|
<advertisement>
|
 |
 
|
|
media search: |
 |
Letters
grave mistakes
Larry Grossman was dead wrong in his Critic at Large piece ("To Err Is Human, to Admit It Divine," cjr, March/April) when he referred to me as "the late Bill Monroe." I know because I discover myself frequently walking the Appalachian Trail, tending a five-day-per-week job and, best of all, enjoying life with my trophy wife (of fifty-five years' standing).
If I had been writing about Larry, even though I am aware of his antiquity and haven't heard of him in years, I wouldn't call him "the late." I would refer to him as "the recent Larry Grossman." That concedes a bit of ambiguity. It lets the reader know you have a strong hunch the fellow is toes up by now but, just for the record, he was, in fact, living last you heard of him.
As Larry writes, in the early '80s when he was president of NBC News and I suggested to him that we try an experimental "letter to the editor" segment on the Today show, I appreciated his backing. Those five-minute inserts produced some lively television. Here was a Philadelphia secretary at her desk in a twenty-second sound bite skewering Tom Brokaw for a phrase she thought was sexist. Here was a used-car dealer on his lot in North Carolina disagreeing with the economic reporting of Mike Jensen. And now a birdwatcher accusing the Today show of adding the sound of an eastern bird to a moody visual essay on a western forest. (He was absolutely right. A film director had thrown in an alien bird song for effect, thinking nobody would know the difference.)
But the network correspondents, who, unlike newspaper writers, are shielded from public criticism, detested plain people criticizing them. The Today producer back then, whose goal in life was to keep his "talent" happy, kept squeezing the segments out of the schedule. And, unfortunately, as you can read between the lines of his column, Larry Grossman was no different from most network news presidents in that he couldn't control the top producers and correspondents.
I still think a venturesome network would do well to get into a regular let's-hear-it-from-the-viewers operation. We proved, I think, that it can be done economically, that it can add zest to news programming, improve the news organization's credibility and human image, and subject some of the on-air princes and princesses to discipline they would benefit from - the same kind of fair-play audience feedback that adds democratic strength to every American newspaper, but with real people on screen and television production values.
Bill Monroe
Bethesda, Maryland
FOOD LION FALLOUT
A Laurel for your "Punishing the Press" issue (cjr, March/April) but I hope you will now examine a possibly dangerous effect of the ABC-Food Lion case and similar ones: new limits on the news media's ability to cover private enterprise.
These new limits come just as conglomerates and other corporations add steadily to their economic and political power over America and Americans, and at a time when the news media need to cover them more closely than ever. If the courts and elected officials in thrall to the big firms can chill such coverage before it even begins, we could end up getting much of our news about the economy from corporate handouts and company propaganda films.
Herbert J. Gans
Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology
Columbia UniversityNew York, New York
ADVANCING THE STORY
I was perplexed and distressed to read your item concerning Reynolds Holding's story in the San Francisco Chronicle about the abuses committed by prison guards at Corcoran State Prison - specifically your comment that Holding's story "disclosed details documented two months earlier by Mark Arax of the Los Angeles Times" (Darts & Laurels, cjr, March/April).
This is true in the sense that the basic facts about the inmate deaths at Corcoran were reported in the Times before Holding's story. It is worth noting that Arax was hardly alone in reporting the inmate deaths at Corcoran; CNN and The Orange County Register reported the incidents as well. The fifth paragraph of Holding's story acknowledged the earlier news reports, and indicated how we intended to advance the story.
Through the use of corrections department records and court documents that did not even exist at the time Arax or the other media worked on their stories and which were obtained exclusively by the Chronicle, Holding developed far more incriminating details about the corrections department's attempt to thwart a federal investigation of abuses at the prison; and, most important, established that prison officials were citing rising inmate violence in their requests for more money for guards and prisons at the same time the guards were systematically inciting increased violence among the inmates. Arax and the other media made no mention of any possible motive for the violence.
Ken Conner
Assistant city editorSan Francisco Chronicle
San Francisco, California
FLAWED ALLIANCE?
After reading in Peter Kornbluh's critique in the January/February issue that there were "significant flaws" in my series about the connections between Nicaraguan drug dealers and the CIA, "Dark Alliance," I kept waiting for an example. I'm still waiting. What he cites as flaws are not.
Does anyone deny that these contras, Norwin Meneses and Danilo Blandon, sold quantities of cocaine to the gangs in South Central Los Angeles? Hardly. The fuss is partly over the sellers' job titles. I called them civilian leaders of the Nicaraguan Democratic Front (FDN) in California, a label Kornbluh claims I used "without supporting evidence."
