Given the Erie Times-News’s editorial predisposition in favor of the proposed tires-to-energy plant on Erie’s eastside, today’s news article describing opponents’ successful efforts to marshal other opponents by Reporter Jim Carroll is refreshingly objective. Hope he doesn’t lose his job over it.
The article notes that Wesleyville Borough and Lawrence Park Township have joined the group called “Keep Erie’s Environment Protected” (K.E.E.P.) in their active opposition to the plant, and two other municipal subdivisions, Harborcreek and North East townships may be poised to join them.
According to Carroll, supervisors of both townships have drafted a joint letter expressing their concerns about the plant’s potential effect on air quality east of the plant site and their current opposition to it. Both boards of supervisors have yet to ratify the “draft letter.”
Carroll’s article would have been more complete and informative if he had published the draft letter in its entirely, rather then merely quoting a Harborcreek Township supervisor paraphrasing it.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Monday, October 29, 2007
Erie Times-News political endorsements: Throw out the filters
In his Sunday so-called public editor’s column defending the Erie Times-News’s archaic practice of publishing political endorsements just before elections, Kevin Cuneo – on the op-ed, not the editorial page – opined, among other things, that “During the past five weeks, the Erie Times-News Editorial Board interviewed 37 candidates running for a multitude of offices.
“Each candidate we interviewed,” Cuneo wrote, “was asked why voters should support him or her, and their responses were included in newspaper stories about the political races. Those stories appeared over a two-week period, and the endorsements are included on the newspaper's editorial pages.”
According to Cuneo, the purpose of the interviews, articles and editorials is to give voters a sound informational basis for casting their voting choices.
If that’s truly the reason why he and his cohorts at the Times-News engage in this fatally flawed process every election year, there’s a much better way of achieving their goal without rendering prejudicial and hollow endorsements.
All they have to do is publish verbatim the questions they ask and the candidates’ responses in those interviews without filtering them through the subjective lenses of reporters and editorial writers.
That way readers may interpret the questions and answers themselves, getting a much better and truer picture of what the candidates say their positions on various issues are and for what they stand, rather than allow the news and editorial folk to interpret - or misinterpret - their platforms and agenda for them.
The Times-News would still control the interview process by selecting the questions. But at least the responses would be the candidates' own, not some polemicist's truncated and twisted interpretation of them.
But it’s a sure bet, to put it in lingo Cuneo best understands, the Times-News would never adopt such a process. It's too rational. Plus, it would rob its would-be empire-builders of their cherished prerogative to dictate choices for the vox populi, and diminish their undue political influence and power over the electoral and policy making process, as well as over policymakers themselves.
Cuneo's response to this proposition is predictable: "That would take up too much space in the newspaper!" Compared to what? The interminable columns of drivel it now publishes.
“Each candidate we interviewed,” Cuneo wrote, “was asked why voters should support him or her, and their responses were included in newspaper stories about the political races. Those stories appeared over a two-week period, and the endorsements are included on the newspaper's editorial pages.”
According to Cuneo, the purpose of the interviews, articles and editorials is to give voters a sound informational basis for casting their voting choices.
If that’s truly the reason why he and his cohorts at the Times-News engage in this fatally flawed process every election year, there’s a much better way of achieving their goal without rendering prejudicial and hollow endorsements.
All they have to do is publish verbatim the questions they ask and the candidates’ responses in those interviews without filtering them through the subjective lenses of reporters and editorial writers.
That way readers may interpret the questions and answers themselves, getting a much better and truer picture of what the candidates say their positions on various issues are and for what they stand, rather than allow the news and editorial folk to interpret - or misinterpret - their platforms and agenda for them.
The Times-News would still control the interview process by selecting the questions. But at least the responses would be the candidates' own, not some polemicist's truncated and twisted interpretation of them.
But it’s a sure bet, to put it in lingo Cuneo best understands, the Times-News would never adopt such a process. It's too rational. Plus, it would rob its would-be empire-builders of their cherished prerogative to dictate choices for the vox populi, and diminish their undue political influence and power over the electoral and policy making process, as well as over policymakers themselves.
Cuneo's response to this proposition is predictable: "That would take up too much space in the newspaper!" Compared to what? The interminable columns of drivel it now publishes.
Sunday, October 28, 2007
The Erie Times-News: Tyranny by oligarchy
Kevin Cuneo pounded yet another nail into the coffin of his so-called “public editor” column today with a predictable panygyric hailing his newspaper’s “vital” role of “informing” the public by heralding its self-serving political and elitest biases for all to see in the form of electoral endorsements. Not on the editorial page, where the newspaper's institutional view belongs, but ironically on the op-ed page where views contrary to the newspaper’s editorial position traditionally appear, committing a double whammy against ethical journalism.
The Erie Times-News primps its self-image with pretensions of technological advances, but its institutional thinking is mired in the Dark Ages of journalism whence it began, completely out of touch with modern trends. Though the Times-News preaches precepts of democratic processes, it practices the self-indulgent tyranny of an oligarchy.
To bolter his case, Cuneo asserts that at some kind of conference down in North Carolina, 19 of 20 editors supported making endorsements. Since there are literally thousands of newspaper around the country, that’s hardly a scientific sample, much less a convincing one. For all we know it was a convention which excluded editors whose newspapers don’t make electoral endorsements.
Of course most newspapers support endorsements. They indulge the same unslakable thirst for power and influence peddling the Times-News does, like flies feeding on manure. It’s only the enlightened ones who understand the First Amendment doesn’t protect the press in order to grant it a bully pulpit.
Once again, Cuneo has usurped the true function of a public editor as reader advocate, instead playing the part of proselytizer, attempting to justify the newspaper’s archaic practice of endorsing candidates to consolidate its own political clout, influence and power.
To support his contention that newspapers have a divine right to endorse candidates, the best Cuneo can do is quote the editor of a newspaper whose founder absolutely rejects the idea of political endorsements by newspapers, and who himself presides over a newspaper, USAToday, which does not publish endorsements.
And goes on to say that while he’s not the editor of a local newspaper, he believes local newspapers should endorse. So Cuneo’s idea of sanctioning endorsements by local papers is to cite the editor of a non-local newspaper which doesn’t endorse. Apparently he couldn’t find an editor of a local paper to quote in his favor. With supporters like that, who needs detractors?
Cherry-picking from his “mail and phone calls,” Cuneo cites two women who told him they rely on the newspaper’s endorsements. But he doesn’t say how many were opposed.
Citing an “angry letter writer,” Cuneo asserts: “I don't think it's a good practice for me to comment on letters sent by readers. It's your chance to have your say.” But “your say” is drowned out by the ocean of print and high visibility the newspaper lavishes on the candidates it endorses.
“The newspaper doesn't force anything,” Cuneo says, erecting a straw man in order to knock him down “It merely provides information for readers to use as they see fit.”
Who said anything about “force?” The issue is using the newspaper for undue influence and unbridled access to elected policymakers on behalf of its own agenda, not force. If the newspaper wants to buy influence using prime advertising space on its editorial page, it should be compelled to register as the lobbyist it really is.
The Erie Times-News primps its self-image with pretensions of technological advances, but its institutional thinking is mired in the Dark Ages of journalism whence it began, completely out of touch with modern trends. Though the Times-News preaches precepts of democratic processes, it practices the self-indulgent tyranny of an oligarchy.
To bolter his case, Cuneo asserts that at some kind of conference down in North Carolina, 19 of 20 editors supported making endorsements. Since there are literally thousands of newspaper around the country, that’s hardly a scientific sample, much less a convincing one. For all we know it was a convention which excluded editors whose newspapers don’t make electoral endorsements.
Of course most newspapers support endorsements. They indulge the same unslakable thirst for power and influence peddling the Times-News does, like flies feeding on manure. It’s only the enlightened ones who understand the First Amendment doesn’t protect the press in order to grant it a bully pulpit.
Once again, Cuneo has usurped the true function of a public editor as reader advocate, instead playing the part of proselytizer, attempting to justify the newspaper’s archaic practice of endorsing candidates to consolidate its own political clout, influence and power.
To support his contention that newspapers have a divine right to endorse candidates, the best Cuneo can do is quote the editor of a newspaper whose founder absolutely rejects the idea of political endorsements by newspapers, and who himself presides over a newspaper, USAToday, which does not publish endorsements.
And goes on to say that while he’s not the editor of a local newspaper, he believes local newspapers should endorse. So Cuneo’s idea of sanctioning endorsements by local papers is to cite the editor of a non-local newspaper which doesn’t endorse. Apparently he couldn’t find an editor of a local paper to quote in his favor. With supporters like that, who needs detractors?
Cherry-picking from his “mail and phone calls,” Cuneo cites two women who told him they rely on the newspaper’s endorsements. But he doesn’t say how many were opposed.
Citing an “angry letter writer,” Cuneo asserts: “I don't think it's a good practice for me to comment on letters sent by readers. It's your chance to have your say.” But “your say” is drowned out by the ocean of print and high visibility the newspaper lavishes on the candidates it endorses.
“The newspaper doesn't force anything,” Cuneo says, erecting a straw man in order to knock him down “It merely provides information for readers to use as they see fit.”
Who said anything about “force?” The issue is using the newspaper for undue influence and unbridled access to elected policymakers on behalf of its own agenda, not force. If the newspaper wants to buy influence using prime advertising space on its editorial page, it should be compelled to register as the lobbyist it really is.
Friday, October 26, 2007
Community College: Blowing smoke, or just confused?
Erie County Executive Mark DiVecchio is either blowing smoke about involving all four local colleges and universities in his proposal for a local community college, or he doesn’t understand his own proposal. Mere involvement is not the issue. It’s assumed that more than one of the four local colleges as well as area vo-tech institutions would be involved in some way and provide relevant services.
The threshhold issue is which college or university, if any, would be designated as the “contracted branch college” under his proposal, privately formulated in conjunction with former Mercyhurst president Bill Garvey.
DiVecchio’s proposal, outlined in the needs study he released on Oct., 2007, calls for a five-year business and operating plan under which the proposed community college’s Board of Trustees would contract “with an existing post-secondary Erie County Institution with Middle States Accreditation (the contracted branch campus) to manage the academic operations and functions common to the existing fourteen Pennsylvania community colleges, including degree programs, student campus life, etc.”
