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Darts & Laurels
* DART to ABC's Good Morning America, for excessive filial devotion. The March 3 program presented an uninterrupted eight-minute celebration of The Disney Institute in Orlando, the newest vacation spot developed by "our parent company" for those who "have graduated from other Disney resorts" and seek to enhance their "quality of life" with an "adventure in education." With the strains of "Pomp and Circumstance" filling the air, GMA consumer editor Amy Atkins sampled some of the institute's eighty "edutainment" courses in canoeing, cooking, self-defense, topiary, animation, and the like that are available at "an average $600-a-weekend" rate; plugged the "high-caliber" entertainment offered to guests; elicited "It's wonderful!" testimonials from happy senior-citizen campers; worked in the Disney name or its Mickey Mouse image some sixteen times; and easily confirmed the public's worst fears of the high potential in synergy for journalistic sin.
* DART to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, for
injudicious journalism. When appellate judge Ralph Adam Fine, one of seven candidates running in the February primary for Wisconsin Supreme Court, challenged in a private letter to the opinion-page editor the ethical propriety of the paper's intention to make an editorial endorsement in the race in light of its frequent involvement in libel and privacy cases that come before that court, publisher Robert A. Kahlor (a defendant in a pending libel case) responded in a letter to Fine testifying to "our journalists'" ability to "set aside personal pursuits and interests," provide "professional, objective judgment," and render "disinterested decisions" when "they review judicial candidates and draft endorsement editorials." Three days later, the Journal bestowed its favor on one Lawrence Bugge, a partner in the law firm of Foley and Lardner whose "breadth and depth of qualifications" no other candidate "can match." One unmatched qualification the editorial failed to note: the paper is represented by Bugge's firm.
* DART to NBC Nightly News, for slipping into a stereotypical state. In a January 27 update on the condition of the conjoined twins born in Mexico and surgically separated in the United States, correspondent David Gregory informed viewers all around the country that the parents of the twins had "snuck across the U.S. border" from Tijuana in order to get medical help. Gregory's assumption of illegal immigration, however, was contradicted by the facts. As coverage by the San Diego Union-Tribune and others made abundantly clear, the family had obtained the full cooperation and support of San Diego's Children's Hospital, which had not only donated its medical services to the twins but had also sent the ambulance that picked them up and transported them across the Mexico-California border, a trip that was interrupted only by a half-hour delay to process the bureaucratic paperwork.
* LAUREL to the San Jose Mercury News and staff writer Mark Leibovich, for "Designated Hitters," a muscular piece on the problem of violence against women by athletes. Centering on a number of Bay Area sports figures but ranging farther afield as well, the cover story in the paper's December 3 Sunday magazine documented in striking detail a pattern of brutal assaults by these so-called heroes on their girlfriends, groupies, and wives; it documented, too, a parallel pattern in which such assaults are ignored or excused by starstruck cops and courts and press. In one typical example, a judge asked for an accused batterer's autograph. In another, a police lieutenant, referring to an incident involving a Giants outfielder who had reportedly beaten up his wife, told Leibovich, "I know when I play softball, when I lose, I'm certainly not in the best of spirits." Team officials, too, the writer points out, are more likely to penalize players for physical violations on the field than for those at home. And from the fans, he notes, abusers still get staing ovations. "When," his report concludes, "does the cheering stop?"
* DART to The Philadelphia Daily News and entertainment columnist Stu Bykofsky, for a misguided use of space. Bykofsky turned his December 11 column -- all twenty-two precious column-inches of it -- into a sandwich board for his recently published "guy's" guide to Philadelphia, including a list of thirty-one sample topics covered (restaurants, hotels, best bar to meet a nurse) as well as details on how to get this "great stocking stuffer" in time for "Xmas" giving. Carried under the headline buy my book! am i being too subtle?, the hard-sell commercial also included this aside: "If you feel I'm slightly overdoing it by devoting a whole column to hyping [the book], Congratulations! You could be a managing editor here."
