|
<advertisement>
|
 |
 
|
|
media search: |
 |
darts & laurels
* DART to The Orange County Register, for playing to win. In a lucky-number game card contest promoted in its pages, on street racks, and at the Pillsbury display in the fourteen Hughes Family Markets in its circulation area, the Register encouraged readers to try their luck at twenty cash prizes of $1,000 to $ 100,000 each -- some $185,000 in all. But the paper loaded the dice. For example, as noted in a March 6 article in the alternative OC Weekly, numbered game cards, which on the first Sunday of the contest were inserted into all editions of the paper, had to be matched with the winning numbers listed at Hughes stores; this required readers in some less than affluent neighborhoods to get themselves to the market via bus. On following Sundays the game cards were inserted only in newsstand copies; this required subscribers to go out and buy a second Register. Readers who asked for a list of the winners were told to write to a promotions company in Kennesaw, Georgia, but, when asked for such a list, the company was unable to comply: nobody, as the Register confirmed to the Weekly, had won a cent. Except, of course, the promotions company, the paper, and the supermarket advertiser.
* DART to the Asbury Park Press, for professional pettiness. When the rival Press of Atlantic City revealed on April 23 that one of New Jersey's largest fuel oil suppliers had been overcharging schools and municipal agencies by $150,000 -- an amount that grew with further investigation to more than $400,000 -- The Associated Press was quick to pick up the story. The AP's story was also quick to attribute the reporting to the Atlantic City paper, whose review of more than a thousand invoices indicated that the overpricing occurred mostly on accounts whose supervisors did not routinely check their bills or had not previously complained. But when the Asbury Park Press ran that AP pick-up on April 25, five little words -- The Press of Atlantic City -- had mysteriously disappeared. In their place was the anonymous attribution to "a published report." A May 15 follow-up on the expanding investigation by the Atlantic City paper met a similar fate in the Asbury Park Press.
* LAUREL to the Northwest Arkansas Times, for refusing to close the book. In a front-page story on March 25, the Times reported on a startling announcement by the new chancellor of the University of Arkansas, John A. White: the University of Arkansas Press, publisher of scores of award-winning scholarly books, would cease operations at the end of June because it wasn't making any money. Immediately the Times went into action. After sixteen days of its intense coverage of what the loss of the UAP would mean to the university, the state, and the region; after its pointed comparisons with the financial realities of other university presses -- almost all of which depend on subsidies; after its embarrassing disclosures about the enormous sums being spent on the new chancellor's home and office and investiture ceremonies; after its shaming editorials, scathing cartoons, and outraged letters from alumni, Chancellor White turned back the page. His expensive investiture ceremonies were cancelled. The Times on Sunday, April 19 ran as a community service a list of some 200 available books published by the Press since its inception in l980 and urged its readers to buy them. A million-dollar corporate contribution got a UAP endowment drive off to a good start. So the UAP lives on. The staff of the University of Arkansas Press summed it all up in a letter of appreciation to the Times: "Your newspaper has been the clarion call in a battle to preserve the intellectual, literary, and historical voice of our great state."
* DART to WCBS-TV, New York, for an off-base story, wildly pitched. In The Mickey Mantle Files, a three-part series that aired during the sweepsmonth of May, the network owned-and-operated station purported to expose a "secret" file "the FBI had put together on the baseball hero" during the 1950s and '60s. Waving in McCarthyesque fashion a document "twenty-eight-pages thick" that "very few people have seen," co-anchor Stephen Clark darkly wondered "why the FBI put the Mick's private life under scrutiny." Mantle's family, too, seen on screen, "wondered why J. Edgar Hoover's G-men would snoop on him." But most wondering of all was the FBI, which had done nothing of the sort. The so-called Mickey Mantle file (since seen by cjr), was nothing more than a bunch of reports in investigative files on other subjects in which his name was mentioned, gathered by the agency in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. Most of the pages detailed the agency's investigation into two threatening letters to the Yankee center fielder, one of which was from "a loyal Red Sox fan." Some of the pages pertained to a routine name-check in connection with a proposed visit to a White House reception by Mantle and other athletes in 1969. (But wait -- the request had been signed by John D. Ehrlichman!) Five paragraphs summarize the name-check results. Here is the first sentence of the lead paragraph of that summary: "Mickey Mantle, former well-known baseball player of the New York Yankees, has not been the subject of an investigation by the FBI." Here is a sentence from the station's promo: "Find out what the Feds wanted to know about the Yankee legend!"