According to reports, DiVecchio and Garvey had complicitly decided that Mercyhurst would be the “contracted branch college” which would oversee the entire community college operation. However, that decision has been challenged by Edinboro University, which wants to be considered for the role. Sooner or late, presumably, Behrend/Penn State and Gannon will also have something to say about that.
Now, under pressure from critics, DiVecchio appears to be backing away from his original plan, but seems to be confused by his own permutations.
In an article today in the Times-News, DiVecchio was quoted as saying “the partnership would be more of a managerial contract. It wasn't to do all of the programs and all the courses of study we wanted.” But that’s contrary to his written plan under which the contracted branch college would unilaterally decide who would do what, when and how.
DiVecchio now says he wants to meet with the four school presidents (besides Mercyhurst, Edinboro, Behrend/Penn State and Gannon) to get "their formal blessing (for the college) and then ask them to be part of it."
"We don't want to duplicate anything that anybody has," he told the Times-News. "We just want to take the best of each university and college, and make it a part of the community college." He said he wants to meet with the four school presidents to get "their formal blessing (for the college) and then ask them to be part of it."
Under the DiVecchio/Garvey plan, the board of trustees would “provide the contracted campus with a Grant of $5,700 for each Erie County resident who has enrolled in the (community college) or its related satellite centers or programs.”
In addition to the county grant, the branch campus “will also receive all student tuition fees authorized each year by the board.” Then “the contracted branch campus will be expected to open a second similar campus around 2010-202 in another portion of Erie County (under the DiVecchio/Garvey plan, Mercyhurst, North East),” as well as develop satellite centers at existing vo-tech institutions throughout the area, including Meadville in Crawford County.
Barring a successful intervention outside the DiVecchio/Garvey camp, which initially selected Mercyhurst as the “contracted branch campus,” the second branch campus would be established at Mercyhurst, North East, leaving the other three colleges with merely providing ancillary services under the direction of Mercyhurst, which would call all the shots.
The community college’s board of trustees would consist of hand-picked members whose function would be to rubber-stamp Mercyhurst’s management and policy decisions about which role, if any, the other colleges and vo-tech centers would play within the overall plan.
The threshhold issue is which college or university, if any, would be designated as the “contracted branch college” under his proposal, privately formulated in conjunction with former Mercyhurst president Bill Garvey.
DiVecchio’s proposal, outlined in the needs study he released on Oct., 2007, calls for a five-year business and operating plan under which the proposed community college’s Board of Trustees would contract “with an existing post-secondary Erie County Institution with Middle States Accreditation (the contracted branch campus) to manage the academic operations and functions common to the existing fourteen Pennsylvania community colleges, including degree programs, student campus life, etc.”
According to reports, DiVecchio and Garvey had complicitly decided that Mercyhurst would be the “contracted branch college” which would oversee the entire community college operation. However, that decision has been challenged by Edinboro University, which wants to be considered for the role. Sooner or late, presumably, Behrend/Penn State and Gannon will also have something to say about that.
Now, under pressure from critics, DiVecchio appears to be backing away from his original plan, but seems to be confused by his own permutations.
In an article today in the Times-News, DiVecchio was quoted as saying “the partnership would be more of a managerial contract. It wasn't to do all of the programs and all the courses of study we wanted.” But that’s contrary to his written plan under which the contracted branch college would unilaterally decide who would do what, when and how.
DiVecchio now says he wants to meet with the four school presidents (besides Mercyhurst, Edinboro, Behrend/Penn State and Gannon) to get "their formal blessing (for the college) and then ask them to be part of it."
"We don't want to duplicate anything that anybody has," he told the Times-News. "We just want to take the best of each university and college, and make it a part of the community college." He said he wants to meet with the four school presidents to get "their formal blessing (for the college) and then ask them to be part of it."
Under the DiVecchio/Garvey plan, the board of trustees would “provide the contracted campus with a Grant of $5,700 for each Erie County resident who has enrolled in the (community college) or its related satellite centers or programs.”
In addition to the county grant, the branch campus “will also receive all student tuition fees authorized each year by the board.” Then “the contracted branch campus will be expected to open a second similar campus around 2010-202 in another portion of Erie County (under the DiVecchio/Garvey plan, Mercyhurst, North East),” as well as develop satellite centers at existing vo-tech institutions throughout the area, including Meadville in Crawford County.
Barring a successful intervention outside the DiVecchio/Garvey camp, which initially selected Mercyhurst as the “contracted branch campus,” the second branch campus would be established at Mercyhurst, North East, leaving the other three colleges with merely providing ancillary services under the direction of Mercyhurst, which would call all the shots.
The community college’s board of trustees would consist of hand-picked members whose function would be to rubber-stamp Mercyhurst’s management and policy decisions about which role, if any, the other colleges and vo-tech centers would play within the overall plan.
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Times-News strangely silent on CC plan
So far, half a dozen writers of letters to the editor and Erie area bloggers have shown they are more perspicacious than all the editors at the Erie Times-News put together by strongly objecting to County Executive Mark DiVecchio’s incipient plan to tie the proposed Erie community college to Mercyhurst College and locate a second branch at the Mercyhurst campus in North East. The newspaper has been strangely silent on the merits of this aspect of DiVecchio’s plan, or lack thereof.
Meanwhile, Edinboro University of Pennsylvania through its president Jeremy D. Brown and benefactor Lou Porreco, threw that college’s hat into the ring, offering their preferred venue and suggesting that it be anointed as the operational collaborator for the community college, rather than Mercyhurst.
It appears that Garvey has been privately advising the county executive on preliminary plans for the proposed educational facility, which is a poor idea on more than one count. Garvey’s name never appears in the 48-page study on the need for what is being called Northwest Pennsylvania Community College (NPCC) The name, Mercyhurst, only appears once throughout the study, and that’s in conjunction with the other three area colleges- Edinboro, Behrend/ Penn State and Gannon. Nevertheless, rumors persist that Mercyhurst has an edge because of Garvey’s role as advisor to DiVecchio.
Several well-informed letter writers and bloggers have objected to any link with Mercyhurst, in part because of Garvey’s prominent past association with it, and because they fear its tuition fees, highest in the area, are likely to be reflected in those charged to prospective students of the proposed community college.
Their concerns are justified. The five-year business and operating plan outlined in the needs study released recently by DiVecchio calls for the proposed community college’s Board of Trustees to contract “with an existing post-secondary Erie County Institution with Middle States Accreditation to manage the academic operations and functions common to the existing fourteen Pennsylvania community colleges, including degree programs, student campus life, etc.”
Under the DiVecchio/Garvey plan, the board of trustees would “provide the contracted campus with a Grant of $5,700 for each Erie County resident who has enrolled in the (community college) or its related satellite centers or programs.” This may be up to twice as much as charged at other community colleges throughout the state.
In addition to the county grant, the branch campus “will also receive all student tuition fees authorized each year by the board.” Then “the contracted branch campus will be expected to open a second similar campus around 2010-2012 in another portion of Erie County,” as well as develop satellite centers at existing vo-tech institutions throughout the area, including Meadville in Crawford County.
The second branch campus and the satellite centers would operate under the administrative control of the contracted branch campus, which “will not only develop these campuses, but accept all responsibility for their operations.”
Among other things, the needs study briefly profiles a dozen or so established community colleges around the state.
It’s interesting to note that none of them is affiliated with any other institution of higher learning. One wonders what DiVecchio/Garvey’s rationale is for integrating another institution into their proposal for the Erie facility, other than the obvious motive of self-interest on Garvey/Mercyhurst’s part. There may be a valid one. If there is, let’s hear it.
Meanwhile, Edinboro University of Pennsylvania through its president Jeremy D. Brown and benefactor Lou Porreco, threw that college’s hat into the ring, offering their preferred venue and suggesting that it be anointed as the operational collaborator for the community college, rather than Mercyhurst.
It appears that Garvey has been privately advising the county executive on preliminary plans for the proposed educational facility, which is a poor idea on more than one count. Garvey’s name never appears in the 48-page study on the need for what is being called Northwest Pennsylvania Community College (NPCC) The name, Mercyhurst, only appears once throughout the study, and that’s in conjunction with the other three area colleges- Edinboro, Behrend/ Penn State and Gannon. Nevertheless, rumors persist that Mercyhurst has an edge because of Garvey’s role as advisor to DiVecchio.
Several well-informed letter writers and bloggers have objected to any link with Mercyhurst, in part because of Garvey’s prominent past association with it, and because they fear its tuition fees, highest in the area, are likely to be reflected in those charged to prospective students of the proposed community college.
Their concerns are justified. The five-year business and operating plan outlined in the needs study released recently by DiVecchio calls for the proposed community college’s Board of Trustees to contract “with an existing post-secondary Erie County Institution with Middle States Accreditation to manage the academic operations and functions common to the existing fourteen Pennsylvania community colleges, including degree programs, student campus life, etc.”
Under the DiVecchio/Garvey plan, the board of trustees would “provide the contracted campus with a Grant of $5,700 for each Erie County resident who has enrolled in the (community college) or its related satellite centers or programs.” This may be up to twice as much as charged at other community colleges throughout the state.
In addition to the county grant, the branch campus “will also receive all student tuition fees authorized each year by the board.” Then “the contracted branch campus will be expected to open a second similar campus around 2010-2012 in another portion of Erie County,” as well as develop satellite centers at existing vo-tech institutions throughout the area, including Meadville in Crawford County.
The second branch campus and the satellite centers would operate under the administrative control of the contracted branch campus, which “will not only develop these campuses, but accept all responsibility for their operations.”
Among other things, the needs study briefly profiles a dozen or so established community colleges around the state.
It’s interesting to note that none of them is affiliated with any other institution of higher learning. One wonders what DiVecchio/Garvey’s rationale is for integrating another institution into their proposal for the Erie facility, other than the obvious motive of self-interest on Garvey/Mercyhurst’s part. There may be a valid one. If there is, let’s hear it.
