Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter.
Dart
to PBS’s NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, for pitching too many softballs to the White House heavy hitter. On February 8, Lehrer conducted a thirty-minute interview with Vice President Dick Cheney that was notable for the subjects that never popped up. Among the more strikingly absent, perhaps — in an interview that came only four days after both The New York Times and The Washington Post reported that Cheney’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, told investigators he had learned of Valerie Plame’s identity as a CIA officer directly from his boss — was any question from the newsman about that scandalous leak. Responding to the chorus of boos from NewsHour fans about the various bases left untouched, the network’s ombudsman, Michael Getler, judiciously weighed in. “There is, indeed,” the umpire conceded, “a long list of questions about Cheney’s views and role that journalists need to explore, in detail and depth, before the historians.” Maybe next year?
Laurel
to Laurel Leff, associate professor of journalism at Northeastern University, for unearthing one of the profession’s darkest little secrets. In 1939, the eminent Harvard scholar Carl Friedrich requested permission to speak for ten minutes to the American Newspaper Publishers Association about the urgent need for leaders in the business to open their doors, much as those in such other professions as the law and the sciences were opening theirs, to European colleagues desperately seeking refuge from Nazi persecution. The ANPA said no. So too did the deans of America’s journalism schools — mostly with sounds of silence — to pleas from within the academy. Now, thanks to Leff, this ignominious record has been brought to light in all its ugly implications. Naming names and quoting quotes, the former Wall Street Journal reporter has documented, in a yet-unpublished paper, the callousness, self-interest, and blatant anti-Semitism that kept the press’s doors barred against the foreign intruders. This spring, responding to an appeal by more than eighty well-known journalists for a public acknowledgement of that terrible failure some sixty years ago, the Newspaper Association of America, née the ANPA, invited Leff to report on her findings to its fifty-member board at its convention in Chicago. An encouraging sign of human progress, to be sure — though of little comfort to the ghosts who filled the room.
Dart
to WSB-TV, the ABC affiliate in Atlanta, for discretion without valor. The recent trial of former mayor Bill Campbell on federal corruption charges raised embarrassingly belated questions about news practices at WSB-TV when a key witness named Marion Brooks described the first-class trips and high-end gifts she got from the big-spending mayor during their four-year affair in the 1990s. During some of that time, Brooks was a reporter and anchor for WSB, where, according to accounts in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the relationship was common knowledge in the newsroom — though not deemed appropriate, evidently, for public airing.
Dart
to CBS, for yet another wardrobe malfunction. In a dramatic hour-long report about a random, brutal murder in Columbia, Missouri, for which a young man named Ryan Ferguson is serving a forty-year prison sentence as a participant in the crime, the network’s prime-time news show 48 Hours incorporated numerous graphics from the local paper, the Columbia Daily Tribune, to mark the course of its narrative. (As chance would have it, the victim was a Tribune editor, killed in the paper’s parking lot during a robbery.) So when the storyline got to the sentencing stage — by which time the program had raised serious doubts about the justice of Ferguson’s conviction — it was no surprise to see a graphic of the Tribune front page on the TV screen, this one showing, under the headline FERGUSON GETS 40 YEARS, a photo of the accused man. What was a surprise was his outfit. Although the paper’s original photo had captured the defendant awaiting sentence garbed in the garish orange jumpsuit of a prison inmate, in the program’s purported reproduction of the page he had been transformed — a respectable citizen conventionally dressed in light shirt, quiet tie, and tan jacket. Blaming the switch on an unnamed freelance editor who didn’t know any better, 48 Hours eventually issued a pro forma apology on its program and its Web site. Sans images or context, however, the statement did nothing to enlighten viewers as to why the alternation was considered so outré in the world of ethical fashion.
Dart
to Variety, for misplaced modesty. In a full-throated review of the Hollywood remake of the 1977 comedy Fun With Dick and Jane, the show biz bible offered a variety of details on the movie’s plot, cast, writing, and direction but didn’t bother to mention that one of the producers of both versions was Peter Bart, Variety’s editor in chief. (In sum: IMPART BART’S PART IN ART, SEZ DART.)
To read the articles in the May/June 2006 issue, click here.
Has America ever needed a media defender more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.
