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Darts and Laurels
^ DART to WGST-AM/FM, Atlanta, for beclouded judgment. To enhance its listeners' appreciation of the recent congressional hearings on the ValuJet air crash, the radio station's news department produced a sensational audio aid -- a dramatic one-minute, fifty-one-second, staged reenactment of the plane's last moments, complete with static and beeps, shouts of "Fire!", and anguished cries and screams. Defending itself against the storm of criticism that followed the airing (three times) of the tape, WGST told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that no family members of ValuJet victims had called the station to complain.
^ DART to KQED, San Francisco, for driving a documentary while under the influence. The PBS station proposed to produce a film about the life of California winemaker Robert Mondavi -- a project into which the Mondavi-founded and -funded American Center for Wine, Food, and the Arts would pour some $50,000. According to The San Francisco Bay Guardian, which uncorked the story in October, it was only after a dissident member of the KQED board protested the apparent conflict that the board mulled things over and put the project on ice.
* LAUREL to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, associate editor Mary Hargrove, and education writer Susan Roth, for a head-of-the-class report on an inexcusable failure. The five-part series "Code of Silence" (September 8-12) documented the remarkable aptitude of Arkansas educators for protecting -- even recommending to other districts -- teachers and administrators accused and/or convicted of serious crimes involving theft, violence, or sexual assault. Drawing on more than three hundred Freedom of Information requests, as well as on interviews with more than eighty educators, law enforcement officers, legislators, and relatives of abused students, the series included thirty-six case histories of school employees -- superintendents, principals, and coaches; science, math, and biology teachers; elementary level, special ed, and substitute teachers; bus drivers and security guards -- who had recently been in court. The series also examined the state's uncommendable teacher-licensing process, which appears to have been marked not only by a lack of enthusiasm r conducting background checks on applicants, but also by habitual tardiness in revoking the licenses of convicted felons. Within days of publication, legislators were calling for hearings, the education department was drafting new laws to ease the revoking of licenses, and the governor was announcing support of background checks for all teachers, to be paid for by the state. For their part, educators, presumably, had learned that protecting students, rather than teachers, would have been by far the better way of protecting their schools from the scandals they tried so hard to avoid.
^ DART to TV Guide, for an incomplete listing. In its December 28-January 3 issue, the magazine published a glowing endorsement of the proposed new program-ratings system, characterizing the industry-backed, age-based plan as being "familiar," "comprehensible," "uncluttered," "direct," "uncomplicated," "useful," "easy-to-understand," and "better equipped to gauge the important subtleties of tone and intent" than the "arcane" and "blurry" content-based plan advanced by children's advocacy groups. The editorial neglected to note that the alternative plan, in which programs would be labeled in terms of their sexual content, violence, and language, poses a serious financial threat to a network overloaded with violent and prurient shows -- namely, Fox, a sibling of TV Guide.
^ DART to Scott Gremillion, sportswriter for the Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Advocate; Reynolds Holding, reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle; and Scott Allen, reporter for The Boston Globe, latest nominees for membership in the Curious Coincidences Club. Gremillion's June 23 profile of Chanda Rubin, Louisiana's rising young star in women's professional tennis, netted seven passages that, word for word, perfectly matched passages that had earlier appeared in Jill Lieber's April 8 story in USA Today. Holding's October 28 front-page story, which purported to expose an official cover-up of abuses at Corcoran State Prison, disclosed details documented two months earlier by reporter Mark Arax in the Los Angeles Times. Allen's lead on a three-part series, "Nuclear Twilight in New England" (September 29) contained surprising similarities to the lead on Michael Remez and Mike McIntire's two-part series, "Northeast Utilities: A Fall from Grace," starting on May 19 in The Hartford Courant.