* DART to WRAL-TV, in Raleigh, and weekend news anchor Kelly Wright, for professional dissonance. When child-care advocates held a rally at the North Carolina Legislative Building in June, Wright emceed the event, applauded the governor's remarks, sang the Whitney Houston number "The Greatest Love of All" -- and then went back to WRAL to report on the rally for the five o'clock news. As Common Sense Legislative Update put it in its June 19 report, "The programs extolled at the rally are worthwhile and should be funded by the General Assembly. But it is hard to understand how a journalist can endorse legislation that he covers." When it came to such criticism, however, the singing anchorman apparently tuned out. On July 11, the Raleigh News & Observer noted that Wright just a few days earlier had reported on the worries about federal money for the elderly by the county's Human Services Department -- a department overseen by the twenty-five-member Human Services Board, on which Wright sat. (He has since moved on to an anchor job at the Fox affiliate in Portsmouth, Virginia.)
* LAUREL to KXLY-TV, in Spokane, Washington, for demonstrating the value of other voices in a one-newspaper town. With the Spokesman-Review involved daily in a classic conflict of interest -- reporting on a controversial $100 million development project in which its owner, the Cowles family, is a major investor -- the ABC affiliate stepped into the breach. Its five-part series explained the complicated financial structure of the deal, not scanting the risks to taxpayers if the developers defaulted on a federal loan obtained by the city or if the city had to make good on its pledge to cover any shortfall from a parking garage in the Nordstrom-anchored mall. Not scanted, either, were the gung-ho views of Betsy Cowles, president of the development company and sister of William Stacey Cowles, publisher of the Spokesman-Review (and owner, too, of the local Journal of Business and NBC affiliate KHQ-TV). Less enthusiastic experts were heard from as well, including newly elected mayor John Talbott, whose calls for a voters' referendum on the project during his campaign earned him little love from the paper. Talbott has continued to stress the absence of an overall feasibility study for the project that was so enthusiastically backed by the previous administration. In one notable segment, KXLY addressed head-on the issue of the Spokesman-Review's coverage: a content analysis by a journalism professor at Eastern Washington University concluded, unsurprisingly, that the paper's news coverage was definitely pro-project. Finally, the series pointed to the lesson of Seattle. In that city the Times was belatedly scrutinizing a similar public-private partnership begun in 1995, now known to some as Nordygate.
* LAUREL to Glamour, for putting the spotlight on some not-so-pretty facts the public needs to know -- and fast. In its August issue, the magazine took an unblinking look at a quiet epidemic that this year alone will devastate the lives of some 12 million young women and men -- sexually transmitted, non-AIDS-related, disease. Plain talk about symptoms and diagnosis, protection and prognosis, together with the personal testimony of ten courageous women -- photographed and named -- on how herpes, gonorrhea, and other STDs have affected their health, their relationships, and their ability to bear children provided powerful support for Glamour's demand that attention must be paid. For as the report impressively documents, it is the federal government's lack of concern -- and of funding -- in this public health emergency that is the real shame of STD.
* DART to Maureen Dowd, edgy columnist of The New York Times, for an unkind cut. In her relentless campaign to prove that James Fallows, the just-ousted editor of U.S. News & World Report, is a journalistic jerk, Dowd in her July 1 column took some of Fallows's words right out of his mouth. Deriding the editor's differences with publisher Mort Zuckerman over their philosophy of news -- a recent example of which was their disagreement about the magazine's coverage of Gianni Versace's murder -- Dowd quoted Fallows thusly: "Each page we give to, say, Versace is a page we can't use for . . . 'News You Can Use.'" Had that remark, as she reported it, been a fair and accurate reflection of what Fallows said and meant, he'd have deserved all of the ridicule Dowd heaped on his head. But as careful readers of the July 7 Times learned from Fallows's letter to the editor (a letter that most certainly did not appear in the other papers around the country that had carried Dowd's peevish piece), "What I actually said was that a page used for covering the shooting of Gianni Versace was a page we couldn't use to cover 'business, technology, politics, education, or 'News You Can Use.'" Oh..
