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Darts and Laurels
* DART to Financial World, for showing how very small, after all, it is. Upon receiving early last August an unsolicited 2,500-word manuscript that had been submitted, complete with title, footnotes, and cover letter, by one Frederic Townsend, an attorney, member of the Chicago Board of Trade, and free-lance writer in Lake Bluff, Illinois, in which he cogently set forth an original and provocative analysis of Orange County, California's financial collapse, the magazine's editors were clearly impressed. So impressed, in fact, that they took his ideas and incorporated them into the September 12 issue's lead editorial. Only when a factchecker called to confirm some statistics did Townsend discover the fate of his piece; his very strenuous objections, however, were to little avail. Among the various responses he got from FW: (1) that it was way past deadline and too late to pull; (2) that what Townsend had submitted was not an article at all but a letter, and therefore the property of Financial World to do with what it wished; (3) that the editorial would attribute the ideas to Townsend, for which he should be grateful; (4) that he would find enclosed a $250 "honorarium" that "of course in no way limits you from publishing your [no longer original] article [sic] elsewhere," and (5) a sick-joke promise: "should you write any future articles you think may be appropriate for Financial World, we would be pleased to give them our careful consideration." Townsend's even more strenuous post-publication pleas that the magazine set the record straight, correct the several misleading errors it had introduced into his attributed analysis, and retract its offensively wrong-headed assumptions about his views on the Orange County matter, have been pointedly ignored.
* LAUREL to The Kansas City Star and staff writer Tracey Kaplan, for flushing out the truth and raising a helluva stink. After getting wind of residents' complaints of less than fragrant odors emanating from the city's recently opened "riverwalk" -- an $86 million flood-control and beautification project designed to transform a concrete, flood-prone ditch near the downtown shopping area into a Seine-like urban paradise of lakes, pools, waterfalls, fountains, and pathways along the water's edge -- Kaplan plunged into the problem and, beginning with a Sunday, August 20, page-one story, spread it all out. Personal observation revealed toilet paper, feces, and urine spilling routinely into what the mayor was calling "the jewel of the Midwest"; laboratory analysis commissioned by the paper had, in contradiction to lab findings announced by the city, revealed levels of fecal coliform bacteria significantly above federal and state standards; a review of construction logs revealed frequent sewage spills, as well as the city's failure to officially rort them, in violation of the Clean Water Act; interviews with engineers and contractors revealed that the warnings of experts in pre-construction planning conferences had simply been ignored. Before the week was out, the Star was reporting that the city would conduct further tests to make sure the water was safe, and would spend $100,000 to identify any problems in the surrounding sewage system; it was also reporting that both the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Missouri Department of Natural Resources had begun official investigations.
* DART to the Bucks County, Pennsylvania, Courier Times, for yet another example of political correctness mindlessly applied. Paraphrasing the remarks made at a local antiviolence conference by Arun Gandhi, grandson of India's great social and spiritual leader, the late Mahatma, the Courier Times told its readers that, "Growing up in South Africa during apartheid, Gandhi was beaten up twice when he was ten. The first time his attackers were white children, a few months later they were African Americans."
* DART to the Portland, Maine, Press Herald, for not telling tales out of school. On October 10, a man identifying himself as Jason Smith presented himself at a local elementary school saying he had been asked by the family of a particular second-grader to take him to the dentist; however, since the man was without a written note, since the mother of the child could not be reached, and since the dentist's name provided by Smith did not match the name of the dentist in the student's file, the principal respectfully but regretfully informed the man that he could not release the child. On October 27, having learned that Smith was part of WGME's investigative news team and that the (failed) abduction had been planned (with the knowledge of the student's mother, who was employed by the station and had been waiting in a car outside) as part of a sweeps-week exposŽ of security in the schools, Superintendent Robert G. Hasson, Jr., wrote to WGME president and general manager Bill Stough, protesting the "abuse of trust" and charging that the station "had engag in a deliberate, cynical deception of the school staff in order to manufacture a news story." He also banned WGME from setting foot in any of the district's schools without prior authorization. In a November 2 letter to the superintendent, Stough offered his response, disingenuously praising the school for having passed its challenging test and piously invoking the press's responsibility to "cover timely matters of public concern." (He did not address a point subsequently made in a highly detailed account by the Falmouth Forecaster, namely, that "Maine has had no recent incidents of children being abducted from school which might have prompted the station's look at the issue.") In any event, nothing of this instructive little story found its way into the pages of the Portland Press Herald. One possible reason, given to the Casco Bay Weekly by Press Herald editor Lou Ureneck, is that the story just "wasn't newsworthy." Another possibility: the Portland Press Herald is owned by Gannett Communications, which also owns WGME.
