By Gloria Cooper
Dart
To the Philadelphia Inquirer, for its extravagant production of an off-off little drama.
Scene I. In an article co-authored by the staff writer Mario F. Cattabiani, the paper throws its spotlight in the annual meeting of the National Conference of State Legislatures, held this year in Seattle, rigorously recording in minute detail the food and drunk and giveaways and entertainment provided by the conference's corporate underwriters.
Scene II. Daylin Leach, a Pennsylvania state representative and former processional stand-up comic, adds another of his sometimes x-rated political satires to the hundreds of others archived on leachvent.com, a personal Web site he maintains for family and friends. In this one, a fictitious reporter, sent by his clueless editors to cover the conference in Seattle, doggedly skilks around in nutty disguises hoping to catch a legislator in such bacchanalian acts as eating a corporate-funded muffin or (a running gag) "getting his jimmy pierced." The straight arrow legislator, for his part, tries in vain to convince the reporter — named, most irreverently, "Mario" — that the lawmakers are truly more interested in the seminars on education and the environment than in Geisha girls and karaoke.
Scene III. The Inquirer gives page-one play — along with news of Katrina's cataclysmic devastation and a stampede in Iraq that left 800 dead — to a 1,575-word news story about Mario C. Cattabiani headed PA Lawmaker's Blog: Funny — Or Offensive? Laced with excerpts that show the lawmaker's irreverence, the story is also laced with quotes that testify to Cattabiani's enterprise — quotes of outraged reaction that Cattabiani solicited from selected spokespeople who were bound to find Leach's blog offensive but who, it now appears, had never even heard of it until Cattabiani brought it to their attention.
Scene IV. The Inquirer follows its front-page revelations with a blistering editorial calling Leach "a joke." Titled What A Lame Attempt At Humor! The editorial blasts him for his distasteful references to sex and drugs, and cites, among other examples it disapproves of, "the Democrat's sarcasm about President Bush's intelligence" and the one about "getting stoned on hashish with Henry Kissinger." This indictment, however, fails to note that in Leach's most recent spoof, the target clearly mocked had been The Inquirer itself. Appearing a few days later will be a similarly bilious (and similarly incomplete) piece by columnist John Grogan.
Scene V. Leach rings down the curtain on leachvent.com (inspiring two more Cattabiani stories). "If anyone has been offended by anything I have written, I am truly sorry," Leach tells his Web site fans, none of whom he says has ever complained. "I was trying to make people laugh and think, not upset them."
Epilogue. Various observers (in the Allentown Morning Call, the Main Line Times) weigh in with less than rave reviews of the Inquirer's performance, and the paper runs some letters criticizing what one reader calls its "personal vendetta." But it is the Philadelphia City Paper, perhaps, that sums the whole thing up most bluntly: "The Inquirer savaged this young legislator because his satire was hitting the mark: Them."
Laurel
To the Baltimore Sun, for peering through the portholes in the ship of state. With all the anxiety afloat about the vulnerability to terrorist attack of the nation's ports, reporters Michael Dresser and Greg Barretet set out to test the local waters, logging their findings in a July 10 front-page special report. Three months in the making, their investigation into security at the Baltimore port, eighth largest in the country, drew on state records, confidential interviews with port police, and the reporters' own eyewitness inspections, documented the telling Sun staff photos.
Among other lapses, they found gaps in fences, unattended gates, phony video cameras, inoperative alarms, sleeping guards, lax identification of visitors, and a manpower shortage that keeps patrol boats in dock for indefensibly long stretches of time. As an accompanying editors' note explained, the paper's "goal was to improve safety by focusing public attention on shortcomings without providing a road map to those who might want to exploit them" — and indeed, attention got focused. While some outraged readers were condemning the exposé as "un-American," "criminal," and "a new low in public responsibility," transportation officials announced a tightening of procedures and a state legislative panel scheduled hearings into security shortcomings at the port.
Dart
To the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and countless other smaller newspapers in he U.S., Canada, and the U.K., for investing prime editorial space in a deceptive venture. Each of the papers carries in its business pages a financial advice column that is literally identical to the others, the only difference being in the writer's name and accompanying photo. Oh, yes — there is also a difference in the details given at the bottom as to where the columnist can be reached, which always happens to be the local branch of the financial-services company Edward Jones, from whose p.r. department at its St. Louis headquarters the unmarked advertisements — er, "public service" offerings — actually come.
Darts & Laurels is written by Gloria Cooper, CJR's deputy executive editor, to whom nominations should be addressed: gc15@columbia.edu.
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