Thursday, May 7, 2015

ARE COWS BECOMING TOO SACRED FOR TOO MANY OF TODAY'S TROUBLED NEWSPAPERS?

My friend Michael H. Price, who I worked with many years ago at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, posted this provocative early 20th Century cartoon, by socialist editorial cartoonist Art Young, depicting the newspapers of the time as brothels:


With the posting, Mike wrote: "The newspaper racket as a brothel. True enough at the start of the 20th Century, when Art Young published this cartoon, and truer in the Great Here & Now. Exceptions all along, of course, but fewer and fewer exceptions. Too much Bread & Circuses, and nowhere near enough provocative substance."

I really wish I could disagree with Mike, but, frankly, I think the sentiment expressed in this cartoon is just as accurate today -- with newspapers continuing to suffer financial hardships due to declining advertising revenues -- as it probably was then. Perhaps even more so.

I've touched on this topic before, in my Feb. 13, 2015, post "NEWSPAPER ETHICS: MAINTAINING (OR NOT) THE LINE BETWEEN DOLLARS AND SENSE," which you will find still available among my older blog posts.

Many of today's papers have seemingly accorded "scared cow" status to large local advertisers -- who seem to have no qualms about using the weight of their advertising dollars to bully publishers and editors -- and to prominent local people, business leader and particularly vocal groups in their communities who raise objections to certain kinds of content.

Once upon a time, back when newspapers were making higher profits than almost any other industry in the United States, most reputable newspapers took great pride in contending they had no sacred cows.

Prominent among those newspapers was afternoon Louisville Times -- where I took my first, post-college reporting job in 1970 -- and its morning sister publication, The Louisville Courier-Journal. But even then and even there, the "no sacred cows" contention wasn't exactly true as I learned when I wrote a story about Democrat Louisville Mayor Dr. Harvey I. Sloane not paying several years worth of a state tax (the exact title of which I can no longer recall) that applied only to those who, like Sloane, were extremely wealthy.

I knew Sloane was good friends with the also very wealthy Bingham family, owners of the papers at the time, who had thrown their full and the newspaper's full support behind his bid to become mayor.

By the time I turned in the story to the city desk the evening before it was to be published in the next afternoon's paper, I had all of my facts confirmed and double checked and even had the mayor acknowledging that he'd "overlooked" the payments due under the tax and his promise that he would immediately make good on what he owed.  My editors and I figured that with all of this nailed down, the cozy relationship between the Binghams and the mayor wouldn't matter when it came to publishing a story about him being significantly delinquent -- we're talking many tens of thousands for dollars delinquent (over the intervening 40 some years I can't recall the exact amount, but I think is was something like $72,000 and change) -- in the payment of any rightfully owed tax.

We were wrong.

When my story was published in the day's first edition, it appeared stripped six-columns across the top of the front page under a large headline that said something like "Mayor fails to pay $72,000 in taxes."

When copies of the first edition hit Publisher Barry Bingham Jr.'s desk, our managing editor, apparently got a call from Barry Jr. raising cain over the story.

As a result, in the day's second edition, the story was moved to the bottom of the page, with the same headline. But that apparently didn't salve Barry Jr.'s state of pisstivity. He didn't want the story on Page 1, period. In addition, Bingham contended that the story was minimalized by my high-up sentence explaining that the particular tax Sloane owed only applied to the very wealthy.

So, by the day's final edition, the story had been moved to a page deep inside the local section under the headline "Mayor fails to pay obscure tax."

As a reporter and then editor at other newspapers where I worked throughout most of the rest of my more than 44 year career, I encountered similar experiences, even though most of those papers also took great pride in saying they had no sacred cows.

Of course, I did enjoy and number of instances where advertisers or prominent individuals and/or business leaders were told that their dollars or their influence were not going to interfere with the publication of valid news stories.

One such instance occurred while I was assistant managing editor for news and projects at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in connection with the Bell Helicopter series that went on to win the 1985 Public Service Pulitzer Prize. The series dealt with a design flaw in some of the helicopters that Fort Worth-based Bell Helicopter built for the U.S. military. In the five-day series, Washington Bureau Reporter Mark Thompson revealed the design flaw -- which led to an in-flight phenomenon called "mast bumping" -- had caused the deaths of nearly 250 service men between 1973 and 1984 and that it had gone uncorrected even after Bell's chief attorney brought it to the attention of company executives in 1979 and recommended the problem be fixed immediately.

The series, which began its five-day run on Sunday, March 25, 1984. enraged Jack Horner, president of Bell, which was the city's single largest employer. On Monday morning the furious Horner called to speak to Publisher Phil Meek, who was out of town. So he settled for screaming over the phone at Executive Editor Jack Tinsley, demanding the series be immediately halted, that the people responsible for it be immediately fired and that a top-of-the-front-page apology to Bell Helicopter be published across six-columns of the Tuesday paper, or else.

Tinsley called me -- as the editor responsible for overseeing those who produced and did the primary editing on the series and for actually putting it in the paper -- into his office. Frankly, I fully expected to be fired.

However, Tinsley told me he had reached Phil Meek by phone and informed him of Horner's demands.