* DART to the Lexington, Kentucky, Herald-Leader, for a dangerous experiment in journalistic alchemy. The paper took a piece of dubious mettle -- an admiring 3,500-word series on how athletic coaches in Kentucky and beyond were getting rich moonlighting as representatives of a long-distance telephone-time wholesaler known as Excel Communications -- and transformed it into marketing gold. In the eleven months since the piece appeared (see Darts and Laurels, July/August 1995) the paper has sold some 600,000 reprints, presumably for distribution at sales meetings, at fifty cents a pop. Blinded perhaps by the glitter of Excel's success, the Herald-Leader's profile does not reflect the fact that the company's image has been somewhat tarnished by solid investigative stories in, among other papers, the San Francisco Examiner and the Roanoke Times, both of which have noted that Excel's structure bares a certain resemblance to a potentially shaky pyramid.
* DART to ABC's World News Tonight, for breaking the journalistic covenant. Following an October 2 segment on reaction to the Israeli peace agreement with the Palestinians, in which correspondent David Ensor reported that Likud party leader Benjamin Netanyahu "calls Prime Minister Rabin a traitor," a Boston-based media watchdog group called CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America) rose up to challenge the truth of that inflammatory statement and to ask for a public apology and correction. On October 6, anchor Peter Jennings delivered an on-air statement that only compounded the newscast's earlier sin, implying that Netanyahu's denial of having uttered such words was arguable, to say the least, since "there are numerous references to him doing so in press reports from the region." Jennings's words were not acceptable in CAMERA's eyes, and the group rose up again, requesting, in a letter to ABC News president Roone Arledge, a list of specific names and dates. An answer came back from senior vice president Richard Wal those "numerous press reports from the region," it seems, were the Des Moines, Iowa, Register, and the Edmonton, Ontario, Journal. CAMERA would not rest. On November 10, six days after Rabin's assassination, the group wrote again to Arledge, informing him of what its research had revealed: "The Canadian publication tells us the 'traitor' charge was thought to have been taken from The [U.K.] Guardian but now acknowledges there is no report in that publication to substantiate their editorial. . . . The Des Moines Register article . . . [was] derived from several wire service stories, none of which contain the 'traitor' charge." Whether ABC bore false witness knowingly or otherwise, its people have proved to be a pretty stiff-necked lot.
* DART to the Houston Chronicle, for belying the noble notion that virtue is its own reward. On October 7, the paper featured a story, complete with photo, on the presentation of a University of Texas distinguished alumni award to Chronicle publisher Richard J.V. Johnson; on October 12, a story, complete with photo, on the Denton A. Cooley Leadership Award dinner chaired by Chronicle publisher Richard J.V. Johnson; on October 17, a story, complete with photo, on the Book & Author Dinner co-chaired by Chronicle publisher Richard J.V. Johnson; on October 24, a photo (no story) on a banquet given by the Welch Foundation, chaired by Chronicle publisher Richard J.V. Johnson; on October 30, an item on this year's University of Houston Communication Alumni Association dinner, complete with photo of last year's Communicator of the Year, Richard J.V. Johnson; and on November 16, an item on an American Diabetes Association gala complete with photo of gala honoree Richard J.V. Johnson. For the record, other people did appear in the above-mentioned photos. Also for the record, "Big City Beat" columnist Maxine Mesinger's columns on October 13 and November 6 included only glowing mentions of her boss -- no photos of the man at all.
