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* DART to KABC-TV, Los Angeles, for moonwalking over the news. Immediately after Oprah's astronomically rated, nationally televised, ninety-minute, prime-time interview with entertainer Michael Jackson on February 10, the network's o-and-o in Los Angeles aired an eleven o'clock "newscast" which, with the exception of sports and weather, revolved entirely around the spacey star. Eclipsing such other events as President Clinton's town meeting in Detroit, the program ranged from an interview with the King of Pop's interviewer to a profile of his interviewer to interviews with his sister and parents to interviews at a local bar with viewers of the interview. "We would have carried any major local story to break," a station spokesman told The Hollywood Reporter, which landed hard on KABC's coverage on February 12, "but there was no bigger story in Los Angels." Besides, the spokesman went on to explain, the Clinton town meeting was dealt with on Nightline.
* DART to the Wisconsin State Journal, for a take-off on the wrong plane. On December 19, the paper carried an item about a university survey in which a high percentage of newspaper editors had readily acknowledged that advertising pressure influenced the news. On January 3, the paper carried a column by editor Frank Denton in which he took issue with the findings -- "at least about this newpaper" -- and loftily explained to readers that, while such pressure exists, "Our job is to resist or manage all such pressures, whatever the source, and concentrate on our central function of telling the truth." On January 6, according to the alternative weekly Isthmus, a production assistant noticed as the paper was going to press that an Express Airlines ad laid out on page 6 was uncomfortably close to a page 5 news item about an overseas plane crash in which four people had died. Did the paper concentrate on its "central function" and put the ad in a holding pattern, as is customary in such cases? Unfortunately, no. Instead, it was the news report that the Journal bumped.
* LAUREL to the news department of the Norfolk, Virginia, Virginian-Pilot/The Ledger Star, and of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, for proving that the traditional (if shaky) wall between the industry's church and state continues to stand. When the Pilot's advertising department rejected an ad for a winter festival sponsored by a local gay and lesbian group, the paper reported on the decision in a fourteen-paragraph story that not only quoted the arguments of both the advertising director and the would-be advertiser, but also took pains to point out an apparent inconsistency in its policy: only three weeks earlier the paper had published an and from the Family Research Council denouncing President Clinton's plan to lift the ban on homosexuals in the military. Similarly, when the advertising department of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch turned down a three-page anti-abortion ad from Missouri Right to Life, the paper reported on the controversy in a story accompanied by the graphic photo of a mutilated doll that had contributed to the decision to reject the ad. As Larry Fiquette, the paper's ombudsman, observed in a January 24 column addressing the puzzlement of readers when the paper published a photo it had previously decided was too tasteless to print, "That apparent anomaly was the vest demonstration of the separateness of a paper's news department and its business offices I've ever seen."
* DART to the Akron, Ohio, Beacon Journal, for short-sheeting the news. Tucked into the top left corner of its January 28 front page was the following not to "Dear Readers: Are your sheets getting a little shabby, your towels a trifle thin? Winter white sales offer a great opportunity to update your linen closet. for shopping tips, including the importance of thread count, see Page C1. [signed] The Editors." Readers who followed the editors' advice found a thirty-three paragraph "Special to the Beacon Journal" article by an outside writer that was blanketed with puffs for such white-sale advertisers as J. C. Penney, Linens and More, and Bed, Bath, and Beyond, and illustrated with a photo of a bedroom ensemble available at Kmart.
* DART to The Boston Globe and education reporter Lauren Robinson, for underachievement in the course of professional conduct. Robinson, who had been covering the Boston schools for the past ten months, recently accepted a $ 67,000-a-year job as executive secretary of the Boston School Committee -- a job for which she was interviewed while still producing pieces on a controversial proposal to which the committee is opposed. Her appointment, disclosed by the rival Boston Herald on February 11, was confirmed by her own paper on February 12 in a thirteen-paragraph story complete with photo of the new appointee; crammed with facts about her background, qualification, and duties, the story skipped any acknowledgement whatsoever of the ethical questions raised by her extracurricular activity. It was the Herald that pointed out the existence of a statute forbidding public servants -- but, notably, not journalists -- from participating is such undisclosed conflicts of interest. and it was the distant Washington Post which, following up on documents leaked by Accuracy In Media, confronted Globe executives on February 25 and compelled them to respond. "The Globe has high ethical standards," Matthew Storin, the paper's just-appointed editor, told the Post, "but this makes you think twice. If a reporter has worked here and doesn't understand it's a fundamental conflict of interest, then we're not teaching people well enough."
