Darts & Laurels
for telling the truth, but not the whole truth, in news about
itself, to: CNN. When The New York Times
revealed in March that those reassuring TV segments about the
new Medicare law were in fact taxpayer-funded Bush commercials
in journalistic drag — the segments used actors posing as reporters
and were presented as legitimate news in politically targeted
markets — other outlets picked up the story. CNN, for one, dealt
with it only on Paula Zahn Now, in a discussion centered on the
bear-in-the-woods question of whether the video news release was
“misleading.” Never acknowledged was the role of CNN itself as
middleman in the misleading. As disclosed by the CJR Web site
campaigndesk.org, the phony report had been distributed through
the CNN Newsource service to subscribing local stations in a “reporter
package” that, in at least some cases, failed to distinguish clearly
between VNRs and news. In the wake of that exposure, CNN promised
a change of policy: henceforth such infomercials will be distributed
separately from genuine news footage, and to only those stations
that (for whatever dubious reasons) want them.
for telling the truth, but not the whole truth, in news about
itself, to: The Virginian-Pilot. On February
1, the paper carried a nineteen-paragraph story, with photo, on
the death of Dennis O’Brien, a thirty-five-year-old Pilot reporter
who seven months earlier had returned from Iraq, where he was
embedded with the Marines’ 2nd Light Armor Reconnaissance Battalion.
The story was filled with details about O’Brien’s education, family,
and career, as well as excerpts from his dispatches and expressions
of loss from the paper’s editor. Other details, however, were
missing. In deference to the family’s wishes — and in disregard
of its own obligation to report fully without favor — the paper
withheld the cause of the journalist’s death. That detail was
later revealed in a highly critical piece by Editor & Publisher:
O’Brien had taken his own life, in a public park in Norfolk, where
a Pilot colleague he’d arranged to meet there discovered O’Brien’s
body.
for telling the truth, but not the whole truth, in news about
itself, to: The Roanoke Times. With fanfare,
tax breaks, and a bill of $31. 6 million, the paper last October
launched a new Heidelberg Mainstream 80 press. Some effects were
immediate: blurry photos, wasted copies, infuriated carriers,
earlier deadlines, incomplete sports scores, irritated readers,
stressed-out staff. Other effects came later: the assignment of
a story about those problems to a business reporter, Duncan Adams,
who took seriously the Times’s guidelines to apply the
same standards in stories about itself that it would to “any other
business”; the unexplained holding of that story after it was
finished; a petition signed by twenty-nine members of the news
staff calling on the paper’s publisher, Wendy Zomparelli, to “halt
further actions which may delay, soften or minimize the impact
of the Adams article”; publication of a new version of the Adams
article from which his byline was removed at his request. Adams
was protesting the deletion of certain discomfiting facts he’d
found about continuing problems at specified Mainstream 80 sites
in Britain, France, and particularly Denmark, where the Dansk
AvisTryk, after three years of printer bedevilment, was considering
getting rid of the thing. (That newspaper’s lawsuit against Heidelberg
was reported by the British trade publication PrintWeek on the
day the Times story ran.)
to the San Antonio Express-News, for a second
rough draft of history. With “regime change” and “nation-building”
now part of our national vocabulary, the Express-News took on
the ambitious task of not only telling, but — more important —
showing what those buzzwords actually mean. Dispatching teams
to five selected countries that, for better or worse, were targets
of U.S. intervention over the last two decades, the paper produced
a massive report that looked unblinkingly at the record. For each
of the five countries the presentation was the same: key facts
on the prelude, the players, and the chronology, accompanied by
narratives that brought the historic intervention to dramatic
life. But for each of the five countries, of course, the outcome
was not the same: Grenada now celebrates as its Thanksgiving the
date that U.S. troops arrived in 1983; Panama, though free of
Noriega, has not escaped from his legacy of corruption; in Bosnia
and Kosovo, the future looks grim; Haiti still stands as the classic
example of a worse-case scenario. What made the difference between
“failure” and “success”? In the series’ view, it was the degree
of U.S. commitment. As to the lesson for today’s Iraq, “this much
America has learned: removing one man does not a successful nation-building
make.”
to The Denver Post, for a journalistic bugle
call to arms. During its nine-month investigation into the raging
epidemic of sexual assault and domestic abuse rampant in the U.S.
military, the Post analyzed Army records and Veterans
Affairs surveys, and interviewed lawyers, counselors, and Pentagon
officials. Most impressively, it listened to the wrenching personal
stories of more than sixty of the estimated 200,000 women who
have experienced such attacks. Its three-part series, raw with
photos of victims’ faces twisted by the remembering, documented
not only the extent of the crisis, but, almost as shocking, the
military’s indefensible response. For the attackers, leniency
and protection; for the victims, threats, thwarted justice, ruined
careers and lives. Noting the inattention to past reforms, the
series mapped out new ones — including the controversial possibility
of limiting the authority of commanders to decide whether one
of their own offending soldiers should be court-martialed. Such
proposals are likely to be on the agendas of the several investigations
prompted by the series. Maybe this time the reforms won’t be so
easily dismissed.
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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