But my series quoted Blandon's uncontradicted testimony as a U.S. government witness that he and five other men set up the FDN's support network in L.A., that he'd been working for the contras since July 1979, and that he had helped start and finance the movement. I also quoted from his 1994 pre-sentence interview with the U.S. Probation and Parole Commission in which he detailed his lo association with the contras. Also, Blandon's boss, Meneses, told me of his and Blandon's connections to the FDN. All of that was reported.
Another "flaw" is related to how long Blandon sent drug money to the contras - Kornbluh pointed to testimony from Blandon that indicated it was limited to the beginning of the 1980s. I will just point out that contra leader Eden Pastora told the Senate Intelligence Committee recently that Blandon didn't start giving him money, trucks, and free housing until 1985. FBI, DEA, and L.A. county sheriff's records all say Blandon's drug ring was funding the contras as late as October 1986.
The argument is also over the length of time these men sold the cocaine in L.A. and the amount of money they raised. The Los Angeles Times's nameless sources say Blandon sent less than $50,000 and Kornbluh repeats that. But I didn't care how little Blandon had contributed to the contras. My stories were about the drug money he admitted delivering to Meneses for the FDN. When you look at that cash, the sums are obvious. Blandon told a federal grand jury in 1994 that he sold between 200 and 300 kilos of cocaine for Meneses in L.A. In court, Blandon swore that all the profits from that cocaine went to the contras, and said he was selling it for $60,000 a kilo. The transcripts are posted on our website (http://www.sjmercury.com/drugs/).
Some might call it an extrapolation to describe $12 million to $18 million as "millions." I call it math.
Gary Webb
San Jose Mercury News
Sacramento, California
Peter Kornbluh replies:
Despite his "groundbreaking and dramatic story," as my article in cjr credited Gary Webb's reporting, there were indeed many flaws in the "Dark Alliance" series. Webb's math, for example, shows that he can add, but not subtract. His "$12 million to $18 million" figure fails to deduct the overhead of the drug operations to the traffickers. (In the court transcript that Webb refers to, Danilo Blandon testifies to how little profit he made in the period he was supporting the contras, due to expenditures for safehouses, cars, trucks, and the drugs themselves.)
The controversy over how much drug money went to the contras is linked to the length of time Blandon actually aided them. Webb's decision to omit testimony by Blandon limiting how long he actually gave drug monies to the contras - because those statements undermined the thrust of the articles - is another flaw. Instead of reporting the evidence, with all its contradictions, Webb selected what was useful to his blockbuster assertions.
His penchant for overstating the weight of the evidence is another flaw. His letter, for exame, states that "FBI, DEA, and L.A. county sheriff's records all say" that drug funds were going to the contras until 1986. But his articles do not cite any FBI or DEA documents that actually provide concrete evidence to support that claim. The series does quote two L.A. sheriff's department search warrants, which record the claims of two unidentified associates of Blandon's. These constitute important pieces of evidence; they do not provide conclusive proof to support Webb's sweeping conclusions.
The most significant flaws in the articles have to do with the repeated suggestions, without supporting documentation of any kind, that the CIA knew about, and was involved in, these drug operations. To be sure, Webb's reporting credibly established the "dark alliance" between contra supporters and crack. What remains unproven is the allegation of a darker alliance with the CIA, the charge that triggered the public furor over his controversial series.
EDITOR'S NOTE
Maggie Balough, former editor of the Austin American-Statesman, takes issue with a number of points regarding Joe Holley's story about the performance of her successor, Rich Oppel ("Old Values, New Life," cjr, January/February). Among them:
* Holley reported that in the past year, the newspaper's daily circulation increased 2 percent under Oppel. Balough, who was editor until February 14, 1995, notes that for the six months through March 31, 1995, its daily circulation rose 2.5 percent.
* Balough says that "employment of minority professionals hovered around 20 percent during much of my tenure," and she questioned Oppel's record when he was editor of The Charlotte Observer from November 1978 through July 1993. Holley quoted Oppel as saying: "In Charlotte, we had 50 percent men, 50 percent women and 25 percent minorities." cjr erred. "I may have misspoken," says Oppel, but those figures were for Knight-Ridder's Washington bureau when he was its chief from August 1993 through June 1995.
* Balough says that "At least twice during my tenure as editor, Joe Holley expressed interest, once directly applying and once through a friend, in working for the newspaper. I made the decision not to hire Holley." Holley responds that he wrote to Balough about an editorial-writing position on December 8, 1993, but never received an answer; and that at the request of the editorial-page editor some time in 1994, he dropped off some clips, and the paper hired someone else. Holley informed Oppel of this before his first interview for cjr's story. Says Holley: "I told Oppel that in choosing to do this story, I waived any interest in working for the American-Statesman."
