Darts & Laurels
Darts: Building Up Bush
The
Washington Post gave inside burial to a major address by Senate
majority leader Tom Daschle attacking Bush’s economic policies—
but gave page-one, above-the-fold play to Bush’s response
(and reinforced, in the Post’s own headline, Bush’s
false implication that Daschle had proposed an increase in taxes).
The
back-to-back presentation by NBC of Tom Brokaw’s hourlong
special The Bush White House: Inside the Real West Wing, and an
episode of the popular dramatic series, The West Wing, blurred
not merely the already shaky lines between news and entertainment;
it also, and more subtly, blurred the lines between news and entertainment
and politics. In making its dubious programming decision, the
network could not have been unaware of the potential for added
value — that through (aggressively promoted) linkage in viewers’
minds, the idealized inhabitants of the fictional West Wing would
enhance the image of the real ones.
The
Associated Press, in a dispatch about a White House meeting between
Bush and Republican and Democratic congressional leaders, accorded
powers to Bush that were downright kingly: he had “summoned”
the leaders, ran the AP report, and given them “marching
orders.” As every middle-school student knows, the separation
of powers, a constitutional principle that has served democracy
well for lo these two hundred years, allows the executive branch
to exercise no such authority over the legislative branch.
Dart: The Other
Competition
keeps a paper on its toes — but it can also lead to clumsy
missteps. Consider how the two dailies in Trenton, New Jersey,
covered the story when an escaped convict, two-time murderer Terrence
Brewer, turned himself in to authorities after a week on the run.
Fearful of the police and remembering the fairness with which
The Times of Trenton had reported on his trial, Brewer chose as
the place for his surrender the Times's very own building. While
that detail was hardly lost in the Times's September 6 front-page
story, sidebars, and photos, The Trentonian managed, with some
awkward journalistic footwork, to avoid it altogether in that
day's coverage, along with any mention of its rival's name. The
escaped convict had "turned himself in to reporters and police
about 8 p.m. yesterday," ran the vague Trentonian lead, ".
. . a mere two blocks from headquarters . . . ."
Dart:The Hustlers
At
the height of the anthrax crisis, Foster's Daily Democrat, in
Dover, New Hampshire, presented on the front page of its October
30 Health/Science section a by-lined article (with photo) by one
Dr. Scott Alderson that purported to provide medical information
about the disease. The good doctor's expert opinion: since no
one really knows much about the prevention and cure of anthrax,
stay healthy through regular visits to your local chiropractor.
Readers with questions were referred to an unidentified phone
number, which turned out to be an answering machine for Alderson's
chiropractic business. Filling an entire column, the piece was,
quite literally, filler, freely offered by chiropractor Alderson
to a paper with low resistance, one acutely in need of some serious
editorial readjustment.
When
Time made what looked and sounded and smelled like a deal with
Apple's Steve Jobs — the magazine got the exclusive story
on the company's new iMac; the iMac and Jobs got the cover —
did the editors think no one would notice, or did they just not
care if they did? And whatever the explanation, will they ever
tell their readers (as opposed to other potential partners) just
how many iMacs were actually bought by browsers responding to
the adjacent imperative, "Buy iMac Now," which (until
critics weighed in) appeared in a purchasing link on the magazine's
Web site?
As
of September 1, Gregg Wendorf, the editor and publisher of the
Advance News-Journal, a weekly based in Pharr, Texas, has been
working as a $40,000-a-year media consultant to the local school
district, writing press releases, organizing coverage, and coordinating
special events. To solve any possible conflict-of-interest problems,
Wendorf blithely explained to reporter Dulcinea Cuellar of the
McAllen, Texas, Monitor, all school district stories will be handled
by his wife. A more appropriate response came from The Poynter
Institute's Keith Woods. "I think, in a sense," Woods
told the Monitor, "the school district just bought a newspaper."
When
the new, state-of-the-art Green Valley Ranch Station Casino opened
in December, it hit the journalistic jackpot — two days of
some 400 column-inches of golden news, including thirteen photos
and three maps, almost all of them in color, in the Las Vegas
Sun. The paper made no bones about the fact that its sole owner,
the Greenspun family, is also half-owner of what it's hoping will
become a favored draw for "the locals." Wanna bet that
those 400 column-inches improved the odds?
