Letters
Cracked Foundation
Thank you for Russ Baker’s wonderful article about the Freedom
Forum (CJR, January/February). Being a former employee of both
Forum Network and The Freedom Forum from September ’99 until
July ’01 at the headquarters in Rosslyn I know firsthand
that of which the article speaks. I couldn’t have written
the words better myself. It’s about time that someone publicly
said something about the management that doomed many programs
of the Freedom Forum instead of just attributing it to a poor
economy, as many would like to do.
Michael C. Biddle, Jr.
Washington, D.C.
Your article is correct that the Freedom Forum made a painful decision to cut back its international programs because of the drop in the stock market, causing an erosion of Freedom Forum’s financial base of support.
The Freedom Forum had a choice of trying to renege on a signed contract to move ahead with a much more accessible Newseum, open to many more U.S. and international visitors, or to cut back on its program of making the newsrooms of this nation more diverse and reflective of our population, or cutting back on the international programs.
The difficult decision was made to cut back on the international
programs, hoping that in some instances others will replace our
support. We are working on that. And it is done with the hope
that in two or three years the stock market will rebound and the
Freedom Forum can once again do more to foster free media in the
developing nations.
Paul Simon
Freedom Forum
Board of Trustees
Director, Public Policy
Institute, Southern Illinois
University
Carbondale,
Illinois
Editors’ Note: In describing Freedom Forum’s substantial investment losses, cjr said the foundation put 90 percent of its total investments into index funds. That was incorrect. Rather, it put 90 percent of its equity investments into such funds. Other investments (27 percent of total investments in 2000; 26 percent in 2001) were in fixed-income securities, according to figures supplied by the foundation.We regret the error.
Other 'Jewels'
In her Voices piece about The New York Times’s “Portraits of Grief” feature on victims of the September 11 attacks (CJR, January/February), Barbara Stewart wrote that a number of competing newspapers offered “brief obituaries of the September 11 victims from their areas.” The Times, on the other hand, has offered “something different — impressionistic sketches,” or, as a Times editor called them, “little jewels.”
I’m not familiar with the work of all the competing papers she mentions, but in the case of one, Newsday, her description is inaccurate. Newsday has also been running mini-feature stories rather than traditional obits, although they tend to be somewhat longer and more detailed than the short pieces in the Times. Nor is the Newsday feature, called “The Lost,” limited to victims from its circulation area in New York City and Long Island. And, yes, I would call these well-written pieces and the evocative photos running with them “jewels” that crystallize the emotions arising from such terrible losses. With assistance from ten other Tribune Company newspapers, Newsday is also creating an informative historical record.
Recognizing the breadth and excellence of Newsday’s “The
Lost” does not take away from the praiseworthiness of the
work being done at the Times. The reporters and editors at both
newspapers are performing a great public service.
Paul Moses
Associate professor
Journalism program
Brooklyn College
Center for Global Media
New York, New York
Coloring the Facts
Whatever readers and your reviewer make of William McGowan’s
complaints in his book Coloring the News about the impact of diversity
on American journalism, they should be aware that he twists facts
out of context or reports them incompletely in order to advance
his argument. To cite only one example, he claims that a column
I wrote for Time criticizing Dinesh D’Souza’s book,
The End of Racism, reflected a “general journalistic resistance
to the broad subject of problems faced by the black underclass.”
He does not mention that the concluding paragraph of my story
contained this passage: “The U.S. certainly does need a searching
debate on racially tinged issues from affirmative action to welfare
dependency and crime. It is quite clear, for example, that racism
alone cannot account for the sorry plight of the underclass and
that traditional civil rights remedies can do nothing to solve
it.” In short, I was inviting the very debate that McGowan
claims that I and other black journalists were resisting. Before
he accuses others of causing a decline in journalistic standards
he ought to examine his own.
Jack E. White
Former columnist
Time magazine
Washington, D.C.
It’s been most disheartening to see favorable pieces about
Coloring the News (CJR, January/ February) by reviewers who fail
to fact-check the allegations in the book. Obviously, the publisher
had no interest in doing so, either.