"I asked him what I should tell Horner and Phil told me to tell Horner to go fuck himself. So, that's pretty much what I did," Tinsley told me. Although, by that afternoon, all of our single-copy sales boxes on Bell property had been ripped up and tossed outside the plant gates and a group of Bell employees had begun picketing outside the newspaper, the series continued and my job, Thompson's job and job of State Editor Roland Lindsey, who directly oversaw Thompson, were safe. Here is a link to the stories that were part of the series, which I still think is one of the finest examples of quality American journalism: https://sites.google.com/site/mthompsondc/star-telegramseries.

Considering the financial condition of most newspapers, I wonder how many of today's publishers would come up with that sort of response to livid complaints from an important advertiser, business leader or heavy hitting employer.

I fear the answer is not very many.

Certainly, during the waning years before my retirement as editor of The Monitor in McAllen, Texas, and departure from the newspaper business, I experienced several incidents in which important local advertisers where allowed to directly browbeat me, call me unethical and irresponsible and even accuse me or one or more of my reporters of taking payoffs during meetings called to let them bitch about things published in the newspaper that they didn't like.

And, as I communicate with editor and reporter friends who still are employed at other newspapers around the country, I hear more and more tales of such incidents in which outside influencers are allowed to successfully interfere with what gets published in their papers. The main reason usually being cited is fear of lost advertising revenue. The consequence, valid and important news stories with, as my friend Mike Price put it, "provocative substance" -- and even online comments from readers on some stories that do get published -- are being thwarted.

The result: As more of these sorts of things happens, readers lose faith and trust in their newspaper, which loses relevance for them. And we all know what happens when people no longer feel their newspaper is relevant in their lives.

-30-

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Tuesday, May 5, 2015

WHERE DOES THE BLAME BELONG FOR THE ABORTED GARLAND, TEXAS, TERROR ATTACK?

Although I sometimes lapse into the belief that just because I spent more than 44 years in the newspaper business I had pretty much seen it all, there are still occurrences almost daily in the news that befuddle and amaze me.

Such is the case with today's latest "revelation" regarding last weekend's shooting incident in Garland, Texas, in which two home-grown, wannabe, Islamic terrorists got themselves killed in a botched attempt to wreak Charlie Hebdo style mayhem.

So, let's see if I have this right.

According to CNN (and other media outlets), ISIS is claiming "credit" for the two assault-weapon-wielding nincompoops who -- after wounding a security guard at an ill-advised “Draw Mohammed” cartoon contest in Garland put on by a group whose only purpose is to hate and inflame all Muslims -- got themselves killed by a sharp-shooting traffic cop armed with only a pistol?

Seems to me that ISIS should be running from the blame/credit for this one, especially since it's questionable whether anyone in the Islamic terrorist organization had ever even heard of the two fools before they got themselves dispatched to collect on their virgins.

In case you haven't already seen it, here is the link to CNN's report on the claim of "credit": www.cnn.com/2015/05/05/us/garland-texas-prophet-mohammed-contest-shooting/index.html

For what it's worth, I think that in this story, CNN does a reasonably good job of trying to not play into the "we're all gonna die at the hands of Islamic terrorists" hysteria. However, I shudder to think how this is being handled by Fox News, which specializes in ginning up fear of everything. Despite my better judgment, I guess that, out of morbid curiosity, I am going to have to check on how Fox is playing this latest "development" and how far back into their "news report" it pushes Mike Huckabee's announcement that he is launching yet another costly and futile bid for the GOP's 2016 presidential nomination in an already overcrowded field.

To me, the bigger question in all of the latest media buzz over the two Garland moron "Muslim martyrs" is how in the world did the FBI lose track of them, especially since it had been keeping tabs on at least one of the two, Elton Simpson of Phoenix, since apparently at least 2011 when he was arrested and convicted on federal charges of making a false statement involving international and domestic terrorism.

According to various news reports over the past few days, Simpson had recently been posting all sorts whacked out tweets on Twitter that one would expect just might seem suspicious to the FBI. I suspect, of course, that when it comes to tracking head cases like Simpson, the FBI has its hands more than full.

Getting back to the issue of who really deserves the "credit" for the Garland attack, it seems to me that Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, co-founders of the far-right-wing, Islamic hate group the American Freedom Defense Initiative -- which organized the contest for artists to draw demeaning cartoons of the Muslim prophet Muhammad -- are a pair of good candidates. It's hard to believe that Geller and Spencer didn't have a clue that such an "event" might be the equivalent of tossing a can of gasoline onto a burning fire.

Although to most American's Geller has, at least until now, been a fairly obscure figure outside of far-right-wing circles, the Garland attack has propelled her into some prominence. A May 4, CNN opinion piece by Haroon Mohgul turned an interesting spotlight on her and her hateful stand against all Muslims. Here is the link to that report: http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/04/opinions/moghul-texas-shooting-gellar.

Although there seems to be lots of blame -- or "credit," if you want to call it that -- to be shared for the Garland attack, it's fortunate that the only people to die were the two men most deserving of being sent off to their just rewards.

-30-


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