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Laurel
to The Des Moines Register, The Associated Press, and the New York Daily News, for crashing the multibillion-dollar homeland security party. Using public information laws to get past the ropes, news organizations have moved beyond the early exposés of lapses at airports and seaports, their efforts now directed to following the money so frantically flung around after the 9/11 attacks. Their findings do not inspire confidence. The Register discovered that the state of Iowa’s astoundingly long list of more than 11,000 “critical sites” designated for protection had somehow overlooked courthouses and skyscrapers while including, among other targets of similar appeal to terrorists, a windmill museum and a liquor warehouse. The AP’s probe of the Small Business Administration, meanwhile, uncovered widespread abuse in its terror-relief program: many devastated Ground Zero businesses, for example, were left high and dry and desperate while banks, encouraged by the SBA to just say yes to any and all comers, heaped millions upon millions in federally guaranteed 9/11 loans on the likes of a pet-grooming salon in Utah and Dunkin’ Donuts shops all around the country, not to mention the fourteen Dairy Queens partly owned by the billionaire financier Warren Buffett. For its part, the Daily News, in an ambitious four-month investigation into the getting and spending of the $21.4 billion recovery aid package for New York City, documented in voluminous detail a gold rush marked by waste, fraud, mismanagement, and the involvement of the mob in both literally and figuratively cleaning up. To all these revelations, attention is being paid. Iowa has whittled down its list of critical sites to a commonsensical 1,300. A Senate committee is inquiring into the SBA’s abuse of the Terrorist Activity Relief Act. A House committee has called for a full accounting of all that New York City money. What remains to be seen, of course, is whether, as the Daily News hoped in its concluding editorial, we “can learn from the mistakes.”
Dart
to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, for rose-colored journalism. In the award-winning “Snapshots” column by the reporter Crocker Stephenson, the paper presents human-interest stories about local folks that capture sympathetically their struggles against adversity and sometimes produce offers of money and work — slice-of-life sketches, it now turns out, from which some of the uglier warts have been air-brushed away. That lonely guy in the wheelchair trying poignantly to engage passersby in friendly conversation, for example, has in fact been known around town for years as “the wheelchair pervert,” with a record of complaints against him as long as your arm for, among other unpleasantries, harassing young women. That down-on-his-luck handyman living in a car with a woman who sells her blood for food in fact has a rap sheet ranging from the delivery of drugs to burglary and theft. And so on. Although Milwaukee Magazine, which highlighted Snapshots’ darker spots in February, assumed in its article that many of the omissions were due to lazy reporting, Stephenson and his editors say that is not the case. On the contrary, the columnist tells CJR, the omissions come from his deliberate dismissal of inconvenient facts “that do not further the narrative” and might discourage compassion. Details, shmetails, as long as the stories warm the reader’s heart.
Dart
to Reuters, for a case of curiously conflicted coverage. Reporting In a December 8 dispatch from Tehran that in a news conference in Saudi Arabia the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who two months before had called for Israel to be “wiped off the map,” was now raising questions about the reality of the Holocaust, the worldwide news service noted diplomatically that “historians say six million Jews were killed in the Nazi Holocaust.” Two hours later, a revised report appeared from which such nuanced equivocation was dropped, replaced with this straightforward statement: “The Nazis killed some 6 million Jews during their 1933-1945 rule.” Oddly, however, in a next-day dispatch about the protest in Germany over the denier’s wild remarks, Reuters again left open the door to debate — this time, allowing only as how the murder of six million Jews in the Holocaust was a “widely accepted view.”
Laurel
to the Houston Chronicle, for a hot series on a cold case. Twelve years after the state of Texas executed an accused murderer — a Mexican-American dropout with no previous convictions, who had proclaimed his innocence to the very end — the Chronicle’s Lise Olsen, acting on a tip, set out to investigate. Uncovering one hole after another — an unexplored alibi, unpursued leads, and irregular interrogations, along with an eyewitness who recanted his testimony, a co-defendant who said he’d been pressured into falsely implicating the boy, and, not least, resentful cops bent on punishing a kid they believed had gotten away with an earlier shooting of an off-duty officer in a bar fight — Olsen’s postmortem left the government’s case in tatters. It also left Texans wondering about the justice of their criminal justice system. Motions toward remedy came swiftly: the shaken district attorney has reopened the case, and a governor’s advisory council is considering new rules for police procedures. Missing, sadly, is that gratifying photo of a former death row inmate walking away alive.
To read the articles in the March/April 2006 issue, click here.
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