From just one case, in which he discusses the National Association of Black Journalists:
In a July 16, 1999, Wall Street Journal piece, McGowan correctly gives the reason the other journalist organizations of color wanted to continue to meet together in Seattle — as “Unity” — after a statewide anti-affirmative action proposition passed: they “weren’t so keen on breaking the organization’s commitments.”
Now, in the book, their reason has changed: the other groups “worried that such protest might harm the perception of professional impartiality.”
The list goes on.
Richard Prince
Chair, Media monitoring committee
National Association of Black Journalists
Alexandria, Virginia
The Whole Truth
Thanks to Neil Hickey for his story about the censorship imposed
by the Bush administration during the war in Afghanistan (CJR,
January/ February). But the article — and the sidebar on
“Larry Flynt’s War” — didn’t go far enough.
The main thrust of the article seems to be that American reporters are being prevented from doing their jobs, jobs vitally important “so the public may be informed about a war conducted in its name.” Flynt is quoted, “the reason the Defense Department doesn’t want reporters with our troops is that if they screw up, they want to cover it up. They can’t cover it up if the press is there.” But there is a much more important reason to have reporters at the front, and that is to report on the nature (even without “screw-ups”) of war itself.
But in war people die in horrible ways, on a mass scale, and indiscriminately. Weapons of war are so designed for this to happen. The war in Afghanistan was no different. Hundreds or thousands of civilians, for example, died simply because they were in the war zone. There was massive destruction of the Afghan infrastructure.
It is the responsibility of journalists, especially during wartime
(and especially now, when Iran, Iraq, and North Korea are being
bandied about as potential targets) to present the uncomfortable
reality of war as truthfully and as vividly as possible. Otherwise
we, as a people, are in danger, more and more, of using the option
of war as a first, rather than last, resort.
Rick Goldsmith
Documentary filmmaker,
Tell the Truth and Run: George Seldes and the American Press
Berkeley, California
Missed Monitor
It was gratifying to see CJR’s thoughtful overview in the January/February issue of the status of international news in U.S. media before and after September 11. Especially significant was the discussion of the gap between public interest in insightful international coverage and the small amount of space and airtime it receives in most U.S. media. Regrettably, however, a table in the article which listed U.S. media outlets and their overseas bureaus failed to include The Christian Science Monitor. With nine international bureaus and scores of stringers, the Monitor has a greater overseas presence than all but five U.S. newspapers and all three major TV networks. And the proportion of our staff and news hole devoted to world news is probably second to none in the U.S. The Monitor remains committed, as it has been throughout its ninety-four years, to covering major events and overlooked stories from every corner of the globe.
Paul Van Slambrouck
Editor
The Christian Science Monitor
Boston, Massachusetts
Laurel Off-Track?
Your undeserved laurel to Michael Gartner and Gilbert Cranberg in the January/February issue somehow morphed into an equally undeserved dart at The Des Moines Register.
You state that the Register had showed “little interest” in Prairie Meadows Racetrack and Casino until the Gartner and Cranberg advertorial insert on November 6, 2001. A check of our electronic archive showed more than two dozen substantive stories about Prairie Meadows’ precarious finances, racing purses and moves to sell the track in the three months leading up to November 6, not to mention columns, editorials, and letters to the editor. What you said Iowans “learned” from the ad they really had learned months or years before in the Register. The ad, you wrote, exposed “serious financial problems” at the casino.
In August, the Register reported: “Prairie Meadows Racetrack and Casino will significantly scale back its practice of donating millions to Iowa charities and community organizations, officials said Monday.
“Casino officials blamed lower gambling revenues and sharply escalating state gambling taxes for the prospective cutback.
“In its most recent financial-outlook report — now nearly a year old — Prairie Meadows projected that its charitable contributions would end completely in 2003.”
A June 9, 2001, Register story noted: “A vote in favor of the casino license is crucial for Iowa’s horse-racing industry, which probably could not survive at Prairie Meadows without slot machine subsidies. The track paid out $13 million more in purses and expenses last year than it made in pari-mutuel bets on horses, which fell 12.5 percent.”
