Letters

PHOTO EXPOSE

Sig Gissler's article "What Happens When Gannett Takes Over" (cjr, November/December) was fascinating. But there's more to the David Peterson episode at Gannett's Des Moines Register. According to an article by Jon Bowermaster in the January 1988 issue of American Photographer, Peterson, a six-time Iowa Press Photographer of the Year, couldn't get his paper, the Register, to agree to a photo exposŽ on the plight of area farmers. So he applied for a $10,000 grant from the Nikon company and the National Press Photogra-phers Association.

With the money, Peterson took a three-month leave. If the Register had refused his pictures, Peterson could have sold them elsewhere.

Bowermaster also reported that the paper tried (without success) to get Peterson to water down his essay with more positive shots. The Register not only finally ran the pictures, but even nominated them for the Pulitzer Prize.

Now here's the kicker: according to American Photographer, the Des Moines Register never acknowledged to its readers or the Pulitzer committee that Peterson produced the pictures on his own time and under grant. No mention of Nikon or NPPA was ever made in the Register's pages.

Even worse, according to the article, managing editor Arnie Garson wrote a story for the Register on "how we did it." Still no mention of the grant, Nikon, or NPPA.

I'll bet your readers would like to know if Peterson stayed on with Gannett.

Steve LaPrade
Norman, Oklahoma

Editor's note: He did.

Applause for Sig Gissler's well-balanced analysis of corporate transformations in formerly family-owned major newspapers. But there is an additional area that deserves review: major chains gobbling up small-town and suburban weeklies.

Until the 1980s, Jackson, Mississippi, was a two-daily town, but both were taken over by Gannett and later combined. One weekly north of the city (our major competitor) and the one west of Jackson (founded by my great-grandparents) came under Gannett control. They soon lost their local, small-town flavor.

To compete, the independent weeklies were forced to specialize. There are now two primarily-black weeklies in Jackson; one metro business weekly; one focusing on white, affluent areas of the city; two in the eastern suburbs, with a return to small-town news; and my employer, competing with a Gannett weekly and running long articles.

Although many weeklies across the state have either been taken over as corporate satellites or run out of business by these companies' aggressive tactics, a niche has opened for a select few independent publications to thrive as alternatives to coverage dictated by profit.

Duane Gordon
Staff reporter
The Madison County Journal
Ridgeland, Mississippi

WHO'S ON FIRST

With regard to Floyd Abrams's piece, "Look Who's Trashing the First Amendment" (cjr, November/December): I don't think the current concerns of the left are in opposition to the First Amendment, but rather in favor of the expanded understanding of the First Amendment in the twentieth century to favor free and diverse expression and not merely protect expression from state suppression. To extend Liebling's epigram about freedom of the press, anyone can speak effectively to the republic if he or she can buy time or space in the media. And he or she can drown out other voices not by the force of their argument, the alleged yardstick of the marketplace of ideas, but by the size of their megaphone. A good example of this megaphone monopoly was illustrated in cjr's excellent piece about the deafening media silence that accompanied the greatest giveaway of taxpayers's assets in history -- the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

It was unfortunate that The Nation framed its useful forum in terms of the wrong guys on the side of the First Amendment. It is counterproductive to frame the question as to which "side" is most favored or suppressed. The entire public is deprived of the lively and full debate democracy demands when, effectively, only money talks.

John M. Phelan
Professor and director emeritus
McGannon Communications Research
Fordham University
NewYork, New York

CORPORATE CONTROL

Our company Internews is a nonprofit that works extensively with local and independent broadcast media in Russia and other regions of the former Soviet Union. You published a brief article describing our work in your May/June 1996 issue.

Now I discover ("cjr World," November/December) that in Russia, "a budding independent press returns to the old ways." My goodness, I think, have the commies gained control of the media while I slept? Perhaps Yeltsin's government or the Russian parliament have taken over?

But no, it is a giant oil company that has bought into the newspaper Izvestia. Scandalous! Imagine if we let big companies like General Electric own media!

