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Darts and Laurels
^ DART to the Lawrence, Massachusetts, Eagle-Tribune, for playing journalistic hooky. As detailed in a page-one story (February 13) in The Boston Globe, reports on John F. Scully, the city's high-profile, low-credentialed, lifetime-tenured superintendent of schools and his uncommendable deportment have been repeatedly absent from the Eagle-Tribune.Some $80 million provided by the Education Reform Act of l993 has been squandered on fancy cars, mahogany-and-leather offices, and a wildly expanded personal staff of relatives and friends (not to mention the bagpipe teacher hired at $40,000 a year) while teachers and students make do in crowded classrooms with out-of-date books and inadequate supplies. As the Globe pointed out, when school officials learned in January that the city's only high school would lose its state accreditation, an Eagle-Tribune editorial advised local politicians to "back off" and stop "raising a ruckus" about the city's schools. One possible explanation for the paper's failing record: Scully is the former son-in-law, and the father of the two young grandchildren, of Irving Rogers, publisher of the Eagle-Tribune. Another intramural item: the Eagle Tribune Publishing Company prints report cards and other such materials for the school system that Scully heads.
* LAUREL to the Cape Cod Times, of Hyannis, Massachu-setts, for turning the tide. In a sweeping six-part series (beginning January 5), the paper documented the abysmal failure of a fifteen-year, $165-million plan to stem the daily flow of toxic waste from the Massachusetts Military Reservation into the water supply of the Upper Cape. Based on a five-month investigation, and enhanced with glossaries, maps, photos, and graphs, the series explained how poisonous chemicals commonly present on the 22,000-acre base -- for example, lead from bullets left lying about on the firing range -- leak into the ground and end up in the bathroom shower and the kitchen sink. It showed how indifferent legislators, bungling regulators, and lazy administrators consistently botched the cleanup of the Superfund site. It analyzed the disturbing rates of cancer -- more than 24 percent higher than the state average -- in the area's population. It explored practical strategies to reverse the rapidly growing environmental crisis. And in its wake, it left a wave of statand federal audits, studies, and investigations, as well as official vows of reform.
^ DART to The Tampa Tribune, for being overly hospitable. Notwithstanding the post-election announcement that political reporter Brian Edwards would be moving on to Washington as press secretary to Representative-elect Jim Davis, the Democratic winner of a nasty congressional race that Edwards had covered from the earliest primaries on, the paper saw no reason to hurry him out before his new boss's swearing-in. Until he actually went through the revolving door the ex-journalist continued on the job, filing, among other stories, one that revealed an extramarital affair between a telecommunications lobbyist and a Republican state senator.
* LAUREL to The Associated Press and writer Martha Mendoza, for looking a gift horse in the mouth. In a January 5 report, Mendoza revealed how a multimillion-dollar federal program created to protect thousands of wild horses on public lands is instead racing them by the thousands into slaughterhouses. Administered by the Bureau of Land Management, the program encourages individual citizens to adopt up to four healthy, government-vaccinated horses each and care for them for a year, after which they get legal title to the animals in the form of BLM's suitable-for-framing certificates. But with that legal title comes the right to dispose of the horses as the adoptive owners see fit. And as Mendoza's computer-assisted tracking showed, many of the owners -- among them, BLM employees -- see fit to sell the animals under their protection for processing into horse meat, at a profit of some seven hundred bucks a horse. After conceding that about 90 percent of the horses rounded up each year end up being butchered, Tom gacnik, director of the BLM's $l6 million-a-year Wild Horse and Burro program, told the AP reporter, "We're here because we care about the critters. They're a wonderful part of America, and we're here to protect them. Of course, we've got a ways to go."
^ DART to Spy magazine; Adweek; the Los Angeles Times; the Asbury Park (New Jersey) Press; and Iowa TV stations KCRG and KWWL, for their active participation in the Product Protection Program. Late last year Spy refused to carry an ad designed by the Amalgamated Lithographers Union to call attention to the fact that a number of K-III magazines -- including Spy -- were using a union-busting shop, one that had been cited by the National Labor Relations Board for unfair labor practices, for much of their pre-press work. Adweek also refused the ad, telling the agency that the revenue from "one union ad" was not worth the risk of losing the revenue from K-III's advertising. The Los Angeles Times refused to carry a series of ads for Pacific Bell's At Hand, a website that features news and information similar to that offered on the Times's own website. The Asbury Park Press refused to run an ad placed by a community alliance to stop the use of Halloween images in "marketing beer to children" -- until the alliance agreed to remove the names and logos of the offending big-time brewers. KCRG, the CBS affiliate in Cedar Rapids, and KWWL, the NBC affiliate in Waterloo, refused to sell airtime to the Center for Science in the Public Interest for a commercial describing health problems associated with a product then being test-marketed in the Cedar Rapids area -- Frito-Lay potato and tortilla chips made with olestra, the controversial fat substitute produced by Procter & Gamble. Twelve other stations that were also approached by CSPI in various test-market cities -- Eau Claire, Wisconsin; Grand Junction, Colorado; Columbus, Ohio; and Indianapolis, Indiana, as well as Cedar Rapids -- accepted the commercial. Refusing to watch their advertisers' weight, those stations have managed to stay fit.
