DARTS
AND LAURELS
BY
GLORIA COOPER
DARTS
SCOUNDREL
TIME
------------------------------------------------------------------------
To wear it, to wave it -- among the more fatuous issues that journalists
face in the wake of September 11 are those unfurled by the flag.
Now it appears that at least one news organization has itself
joined the Flag Police. In a McCarthyesque, anonymously written
column of political chatter on Sunday, September 16, the Citizens'
Voice of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, self-righteously impugned
the patriotism of one Dave Janoski, a reporter and editor for
the rival Times Leader, for "repeatedly stand[ing] silent"
when county commissioners pledge allegiance to the flag at meetings
"he attends." Headlined it's your flag, dave, pledge
allegiance!, the piece neglected to mention that Janoski had attended
those meetings as part of an investigation into ties between the
county and the Voice, ties that allegedly had included printing-job
payments to a reporter who now covers county business for the
Voice. Three weeks later, on Sunday, October 7, in another anonymous
column, the Voice reported the "shocking" news that
Charlie Herring, a high school history teacher who happens to
be "one of [the] biggest supporters" of a school board
member seeking reelection, "was seen two weeks ago yesterday
seated at a secretary's desk in the main office, looking at papers
during the Pledge of Allegiance"; what's more, the Voice
noted indignantly, Herring had "never stood" while faculty
and students displayed "their pride and respect for the American
Flag." On October 14, the Voice plied its poisonous brand
of patriotism still more toxically with a cartoon showing Herring
sitting feet up on desk, the lesson on the blackboard reading
"Great Flag Burnings of the Sixties," while two persevering
students recite the pledge. The cartoon caption read something
fishy in crestwood. Indeed.
MISSING
------------------------------------------------------------------------
To mark the 350th anniversary of the city of Norwalk, Connecticut,
The Hour on Sunday, September 30, carried a special who's who
section profiling scores of local heroes in every walk of civic
life, from sports, education, and religion to the arts, medicine,
the law, and, of course, business -- including, not surprisingly,
Stew Leonard, the proprietor and advertiser of the famous food
store that bears his name. The fifteen-column-inch story on the
"tireless," "imaginative," man with the "fertile
mind" was as tactful as it was fawning. "At one point
several years ago," The Hour reported euphemistically, Leonard
"followed a path of advice that led to violation of federal
income tax laws. He pleaded guilty and was isolated from his business,
his community, and his family for more than four years. A devastating
blow, but he survived it by applying the same positive attitude
he had always taken in the face of adversity." What The Hour,
while mentioning that Leonard had been "incarcerated,"
left out: that he had gone to prison for a $17.1 million tax fraud
in a cash-skimming scheme that helped him and his wife avoid paying
$6.7 million in income taxes -- the largest criminal tax fraud
in Connecticut history.
The New York Times's promotional campaign this fall featured Norman
Rockwell's classic painting "Freedom from Fear," in
which all-American mom tucks the kids into bed as all-American
dad looks on, newspaper in hand headlining ominous news of war.
According to the image published by the Times, that paper was
the September 12 New York Times itself, announcing u.s. attacked
. . . hijacked jets destroy twin towers and hit pentagon in day
of terror. What the Times, in a stroke of artful chutzpa, left
out: that the fragmented headline in Rockwell's 1943 original
reads bombings kill . . . horror hits, inspired by FDR's Four
Freedoms speech in World War II; and that the paper gripped by
the father is the Bennington Banner in Vermont -- a paper still
very much alive.
ARS
LONGA,
JOURNALISM BREVIS
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The quality of mercy at USA Today is not strained; it isn't there
at all. When three high-spirited employees -- sportswriter Karen
Allen, sports special project editor Denise Tom, and database
editor Cheryl Phillips, whose combined years with Gannett total
more than two score and ten -- found themselves gazing at the
costly blue sphere on display in the executive suite of the company's
new $300 million digs, they could not resist the impulse to leave
a "Kilroy was here" message among what looked like other
markings in a layer of dust on the ball. Unamused, the company's
royals -- after viewing a security-camera videotape of the trio's
prank, after meetings with the culprits, and after receiving their
apologies, a letter of remorse, and their offers to pay for fixing
the dust-like blue pigment they had so innocently disturbed --
handed down an "irreversible" decree worthy of Draco,
if not the Marx Brothers: Fired without severance immediately.
Significantly, the sculptor herself, Lita Albuquerque, was more
offended by the punishment than by the crime. "I think it's
a terrible thing, firing people from a lifetime job for what is
essentially graffiti . . . . It is certainly reparable for not
a lot of money," Albuquerque told The Washington Post's Lloyd
Grove. "This," she pronounced, "is crazy!"
Seems to us that the artist's perspective is pretty much on the
ball.