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Reporters' shield bill:Read before salivating
In its lead editorial today, the Erie Times-News once again demonstrated its terminal political naivete when it cheerily huzzaed the bill passed in the U.S. House of Representatives today dealing with a reporter’s federal shield law, calling it a “great victory.” Though it gives that illusion, it’s nothing of the sort. And it still has to get through a hostile Senate. Before Times-News editors salivate over passage of any bill, they ought to read it first.
It’s not until the fourth paragraph that the editorial acknowledges the bill would only give reporters a “qualified” privilege, as opposed to an absolute privilege barring the federal government from forcing them to reveal their sources’ identities. That’s just the tip of the iceberg.
As I pointed out in an earlier blog (To shield or not to shield, Oct. 15, 2007), any bill that passes Congress will be so loaded with loopholes and exceptions it will be virtually toothless. And so it is. Without them, the so-called “Free Flow of Information” bill would never have passed the House.
The Times-News editorial concedes that “Reporters would have to testify in some circumstances. For example, they could be compelled to testify if it is deemed needed to prevent a terrorist attack or ‘significant and specified harm’ to national security.” But there are other equally significant exceptions the editorial doesn’t mention.
For example, under the bill reporters would be required to disclose a source of information if knowledge of the information would prevent imminent death or significant bodily harm; or to identify a source who has revealed trade secrets or information involving personal medical or financial records.
In addition, it allows judges to “consider the public interest” in forcing disclosure in ALL cases involving leaks that could be harmful to national security, not just criminal cases.
These are just House exceptions. It’s certain the Senate will add many others before the bill goes to the floor of the Senate for a vote, if it does. If it passes the Senate – a big IF - the bill almost certainly will have been further defanged there, then referred to a joint House-Senate conference committee to resolve any differences between the two versions, then back to the floors of the House and Senate for another vote.
That gives the Bush administration, which opposes the bill in almost any form that might prove useful to the press, plenty of time to twist enough congressional arms to defeat it, or in the alternative, veto it, as President Bush has said he would.
The Times-News editorial cites as an example of those who would be protected under the proposed legislation the “high profile” case of New York Times Reporter Judith Miller. The editorial says “She spent 85 days in jail in 2005 for rebuffing efforts to force her to identify sources in the CIA leak case involving Valerie Plame.” This is incorrect.
In fact, Miller would NOT have been protected if the pending legislation had been law at the time, because she would have fallen under the terrorist and national security exception cited above. Moreover, Miller was not jailed because she, along with several other journalists, refused to identify her source for outing Plame, as wrongly stated by the Times-News, but because she refused to testify before a federal grand jury.
And Miller’s source, Scooter Libbey, Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, who had leaked the information outing Plame as a U.S. spy, had released Miller and other reporters from their vow of confidentiality to him. But Miller chose to defy the grand jury anyway and was jailed for contempt. Was she show-boating? I think so.
The Times-News editorial further states: “But prosecutors, criminal defendants or civil litigants would have to prove they had exhausted all other means of getting the information before demanding a reporter testify or reveal a source. That is significant.” It’s significant, all right, but it’s already the law and the practice in most cases.
Now consider the political realities. The Times-News editorial makes a big deal of the fact that the bill passed the House “by an overwhelming 398 -21 margin” No surprise there. It’s apple pie and motherhood. Most representatives voted for it on its first floor vote because they know it’s unlikely to pass the Senate, yet they can say for the record they voted for it, thus endearing themselves to the press and those gullible members of the public who have been falsely persuaded it’s in the public interest.
It’s not until the fourth paragraph that the editorial acknowledges the bill would only give reporters a “qualified” privilege, as opposed to an absolute privilege barring the federal government from forcing them to reveal their sources’ identities. That’s just the tip of the iceberg.
As I pointed out in an earlier blog (To shield or not to shield, Oct. 15, 2007), any bill that passes Congress will be so loaded with loopholes and exceptions it will be virtually toothless. And so it is. Without them, the so-called “Free Flow of Information” bill would never have passed the House.
The Times-News editorial concedes that “Reporters would have to testify in some circumstances. For example, they could be compelled to testify if it is deemed needed to prevent a terrorist attack or ‘significant and specified harm’ to national security.” But there are other equally significant exceptions the editorial doesn’t mention.
For example, under the bill reporters would be required to disclose a source of information if knowledge of the information would prevent imminent death or significant bodily harm; or to identify a source who has revealed trade secrets or information involving personal medical or financial records.
In addition, it allows judges to “consider the public interest” in forcing disclosure in ALL cases involving leaks that could be harmful to national security, not just criminal cases.
These are just House exceptions. It’s certain the Senate will add many others before the bill goes to the floor of the Senate for a vote, if it does. If it passes the Senate – a big IF - the bill almost certainly will have been further defanged there, then referred to a joint House-Senate conference committee to resolve any differences between the two versions, then back to the floors of the House and Senate for another vote.
That gives the Bush administration, which opposes the bill in almost any form that might prove useful to the press, plenty of time to twist enough congressional arms to defeat it, or in the alternative, veto it, as President Bush has said he would.
The Times-News editorial cites as an example of those who would be protected under the proposed legislation the “high profile” case of New York Times Reporter Judith Miller. The editorial says “She spent 85 days in jail in 2005 for rebuffing efforts to force her to identify sources in the CIA leak case involving Valerie Plame.” This is incorrect.
In fact, Miller would NOT have been protected if the pending legislation had been law at the time, because she would have fallen under the terrorist and national security exception cited above. Moreover, Miller was not jailed because she, along with several other journalists, refused to identify her source for outing Plame, as wrongly stated by the Times-News, but because she refused to testify before a federal grand jury.
And Miller’s source, Scooter Libbey, Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, who had leaked the information outing Plame as a U.S. spy, had released Miller and other reporters from their vow of confidentiality to him. But Miller chose to defy the grand jury anyway and was jailed for contempt. Was she show-boating? I think so.
The Times-News editorial further states: “But prosecutors, criminal defendants or civil litigants would have to prove they had exhausted all other means of getting the information before demanding a reporter testify or reveal a source. That is significant.” It’s significant, all right, but it’s already the law and the practice in most cases.
Now consider the political realities. The Times-News editorial makes a big deal of the fact that the bill passed the House “by an overwhelming 398 -21 margin” No surprise there. It’s apple pie and motherhood. Most representatives voted for it on its first floor vote because they know it’s unlikely to pass the Senate, yet they can say for the record they voted for it, thus endearing themselves to the press and those gullible members of the public who have been falsely persuaded it’s in the public interest.
For the Times-News: a special project
Having in all likelihood blown its travel and special projects budget for the year on the counterproductive Steris series in Mexico, the Erie Times-News probably has none left for a special project that would truly benefit the Erie area.
Namely, travel to various tire-to-fuel plants around the country to find out how they operate, what their impacts on the communities have been: social, economic, cultural and environmental, whether beneficial or adverse. There are dozens of these plants in the U.S., some as close as New York and Connecticut, some of which have been in operation since the late ‘70s, or earlier.
Instead of rushing to judgment, the newspaper could launch such a worthwhile investigative project to gather empirical information, rather than rely on hearsay or sponsors’ spin. Anyone who’s been around major industrial projects knows they cannot rely upon the sponsors to be upfront about potentially adverse consequences, either because they haven’t done enough study and don’t know, or because they don’t want to jeopardize the project’s acceptance at the outset.
The owners of the new biofuels plant, for example, knew at the outset that bringing its boilers on stream would have a negative people impact here, but concealed that knowledge in order to advance its project. No doubt, there will be other unwelcome surprises as that facility, so to speak, gathers steam. It will be interesting to see what they are.
If the Times-News undertakes such an investigative project, it will learn, among other things, that the concept is not monolithic. There are tires-to-fuel plants and there are tires-to-fuel plants, as diverse as the areas they serve.
Times-News editors and reporters would also learn, if they undertook such a project, that most, if not all of these plants do not rely solely on waste tires for their raw fuel, but mix other combustibles with the tire chips, such as wood, natural gas, waste petroleum products, offal, coal, manure and others, some to a much larger degree than others.
Thus the nature of a particular tires-to-fuel project and its multiple effects on the community singularly depend upon the fuel mix it consumes to reduce the tires to utilitarian fuel. This is the threshold decision any sponsors of a proposed tires-to-energy plant must make before proceeding any further. Even before they prepare and submit to appropriate authorities applications for the necessary permits needed to proceed.
If the current sponsors of the tires-to-fuel plant proposed for Erie have reached that threshold decision, they have not made it publicly known. From that, all other decisions and actions must flow.
Namely, travel to various tire-to-fuel plants around the country to find out how they operate, what their impacts on the communities have been: social, economic, cultural and environmental, whether beneficial or adverse. There are dozens of these plants in the U.S., some as close as New York and Connecticut, some of which have been in operation since the late ‘70s, or earlier.
Instead of rushing to judgment, the newspaper could launch such a worthwhile investigative project to gather empirical information, rather than rely on hearsay or sponsors’ spin. Anyone who’s been around major industrial projects knows they cannot rely upon the sponsors to be upfront about potentially adverse consequences, either because they haven’t done enough study and don’t know, or because they don’t want to jeopardize the project’s acceptance at the outset.
The owners of the new biofuels plant, for example, knew at the outset that bringing its boilers on stream would have a negative people impact here, but concealed that knowledge in order to advance its project. No doubt, there will be other unwelcome surprises as that facility, so to speak, gathers steam. It will be interesting to see what they are.
If the Times-News undertakes such an investigative project, it will learn, among other things, that the concept is not monolithic. There are tires-to-fuel plants and there are tires-to-fuel plants, as diverse as the areas they serve.
Times-News editors and reporters would also learn, if they undertook such a project, that most, if not all of these plants do not rely solely on waste tires for their raw fuel, but mix other combustibles with the tire chips, such as wood, natural gas, waste petroleum products, offal, coal, manure and others, some to a much larger degree than others.
Thus the nature of a particular tires-to-fuel project and its multiple effects on the community singularly depend upon the fuel mix it consumes to reduce the tires to utilitarian fuel. This is the threshold decision any sponsors of a proposed tires-to-energy plant must make before proceeding any further. Even before they prepare and submit to appropriate authorities applications for the necessary permits needed to proceed.