Laurels
Cardinal
Sins
In January, when the former priest John Geoghan was found guilty
in the first of a string of sex-abuse cases pending against him,
almost a year to the day had passed since the Boston press had
reported on a remarkable new development: a judge had ruled that
Bernard Cardinal Law, archbishop and cardinal of the Boston archdiocese,
could be named a defendant in twenty-five of eighty-four civil
cases against Geoghan for knowingly allowing the abuse to go on.
In those intervening months, no local journalist dug more deeply
into the story, and Law's part in it, than Kristen Lombardi of
the weekly Phoenix. Published in March, August, and October, her
prodigiously reported pieces documented the sorry history of Geoghan's
career, as well as the still sorrier protection of that career,
and too many others like it, by the church and by Cardinal Law.
Lombardi's investigation established that Geoghan had been well
known among experts in clergy pedophilia for having flunked out
of many psychiatric hospitals during various sick leaves; it further
established that, complaints to clergy notwithstanding, the church
had kept shuffling him from one parish to another, where unsuspecting
families in six different communities welcomed him into their
homes and into their children's now traumatized lives. The question,
in short, had shifted from Geoghan's acts to what Cardinal Law
had known about those acts, and when he'd known it. In a strong
editorial urging that that question be pursued in a court of law,
The Boston Herald lent the daily's weight to the weekly's findings.
"The Phoenix interviews add to a mounting body of evidence
that Geoghan's superiors could not have been ignorant of his conduct,"
the Herald wrote in an all-too-rare act of editorial courtesy,
five times mentioning the Phoenix by name, "and yet they
did nothing to keep him away from the young people he was driven
to victimize." Cardinal Law has since announced new policies
and apologized for the old ones.
The
Children's Hour
You of little faith in journalism's future, look upon the works
of the high school press and take heart. Look, for example, at
Omaha Central High, where the monthly Register delivers to some
2,500 students an impressive mix of news, opinion, entertainment,
and sports that grizzled pros might envy. In its October 31 issue,
fearless reporting, responsible judgment, and a firm commitment
to ethical standards both in and out of journalism were on particularly
fine display. Beginning below the page-one fold of the forty-page
broadsheet was meth: anatomy of an epidemic, a detailed examination,
enhanced with dramatic photos and graphics, of the making, selling,
distribution, and effects, notably on students, of methamphetamine,
"one of the fastest growing and most frightening drugs in
the nation." Beginning above the page-one fold was an exposé
of how school administrators had violated the district's code
of conduct in allowing a student linebacker to play in five football
games after he'd been charged with two counts of assault. As a
result of the investigation, the student was benched for the rest
of the season. But the Register's editors did not stop there;
in their lead editorial, they registered their disgust with school
officials. "Until the court solves the matter," the
editorial admonished, athletes charged with crimes "should
stay off the playing field. Otherwise, courtroom bailiffs and
probation officers might have to start accompanying athletes to
the games. But maybe the school could give these new people uniforms,
too."
Call
Waiting
That the cell phone has moved from handy convenience to essential
lifeline is now a truism. But, as a wake-up story in the Portland
Oregonian made crystal clear, the negative effects of the ubiquitous
gadget range well beyond distracting talkative drivers or enraging
captive bystanders: it can — in fact, does — jeopardize
lives. Six months in the making and published just as a conference
of public safety officials was getting under way, the page-one,
3,600-word report by Emily Tsao and Ryan Frank documented hundreds
of incidents around the country in which police and fire department
radios — that other lifeline — failed to work in emergencies
because of interference from cell phone towers. In twenty-eight
states, they found, at least one such potentially fatal episode
had occurred; in twenty-one of those states, the Nextel company
alone had been the source of the interference. Identifying the
extent and the source of the problem, however, was only the beginning:
What was the solution and who was going to pay for it? Digging
deeper, Tsao and Frank went on to explore the history of the issue
and the positions of the major parties involved. One such party
is the FCC, which, as regulator of the airwaves, had originally
approved the plan, put forward in 1991 by a former FCC lawyer,
to develop a national wireless phone business that eventually
became Nextel, allowing its radio frequencies to be intertwined
with or adjacent to those used by police and fire radios. As the
Oregonian signed off, Nextel, the police, and the FCC were pointing
fingers at each other, halfway measures were on the horizon, and
at least one expert was predicting a “cataclysmic” effect
on the public safety system if only those limited measures came
into effect."
Darts & Laurels is written by Gloria Cooper, CJR's deputy executive editor. Nominations may be addressed to her by mail, phone (212-854-1887), or e-mail (gc15@columbia.edu).
