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Darts and Laurels
^ DART to KCBS-TV, Los Angeles, for inventing a brand-new way to (literally) cover people in the news. Reporter Dave Lopez's April 23 interview with Ernesto and Diane Medina, parents of a ten-year-old boy who was lured from his neighborhood with a kidnapper's tale of a poor lost kitten -- and whose naked, decomposed body had just been found by rangers in a California canyon -- was a heartbreaker. Seated on a sofa in the family living room, the mother spoke movingly of her love for her son and her trust in God. Together the grieving couple displayed a large framed group of photographs that they planned to bury with him. The effect was somewhat diminished, however, when Ernesto handed off the photos to someone offscreen, revealing the parents sporting t-shirts emblazoned with the KCBS logo. (cjr's calls to KCBS to ask how and why they got the promotional t-shirts went unanswered.) As an outraged Howard Rosenberg, television critic for the Los Angeles Times, asked later in his column, "Did the station try to have its logo put on Anthony's coffin, too?"
^ DART to Cindy Adams, New York Post columnist, latest nominee for membership in the Curious Coincidences Club. Adams's extended March 20 column on the Oklahoma City bombing, which purported to be based on her own legally obtained, "must-protect-my-sources" copy of Timothy McVeigh's detailed statements to his lawyers, was startlingly similar to an exclusive report for Playboy by reporter Ben Fenwick. That story, which was based on lawfully obtained documents prepared under the direction of McVeigh's counsel, had been posted on the magazine's website on March 11. Mysteriously, the similarities in Adams's account included deletions, additions, and corrections of the defense team's documents that had come from Fenwick's own painstaking research.
* LAUREL to Modern Healthcare, for an illuminating report on a less-than-routine procedure. When anti-abortion fever was raging this spring in Washington, the American Medical Association, which has long held fast to the principle of government noninterference in clinical decisions, paradoxically intervened in support of a congressionally sponsored ban on so-called partial-birth abortions. Departing so radically from its previous public stand, as well as from that of other professional groups that oppose the ban, including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the AMA's reversal was hard to understand -- but only until Modern Healthcare published its May 26 issue. There it was revealed by reporter Jonathan Gardner that on May 19 -- the very day the AMA announced its endorsement of Senator Rick Santorum's proposal for a ban -- it sent to House Speaker Newt Gingrich a prescription for some of the things the doctors hoped to see in the balanced budget being debated on Capitol Hill. Included in their "wish list": a more favorable formula for Medicare compensation, loosening of medical malpractice laws, and dropping of the rules against physician referrals to services in which they have a financial interest. As Gardner dutifully noted, the AMA and the senator who negotiated its endorsement of the ban were in strong denial of a quid pro quo. Still, such suspicious symptoms would seem to bear rather close watching.
^ DART to the San Francisco Examiner, for running scared. Offended by the "wretched excess" of the city's new Nike Town superstore, columnist Stephanie Salter took off in an eloquent Sunday piece on the company's "twisted values." She cited, among other things, the much-publicized exploitation of workers that Nike and dozens of other "hypergreedy" corporations have engaged in at their offshore factories. Before the laid-out column actually went to press, it hit the wall and died. As editorial-page editor Jim Finefrock later explained to a disappointed Salter, the Examiner was afraid that her critical words would trip up plans for the paper's upcoming Nike-sponsored "Bay to Breakers" race. (Finefrock denied that the column had been killed; rather, he told the alternative San Francisco Weekly, the Examiner "had chosen not to run it.")
* LAUREL to NBC's Today show, for letting the microchips fall where they may. In contrast to the network's embarrassing on-air displays of affection for Microsoft since they got engaged, Today's May 16 "Money" segment on how to get on the information highway was refreshingly synergy-free. Explaining how ten leading Internet service providers rated on reliability, speed, navigation, and so on, an expert advised Today's viewers that tough installation and frustrating technical support had put Microsoft in the number 10 spot, the bottom of the list.
^ DART to environmental reporters Bruce Ritchie of The Gainesville Sun; Dean Rebuffoni of the Minneapolis Star Tribune; Randall Edwards of the Columbus Dispatch; and David Ropeik of Boston TV station WCVB, for a case of ethics lite. As disclosed by the newsletter Environment Writer, these journalists are among some fifty around the country who have accepted free subscriptions to Greenwire, an $835-a-year electronic environmental news digest, courtesy of Anheuser-Busch. The offer was targeted to media outlets in regions where the company operates theme parks or breweries and is involved in land-use issues.