If the current sponsors of the tires-to-fuel plant proposed for Erie have reached that threshold decision, they have not made it publicly known. From that, all other decisions and actions must flow.
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Slouching to judgment
In his column Sunday headlined “Opponents rush to judgment on tire-to-energy plant,” Pat Howard took up the company line when he chastised those who have raised questions about the potentially adverse environmental effects of the proposed waste recycling plant, admonishing them to withhold their opposition until all their questions have been answered.
Howard should heed his own advice. After all, he’s doing exactly what he’s accused opponents of doing, rushing to judgment, albeit from the opposite direction in favor of proceeding with the project notwithstanding the sponsors’ failure to provide basic information on its potential environmental effects.
He writes, somewhat duplicitously, that “Many plant opponents have put their verdict ahead of the evidence.” Well, so have he and his ilk. They just reached a different verdict. The opposite of no action, which opponents espouse, is some action to move forward, which is what Howard advocates, a rush to judgment, if you will.
“Before the company files a single permit document with the state Department of Environmental Protection,” he writes, “ its opponents have seen and heard enough….My experience in this business has taught me to be wary of folks who start with a conclusion and reason their way back from there."
Whatever Howard’s “experience in this business” may be, it’s obviously not been enough to inform him that the preparation of a permit for a major industrial project and its submission to government authorities is the first big step of what invariably becomes an irreversible process.
At that point, it gains an irresistible constituency and political momentum which carries the process through to completion, bowling over any opposition in its path. If a project of this sort isn’t nipped before the permit is issued, it never will be, barring a catastrophic development.
I’m not saying it should or shouldn’t. Unlike Howard, I shall slouch, not rush to judgment.
Howard should heed his own advice. After all, he’s doing exactly what he’s accused opponents of doing, rushing to judgment, albeit from the opposite direction in favor of proceeding with the project notwithstanding the sponsors’ failure to provide basic information on its potential environmental effects.
He writes, somewhat duplicitously, that “Many plant opponents have put their verdict ahead of the evidence.” Well, so have he and his ilk. They just reached a different verdict. The opposite of no action, which opponents espouse, is some action to move forward, which is what Howard advocates, a rush to judgment, if you will.
“Before the company files a single permit document with the state Department of Environmental Protection,” he writes, “ its opponents have seen and heard enough….My experience in this business has taught me to be wary of folks who start with a conclusion and reason their way back from there."
Whatever Howard’s “experience in this business” may be, it’s obviously not been enough to inform him that the preparation of a permit for a major industrial project and its submission to government authorities is the first big step of what invariably becomes an irreversible process.
At that point, it gains an irresistible constituency and political momentum which carries the process through to completion, bowling over any opposition in its path. If a project of this sort isn’t nipped before the permit is issued, it never will be, barring a catastrophic development.
I’m not saying it should or shouldn’t. Unlike Howard, I shall slouch, not rush to judgment.
Sharing the blame
There’s a substantial factual error in today’s Times-News’s otherwise perceptive, if belated editorial taking Erie Schools Superintendent James Barker and the board to task for the $37 million bond refinancing exercise they undertook back in 2003 without assessing its true implications or inquiring how much it would cost.
Normally, these are financial exercises designed or intended to save money. But this one clearly cost the district taxpayers an unknown but significant sum exceeding $1 million, plus the significant but as yet undetermined fees the broker charged to handle the transaction. (See this blog, Barker’s cover story, Oct. 14, 2007).
However, the Times-News also bears some responsibility for its longstanding failure to bring the matter to light, which was only revealed recently when a New York City news organization, Bloomberg News, exposed the costly blunder, scooping the local paper in its own backyard.
Today’s editorial says: “But back in September 2003, Barker and the board seemingly decided to push ahead with refinancing about $37 million in bonds in a complex transaction to enable the district to net about $750,000 as it was trying to solve its annual budget challenges.”
In fact, the original savings from the refinancing transaction had initially been presented by the broker as $1.5 million, double the figure cited in the editorial. So the actual but as yet unknown costs to the district are significantly higher than indicated therein.
According to the editorial, “Three board members who supported it and are still on the board - Jim Herdzik, Mary Frances Schenley and Eva Tucker Jr. - should share responsibility for this apparent failure.”
If the Times-News is going to finger-point, it should take the exercise one logical step further. News coverage at the newspaper is dictated by its editorial board which reportedly makes decisions collectively as to which matters are to be covered, which aren’t, and how.
Among them are Executive editor Rick Sayers, Managing Editor Pat Howard, Editorial Page Editor Bryan Oberle and Public Editor Kevin Cuneo. To put it in their terms, seems they “should share responsibility for this apparent failure“ to expose this important matter at the time it occurred, rather than allow an out-of-state reporter to scoop them four years later.
Normally, these are financial exercises designed or intended to save money. But this one clearly cost the district taxpayers an unknown but significant sum exceeding $1 million, plus the significant but as yet undetermined fees the broker charged to handle the transaction. (See this blog, Barker’s cover story, Oct. 14, 2007).
However, the Times-News also bears some responsibility for its longstanding failure to bring the matter to light, which was only revealed recently when a New York City news organization, Bloomberg News, exposed the costly blunder, scooping the local paper in its own backyard.
Today’s editorial says: “But back in September 2003, Barker and the board seemingly decided to push ahead with refinancing about $37 million in bonds in a complex transaction to enable the district to net about $750,000 as it was trying to solve its annual budget challenges.”
In fact, the original savings from the refinancing transaction had initially been presented by the broker as $1.5 million, double the figure cited in the editorial. So the actual but as yet unknown costs to the district are significantly higher than indicated therein.
According to the editorial, “Three board members who supported it and are still on the board - Jim Herdzik, Mary Frances Schenley and Eva Tucker Jr. - should share responsibility for this apparent failure.”
If the Times-News is going to finger-point, it should take the exercise one logical step further. News coverage at the newspaper is dictated by its editorial board which reportedly makes decisions collectively as to which matters are to be covered, which aren’t, and how.
Among them are Executive editor Rick Sayers, Managing Editor Pat Howard, Editorial Page Editor Bryan Oberle and Public Editor Kevin Cuneo. To put it in their terms, seems they “should share responsibility for this apparent failure“ to expose this important matter at the time it occurred, rather than allow an out-of-state reporter to scoop them four years later.
Monday, October 22, 2007
An archaic and arrogant practice
For the past week or so, the Erie Times-News has been publishing editorials endorsing or not endorsing candidates in the upcoming election. This is an archaic and arrogant practice which over the decades has detracted rather than contributed to the electoral process.
It’s one that has never been acceptable among intelligent and thinking citizenry, and is growing less and less palatable as self-serving newspapers like the Times-News, poseurs of objectivity, make recommendations pro or con which reflect their own biases, vested and financial interests, not the general public’s. It's influence-peddling of the rankest kind.
Here’s what one prominent newspaper founder, owner and publisher, Al Neuharth whose newspaper, USA TODAY, with the largest circulation in the nation, more than two million, has said about this counterproductive and despicable practice:
“Enlightened newspaper editors and owners have come to understand that when they endorse a political candidate their news coverage becomes suspect in the eyes of readers, even though most reporters are basically fair and accurate.
“When USA TODAY was founded in 1982, we decided our role was to inform, educate, entertain, debate, but not dictate. That built trust among readers and is one of the reasons the "Nation's Newspaper" has the largest circulation in the country.
“If decision-makers at newspapers quit trying to be kingmakers, they and their readers would benefit.”
Amen.
It’s one that has never been acceptable among intelligent and thinking citizenry, and is growing less and less palatable as self-serving newspapers like the Times-News, poseurs of objectivity, make recommendations pro or con which reflect their own biases, vested and financial interests, not the general public’s. It's influence-peddling of the rankest kind.
Here’s what one prominent newspaper founder, owner and publisher, Al Neuharth whose newspaper, USA TODAY, with the largest circulation in the nation, more than two million, has said about this counterproductive and despicable practice:
“Enlightened newspaper editors and owners have come to understand that when they endorse a political candidate their news coverage becomes suspect in the eyes of readers, even though most reporters are basically fair and accurate.
“When USA TODAY was founded in 1982, we decided our role was to inform, educate, entertain, debate, but not dictate. That built trust among readers and is one of the reasons the "Nation's Newspaper" has the largest circulation in the country.
“If decision-makers at newspapers quit trying to be kingmakers, they and their readers would benefit.”
Amen.
Sunday, October 21, 2007
WANTED: A real public editor
In a recent column, writing as the Erie Times-News’s “public editor,” so-called, Kevin Cuneo introduced by name the “people who represent newspaper’s readers" (Sept. 16, 2007) by serving as volunteers on the Reader Advisory Board. He wrote that they are “the kind of people…who love their daily newspaper, consider it an important part of the community and are never shy about suggesting ways to make it better."
It’s hard for me to believe the board members, who supposedly advise, consult with, discuss and help the editors guide the newspaper's news and editorial content, had anything to do with today’s farcical offering by Cuneo (Sunday, Oct. 21, 2007).
Once again, in the guise of the paper’s public editor, Kevin donned his cap as promotions and public relations director to outline a desperation gimmick to increase the company’s declining advertising lineage and readership. Kevin calls it the “know all about it” program designed to “deliver the details faster and easier than ever before,” (conceding for the first time ever I’m aware of, that the newspaper is less than perfect), apparently a play on the newsboy cry of old, "read all about it."
More resembling an in-house ad than a column, today’s “public editor” offering gobbles up about 30 column inches of precious space on the op-ed page which should have been devoted to a serious discussion of public affairs, not to huckstering. With one broad stroke, Cuneo not only corrupted the position of public editor, but the integrity of the newspaper’s op-ed page as well.
If the Times-News reader advisory board is gong to serve any useful public service,it could start by urging the newspaper to replace Cuneo with a real public editor who takes the position seriously.
It’s hard for me to believe the board members, who supposedly advise, consult with, discuss and help the editors guide the newspaper's news and editorial content, had anything to do with today’s farcical offering by Cuneo (Sunday, Oct. 21, 2007).
