Darts & Laurels
Dart
for redefining promotion as news, to:
The San Diego Union-Tribune.
Months before the advent of Billy Graham and his evangelical Christian
crusade in San Diego this spring, the Union-Tribune began spreading
the news of his coming, and on Sunday, May 4, it let out all the
stops. An adoring, eight-page, special section (heralded on page
one) was devoted entirely to Graham - "Eternal words from
a man for eternity," ran the section's front-page blurb -
his followers, his mission, and its music, not to mention such
mundane matters as the availability of parking and food. Meanwhile,
a story in the news section seemed to imply that the absence of
rain from the stadium during a preview student gathering had been
the result of an organizer's prayer. In all, from its first report
about the newsworthy revival (December 28) to the final wrap-up
on its great success (May 15), the Union-Tribune blessed Billy
Graham's mission with an awesome sixty-one photos and at least
24,500 words. As one believer put it in a letter to the editor,
"Your coverage . . . served to magnify the message that Graham
continues to bring to the world."
The
Courier News.
The front page of the May 15 edition of the Bridgewater, New Jersey,
paper was taken up mostly by a 40-column-inch report, starting
above the fold and including a four-color photo as well as a boxed
map providing directions and shopping hours, on the opening of
a new T.J. Maxx 'n More off-price store; a page inside was taken
up by 29 more column inches noting, among other things, some forty
categories of merchandise offered. The back page of the section
was taken up by a full-page, four-color ad announcing the grand
opening of the new T.J. Maxx 'n More.
The
Providence Journal.
Since last December, when the Krispy Kreme doughnut chain opened
a mobile bakery at the site of what by spring would be a permanent
store, the paper has been on a journalistic sugar binge - filling
its pages with more than a dozen puffy stories (including lists
of the varieties available), and even sprinkling another dozen
mentions in unrelated pieces about local politics and sports.
Little wonder that when, in celebration of its grand opening on
May 13, the store delivered to Projo newsrooms an abundant sampling
of its treats, dyspeptic staffers found it rather hard to swallow.
Dart
to NBC Nightly News, for slipping on a story in its own
front yard. When the House of Representatives voted on July 23
to block a new FCC rule that would allow TV networks to own more
stations, it was front-page news across the country: after all,
so stunning a reversal by so overwhelming a margin (400 to 21)
of a rule so passionately pushed by the powerful media companies
(not to mention President Bush) had been accomplished by a deluge
of e-mails, phone calls, and letters of protest from 2 million
ordinary folks. This development presented the networks with a
challenge: how to cover a story in which they had an obvious interest.
On ABC World News Tonight, to its credit, Peter Jennings concisely
covered the salient points, noting the "public outcry"
and his network's ownership by Disney. On The CBS Evening News,
Dan Rather gave at least a nod to the House's action, albeit in
a measly forty-two words without context or elaboration, let alone
acknowledgement of his network's interest in the outcome. But
over at NBC Nightly News, Tom Brokaw offered viewers even less
than that : for a story of such significant public interest, he
had no words at all. (Nor, apparently, did NBC's sibling, MSNBC;
nothing about the vote showed up on Nexis, and repeated calls
to MSNBC were unavailing.)
Laurel
to Southern Exposure, for exposing some of the shadier
regions of southern life. In "Banking on Misery," a
fifty-three-page cover package in its summer issue, the quarterly
examined the wealth of ways in which the "poverty industry"
conspires, unchecked, to fleece low-income, blue-collar, mostly
minority people desperate for cash. Those ways, described and
documented in rich detail, range from predatory mortgage lending
and credit-insurance rip-offs to usurious interest on credit cards,
gouging on payday loans, and entrapment in overdraft costs. Worse,
it's not the stingy neighborhood pawn broker or the heartless
corner banker who's doing the exploiting: it's the respectable,
powerful financial institutions - most egregiously, Citigroup
and its various subsidiaries, as well as the ubiquitous one-stop
"financial supermarkets," where one can do everything
from paying a bill to getting a loan, all for outlandishly high
fees - that keep their hapless customers in a cycle of debt and
keep Wall Street happy. If the situation seems hopeless, the magazine's
editors are not: the package closes, resourcefully, with another
fact-filled section: "Fighting Back."
Dart
to The Today Show, for failing to meet truth-in-labeling
standards. In a June 12 segment on the growing crisis of childhood
obesity, substitute anchor Lester Holt brought together Felix
Ortiz, a New York assemblyman who had proposed a so-called junk-food
tax - a 1 percent tax on snacks, soft drinks, fatty foods, and
the like that would be used for education programs - and Dr. Elizabeth
Whelan, president of the seemingly independent American Council
on Science and Health, who, while acknowledging the crisis in
public health, vigorously rejected the idea of a "junk food"
tax, not to mention the very notion of junk food itself. "And,
you know," she declared, "there is room in life for
potato chips and Twinkies and all these other maligned foods if
you don't eat huge amounts of them." Point well taken. But
one that viewers might well have taken with a mindful grain of
salt, had they been given at least a clue to the organization
that Whelan represents. Although it no longer discloses the sources
of its funding, past donors have included the National Soft Drink
Association, M&M Mars, Pepsi-Cola, The Sugar Association,
Coca-Cola, and Frito-Lay.
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).
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