Darts & Laurels
Dart: What's Wrong with This Picture?
At
KENS-TV, the CBS affiliate in San Antonio, reporter Bridget Smith’s
sweeps-week news story about a “miracle” anti-wrinkle
cream included the price of the product, a local phone number
for ordering, reassurance by the anchor about its safety and efficacy,
and further details by its sole San Antonio distributor, one Jennifer
McCabe. McCabe, it turns out, works for KENS as a producer/director
in commercial production and is engaged to the newscast’s
executive producer. The San Antonio Express-News asked the news
director, Tom Doerr, to comment on the apparent conflict. Replied
Doerr smoothly, “I don’t see an ethical problem.”
At
WMAQ-TV, the NBC owned-and-operated station in Chicago, Dave Lissner,
flanked by the two anchors of the five o-clock Thursday newscast,
has been delivering features on local restaurants. Lissner is
the owner and publisher of a guide to local restaurants that advertise
in his publication (in the form of menus). As reported by Robert
Feder, media critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, WMAQ bosses found
nothing unpalatable in Lissner’s double role. “They’ve
actually told me that I can do any restaurant I want,” Lissner
told Feder. “They’ve not told me to do or not do anything.”
Celebrating
itself in a March house ad, The Providence Journal boasted to
readers, “Only one can be the best. And it’s not The
Hartford Courant. It’s not The Boston Herald. It’s not
even The Boston Globe. The New England Newspaper Association picked
The Providence Journal as the New England Newspaper of the Year
in the Metro Category . . . .” Nowhere did it mention that
neither the Herald nor the Globe had bothered to enter the contest.
At
WCIV-TV, the ABC affiliate in Charleston, South Carolina, reporter
Jill Miller was covering state politics while serving as president
of the East Cooper Republican Women’s Club. Asked about the
appearance of a conflict of interest, the general manager at the
time, Steve Brock, told the city’s Post and Courier in November
that he saw no problem. “Everybody’s biased,” he
said.
Meanwhile,
it appears that when WRAL, the CBS affiliate in Raleigh, North
Carolina, fired Renee McCoy, the longtime anchor on the early-morning
and noon newscasts, it did the right thing for the wrong reasons.
According to a story published in the Raleigh News & Observer,
McCoy, a single mother, had asked for and been given a lighter
workload to have more time with her young daughter, and much to
her surprise, when contract renewal came up, management had complied
— big time. But not to worry. Although McCoy, as well as
the News & Observer reporter, kept the story’s focus
on “the larger issue” of her job loss — namely,
the conflict between job and family — readers also learned,
if only incidentally, that McCoy would now be expanding her already-established
public relations business, in which, among other things, the anchor
had been coaching newsmakers in dealing with the news media.
Dart:
The Uses of Publicity
When The Virginian-Pilot received a press kit about “Precious
Cargo,” an upcoming PBS documentary about the first generation
of Vietnamese adoptees, in which were featured two local residents
who had met and fallen in love on a trip to their homeland sponsored
by the agency that decades ago had brought them as infants to
America, the paper didn’t review the documentary as the publicists
had hoped. Instead, The Virginian-Pilot ran a front-page article
rehearsing the tale of the “Precious Cargo” newlyweds
with no reference at all to the program or, for that matter, its
producer, Janet Gardner, whom The Virginian-Pilot reporter had
interviewed at length. The paper did, however, make use of one
of the still photos included in the press kit.
Darts: Adventures in Idea-ology
The
big bold idea put forward in “The Ideas Industry” column
in the March 3 Washington Post came from the mouth of Robert W.
Hahn, identified as director of the American Enterprise Institute-Brookings
Joint Center for Regulatory Studies: since “full” disclosure
of conflicts of interest is never really possible, Hahn’s
argument went, the press should abandon the attempt and concentrate
on a source’s expertise rather than on his funding. For the
Ideas Industry columnists Richard Morin and Claudia Deane, it
was an idea whose time had clearly come. Readers were given nary
a word about the generous funding of Hahn’s Regulatory Studies
Center by Arthur Andersen, Deloitte & Touche, Ernst &
Young, and PriceWaterhouseCoopers, as well as State Farm, US Air,
Edison Mission Energy, and other entities that have a vested interest
in opposing industry regulation.
Hahn
no doubt favors as well the all-too-common practice of omitting
from the bios of outside op-ed writers the political orientation
of the neutrally named groups they represent. In a March 18 piece
in The Bergen Record, for example, lauding the benefits to humanity
of “cheap energy” (i.e., fossil-burning fuels) while
dismissing pollution threats to public health, and in another
in the June 3 Des Moines Register, on why the proposed Kyoto pact
would mean “all pain, no gain,” the writer was identified
as follows: “Tom Randall directs environmental programs at
the John P. McGovern Center for Environmental and Regulatory Affairs
at the National Center for Public Policy Research.” Both
papers also noted that “This piece was distributed by the
Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.” What the I.D. left out
is that the NCPPR exists to bring public opinion around to the
conservative view and that, among its self-described environmental
missions, “the collection and promotion of regulatory horror
stories” is counted as key.
