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Darts & Laurels
* DART to the Contra Costa, California, Times, for fair-weather journalism. So green-gilled did management get upon sighting, in early copies of the Sunday, September 24 travel section, a consumer-oriented wire story by Universal Press Syndicate writer Laura Bly in which were logged the less-than-idyllic adventures of passengers caught on Caribbean cruises in a busy hurricane season, that they stopped the press run in its course and threw the story overboard. After that minor delay, the press run sailed on, refit with fresh copy that calmed readers, buoyed advertisers, and couldn't possibly make waves.
* DART to David Brinkley, for taxing his credibility. At a time of growing unease over the apparent conflicts of interest that arise when working journalists take on lucrative assignments for corporations, trade groups, and the like -- an unease made manifest in the various attempts, by Congress and by other journalists, to require disclosure of such outside sources of income, as well as in the restrictions upon such extracurricular paid assignments laid down by, among other networks, Brinkley's own ABC -- the highly respected, highly paid moderator of This Week with David Brinkley produced an article in the fall on the "twisted" logic of a federal tax code aimed at "soaking the rich." The article, for which Brinkley was paid an undisclosed amount, was written exclusively for and published by Rising Tide, a four-color glossy magazine put out by the Republican National Committee.
* LAUREL to The Indianapolis Star and reporter Larry MacIntyre, for premium reporting. When Pat Rooney, chairman of the locally based Golden Rule Insurance Company, one of the nation's leading providers of individual health insurance, became a candidate for governor last spring and promised in a campaign commercial to treat taxpayers like customers, MacIntyre decided on an exploratory examination of just what such a policy might mean. Three months later, after reviewing the company's business practices, studying a hundred court files, and interviewing more than fifty people, he had a pretty good idea. His three-part series (October 8-10) traced an aggressive pattern -- rates increased, policies canceled, customers sued, claims denied -- that turned Golden Rule into a billion-dollar company, made Rooney into a multimillionaire, and sometimes left his customers gravely ill, uncovered, and ridden by debt. By the time the series saw print, Rooney had canceled his candidacy -- in part, at least, according to his former campaign chairman, because ofiscomfort with MacIntyre's inquiry. Rooney's approach to health care, however, is very much alive: he has been one of the long-time leading lobbyists for medical savings accounts, currently enjoying much attention on Capitol Hill. And as MacIntyre's series makes clear, when it comes to any health-care policies with which Rooney is involved, it behooves both Congress and the public to read the fine print.
* DART to the Springfield, Massachusetts, Union-News, for not taking any chances. Although syndicated columnist William Safire is a regular player on the paper's op-ed page, his September 28 piece on the evils of state-sponsored casino gambling didn't make the cut (at least not until October 8, when a candidate for mayor called attention to its absence in an ad in the Union-News). One possible reason: the paper had set its stakes on having such a casino built in Springfield, preferably on land next door.
* LAUREL to the Baltimore Sun, for calling the right play. While news that a professional sports team is considering relocation typically kicks off local coverage that flies far out of bounds, the Sun's handling of the shift of the Cleveland Browns to Baltimore managed to stay on the ball. Recalling the city's still-raw experience in 1984 when the powers that be blew the whistle on the Baltimore Colts, the Sun's news reports and opinion columns were marked by uncheering analysis, pointed questions, and compassion for Cleveland's pain. (In contrast, coverage ran well over the line in the hands of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, which, having neglected over the years to report on developments that might have made the move less of a surprise, piled up yards of outraged copy on the secret deal, including a page-one editorial on how it could be stopped. On November 5, front-page banner position went to a follow-up piece proclaiming mayor fights browns' move; the secondary story that day was headed rabin slain.)
* DART to Philadelphia Newspapers, Inc., parent to the Inquirer and the Daily News, for a domestic trade agreement of rather unsettling import. After a routine audit produced a $500,000 bill that city hall claimed -- and that PNI denied -- was due for unwithheld taxes on corporate stock options given to the papers' executives in 1993, PNI sat down with Mayor Ed Rendell's administration and worked it all out: the city would write off the tax bill in exchange for six free full-page ads and a discount on future ads. (According to the alternative City Paper, which in September revealed the details of the deal, the full retail value of the ads and the discount came to $156,700.) Although the unprecedented 1993 agreement received little attention at the time (neither paper having reported it) and although the agreement stipulated that the ads, to be used by July 1995, be for non-election purposes, it lent sudden credence this fall to campaign charges, made by Rendell's rivals for the mayor's job, that sweetheart coverage was linked to the sweetheart deal. Those charges have been vigorously denied by the papers' publisher, editors, columnists, and reporters as well as by outside observers. But few deny that, at the very least, the papers appear to have bartered away some of their credibility.
* DART to The Washington Post; to the San Francisco Examiner; and to 60 Minutes, for forgetting their professional manners.
¥ The Washington Post's September 12 story by Sandra Boodman on the practical workings of joint child-custody agreements was accompanied by a sidebar focusing on the personal experiences of one divorced couple and their two preschool-age sons -- the same family that Susan Kellam had persuaded to go on the record for the sidebar to her own article on that same delicate subject in the January 13 issue of the Congressional Quarterly Researcher.
¥ The Examiner presented on its August 3 front page what appeared to be the shocking exposŽ of a secret church report on the San Francisco archdiocese's plans to pile up a profit of some $43 million by closing churches and selling off land -- but which in fact had been splendidly revealed by the rival Independent on its front page two days before.
¥ In 60 Minutes's December 3 interview with Emannuel Constant, head of the FRAPH paramilitary group in Haiti, correspondent Ed Bradley asserted unequivocally that Constant was talking "for the first time about his secret dealings with the CIA" -- despite the fact that in an exhaustive article that appeared in The Nation as long ago as October 24, 1994 (and had been picked up at the time by, among others, The Washington Post, CNN, The New York Times, and CBS itself), Allan Nairn had reported that "interviews with Constant and with U.S. officials who have worked directly with him confirm that Constant recently worked for the CIA and that U.S. intelligence helped him launch the organization that became the FRAPH."
* LAUREL to the New Orleans Times-Picayune and staff writer Chris Adams, for "Medicaid Madness," a deep analysis of the manic leap -- some 9,000 percent over the past five years -- in public funding of private psychiatric care for Louisiana's poor. Drawing on a computer-assisted examination of 60 million records and more than 400 interviews, Adams's stories documented the sociopathology in sickening detail. A three-sentence rewrite of the rules, for example, elevated profit margins to 40 and 50 percent (as compared with the industry standard of 5 percent) for a group of small, mostly unaccredited facilities owned by state officials, political supporters, campaign contributors, and legislators, including the president pro tem of the House. Another quiet one-sentence rule change, in which three facilities owned by political and business associates of the governor were designated "teaching hospitals," brought in $9 million in one year alone for supervising six part-time medical students. Doctors' salaries also got a shot in the arm, sometimes to nearly $million a year (as compared with the national average of $130,000) while the former lieutenant governor and two of his partners paid themselves $50,000 a month each for serving as members of their hospital's board. In addition to five state and federal investigations, the Times-Picayune's exposŽ produced promises from all seven gubernatorial candidates that, if elected, they would cure the problem.
* DART to The Sacramento Bee, for giving new definition to the concept of crusading journalism. So enraptured were the editors with the coming of evangelist Billy Graham to the paper's circulation area that they devoted amazing space -- features, sidebars, columns, maps, schedules, excerpts, interviews, and some forty photos, not to mention page-one stories on October 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, and 23 -- to spreading his good news.