^ DART to USA Today, for a disturbing flare-up of a chronic disease. Distributed this spring at health-care facilities around the country was yet another of those insidious four-page, four-color, USA Today-lookalikes -- this time, using the paper's unmistakable typeface, layout, graphics, and features to push the Columbia HCA Healthcare Corporation. Unsurprisingly, the feel-good "news" validated in the "Special Promotional Edition" under the paper's logo (columbia quality recognized: innovations at columbia hospitals save lives) avoided some rather unnerving questions, recently raised by The New York Times, about legal and ethical side effects of Columbia Healthcare's practices.
^ DART to American Way, the in-flight magazine of American Airlines (estimated readership: 1.6 million), and senior editor Chuck Thompson, for not facing the music. In his January 1 cover story on how forty-something rock 'n' rollers manage (however marginally) to play out their teenage fantasies of touring the world as a band, Thompson underscored the struggles of one such dedicated group known as The Surf Trio. However, somewhere in the number -- which also featured the trio in several full-page photos, named their recording label, and mentioned where they could be heard -- Thompson missed a beat. As revealed by the Portland paper Willamette Week, the writer neglected to note that, working under another name, he is a drummer in the band. Defending his omission of that striking fact, Thompson told the paper, "It's not a story . . . that makes a judgment about whether The Surf Trio is good or bad. It's just about the scene."
* LAUREL to the Meeker, Colorado, Herald, and editor and publisher Glenn R. Troester, for muscular journalism. Late last year, rumors gripped the town that during practice of the high school championship wrestling team, the popular longtime coach, Mike Tate, had broken up a scuffle by lifting one of the young athletes off the ground by his genitals, sending the boy to the hospital and causing serious bodily injury. Troester checked out the rumors and found that they were true. Haunted by a similarly violent incident involving another boy and the team the year before -- an incident that, as a newcomer to the wrestling-crazy town, he regretfully had not exposed -- Troester grappled with his conscience, sought legal and ethical counsel from journalistic experts, and validated the rumors in a page-one report. Notwithstanding the blows that came within hours -- cancellations from subscribers, refusals by storeowners to sell the paper, denunciations from parents, students, teachers, and alumni -- the Herald continued to report in great detail in ensuing weeks on the coach's arrest and suspension, the filing of two multimillion-dollar lawsuits by parents of the two assaulted boys against the school district, and the hearing on felony assault charges. A published letter to the editor from a college journalism student who condemned the Herald for hurting "this community, the school system, and more people than you realize," prompted Troester to respond. "Let me state it simply," his editorial concluded. "If you are an employee in a public institution, and you become a target of a crime investigation, and we hear about it, we will overturn every rock necessary to get accurate and reliable information, and we will publish it. We will never again be a party to a hush-up, a cover-up, or any other such shenanigans. If we must use confidential sources as a last resort to keep things from getting 'lost,' we will. You can bet we will not go to press unless we can defend what we report. If that incenses college sophomores, so be it."
^ DART to Home magazine and Architectural Digest, for furthering the infestation of journalistic termites. The March issue of Hachette Filipacchi's Home surrounds a dangerously eroded wall: a glossy three-page spread on repainting a Louisiana house that was produced and edited jointly by the magazine's promotions department and Benjamin Moore Paints, a major Home advertiser, in conjunction with a contest jointly sponsored by Home and Benjamin Moore. As The Wall Street Journal pointed out, not only was the spread not identified as advertising, but it was listed in Home's table of contents along with major feature articles. Similarly, the March issue of CondŽ Nast's Architectural Digest confirms an ethically shaky foundation. Apparently the mention of two high-end fabric makers, Clarence House and Brunschwig & Fils, in captions throughout the issue some half a dozen times, is but one example of the blueprint drawn by editor Paige Rense: only advertisers are to be identified in captions. "And why," Rense asked the Journal reporter, "should I list those who don't support us by advertising over those who do?"
^ DART to The Cincinnati Enquirer, for monkeying around with the news. A page-one story (April 3) about Chaka, the prolific gorilla whose seventh offspring -- number forty-five for the Cincinnati Zoo -- had broken a U.S. record, was accompanied by a full-front, four-color photo of the champ that showed his achievement to be all the more remarkable. Totally bereft of genitalia, Chaka was endowed instead with a lovely, pale green glow. Chided for what one reader called the Enquirer's "obsessive prissiness," the editor explained that the leaf of a (fig?) tree had gotten in the photographer's way.
