed the photo to its pages again and again and again -- twice in the July 19 edition (on the opening page of its inside sports section and in a 9-1/2 by 12-1/2-inch blow-up on the News's back page); four times more in the July 20 edition (on pages 3, 75, 78, and 81) and in another, slightly different version on page 72; and, lest any reader be too knuckleheaded to file away forever that image in his brain, they gave it to him twice again, in an editorial cartoon and in a 9-1/2 by 12-1/2-inch drawing on that edition's back page. In all, nine moving middle fingers before the News, having writ, moved on.