LAURELS
INSPECTING
THE BAGGAGE
------------------------------------------------------------------------
While the public shuddered and Congress sputtered as the press
uncovered one security lapse after another at airport after airport,
Knight Ridder newspapers took off in a different direction. Piloted
by a first-class team that included Mike McGraw of The Kansas
City Star, Fredric N. Tulsky, Eric Nalder, and Pete Carey of the
San Jose Mercury News, and Seth Borenstein of KR's Washington
bureau, the investigation traced the history of efforts to improve
the country's aviation security system in recent years. They found
an unsettling pattern in which commonsensical plans ran into such
heavy political turbulence that they never left the ground. Proposals
for keeping explosives off planes; for conducting background checks
on workers; for setting minimum standards in hiring and training
screeners; for requiring foreign carriers to adopt certain measures
-- at every turn, public safety has been bumped by the VIPs, those
Very Influential Priorities convenience and cost, so dear to the
hearts of the security companies, the airlines, and the FAA. And,
therefore, dear as well to Congress, a dizzying number of whose
members have passed through the revolving door between airline
industry lobbyists and regulators, are the grateful recipients
of hefty contributions to their political campaigns and parties,
and as Very Important Politicians enjoy exotic trips hosted by
an industry they are supposed to oversee. Meanwhile, actual hijackings,
thwarted conspiracies, suspicious crashes, and other warnings
have gone tragically unheeded, and legislation for reform tragically
delayed. Published only days before the federalization of airport
security became the law of the land, the report raised the question
of whether the government can be trusted this time to put the
public's safety first.
HELP
WANTED
------------------------------------------------------------------------
From Ecuador and Egypt, from El Salvador and China, from Pakistan
and Poland, the immigrants come, willing to accept the abysmal
conditions and substandard pay of the high-risk jobs nobody else
wants but surely not bargaining for death. Yet far too commonly,
as documented by Newsday staff writer Thomas Maier in a disturbing
five-part series, death is what they get. Five-fifty-an-hour pickers
plunging from eighteen-foot piles of garbage, untrained tree trimmers
electrocuted while working near power lines, farm workers felled
by dangerous pesticides, meat handlers crushed while loading heavy
cartons in slippery, icy water -- such were the typical cases
examined by Maier. Drawing on translator-aided interviews, police,
court, and workers' compensation records, and computer-analyzed
documents from various government agencies, Maier discovered in
his ten-month investigation that, of the 4,200 immigrant workers'
deaths that occurred around the country from 1994 to 1999, more
than 500 occurred in New York State alone, many of them on Long
Island, Newsday's home. Maier also discovered that hundreds of
those needless deaths go uninvestigated, unpunished, and uncompensated
by regulatory agencies busily looking the other way. OSHA, for
example, is shown to have frequently cited companies for violations
that were never followed up, exacted promises from employers that
were never kept, and levied laughably low fines. Meanwhile, compensation
to which workers' families were entitled has stayed safely beyond
reach, protected by the immigrants' difficulties with language,
their fear of officialdom, and their ignorance of their rights.
Within days of the series' publication, New York Senator Hillary
Clinton entered it into the record of the confirmation hearings
for OSHA's new head and, together with fellow Senator Charles
Schumer, called for a federal inquiry.
THOROUGHBRED
JOURNALISM
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ninety-three thousand lucky subscribers of The Des Moines Register
got an unexpected windfall with their November 6 paper -- a four-page
insert reported, written, printed, and paid for by Michael Gartner,
the paper's former editor, and Gilbert Cranberg, the retired editor
of its editorial pages, exposing serious financial problems at
the tax-exempt Prairie Meadows racetrack and casino. Bridling
at the local press's show of little interest in earlier tips,
Gartner and Cranberg had themselves taken up the investigative
reins, and, when the Register rejected their finished 4,500-word
series, they'd put their money on an ad. Thus it was that Iowans
came to learn of the inherent conflict in Prairie Meadows's unusual
licensing arrangement, by which it is supposed to "nurture"
the state's horse racing industry (at an ever-increasing cost
through purses in the millions) and, at the same time, contribute
to community charities -- an arrangement that, in effect, has
led to the subsidization of the horse racing industry by the casino.
And thus they came to learn of the bleak future that staying the
course could mean for the charities dependent on money from an
operation whose losses run close to $35 million a year; and to
learn of possible solutions, including a proposal for separate
referendums, in the three Iowa counties that have both tracks
and casinos, on whether each should continue. (In a curious coincidence,
after the Register had accepted the journalists' extraordinary
ad but before it was actually published, the paper straggled in
with a pair of Prairie Meadows stories, clearly spurred by --
but without any nod to -- Gartner and Cranberg's work.)
Nominations
for Darts and Laurels may be addressed to Gloria Cooper, CJR's
deputy executive editor, by mail, phone (212-854-1887), or e-mail
(gc15@columbia.edu).