I could go on and on.
The 4,500-word advertorial position paper you praise added nothing new other than assertion and opinion. As always, the Register prefers to do independent and unbiased reporting.
Paul Anger
Editor and vice president
The Des Moines Register
Des Moines, Iowa
The editors reply: The Laurel to the Gartner-Cranberg investigative ad was well deserved, in CJR’s view, if only for its service in connecting all the dots.
Dubious Posture
Steve McNally, who wrote the “Letter From Jerusalem” in your January/February issue, should be reminded that bending over backwards — and especially holding the position — often causes blackouts or, at best, a skewed perception of reality. In at least a dozen instances, words in quotes refer to Israeli or pro-Israeli positions. I could not find one word on the Palestinian side within quotes. When the words “terrorist activities” and even “country” are put in quotes, I can see that the bent-over-backwards position is having its effect. Then, of course, there is the required, “There’s no real truth here,” which someone said, so it must be included. Is moral equivalence now part of freedom of the press?
I belong to CAMERA so I have read the monograph on bias in NPR’s coverage of the conflict. Have the editors read it? Has McNally? I thought a reporter should respond to data where available rather than counterattack editorially. Where is McNally’s evenhandedness now? Ah yes, at the very end of the piece, we learn that free lance McNally reports for NPR. Quel surpris! I can hardly wait to see McNally’s piece on the Karin A. You know, the vessel carrying “contraband arms” for use by “terrorists.”
There is a long paragraph asking for forgiveness for being Western and middle-class and being a member of a Western consumer society. McNally, I forgive you. I’m not sure the Palestinians (or Hamas) will, no matter what you write.
Harold B. Reisman
Weston, Connecticut
Undue Credit
In your 40th anniversary issue (November/December), CJR gave
scant mention to the media’s coverage — or lack of coverage
— of the nation’s savings and loan crisis. On page 107,
a brief trailer mentions “Billions paid out by government
in S&L scandal . . .” Then on page 135, CJR says the
S&L story “had been reported but mostly on a bank by
bank basis in the financial pages . . . the story finally broke
open in 1989 with a series in The Washington Post.”
Actually, by 1989 the S&L mess was already a national story
— but in the pages of the trade press and a few other newspapers,
notably The Dallas Morning News and the Houston Post. Since the
mid-1980s National Thrift News (and its successor National Mortgage
News) had been reporting on the crisis and connecting the dots.
NTN/NMN — which broke the ‘Keating Five’ story
and other developments — was honored with the Polk Award
in 1988 for its coverage of the crisis, a full year before the
Post supposedly stumbled upon the story. In 1989 three NTN/NMN
reporters published ‘Inside Job, the Looting of America’s
Savings and Loans’ (McGraw-Hill) which went on to become
a New York Times bestseller.
In other words, you are right — most of the media missed the S&L crisis — but not all. To suggest that The Washington Post put the story on the map is just blatantly wrong. The Post missed the story along with most of the other media giants, including The New York Times. If only cjr had done its homework . . . then again, not doing one’s homework is why most of the big boys missed the story in the first place.
Paul Muolo
Executive editor
National Mortgage News
Washington, D.C.
For the Record
I read “Darts & Laurels,” by Gloria Cooper, with astonishment and dismay. Cooper pats her fellow journalists on the back for their coverage of the September 11 terrorist attacks: “The nation’s news media conducted themselves with the courage, honesty, grace, and dedication a free society deserves. In that tragic emergency, America’s journalists knew what they needed to do. And, for the record, they did it,” she wrote.
I disagree. The media have a long, long way to go to redeem their traditional claim of being the public’s watchdog. They can start by applying increasing scrutiny to the Bush administration for its failure to defend the nation from terrorists on September 11.
L. Hallak
San Jose, California
You wrote: “In that tragic emergency, America’s journalists knew what they needed to do. And, for the record, they did it.”
And, for the record, haven’t really done it since. The intervening time has seen a remarkable amount of rumor mongering, jingoism, blind adherence to rumor, and armchair patriotism.
Jeff Green
Kent Lakes, New York
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