Once again, in the guise of the paper’s public editor, Kevin donned his cap as promotions and public relations director to outline a desperation gimmick to increase the company’s declining advertising lineage and readership. Kevin calls it the “know all about it” program designed to “deliver the details faster and easier than ever before,” (conceding for the first time ever I’m aware of, that the newspaper is less than perfect), apparently a play on the newsboy cry of old, "read all about it."
More resembling an in-house ad than a column, today’s “public editor” offering gobbles up about 30 column inches of precious space on the op-ed page which should have been devoted to a serious discussion of public affairs, not to huckstering. With one broad stroke, Cuneo not only corrupted the position of public editor, but the integrity of the newspaper’s op-ed page as well.
If the Times-News reader advisory board is gong to serve any useful public service,it could start by urging the newspaper to replace Cuneo with a real public editor who takes the position seriously.
Saturday, October 20, 2007
Saving face
Often a headline over a story, column or article can subtley misrepresent the thrust of the written piece that follows. Sometimes it’s coincidental, sometimes deliberate.
There’s a good example of the latter in the headline over a letter to the editor submitted by Lou Porreco, president of the Erie Municipal Airport Authority published Saturday.
In his letter, Porreco pointed out a striking inconsistency in how the Times-News has handled its coverage of the debate over the $75,000 bonus the authority promised Airport Director Kelly Fredericks as an incentive to complete the construction of the controversial airport runway extension in a timely manner.
Porreco notes that between an editorial published October 12 and two others written way back on June 29 and April 18, the newspaper did a 180, from supporting the bonus early on, to questioning more recently its value as an incentive for Fredericks to oversee the completion of the job by 2011.
Could these contradictory positions have been sanctioned by the same editors? Porreco wants to know. He said the newspaper’s early support of the bonus made negotiations with Fredericks more difficult, rendering the newspaper’s recent vacillation to the contrary puzzling.
My point here is not to amplify the contradictions in the Times-News’s shifting editorial positions. Porreco’s letter did an excellent job of that. My purpose is simply to highlight the inappropriateness of the mealy-mouthed headline placed over Porreco’s letter by some faceless copy editor and approved by his or her bosses.
It reads: “Authority defends Fredericks’ $75,000 bonus,” making it appear as though the thrust of Porreco’s letter was to defend the bonus, when in fact it was primarily to highlight the newspaper’s baffling inconsistency with respect to it,and which the phony face-saving headline seeks unsuccessfuly to diminish.
There’s a good example of the latter in the headline over a letter to the editor submitted by Lou Porreco, president of the Erie Municipal Airport Authority published Saturday.
In his letter, Porreco pointed out a striking inconsistency in how the Times-News has handled its coverage of the debate over the $75,000 bonus the authority promised Airport Director Kelly Fredericks as an incentive to complete the construction of the controversial airport runway extension in a timely manner.
Porreco notes that between an editorial published October 12 and two others written way back on June 29 and April 18, the newspaper did a 180, from supporting the bonus early on, to questioning more recently its value as an incentive for Fredericks to oversee the completion of the job by 2011.
Could these contradictory positions have been sanctioned by the same editors? Porreco wants to know. He said the newspaper’s early support of the bonus made negotiations with Fredericks more difficult, rendering the newspaper’s recent vacillation to the contrary puzzling.
My point here is not to amplify the contradictions in the Times-News’s shifting editorial positions. Porreco’s letter did an excellent job of that. My purpose is simply to highlight the inappropriateness of the mealy-mouthed headline placed over Porreco’s letter by some faceless copy editor and approved by his or her bosses.
It reads: “Authority defends Fredericks’ $75,000 bonus,” making it appear as though the thrust of Porreco’s letter was to defend the bonus, when in fact it was primarily to highlight the newspaper’s baffling inconsistency with respect to it,and which the phony face-saving headline seeks unsuccessfuly to diminish.
An epitaph for community journalism
This is the story of how the Times Publishing Co, five years ago, killed community journalism in Erie County. In July of 2002, the Times, publisher of the only metropolitan daily newspaper and seven weeklies within Erie County - which it had acquired years ago known as the Brown-Thompson newspapers - confirmed rumors rampant throughout the county for several months that it would close all seven.
They included the North East Breeze, which had been in continuous publication under one name or another for more than 100 years, longer even than the Times’s daily newspaper, as well as papers in Girard, Edinboro, Union City, Millcreek and elsewhere. While I can’t speak for the other communities, what happened in North East was prototypical.
Citing rising costs, the Times said in place of the local coverage hitherto provided by the weeklies, it would incorporate news coverage of each community in a weekly zoned or regional section of its daily newspaper, the Times-News, which it would call "NEIGHBORS."
But the reality which soon emerged was that the new weekly sections in the daily paper were loaded with copy from half dozen other communities, including some just across the PA-NY state line, Ripley, Westfield and Chautauqua. The Times did not explain how it was going to fit all the local news and editorial copy previously contained in seven weeklies - typically running from more than a dozen to several dozen broadsheet or tabloid pages - into a single weekly zoned section, for the obvious reason that it would be impossible.
Most of what the Times’s "Neighbors" section published about North East is what is known in the trade as “fluff:” soft, fleeting, feature and human interest articles which are fun and easy for newspaper writers to write, but which contain little of substance.There’s a place for that kind of newspaper writing, but not at the expense of more relevant and meaningful reporting requiring tough, time-consuming, gritty, dogged digging out of facts, or investigative and analytical reporting, which constitute a newspaper’s principal trade-in-stock.
Soon after the Times had acquired the Breeze and the other weeklies, the only ones within the county, from Brown-Thompson, it proceeded upon a premeditated and cynical long-term voyage of attrition that would ultimately eliminate them as advertising competition to the Times’s flagship daily in Erie.
The Times gradually cut staff, expenses and coverage at the Breeze, reducing the number of pages and its local “news hole,” using countless galleys of stock pages and trivial syndicated filler to flesh it out.
Much of the coverage had little or no relevance to North East readers and subscribers. Weekly inclusion of canned news and events from the other communities was indiscriminately shoveled into the shrinking news hole of the Breeze. It eventually became, in effect, a regional rather than a local weekly covering most of Erie County and parts of Crawford County and Chautauqua County, NY, although it was still called the North East Breeze.
For all these reasons: reduced staff, smaller newshole, irrelevance to local
interests, and non-professional journalism practices, the Breeze soon began losing local reader and advertiser support. Once cherished in the community, the Breeze eventually became an object of contempt among the vast majority of local residents.
By the time it was shuttered by the Times, over-the-counter-sales of the Breeze at the town’s most prominent news stand had dropped from about 60 to 16 copies per week, mirroring its drop in subscriptions, as well as reader and advertiser interest.
Immediately North East, like the other small towns which had been robbed of their local newspapers by the Times, lost its principal community bulletin board and consistent coverage of its local government entities, including the borough council, township board of supervisors, planning and zoning commission, water and sewer authority, and others, from which it has never recovered.
It also lost its only outlet for local advertising. Accustomed to print advertising costs geared to the size of the community and its small mom and pop businesses,local advertisers were suddenly faced with costs apropos to metropolitan Erie, which they could ill afford.
Costs of legal advertising for the local government entities required by law doubled overnight, forcing them to cut back drastically in other budget areas and eliminating critical services and programs. In the wake of these sobering events, I wrote a letter to the editor of the Erie Times-News. It concluded::
“It's tragic that a faceless and indifferent absentee corporation purportedly dedicated to the freedom of information and press with no ties to or stake in the community, except for its bottom line, has with impunity put an inglorious end to one of this community’s most precious and long-lived assets and institutions, a reflection of its unique culture and heritage, its local newspaper.” Needless to say, the letter was never published.
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They included the North East Breeze, which had been in continuous publication under one name or another for more than 100 years, longer even than the Times’s daily newspaper, as well as papers in Girard, Edinboro, Union City, Millcreek and elsewhere. While I can’t speak for the other communities, what happened in North East was prototypical.
Citing rising costs, the Times said in place of the local coverage hitherto provided by the weeklies, it would incorporate news coverage of each community in a weekly zoned or regional section of its daily newspaper, the Times-News, which it would call "NEIGHBORS."
But the reality which soon emerged was that the new weekly sections in the daily paper were loaded with copy from half dozen other communities, including some just across the PA-NY state line, Ripley, Westfield and Chautauqua. The Times did not explain how it was going to fit all the local news and editorial copy previously contained in seven weeklies - typically running from more than a dozen to several dozen broadsheet or tabloid pages - into a single weekly zoned section, for the obvious reason that it would be impossible.
Most of what the Times’s "Neighbors" section published about North East is what is known in the trade as “fluff:” soft, fleeting, feature and human interest articles which are fun and easy for newspaper writers to write, but which contain little of substance.There’s a place for that kind of newspaper writing, but not at the expense of more relevant and meaningful reporting requiring tough, time-consuming, gritty, dogged digging out of facts, or investigative and analytical reporting, which constitute a newspaper’s principal trade-in-stock.
Soon after the Times had acquired the Breeze and the other weeklies, the only ones within the county, from Brown-Thompson, it proceeded upon a premeditated and cynical long-term voyage of attrition that would ultimately eliminate them as advertising competition to the Times’s flagship daily in Erie.
The Times gradually cut staff, expenses and coverage at the Breeze, reducing the number of pages and its local “news hole,” using countless galleys of stock pages and trivial syndicated filler to flesh it out.
Much of the coverage had little or no relevance to North East readers and subscribers. Weekly inclusion of canned news and events from the other communities was indiscriminately shoveled into the shrinking news hole of the Breeze. It eventually became, in effect, a regional rather than a local weekly covering most of Erie County and parts of Crawford County and Chautauqua County, NY, although it was still called the North East Breeze.
For all these reasons: reduced staff, smaller newshole, irrelevance to local
interests, and non-professional journalism practices, the Breeze soon began losing local reader and advertiser support. Once cherished in the community, the Breeze eventually became an object of contempt among the vast majority of local residents.
By the time it was shuttered by the Times, over-the-counter-sales of the Breeze at the town’s most prominent news stand had dropped from about 60 to 16 copies per week, mirroring its drop in subscriptions, as well as reader and advertiser interest.
Immediately North East, like the other small towns which had been robbed of their local newspapers by the Times, lost its principal community bulletin board and consistent coverage of its local government entities, including the borough council, township board of supervisors, planning and zoning commission, water and sewer authority, and others, from which it has never recovered.
