to The Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, for two series on law and order that were separate yet equally important. In its ongoing investigation of the increasingly common practice of sealing court records, the Times has proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that in an extraordinary number of such legally sanctioned concealments, the public interest has been badly served. Far better served — as evidenced by the paper’s painstaking analysis of more than 10,000 sealings since 1990 in Washington’s King County — have been the interests of the negligent hospital, the crooked lawyer, the perverted teacher, the unscrupulous maker of an unsafe product, in keeping their transgressions secret. Under the glare of the Times’s headlines, the state supreme court has tightened the rules for allowing such entombments, judges have become less quick to give them license, and the Times continues with its campaign to get improperly sealed files reopened and tell its readers what’s inside . . . . Meanwhile, the Post-Intelligencer (sharer in a shaky joint operating agreement with the rival Times; see page 15) has been busy investigating a different kind of protection at work in King County's justice system: the protection of bad cops in the sheriff’s office. Retracing some of the more dramatic episodes in which the conduct of officers was less than becoming — episodes that brought complaints of beatings, sexual intimidation, and domestic violence, among others — the P-I exposed a union-controlled culture in which higher-ups consistently looked the other way, punished those bold enough to complain, and rewarded offenders with enviable pensions paid for by the public. By spring, the paper was reporting on the many encouraging moves toward civilian oversight. In short, those who doubt the value of sleepless competition to a two-newspaper town need look no further than Seattle.
to WXYZ-TV, Detroit, and its evening anchor Frank Turner, for drawing a little too near to God. With the ABC affiliate’s blessing, Turner has not only been delivering the news but, until the recent past, sermonizing on it as well, using his “Final Thoughts” pulpit at the end of the newscast to righteously expound on such politically fraught matters as prayer in the schools, gay marriage, and God in the Pledge of Allegiance, as revealed through what he sees as the Bible’s literal truth. Little wonder, then, that he had no compunction about asking management to sanctify the Almighty’s latest plan. That plan called for Turner to continue in his high-paying job on the WXYZ news desk while, as his press release put it, working “to bring the ministry of ‘America’s First Evangelical Anchorman’ to Detroit radio listeners [via a two-hour weekday program on the gospel station WEXL] and to the world via the Internet.” No compunction, either, about exhorting the public to be “vocal and demonstrative [in appealing] to Channel 7 directly by phone, fax, email and letter . . . to follow His leading as we demand.” And — in the face of WXYZ’s refusal to grant him dispensation from the no-double-dipping clause in his exclusive three-year contract — no compunction, again, about filing a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission charging religious discrimination. For its part, the station, which dropped “Final Thoughts” in 2004 after viewers complained (though many of those “Thoughts” are still posted on Turner’s Web site), has, Turner’s lawyers observed to the Detroit News, “encouraged and even promoted Turner’s religious calling, until now.” Indeed, WXYZ remains remarkably tolerant of the continuing boast on their popular anchor’s Web site of his “growing reputation for boldly proclaiming the Gospel of our Savior in the last place anyone would expect: a secular newscast.”
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to The Miami Herald, for a less than magnificent obsession. When Philip Blumberg, a prominent businessman and civic leader in the Greater Miami community, was arrested in January on charges of drug possession, the Herald embraced the story and kept it alive at every possible turn. The climax — after five earlier reports (January 31,with photo; February 5, with photo; February 7; March 9, plus page-one teaser and photo; and April 7) — came in a lengthy profile of Blumberg, filled with detail after humiliating detail about his private life, that began on the Sunday, April 9, front page and was accompanied by five photos of the fallen man. Defending all this attention on news-value grounds, the paper vigorously denied any untoward interest in the subject. It did, however, feel obliged, under pressure from Blumberg’s lawyers, to finally write a boxed “disclosure” that ran inside the Sunday piece. Those who managed to read between the convoluted lines gathered that Blumberg and Knight Ridder, the paper’s parent, had once had a deep financial relationship involving the investment of K-R pension funds in Blumberg’s privately owned company, American Ventures; that the affair had ended several years ago in bitterness when Knight Ridder decided to redeem the funds; and that the propriety of that decision is under serious challenge.
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