And, we are told, Vladimir Guzinsky, owner of "media conglomerate, banking, and real estate interests" was allowed to transmit NTV, which he owns with another energy group and a bank, nationally; and he got a cable TV venture as well. Shameful! Good thing this is the good old USA or we'd have NBC on both broadcast and cable, with Bill Gates investing in them!

After Russian media "produced hard-hitting coverage of news" for a few years, now "tough coverage is a rarity." Sound familiar?

 Finally, the article lays blame as follows: "Russia's editors themselves, through arrogance and bad business decisions, have pushed their media into the orbits of corporations." I see. Is that how it happened here, too?

Evelyn Messinger
Executive director
Internews
San Rafael, California

MITIGATING CIRCUMSTANCES

I write to correct an inaccuracy in a "Darts & Laurels" item in your November/ December 1997 issue. At no time did Tracy Everbach of The Dallas Morning News ever write a "glowing testimonial" to appear in my law firm's "glossy brochure." I'm afraid Tracy is the victim of my error. I bear the responsibility and blame.

 Tracy is a hard-working, ethical reporter. I also consider her my friend. When my partners and I established our law firm, we hired a public relations firm to produce a brochure. In order to gain more information about our fledgling firm, the p.r. specialist asked me for the names of friends, colleagues, and associates. Unfortunately for Tracy, I gave the woman her name.

Tracy was contacted and asked to describe her impressions of my work and me. She was not informed and did not know that her comments would be transcribed and published in our brochure. It's not that I tried to hide that fact. I simply was ignorant regarding the culture of journalists. As Tracy has been swift to inform me, my error placed her in a very difficult position with her editors and her peers. If you knew her and her work, you would find her worthy of laurels. Reserve the darts for me.

Thomas M. Melsheimer
Lynn Stodghill Melsheimer & Tillotson
Dallas, Texas

YOU CAN FIGHT ABUSE

It isn't true that newspapers have no recourse if a government agency pulls out public notice advertising in revenge for something the paper has published ("Puerto Rico: Publishing News, Losing Ads," cjr, September/October). In fact, they can sue, and they can win.

Nearly a decade ago we sued the sheriff of Broward County, Florida, for doing precisely what the governor of Puerto Rico apparently did to El Nuevo D'a. Sheriff Nick Navarro had halted a twenty-year practice of publishing sheriff's sales and forfeiture notices in our Fort Lauderdale paper because he was angry about something we had written about him.

Our lead counsel, Floyd Abrams of New York's Cahill Gordon & Reindel, argued that it's illegal for a government agency to withdraw a benefit, even a wholly discretionary one like advertising, as punishment for exercising a constitutionally protected right. Indeed, the case law Abrams based his arguments on is very favorable to the press, and even holds that timing alone may be sufficient to prove motive: if the unfavorable story runs and, a day later, the ads are pulled, a retribution motive can be inferred.

We won at trial, we were upheld on appeal, and we were upheld on fees. We got some $30,000 in damages and around $250,000 in costs. The voters dumped Navarro in the next Republican primary.

No need for newspeople to take this kind of abuse from political hacks.

Edward Wasserman
Chairman and editor in chief
Daily Business Reviews
Miami, Florida

THE BLOOMBERG BOX

Interesting piece on Bloomberg ("How Bloomberg Pressures Editors," CJR, September/October). I just want to add, lest anyone think the company's ambitions are limited to the U.S., that Britain has a Bloomberg satellite channel (it looks like a computer screen with the little boxes of graphics, figures, and headlines all over the place with a guy talking in the middle), and the company also supplies the business section for The Independent on Sunday. The UK Press Gazette reported a few months ago that despite promises to the contrary, buying in from Bloomberg has meant letting go some of The Independent's existing business editorial staff.