It also lost its only outlet for local advertising. Accustomed to print advertising costs geared to the size of the community and its small mom and pop businesses,local advertisers were suddenly faced with costs apropos to metropolitan Erie, which they could ill afford.
Costs of legal advertising for the local government entities required by law doubled overnight, forcing them to cut back drastically in other budget areas and eliminating critical services and programs. In the wake of these sobering events, I wrote a letter to the editor of the Erie Times-News. It concluded::
“It's tragic that a faceless and indifferent absentee corporation purportedly dedicated to the freedom of information and press with no ties to or stake in the community, except for its bottom line, has with impunity put an inglorious end to one of this community’s most precious and long-lived assets and institutions, a reflection of its unique culture and heritage, its local newspaper.” Needless to say, the letter was never published.
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Coming soon: a ton of bricks
As cold weather approaches, those of us who use natural gas for heating our homes and businesses will soon feel the chilling effects of the second increase in gas prices by National Fuel Gas in a little over a year totaling nearly 20 percent. Naturally, this last hike went into effect in the midst of a hot summer when we use very little heating gas in order to escape our immediate notice. But come December and beyond, it’ll hit us like a ton of bricks.
This impending disaster reminds me of the ludicrous attempt the Buffalo,NY-based NFG made a little over a year ago at the threshhold of summer when it announced it would impose a surcharge for those who consumed less gas during the upcoming summer. A blizzard of protests organized by the indomitable Ken Springirth fell upon the land.
In defense of this indefensible outrage, Nancy Taylor, NFG’s mouthpiece in Buffalo wrote a letter to the editor of the Erie Times-News attempting to rationalize this unheard of practice of imposing a surcharge on consumers for reducing their gas consumption in order to lower their gas bills. (Company maintains new charge is fair, June 30). Her glib corporate spin only succeeded in generating what natural gas normally does when combusted, more hot air.
I sent in a letter to the Times-News responding to Taylor’s hemmorhagic spiel. But the powers that be, following in lock step their penchant for withholding the other side of the story, refused to print it, allowing Taylor’s corporate fibs to go unchallenged.
Taylor said the surcharge was needed to cover the company’s fixed overhead costs. And in a classic example of corporate doublespeak, she maintained that the surcharge actually would save gas customers money.
According to Taylor, 70 percent of what customers pay on their gas bills covers the cost of the gas which distributors like NFG obtain from suppliers. The other 30 percent, she said, goes towards fixed expenses like “construction equipment, vehicles, pipe, meters, office supplies, people, billing and computer systems to name some.”
Among those she neglected to name are obscene executive salaries and perks such as hers (as NFG’s senior manager of corporate communications - read “spin doctor”), coupled with the company’s bloated profits and shareholder dividends which greedily feed off the backs of the less affluent. “Reduced usage,” she asserted, “means a lower natural gas supply charge, period.” Duh. Not if a surcharge is applied to it!
Taylor said “If you turn back your thermostat and install a new furnace, you will still experience real savings.” What escaped her surreal logic was the fact that turning back the thermostat to many consumers meant suffering in their homes through sub-normal cold, while the cost of installing a new furnace for many is prohibitive, especially in light of the already prohibitive gas prices.
Taylor bewailed what she claimed are the “limited profits” of “a regulated utility,” (better known as a monopoly, like the one held by the Times Publishing Co.), but conveniently neglected to say how much profit NFG amasses, a tightly-held “proprietary” secret. NFG’s creative accounting practices are so labyrinthine that I don’t believe even Ken could unravel its true profit stream. Taylor also ignored the fact that the state Public Utilities Commission, the supposed consumer guardian, is a subservient tool of the natural gas industry, typically rubber-stamping its proposed rate hikes, a classic example of the tail wagging the dog.
To demonstrate NFG’s cost-effective practices, Taylor said since 1990 the company had cut 40 percent of its labor force. Which merely suggests to me that some or all of its pre-1990 labor force was redundant and cost-inefficient. She stated: “Our proposed conservation rider (surcharge) is not something new in the utility business.” But she didn’t offer a single example of another one anywhere, merely citing the endorsements of gas industry trade groups. Taylor’s twisted rhetoric characterized the surcharge as a “consumer-friendly rate tool.” With friends like that, who needs enemies?
Due to the efforts of Ken Springirth and other dedicated consumer advocates like him, NFG eventually backed away from its untenable proposal, but no thanks to the Times-News.
This impending disaster reminds me of the ludicrous attempt the Buffalo,NY-based NFG made a little over a year ago at the threshhold of summer when it announced it would impose a surcharge for those who consumed less gas during the upcoming summer. A blizzard of protests organized by the indomitable Ken Springirth fell upon the land.
In defense of this indefensible outrage, Nancy Taylor, NFG’s mouthpiece in Buffalo wrote a letter to the editor of the Erie Times-News attempting to rationalize this unheard of practice of imposing a surcharge on consumers for reducing their gas consumption in order to lower their gas bills. (Company maintains new charge is fair, June 30). Her glib corporate spin only succeeded in generating what natural gas normally does when combusted, more hot air.
I sent in a letter to the Times-News responding to Taylor’s hemmorhagic spiel. But the powers that be, following in lock step their penchant for withholding the other side of the story, refused to print it, allowing Taylor’s corporate fibs to go unchallenged.
Taylor said the surcharge was needed to cover the company’s fixed overhead costs. And in a classic example of corporate doublespeak, she maintained that the surcharge actually would save gas customers money.
According to Taylor, 70 percent of what customers pay on their gas bills covers the cost of the gas which distributors like NFG obtain from suppliers. The other 30 percent, she said, goes towards fixed expenses like “construction equipment, vehicles, pipe, meters, office supplies, people, billing and computer systems to name some.”
Among those she neglected to name are obscene executive salaries and perks such as hers (as NFG’s senior manager of corporate communications - read “spin doctor”), coupled with the company’s bloated profits and shareholder dividends which greedily feed off the backs of the less affluent. “Reduced usage,” she asserted, “means a lower natural gas supply charge, period.” Duh. Not if a surcharge is applied to it!
Taylor said “If you turn back your thermostat and install a new furnace, you will still experience real savings.” What escaped her surreal logic was the fact that turning back the thermostat to many consumers meant suffering in their homes through sub-normal cold, while the cost of installing a new furnace for many is prohibitive, especially in light of the already prohibitive gas prices.
Taylor bewailed what she claimed are the “limited profits” of “a regulated utility,” (better known as a monopoly, like the one held by the Times Publishing Co.), but conveniently neglected to say how much profit NFG amasses, a tightly-held “proprietary” secret. NFG’s creative accounting practices are so labyrinthine that I don’t believe even Ken could unravel its true profit stream. Taylor also ignored the fact that the state Public Utilities Commission, the supposed consumer guardian, is a subservient tool of the natural gas industry, typically rubber-stamping its proposed rate hikes, a classic example of the tail wagging the dog.
To demonstrate NFG’s cost-effective practices, Taylor said since 1990 the company had cut 40 percent of its labor force. Which merely suggests to me that some or all of its pre-1990 labor force was redundant and cost-inefficient. She stated: “Our proposed conservation rider (surcharge) is not something new in the utility business.” But she didn’t offer a single example of another one anywhere, merely citing the endorsements of gas industry trade groups. Taylor’s twisted rhetoric characterized the surcharge as a “consumer-friendly rate tool.” With friends like that, who needs enemies?
Due to the efforts of Ken Springirth and other dedicated consumer advocates like him, NFG eventually backed away from its untenable proposal, but no thanks to the Times-News.
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Self-congratulatory bombast
Kevin Cuneo, writing in his blog called Readers’ Forum today (which reads like a reject from the “public editor’s column), had better be careful he doesn’t break his arm patting himself and his colleagues on the back, taking all the credit for the agreement among and between the city, county and Millcreek involving the airport runway extension, county appointments to the Municipal Airport authority, sundry golf course facilities and various other convoluted quid pro quos.
There’s a lot of garbled rhetoric in between, but in essence here’s the way Kevin put it in the column entitled A deal takes shape to help remake Erie (Oct. 18, 2007): “In this case, I felt city and county leaders reacted positively to the newspaper's encouragement and criticism, and worked for the general good.”
Kevin’s self-congratulatory bombast derived from his modest notion that “For years on its editorial pages, the Times-News has encouraged such teamwork between the leaders of various local governing bodies.”
Kevin is quick to spin even the most innocuous development consistent with the Erie Times-News’s self-serving editorial policy into an opus grande. But when its editorial efforts fall flat, they are studiously ignored. For example.
In a cogent letter to the editor today, City Council member Jessica Horan–Kunko noted that an Oct. 6 editorial “took issue with a resolution passed by Erie City Council asking Erie Renewable Energy, the proposed developer of the tire-to-energy plant, to voluntarily prepare an environmental impact statement," and proposed instead that one should more appropriately be undertaken by the state.
Ms Horan-Kunko deftly demonstrated how off-base that proposal is: “As the sponsor of that resolution,” she wrote, “I researched the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection permitting process to which the tires-to-energy plant will be subject. According to the DEP, its review will not include an environmental impact statement. It will focus on emissions, erosion and sedimentation, and storm water management. The DEP will not address noise pollution, traffic, the ability of the city to treat the plant's wastewater or fire/disaster procedures,” all functions the editorial wrongly ascribed to the state.
Ms. Horan Kunko added: “Although only the federal government can require it, an environmental impact statement is the most common, widely used and objective process by which to obtain the facts that will help us make an informed decision, balancing private and public interests in job creation with legitimate environmental concerns.”
That more or less equates with what I had written in my blog the day the errant editorial appeared, which follows: “While ’s it’s true the city can’t require the firm to prepare and submit an environmental impact statement (EIS),” I wrote, “contrary to the editorial, neither can the state Department of Environmental Protection.
“Any mandate for an EIS can only come from the federal government under the provisions of the 28-year-old National Environmental Policy Act of 1970 (NEPA). While the federal government has delegated certain land, water and air protection responsibilities to the various states within their jurisdictions, only the feds can order the sponsor of a project to submit data required under NEPA to designated federal agencies bearing on environmental impacts. It is the U.S. Interior Dept., the lead federal agency, which is ultimately responsible for preparing and issuing an EIS, and may require the sponsor to pay for the costs.”