* DART to The Boston Globe and reporter Matt Bai, for overzealous application of the public's right to know. Bai's account of the fiftieth person slain in 1995 on the city's streets -- a young high-school dropout fatally shot after an argument at a party at his girlfriend's home -- made mention of the victim's name some seventeen times, along with mention of the fact that because the victim's mother was attending her grandmother's out-of-state funeral, she had not yet been told of her only child's death. In contrast, the same day's account in the rival Boston Herald included all the facts the public needed to know except the victim's name, a fact withheld because, reporter Sean Flynn's story explained, "The family was afraid [his mother would] learn the tragic news from the papers or radio, rather than from those who love her."
* DART to WXIA-TV, Atlanta, and reporter Carmen Burns, for carrying the torch. At a press conference called by the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games to mark the "100 Day Countdown" to the opening of events and unveil its plans for the banners, logos, pictograms, and other decorations designed to create "The Look," Burns turned up not in the audience with other members of the news media but at the ACOG podium with officials of the committee. There she described for the astonished journalists the "ACOG blue" blazers, the "Olympic teal" scarves, the "Olympic white" sox, and the other "stylish," "functional," and "easily maintained" clothing and accessories that employees and volunteers would be sporting at the scene. (According to a report in the Atlanta Business Chronicle, Burns's boss, news director Dave Roberts, found nothing disqualifying in her ACOG performance. WXIA, the report went on to note, is the "official" local TV station for the games, giving it the right to use Olympic symbols in promotions of its own.)
* LAUREL to Rupert Murdoch, for a decisive vote for civic journalism in its least problematic form. As press lords grow more lordly in our free-market democracy and their vassals grasp at citizen-friendly gimmicks to keep that democracy strong, the Australian-born, now naturalized chairman of the billion-dollar News Corporation has made a gracious bow to the public interest. Deploring the obsessive and corrupting need by politicians to raise colossal sums of money for television spots as "a cancer in our system," Murdoch announced in a February 26 speech to the National Press Club that, in the weeks leading up to the national election on November 5, his Fox Television stations will make airtime available -- including an hour of prime time on election eve -- to the major presidential candidates, free of editorial interference and free of charge. Murdoch also challenged others to follow his lead. "It would be a very good thing for television, for our country, and for the voters who also happen to be our customers," he sd, "if all of network TV did so." Meanwhile, as Walter Cronkite and Paul Taylor observed in an op-ed piece in The Washington Post, "The initial reaction from the three more established and public-spirited networks was [as Murdoch himself had predicted] to treat him as 'the skunk at the tea party.'"
* LAUREL to Fortune magazine and staff writer Richard Behar, for sorting out the garbage in New York's trash-collection industry. In his January l5 report on the courageous efforts by legitimate outside contractors -- notably William Ruckelshaus's Browning-Ferris Industries -- to gain a foothold in the billion-dollar Mafia-controlled market, Behar detailed the history of beatings and bribes, extortion and threats -- including a gift of the severed head of a dog -- that has kept the mob in charge, as well as the growing pile of prosecutions and indictments (achieved with Browning-Ferris's help) that, together with dramatically lower costs to businesses all around the city, are beginning to take effect. Graphic sidebars identified mob-linked carters under investigation or indictment, along with their best-known clients; also listed were major organizations that have been brave enough to buck the Mafia bosses and move to BFI -- among them, United Parcel, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Nabisco Foods, Hotel Intercontinental, and The Village Voice. (At The New York Times, apparently, such courage is in short supply. Behar points out that, although a l993 Times editorial praised BFI for coming into a market it described as a "well-documented disgrace" run by "gougers and racketeers," the Times continues to have its own rubbish hauled away by a company indicted for alleged participation in a Mafia-run cartel.)
* DART to Judith Sweeney, president of the Orange County edition of the Los Angeles Times, for an attitude problem of the most fundamental kind. In a "Christ in the Marketplace" talk delivered at Westmont College in Montecito and later reprinted in the school's quarterly alumni magazine, Sweeney revealed to the (presumably) worshipful audience at her alma mater some of the crosses she has had to bear in her earthly job at the Times. One "obstacle to being an effective witness [for Christ] in the secular work world," Sweeney told the students, "is submitting to the authority of a non-Christian boss. How do you submit to the authority of someone on a daily basis that doesn't have the moral character that you do?"