Laurel:
The Jenin Story
With Yasir Arafat charging that during the battle at Jenin, the
West Bank camp that is home to 13,000 Palestinian refugees and
a reputed training ground for terrorists, Israeli forces had committed
a “massacre” of more than 500 innocents; with Israeli
denials noted dutifully if unpersuasively; with much of the British
press embracing Israel’s guilt as established fact; with
the United Nations preparing an investigation by a team whose
political sympathies ensured that its conclusions would be challenged
— amid all this confounding din, what was the world to believe?
Enter the independent U.S. news media, on a fact-finding mission
of their own. Touring the camp as soon as Israel deemed it safe,
American journalists filed crucial — and credible —
accounts of what they saw and heard and smelled. In The Boston
Globe, for example, Charles A. Radin and Dan Ephron, after interviewing
teenage Palestinian fighters, a leader of Islamic Jihad, an elderly
man whose home was at the center of the fighting, and other residents
of the camp who were present during the battle, concluded that
“in contrast with allegations by some Palestinians and Amnesty
International investigators . . . women and children were able
to evacuate the camp before the climactic battle began.”
As the headline over their page-one story put it, claims of massacre
go unsupported by palestinian fighters. Edward A. Gargan of Newsday,
graphically describing his “daylong journey through bullet-scarred
alleys, staircases punched through by rockets, and disemboweled
houses” and recounting his numerous interviews with Palestinian
residents, concluded that there was, as the headline summed it
up, no sign of massacre in jenin camp. Unsparing of the details
of devastation and destruction, correspondents for other U.S.
news outlets reached the same conclusion: not a deliberate, cold-blooded
murder of hundreds, but a loss in battle of dozens. On that point,
at least, Arafat and Sharon finally agreed.
(Only rarely, of course, does the truth about events in the Middle
East lend itself to such quantification; the more ordinary burden
of responsible journalism is in furnishing reportage free of subtly
subjective weight. Newsweek’s insightful account of the siege
at the Church of Nativity in Bethlehem, for instance (cover story,
May 20), included the perspectives of a Palestinian militant,
an Israeli reservist, a Franciscan priest, and a teenage bystander.
In contrast, a photo essay in Time (also May 20), by Carolyn Cole
— the only photographer to get inside — showed nothing
but trapped, suffering Palestinians. Sample captions: “Wounded”;
“Tired and hungry”; “Nothing to do”; “All
alone.” “The men sent abroad were heartbroken,”
ran the largest blurb in the eight-page spread. “They sacrificed
themselves.”)
Laurel:
No Rose Gardens Here.
It’s a sad, familiar story, our inhuman treatment of humans
who are mentally ill and poor. Does it need to be told again?
Does it still have the power to shock? And, even if it does, will
it do any good? The answer, as shown in Clifford J. Levy’s
ineffaceable report in The New York Times, is yes and yes and
yes. The result of a yearlong investigation of the so-called adult-home
system — a system that today “serves” 15,000 resident-patients
and costs $600 million a year in taxpayer dollars to run —
Levy’s three-part series, Broken Homes (April 28-30) made
disturbingly clear that the mostly for-profit homes are at least
as bad as the snake pits of the psychiatric hospitals they were
designed to replace, and in some ways arguably worse. Based on
three dozen visits to the most troubled adult homes in New York
City, hundreds of interviews, and an examination of thousands
of pages of records, Levy’s probe exposed a system in which
illiterate aides dispense complex medications, wantonly neglected
patients throw themselves from windows, unwitting residents are
put under the knife for unneeded eye and prostate surgeries solely
for the collection of Medicare-Medicaid dollars, and deaths natural
or otherwise go unnoticed, unrecorded, and unquestioned. Before
the ink on the series was dry, federal prosecutors began to investigate,
the health department pledged reform, the Pataki administration
hired a consultant to improve inspection, and his Democratic rivals
had a new issue to seize on in New York’s gubernatorial race.
Laurel:
Iron Principles
Thanks to the actions of a teed-off Golf Digest editor, the magazine
has taken a more open stance in its coverage of the PGA Tour.
As brought to the fore by David Sweet in the SportsBusiness Journal
(whose parent company, Advance Publication, also owns Golf Digest),
the magazine recently signed on as a media sponsor of the PGAT,
an arrangement that allows other sponsors to place ads in Golf
Digest’s “tour talk” sections as a way of satisfying
their advertising obligations to the tour. In March, just such
a section had, much to the staff’s dismay, appeared in Golf
Digest — nine and a half pages on the hobbies of PGAT stars
and nine ads from the likes of IBM, Hyundai, TD Waterhouse, Starwood
Hotels, Hyundai, Thermacare, and Palm, most sporting the tour
logo and none of the section beclouded by an “advertising”
label. Informed by his Golf Digest bosses of plans for a similar
section in September, Ed Weathers, a senior editor at the magazine,
quit. Interviewed by the SportsBusiness Journal for its Weathers-resignation
story, a Golf Digest spokesman insisted that “We would not
compromise our integrity,” but a spokesman for the tour suggested
otherwise. “We discussed what content would be, and they
did it,” he told the SBJ. “We’re trying to come
up with editorial content that puts our players in a good light.”
On the day the story broke in SBJ, Golf Digest announced that
its September “tour talk” section would be treated entirely
as advertising or advertorial.
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).