Good thing Ms.Horan-Kunko didn’t rely on the Times-News’s editorial “encouragement and criticism,” as Kevin put it in his boastful Reader’s Forum column, to formulate her perspective on this key public policy issue.
Kevin concluded the Forum with this stirring pronouncement: “At the newspaper, we cover the news and report the facts. But as a local business, we have a vested interest in supporting the heavy lifting which must be done to ensure a strong, vibrant future for Erie.”
But what he and his colleagues don’t seem to understand is that the facts belong in the news columns, while the newspaper’s vested interests should be restricted to the editorial page. All too often, in the Times-News, they are interchangeably commingled.
There’s a lot of garbled rhetoric in between, but in essence here’s the way Kevin put it in the column entitled A deal takes shape to help remake Erie (Oct. 18, 2007): “In this case, I felt city and county leaders reacted positively to the newspaper's encouragement and criticism, and worked for the general good.”
Kevin’s self-congratulatory bombast derived from his modest notion that “For years on its editorial pages, the Times-News has encouraged such teamwork between the leaders of various local governing bodies.”
Kevin is quick to spin even the most innocuous development consistent with the Erie Times-News’s self-serving editorial policy into an opus grande. But when its editorial efforts fall flat, they are studiously ignored. For example.
In a cogent letter to the editor today, City Council member Jessica Horan–Kunko noted that an Oct. 6 editorial “took issue with a resolution passed by Erie City Council asking Erie Renewable Energy, the proposed developer of the tire-to-energy plant, to voluntarily prepare an environmental impact statement," and proposed instead that one should more appropriately be undertaken by the state.
Ms Horan-Kunko deftly demonstrated how off-base that proposal is: “As the sponsor of that resolution,” she wrote, “I researched the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection permitting process to which the tires-to-energy plant will be subject. According to the DEP, its review will not include an environmental impact statement. It will focus on emissions, erosion and sedimentation, and storm water management. The DEP will not address noise pollution, traffic, the ability of the city to treat the plant's wastewater or fire/disaster procedures,” all functions the editorial wrongly ascribed to the state.
Ms. Horan Kunko added: “Although only the federal government can require it, an environmental impact statement is the most common, widely used and objective process by which to obtain the facts that will help us make an informed decision, balancing private and public interests in job creation with legitimate environmental concerns.”
That more or less equates with what I had written in my blog the day the errant editorial appeared, which follows: “While ’s it’s true the city can’t require the firm to prepare and submit an environmental impact statement (EIS),” I wrote, “contrary to the editorial, neither can the state Department of Environmental Protection.
“Any mandate for an EIS can only come from the federal government under the provisions of the 28-year-old National Environmental Policy Act of 1970 (NEPA). While the federal government has delegated certain land, water and air protection responsibilities to the various states within their jurisdictions, only the feds can order the sponsor of a project to submit data required under NEPA to designated federal agencies bearing on environmental impacts. It is the U.S. Interior Dept., the lead federal agency, which is ultimately responsible for preparing and issuing an EIS, and may require the sponsor to pay for the costs.”
Good thing Ms.Horan-Kunko didn’t rely on the Times-News’s editorial “encouragement and criticism,” as Kevin put it in his boastful Reader’s Forum column, to formulate her perspective on this key public policy issue.
Kevin concluded the Forum with this stirring pronouncement: “At the newspaper, we cover the news and report the facts. But as a local business, we have a vested interest in supporting the heavy lifting which must be done to ensure a strong, vibrant future for Erie.”
But what he and his colleagues don’t seem to understand is that the facts belong in the news columns, while the newspaper’s vested interests should be restricted to the editorial page. All too often, in the Times-News, they are interchangeably commingled.
Reflections on criticizm
Several well-meaning readers who tend to concur with my frequent scoldings of the columnists, reporters, editorial policies and practices over at the Times-News, have suggested I pepper my criticisms with some occasional praise reflecting some of the newspaper’s benign attributes, or my efficacy as a captious critic, if any, may be somewhat eroded.
I appreciate their suggestions. It’s a sentiment I’ve confronted before. But it’s unlikely I’ll change my focus for these reasons.
The monolithic Times Publishing Co. commands a seven-day a week newspaper, hundreds of column inches daily, an all-encompassing if stunted 7/24 web site, a mediocre news and editorial staff (with a few exceptions) of two score or more, financial resources in the millions and a print monopoly over advertising, events and opinion-shaping within its market area. It blankets most or all of four counties in northwestern Pennsylvania, and projects an influential if warped voice that is heard in the state capital of Harrisburg and throughout the state.
What’s more, it systematically misuses and abuses the constitutionally-protected power of the press to serve its own ends and the agendas of special interests which are often incompatible with the broad public interest, giving them a voice denied those less privileged..
That said, my response to my well-intentioned friends is not only do I believe my constant carping in the direction of the Times-News is fully justified, but a dozen or more blogs equally committed to unmasking the foibles of the Times-News would be warranted to countermand its odious influence.
That doesn’t mean I won’t acknowledge any extraordinary journalistic achievements in the Times-News if and when they emerge, such as my encomium recently on Kevin Cuneo’s regular column, “Take Thirty,” my favorite column in all the world.
Unfortunately, gems like that are few and far between within the Times-News’s pages and cyberspace. As a result, the vast majority of my reflections upon its myriad misdeeds will continue unstinted.
I appreciate their suggestions. It’s a sentiment I’ve confronted before. But it’s unlikely I’ll change my focus for these reasons.
The monolithic Times Publishing Co. commands a seven-day a week newspaper, hundreds of column inches daily, an all-encompassing if stunted 7/24 web site, a mediocre news and editorial staff (with a few exceptions) of two score or more, financial resources in the millions and a print monopoly over advertising, events and opinion-shaping within its market area. It blankets most or all of four counties in northwestern Pennsylvania, and projects an influential if warped voice that is heard in the state capital of Harrisburg and throughout the state.
What’s more, it systematically misuses and abuses the constitutionally-protected power of the press to serve its own ends and the agendas of special interests which are often incompatible with the broad public interest, giving them a voice denied those less privileged..
That said, my response to my well-intentioned friends is not only do I believe my constant carping in the direction of the Times-News is fully justified, but a dozen or more blogs equally committed to unmasking the foibles of the Times-News would be warranted to countermand its odious influence.
That doesn’t mean I won’t acknowledge any extraordinary journalistic achievements in the Times-News if and when they emerge, such as my encomium recently on Kevin Cuneo’s regular column, “Take Thirty,” my favorite column in all the world.
Unfortunately, gems like that are few and far between within the Times-News’s pages and cyberspace. As a result, the vast majority of my reflections upon its myriad misdeeds will continue unstinted.
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Political correctness and expedience
Once again, the Erie Times-News has demonstrated it is riotously out of step with the American people as demonstrated by its hagiographic editorial today deifying Al Gore in abject deference to the Nobel award. It adds yet another monumental gaff to the Nobel panel’s long list of colossal blunders over the decades.
Both the Oscars and the Nobel panel have degraded the intrinsic value of their awards, not to mention the Times-News’s credibility, by sanctioning putative political correctness and expedience over integrity.
A Gallup poll taken right after the award was announced was expected to show a big lift in the public’s readiness to entertain Gore as a presidential candidate. But it registered just the opposite. Not even the Democrats polled said they wanted him as their presidential nominee.
Both the Oscars and the Nobel panel have degraded the intrinsic value of their awards, not to mention the Times-News’s credibility, by sanctioning putative political correctness and expedience over integrity.
A Gallup poll taken right after the award was announced was expected to show a big lift in the public’s readiness to entertain Gore as a presidential candidate. But it registered just the opposite. Not even the Democrats polled said they wanted him as their presidential nominee.
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Correction: Reporter's shield
Eagle Eye Scott Bremner rightly corrects my mistaken assertion in yesterday’s piece on the reporters’ shield issue that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein did not know the identity of Deep Throat. In fact, both did, as did their executive editor, Ben Bradlee and Bernstein’s wife.
However, the two Washington Post reporters would have been under no pressure by the U.S. Justice Dept. or the courts to reveal their source because there was no suspicion they might have been violating any law, since it was not known at the time that Deep Throat was a ranking FBI official.
Had that been known, it might have been a different story. But is there anyone who doubts Woodward and Bernstein would have protected Mark Felt’s identity to the death unless and until he either released them from their pledge or revealed it himself.
However, the two Washington Post reporters would have been under no pressure by the U.S. Justice Dept. or the courts to reveal their source because there was no suspicion they might have been violating any law, since it was not known at the time that Deep Throat was a ranking FBI official.
Had that been known, it might have been a different story. But is there anyone who doubts Woodward and Bernstein would have protected Mark Felt’s identity to the death unless and until he either released them from their pledge or revealed it himself.
ABOUT BOOKS, Episode One
An omnivorous reader since childhood, I prefer non-fiction (history, biography, autobiography), and classic literature - fictional or non-fictional - of any genre and period. At age nine, my parents gave me for Christmas the first complete edition of the Sherlock Holmes writings of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a 13-hundred page omnibus which contains the four novels and more than 50 short stories.
It's been one of my lifelong favorites, and I read it over and over again in full about every five years. More than anything else in my life,"The Complete Sherlock Holmes," with an insightful Introduction by Christopher Morley, influenced me to become a professional journalist and writer.
From time to time, I'll comment here on books I'm reading or have read, under the heading ABOUT BOOKS. With this inaugural book blog, I introduce readers to a book I wrote which was published in 2004 entitled "Alaska Agonistes: The Age of Petroleum - How Big Oil
Bought Alaska." "Agonistes," from the Greek, in this context, means "torn with inner conflict."
It's non-fiction based on my work as a newsman in Alaska over a period of 20 years and beyond. I'll begin here with a detailed description of the book's contents, followed by comments on and reviews of the book by critics and others.