* LAUREL to once and current staffers of New York's WNBC-TV -- David Diaz, Richard Kramer, Carol Jenkins, forty-odd videotape editors, and some two dozen members of the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians -- for becoming heroic keepers of the journalistic flame. Assigned to produce a sweepsweek tabloid-type segment on "how to Tell If Your Child Is Gay," producer Kramer refused, and soon resigned. Asked to narrate the piece, which was produced eventually by an outside free lance, correspondent Jenkins just said no. Discovering that his in-progress documentary on drugs called for some less than bona fide reporting (such as a prewritten script and interviews for cash), anchor Diaz resisted, and prevailed; at contract-renewal time in January, however, he departed for WCBS. Following Diaz's resignation, the videotape editors converged on management in protest. Two months later, two dozen members of the NABET took a day off to demonstrate their discomfort with the downmarket direction of their work. (In an interview with the New York Daily News, managing editor Peter Leone claimed that their absence had not been noticed.)
* DART to Lee Webb, news anchor for WTLV-TV, the NBC affiliate in Jacksonville, Florida, for breaking journalism's First Commandment. When the Christian Coalition Leadership School assembled in Jacksonville on January 16, the journalist was there as a member of its "faculty," instructing the evangelicals in the mysteries of dealing with what he described as "the obvious bias that exists in the media against you as Christians." The gospel according to Webb (offered after first explaining to the leaders-in-training that he had agreed to participate "In the condition that on one tell the media that I am here"): establish a one-on-one relationship with newsroom decision-makers; try to control the tone and setting of interviews; avoid using evangelical buzzwords. He also advised them to voice their complaints about coverage directly to the general manager, news director, and sassignment editor at each of the city's network affiliates, and helpfully provided their names. Following publication of a detailed report on the meeting in Folio Weekly magazine ("Lobbying for God," January 26), WTLV suspended Webb in offscreen television limbo for the rest of the week. His punishment, however -- which, in line with his advice, created a flood of angry phone calls to WTLV -- was delivered not because of any question of which master the newsman serves but, rather, as station management carefully explained in subsequent accounts in the press, because he had violated policy by failing to notify his bosses before addressing the group.
* DART to syndicated columnist William F. Buckley, for journalistic mulishness. Prodded by an editor at Universal Press Syndicate, who was prodded by the associate editor of The Charlotte Observer, who was prodded by one of the Observer's business reporters -- to acknowledge that an unequivocal assertion in a January 5 column was unequivocally wrong, Buckley would not be budged. And thus it is that Buckley's commentary on "The Black Problem," in which he purports to quote crime statistics as detailed in a "startling" new book on race relations in America (reviewed by a free-lance writer in Buckley's own National Review), spreads the uncorrected falsehood that "The vast majority of the people blacks kill are other than blacks." Had he been willing to look at the book and/or the review, he would have been forced to report the (inconvenient?) fact the "The vast majority of the people blacks kill are other blacks."
* DART to Georgia Trend magazine, for the far-from-unimpeachable state of its editorial ethics. Since its purchase in September by Atlanta businessman and fundraiser Virgil R. Williams, the trend at the award-winning monthly has been toward picking pieces that sweeten the image of Governor Zell Miller, bruise the reputation of Miller's opponents, and neglect to inform readers that the publisher, president, and c.e.o. carries another label as well -- that of the governor's "honorary chief of staff." Also for the pits: Williams's December "Last Word" column, in which he strongly argued for going ahead with a highly controversial road-building plan. Headlined GEORGIA NEEDS THE OUTER LOOP, the column failed to note that its writer would be very much in the inner loop to profit from the venture: Williams is co-owner of Moreland Altobelli Associates, the largest road management and transportation consulting firm in Georgia; the family-owned Williams Brothers Company is one of the largest concrete makers in the state. In January, Miller named Williams to the Georgia Board of Regents; Williams's magazine named Miller its "Man of the Year."