^ DART to the Montgomery, Alabama, Advertiser, for repressing its institutional memory. The paper's twenty-one-paragraph obituary on retired Navy Rear Adm. John G. Crommelin -- the lead story on the first page of its second section on November 5 -- was unrestrained in its admiration for a local "hero" of World War II, citing his "daring exploits," "superb skills," "unwavering love of the service," and "outspokenness . . . as the savior of naval aviation," and quoting colleagues who called him a "true American patriot" deserving of "high praise." It also mentioned, in passing, that after retirement from active duty in 1950, the admiral had "immediately embarked on a series of unsuccessful campaigns for the U.S. Senate." Noticeably missing was any signal to the nature of those Senate campaigns -- an oversight remedied by a reader's letter to the editor published on November 17. Quoting from campaign handouts, the reader noted Crommelin's promise that a vote for him would be a vote against the "Communist-Jewish Conspirators" [whose objective it is to] "desty Christianity, . . . eliminate all racial distinctions except the so-called Jewish race, which will then become the master race with headquarters in Israel and the United Nations . . . and from these two communications centers rule a slave-like world population of copper-colored human mongrels." The "hero article," the reader observed, "brought back the painful memory of the support Crommelin had received from some of the most influential people in Montgomery. Evidently his racist politics remain unimportant to the Advertiser and can be ignored by many of the same folks who were around back then."
^ DART to Forbes magazine, the "Capitalist Tool," for a misguided turn of the screw. When James Robbins, president of Cox Communications, offered to participate in a panel being organized for a Forbes-sponsored conference for Wall Street analysts on the future of telecommunications, he was told by Forbes that the magazine was putting together a twenty-six-page advertising section on the subject, and that if he wanted to be on the panel, his company would have to buy an ad. As noted in a September 18 story in The Wall Street Journal, other business publications that also sponsor conferences, such as The Economist, Fortune, Business Week, and the Journal itself, make no such stipulation, thus avoiding the apparent conflict of requiring companies they cover to purchase ads.
* LAUREL to New York magazine and free-lance writer Katherine Eban Finkelstein, for the November 25 cover story, "Bad Blood?" a bone-chilling report on allegations of tainted practices at the New York Blood Center, the city's largest supplier of blood. Drawing on more than six years of internal documents and FDA inspection records, as well as on extensive interviews with former and current employees and industry experts, Finkelstein's five-month investigation pinpointed a pattern in which -- with the approval of their supervisors and the encouragement of ill-advised productivity bonuses offered by managers under increasing financial pressure -- technicians allegedly cut corners, doctored slides, falsified test results, destroyed records, lied to health inspectors, and shipped adulterated blood products around the world. On December 16, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York announced that the government had simultaneously filed a civil suit and a consent decree to remedy violations by the center and three of its ficers.
^ DART to KENS-TV, San Antonio, Texas, for perverting the principle of the public's right to know. After a provocative warning to viewers of a November sweeps-week newscast that the content of an upcoming report was so offensive that children should be sent from the room and some adults should shut their eyes, anchor and managing editor Chris Marrou presented reporter Al Zimmerman's update on a story the station had aired during an earlier sweeps-week program in July -- namely that, police crackdowns notwithstanding, the men's room at a local public park was as popular as ever as a place for homosexual trysts. What's more, thanks to the miracle of hidden cameras, there were plenty of visuals to prove the point: two separate sequences in the three-and-half-minute report showed men explicitly, graphically, unmistakably engaged in oral sex. Later in the program, when calls from irate viewers were burning up the wires, the anchor and the sports reporter piously denounced the segment. "I think it's probably the relt of a continued attempt to get ratings," Marrou told the audience. "I apologize to you." "I want to compliment you on your message," the sports reporter said. "We're not that hard up for ratings and never will be. I'm sorry it happened." Such is the state of public cynicism, however, that Jeanne Jakle, TV critic for the San Antonio Express-News, suggested in her November 16 column that even those apparent ad libs had perhaps been part of an anything-for-ratings script.
^ DART to TheDetroit News and the Free Press, for overcharging at the mall. The long-awaited August opening of a brand-new advertiser, the upscale Somerset North shopping center, occasioned a promotional spree by the jointly operated papers that included countless column-inches of news stories, sidebars, photos, and maps; two four-color special sections produced by news-staff members; and page-one announcements that still more details on the mall could be found on display at the papers' very own website.
^ DART to the LouisvilleCourier-Journal, for putting itself into a compromising position. A front-page article on the robust reemergence of adult entertainment in the city was accompanied, in the early editions of September 23, by a titillating photo of a scantily clad exotic dancer performing a revealingly high kick. As later editions appeared, the page-one cheesecake stayed stubbornly in place -- with one notable change: in a triumph of graphic allure over graphics ethics, the dancer's costume had been lengthened sufficiently to cover her crotch.