Wendy M. Grossman
Richmond, Surrey, England

One recent weekend my mother-in-law, who lives in Cedar Grove, New Jersey, received a free unsolicited battery-powered AM radio in the mail. The gimmick was that the radio receives only one station: WBBR 1130 AM, Bloomberg Radio News.

Perhaps editors who cherish the Bloomberg terminals described in your recent story would do well to treat the Bloomberg radios as an object lesson about the news service's ultimate objective.

Peter R. Wiley
Lewisburg, Pennsylvania

TEAMSTER TEMPEST

Your report on the coverage of the Teamsters eighteen months ago ("Working the Teamsters," CJR, July/August 1996) certainly deserves a Dart. In that piece, Mike Hoyt unfairly attacked the few reporters who were skeptical of union "reformer" Ron Carey. Hoyt referred to our coverage as a "sideshow" that generated "inconclusive smoke" and that had an "Alice in Wonderland quality."

My, what a difference a year makes. Carey's exit from the union presidency, after a finding that he was involved in a corrupt election, is now making headlines. But none of this is a surprise to the few reporters who took the time to thoroughly investigate the union boss and his past behavior. Our instincts and the facts persuaded us long ago that we had a skunk by the tail. Now the odor is official.

There were numerous problems with Hoyt's broadside. For one thing, he trusted the wrong people: Carey's henchmen, the traditional labor press, even the union's federal overseers who protected Carey for years. All of these sources had a vested interest in silencing or ignoring criticism while the most important labor scandal of the decade was unfolding.

The worst aspect of his story was its chilling effect. He undoubtedly scared away other reporters from covering labor in an aggressive way. We now find that the key leaders of the so-called labor reform movement (including Carey and several AFL-CIO bigwigs) are likely to face criminal charges. But that news will come as a shock to most citizens -- thanks to a labor press that used Hoyt's story as an excuse to remain asleep in their own wonderland.

Richard Behar
Senior writer, Fortune
Edward Barnes
Correspondent, Time
New York, New York

Mike Hoyt replies: My story on coverage of the 1996 Teamsters election campaign (which is available on CJR'S Web site) made several points. One was that coverage of a series of corruption charges against Carey crowded out coverage of nuts-and-bolts issues -- about both candidates' records as negotiators, about who was supporting them, about their platforms and ideas, about how they the financed their campaigns, etc. -- that would have helped a million and a half teamsters cast informed votes. The point remains valid.

My piece noted that longtime labor reporters tended to discount the many corruption accusations that were floated about Carey during the campaign, and I raised a still-open question about their attitude: "Is this a kind of bias, or is it a reflection of experience and knowledge? A bit of both?" I did indeed criticize the pieces that Behar and Barnes wrote in Time suggesting that Carey was a) tight with the Mafia and b) took payoffs -- claims that blew away like smoke after official investigation. I would still criticize them. Carey apparently fought dirty in the campaign. Does that validate the Mafia and payoff stories? No. If Bill Clinton is found to have evaded campaign law, does that mean the people who reported that he killed Vincent Foster are correct?

I hoped to encourage reporting on the Teamsters, not chill it.

ADMITTING TO ALCOHOLISM

Lance Morrow suggests in his piece "Journalism After Diana" (cjr, November/December) that it may have been press inattention to Wilbur Mills's alcoholism that caused it to be unreported until he and Fanne Fox -- the "Argentine Firecracker" -- splashed into both Washington's Tidal Basin and the headlines in 1974. Morrow is only partly correct.

Because the House Ways and Means Committee, which the Arkansas Democrat chaired, dealt with the funding of health programs, I often covered its hearings when I was the chief medical and science reporter at the now-defunct Washington Star.

One day in 1972 or, perhaps even earlier, a hearing had just ended when Mills called me aside and said he had something important to tell me. That something was that he was a chronic alcoholic and that I should understand that he would like that known.

I duly reported that to my editors, but they wouldn't print it. I thought then and still do that -- besides being a disservice to the public -- this was a disservice to Mills.

Judith Randal
Independent science journalist
Lovettsville, Virginia

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