* LAUREL to West Wing, the student newspaper of Mission High, San Francisco's most disadvantaged inner-city public school, for taking to heart that grand old adage about the mightiness of the pen. When the district superintendent inexplicably replaced Mission's highly popular principal with a highly contentious one who didn't speak the students' language in any sense, West Wing became their voice of reasoned protest. In straightforward, balanced reports the paper kept the school, the community, and the city informed about Mission's dramatic improvement in state test scores and dropout rates under the ousted principal; about the peaceful demonstration in which students, linking arms, encircled the building; about board of education meetings on teacher-contract issues; and about the controversial acts of the communicationally challenged principal -- from his attempted suspension of an annoying columnist to the handing out of expensive basketball shoes to the boys while requiring the girls to pay half the price of theirs. In March, West Wing became the first winner of the Columbia Scholastic Press Advisers Association's Sullivan award for "idealism, resilience, and pragmatism."
^ DART to The Kansas City Star, for not putting its mouth where its money is. A December 30 editorial took to task three gambling casinos in the area that had filed protests against the assessed values of their properties with the Missouri State Tax Commission. The paper argued that the casinos were not being "good neighbors" because such challenges could hurt the children in the local schools. But as was swiftly pointed out by the alternative weekly New Times, the editorial, headed tax protests hurt education, neglected to mention that The Kansas City Star is appealing its tax assessments for l995 and l996 -- and that, if the paper were to get the refund it is seeking, more than $300,000 of it would come out of the school district's dwindling stack of chips.
^ DART to Country Inns, "The Lifestyle Magazine for the Sophisticated Traveler" based in South Orange, New Jersey, and editor Gail Rudder Kent; and to Tikkun, "a bimonthly Jewish critique of politics, culture, and society" based in San Francisco, and editor Michael Lerner, for inventive editing. Of the twenty-one people listed on the Country Inns masthead as members of the editorial staff, five are creations of the editor's imagination and one is an outside friend. (Kent, impersonating her assistant, has denied this.) Similarly, of the many provocative letters to the editor published in Tikkun, an unestimated number have been written -- and will continue to be written, an unrepentant Lerner told The Washington Post -- pseudonymously by him.
* LAUREL to The Wall Street Journal and reporters Michael K. Frisby and David Rogers, for bringing the public into the pipeline. With their page-one story on March 17, Frisby and Rogers unearthed yet another, deeper layer of campaign-finance dirt. This time, the story involved more than the familiar greasing of the palm of the Democratic National Committee by a motivated businessman -- namely, one Roger Tamraz, a Lebanese-born U.S. citizen who was seeking U.S. support for his plan to build a multibillion-dollar oil pipeline from the Caspian Sea to Turkey. This time, it involved an attempt by Donald Fowler, then chairman of the DNC, to pressure the National Security Council to clear Tamraz, a generous donor (some $177,000 in l995 and '96) for access to President Clinton. And this time, after the NSC's denial of that clearance to the controversial Tamraz -- who has had dealings with Libya and Iraq and is alleged to have embezzled bank funds in Lebanon -- it involved the mysterious reach of the DNC into the Central Intelligence Agency. Prodded by t DNC, the CIA provided the NSC with a (presumably) reassuring report on Tamraz (who did, in fact, meet with Clinton five times after that). The Journal's reporting has fueled investigations by Congress, the White House, and the CIA into the possibly illegal breach of national security safeguards.
^ DART to The Wall Street Journal, for regressive journalism. Headline over Joel Millman's December 26 page-one account of how a labor dispute between Basic Petroleum International Ltd. and its workers in Latin America was resolved by Gilberte Beaux, the company's c.e.o.: french grandmother brings labor peace to guatemala jungle. (Interestingly, two columns away, Joseph B. White's story on how a Pratt & Whitney factory in northern Maine was brought back from the brink of death by Robert Ponchak, the company's risk-taking plant manager, left readers completely in the dark as to Ponchak's progenitorial status.)
