Darts & Laurels
Laurel for not going gentle into that editorial night, to:
Virginia Gerst, editor of Diversions, a section that appears in twenty-seven editions of the weekly Pioneer Press in suburban Chicago. Ordered to run an appetizing restaurant review concocted by the paper’s marketing director to tempt the eatery’s owner — and erstwhile advertiser — who reportedly had expressed distaste for an earlier review that was something less than a rave, Gerst raised strong ethical objections to no avail. And so, Gerst quit.
Dan Cook and Sharon Debusk, editor and managing editor, respectively, of the Portland, Oregon, Business Journal. The Journal’s interview with the local Planned Parenthood’s ceo was already at the printer when Craig Wessel, publisher of the Advance Publications weekly, stepped in and killed it. As reported by Willamette Week, Wessel’s stated objection to the interview — an interview that, among other things, explored the organization’s plans for expansion as well as its efforts at improving operational efficiency and cost control — was that “it had no relevance to the business community.” The publisher also reportedly said (and reportedly denied) that (1) the piece was inappropriately positioned on a page with an important ad for a bank, and that (2) the paper “doesn’t cover extremist groups.” And so, with plenty of reasons to pick from, Cook and DeBusk quit.
Gerson Borrero, editor-in-chief of El Diario/La Prensa in New York, the nation’s oldest Spanish-language daily. After three of Borrero’s colleagues sent to the paper’s new Canadian owners a petition they had circulated among Cuban exiles in Miami protesting a scheduled op-ed piece on education by Fidel Castro — the first of a series solicited by Borrero from the presidents of Latin American countries — the owners killed the piece. And so, Borrero quit.
to Boston Magazine, for doing its homework, and then some. Now that the church has begun to rid itself of those who prey on children, can the state be far behind? Not very, if Boston magazine has anything to say about it, which it unequivocally did in its October issue. Based on records obtained after a legal battle with the Massachusetts Department of Education, the article, “Teachers’ Dirty Looks,” documented the alarming presence in the system of teachers with criminal records of rape, indecent assault, child pornography, and sexual harassment. More alarming still are the inexcusable loopholes in the law that permit, even encourage, that presence. In twenty-seven states, for example, sex between a teacher and a sixteen-year-old student is illegal — but not in Massachusetts. In forty-two states, applicants for teaching jobs are subjected to nationwide criminal background checks by the FBI — but not in Massachusetts. (The Bay State confines its check to arrests or convictions that occurred only within its borders, effectively offering a convenient school playground to molesters from neighboring states.) And in such other state agencies as those that oversee doctors and lawyers, officials have the power to issue subpoenas — but not in Massachusetts’s Department of Education, which lacks that tool so vital to investigations of abuse. Almost before the ink was dry, a state senator had convened a task force, the Globe was reporting on the debate the article raised, and the Herald was editorializing on the “Glaring Schoolhouse Gap” exposed by the city magazine.
to The Blade, in Toledo, Ohio, for cutting through the fog of war and time and secrecy. Thirty-six years after an elite forty-five-man U.S. Army platoon in tiger-striped uniforms arrived in the jungles of Vietnam on a search-and-destroy mission aimed at “out-guerrilling” the fierce guerrilla enemy, the paper undertook a daunting mission of its own: to investigate allegations, never before publicly aired, that many members of that “Tiger Force” unit had committed unthinkable atrocities against unarmed Vietnamese civilians. The result, eight months in the making and drawing on thousands of classified and unclassified records and scores of interviews with former Tiger Force soldiers as well as witnesses in Vietnam, was a four-part series published in October. Its title, “Buried Secrets, Brutal Truths,” did not exaggerate: in a perverse definition of a “free-fire zone,” platoon members shot down elderly farmers in their fields, beheaded a baby, kicked out the teeth of dead civilians to grab the gold, tortured and executed prisoners, strung human trophy ears on shoelaces to wear as necklaces. Almost as shockingly, findings of official inquiries disappeared into Army archives, and with the help of the Nixon administration, the war criminals got away with it. That is, until now.
to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, for exhibiting symptoms of journalistic malaise. A September 24 article on the paper’s Web site (since revised), in which the paper reported that two students at the University of Georgia had been hospitalized with a tentative diagnosis of meningitis — one viral, one bacterial — was almost a perfect reprint, word for carefully chosen word, of a press release put out by the university. Although a quick and simple Google search could have helped the paper educate readers about some of the particularly relevant, if not particularly reassuring, facts about the deadly bacterial form of the disease — for example, the transmission rates for college students, the rates for dorm residents, the fact that it can be transmitted by kissing, and the rate of fatalities — the paper bypassed that opportunity. What it did add to the UGA press release was this: “By Kelly Simmons, Atlanta Journal-Constitution Staff Writer.”
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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