Alaska Agonistes: The Age of Petroleum,
How Big Oil Bought Alaska, by Joe LaRocca,
Professional Press, Chapel Hill, N.C., 460 pps,
“Alaska Agonistes" is an anecdotal history of the modern oil industry in Alaska, the nation's most celebrated and denigrated oil province, and its social, political, environmental and economic
implications. It describes the tumultuous aftermath of the discovery in 1968 on Alaska's North Slope of the largest known oilfield in North America.
The sensational discovery, which shook the oil and financial world in the late 1960s, transformed Alaska from an obscure backwater into an international hotspot that drew armies of oil folks, financiers, news people, authors, tradesmen, technicians, lobbyists, public relations agents, would‑be entrepreneurs, and their colorful cadre of camp followers to the North Country by the tens of thousands.
Within a decade it would more than double Alaska's population, transforming its principal communities from small, sleepy frontier towns into thriving, strip mall‑pocked cities; bring unprecedented affluence to many of its residents and newcomers (and financial ruin to many
others); inflate the annual state budget from about $100 million to more than $6 billion, then gradually shrink it to less than $2 billion, bloating government bureaucracy at the local, state and federal levels; and foster wrenching social, cultural, economic and political change.
The book's broad purpose is to show how the invasion of Alaska by multi‑national oil companies in general, and the intrusion of the trans Alaska oil pipeline in particular has transmuted its social, political, cultural and environmental landscapes and re‑shaped them to conform to the needs, dictates and whims of Big Oil. The book makes the case that Alaska's democratic processes have been virtually taken over by the oil industry to the detriment of self‑government, but, oddly, with the consent of a majority of the governed, a shadow government that corrupts the body politic.
Oil money has also placed Alaskans at odds with most other Americans, both economically and environmentally, because their continued prosperity depends upon upward spiraling prices for consumer energy fuels, and the quest for additional crude oil and natural gas supplies in Alaska (for example, the national controversy over proposals to drill for oil within a tiny enclave in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge) to sustain optimum production. About 90 percent of Alaska's state budget derives from oil revenues.
Oil has also spawned the state's Permanent Fund Dividend Program, a grant exercise which now gives every man, woman and child who has lived in Alaska for at least six months an
annual stipend of up to $1,500 or more per year, derived from the state's unique constitutionally‑mandated Permanent Fund, fueled by oil revenues, now totaling more than $40 billion.
Perpetuation of the Fund and Dividend Program depends upon continuing state oil revenues, making virtually every Alaskan an advocate for the oil industry at any social and political cost, thus augmenting the industry's already over-whelming political base and power, giving it effective control over the electoral process in Alaska. The book also describes the tumultuous aftermath in Alaska of the discovery of the Prudhoe Bay oilfield on the North Slope in 1968.
While in Alaska, the author, the first newsman on the scene, covered the discovery and the ensuing construction of the $10 billion Trans Alaska oil pipeline from 1968 to 1977, the costliest privately-financed construction project in history which took nearly a decade, from 1969 to 1977 to complete.
The book traces the deterioration of the aging pipeline after 30 years of operation which, for reasons the book explains, is a disaster waiting to happen. It also covers the financial and field operations of the oil industry, from small independents to large multi‑national corporations like Exxon Mobile, British Petroleum, Conco Phillipsand others, and the politics of oil at the local, state and national levels.
The author writes extensively of the social, cultural, economic and environmental effects on Alaska and the nation of world‑scale oil production, including the construction and operation of the pipeline and related matters. Posing as a construction stiff, he worked for several months on the pipeline project undercover and incognito to sniff out and expose management and construction practices detrimental to the broad public interest.
The author covered the Alaska legislature and state government for 20 years. In the book, he discusses corruption of public officials stemming from Alaska's petrodollar wealth, and massive litigation between the state and members of the oil industry, including the largest and costliest civil rate case in the history of U. S. jurisprudence, implicating tens of billions of dollars.
The' book also covers in detail the sensational but under‑reported congressional hearings in the 1990s prompted by complaints of whistleblowers, working for the trans Alaska pipeline consortium alleging imminent threats and potentially disastrous consequences stemming
from mismanagement of the pipeline, some of which still prevail today.
It also discusses at length failed efforts over a period of five years to build a large diameter pipeline to carry North Slope natural gas through Alaska and Canada to U.S. and Canadian markets. That ill‑starred project collapsed under the weight of its gross and prohibitive costs, estimated in excess of $50 billion, and its highly politically‑charged genesis under the Carter administration.
As a result, the North Slope's vast natural gas reserves remain untapped, although now, 25 years later, there are on-going, but so far futile, efforts underway to resuscitate the gargantuan project in one form or another.
The book also analyzes the historic voyage in,1969 of the S.S. Manhattan on which the author sailed during its epic trip though the ice‑packed arctic waters of the fabled Northwest passage, an experiment sponsored by Humble Oil (now Exxon) to determine the feasibility of shipping
North Slope oil aboard supertankers through North America's northernmost archipelago to U.S. Eastern and European markets.
In another chapter, entitled, Hit & Run Journalism, Other Scriveners, the book critiques at length some fifteen non‑fiction books which have been written about Alaska oil and related matters since the 1968 North Slope oil discovery.
Copies of "Alaska Agonistes" may be obtained by writing to me at 23 Clinton St., North East, PA; jlar5553@verizon.net; or call (814) 725-8926.
READER COMMENTS
"The book arrived today. It was like being in a time warp. It covered things I had participated in but had clean forgotten. I judge it to be a great addition to Alaska history from a guy whose integrity was always at the top of the heap. Thanks." Steve Cowper, Austin, Texas; former Alaska Governor, former State Representative, Fairbanks.
"...this is an important book for these turbulent times, a book full of facts, conjecture and cautionary notes to guide us through the years to come, no matter who might be in charge here after the fall." Dan Davidson, BOOKENDS, (review), Whitehorse Daily Star, Whitehorse Yukon Territory, Canada
"This I gotta read. I still don't believe anyone got bought before Sheffield & Bill Allen, and that the deal didn't really close until Knowles; but, I'll wager you tell a different story. I've always said you were the best reporter I'd ever read, until the first time you wrote about me....." ROBERT LERESCHE, former Alaska Commissioner of Natural Resources.
“Enjoyed reading your book. Your writing style makes for easy reading. I particularly liked your treatment of local media vis-a-vis oil... Secrecy in and out of industry and government, ‘confidential’ settlements, bad advice given and taken from ‘inept amateurs from governors and attorneys general on down.’ Your capture of the gas pipeline history deserves to be read by those here now still working on the project…Your legendary investigative reporting in Alaska is sorely missed. You were one of the great ones.” Jack Roderick, Anchorage - Author, Historian
“I've enjoyed reading ‘Alaska Agonistes’. I lent the book to a friend, a retired Canadian surgeon, and he spent two hours talking with me about it and the implications of matters he found in there.” Wallace Turner, Seattle WA, Author, Pulitzer Prize Winner (retired, New York Times).
“A VETERAN ALASKA journalist, Joe LaRocca, has written a provocative new book on the oil industry in Alaska. The book is ‘Alaska Agonistes: The Age of Petroleum, How Big Oil Bought Alaska.’ ‘Agonistes’ means ‘torn with innerconflict,’ and I suspect there will be a good deal of inner and outer conflict over the contents of this volume…(LaRocca) knows a great deal about state politics and the oil industry in Alaska. There are no journalists in Alaska today who know the background the way (he) does, and we have no experts on the oil industry, or the deals that brought us to where wea re now.”Dermot Cole,Columnist, Fairbanks Daily News-Miner
“Observing the low quality of our local media reporting on the oil industry and related Alaska affairs in general, I have on numerous occasions said to others something to the effect that I wished Joe LaRocca were still around and regularly reporting to us. So I was pleased to see Dermot Cole's column in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner on March 23,2004 mentioning (his) new book ‘Alaska Agonistes’. This morning's News-(Miner) carries three major stories on the oil business. Without reading “Agonistes,” I would not comprehend the implications of what is being said in these stories. The book certainly has given me a lot to think about and has increased my awareness of many things.”Neil Davis, Professor Emeritus, Director, Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska, Fairbanks.
“I find myself savoring each short chapter. I am learning from both the breadth of your overview and the knowledgeable selection of specific observations with which you support your conclusions.”Rich Fineberg, Consultant, Fairbanks
“Only having been in AK about four years, the book was, for me, insightful, and cleared up a lot of issues I had been wondering about. I suppose if I had been here during the time period of the pipeline that it would have been more meaningful, but as it was it was a good read from a different perspective than the media usually spins things here!” Jim Hall, Kenai, National Wildlife Refuge
“Thank you for writing this great book! It’s so important that the real story gets told. Keep up the good fight. ” Dan Lawn, environmental specialist,Valdez, Alaska.
"I remember ( Circa 1973) when Dennis Fradley and I asked (State Senate President) Terry Miller about your writing on the Trans Alaska Pipeline Right of Way Leasing Bill. He said “We’ll just have to see who’s proven right.” So now we know Joe’s right. But Terry is dead, as are Governor Bill Egan and most of the other suspects who were in the room holding weapons. The rest are on a beach in Hawaii or somewhere. Fred Pratt, Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, former reporter, columnist.
It's about time your perspective on that critical history got recognition here in Alaska. Hopefully some of the lessons will be understood. Kudo to you for taking the time to help. Gregg Erickson, Juneau, AK, Consultant, News Letter Editor/Publisher, The Alaska Budget Report.
Ken enjoyed your many articles over the years, and especially admired the fact that you presented (regardless of topic) factually “the other side” without spite, malice or a personal agenda. We always felt you were a brilliant writer.” Mrs. Ken (Olga) Carson, Anchorage, Alaska
I remember your uniquely brave journalism and the lonely trail you trod trying to make any kind of sense out of the Great Alaskan Feeding Fury. Bill Spear, Juneau, Alaska
For those of us who were here during "the pipeline years," Mr. La Rocca's tome is a trip down memory lane. It is also a textbook for the future--you know, for the next pipeline. Phil Deisher, Fairbanks,
You were one journalist in Alaska at that time who took pains to be objective on emotional natural resource issues. Dave Harbour, Anchorage, Alaska: Public Affairs, Consulting, commissioner / Alaska Regulatory Commission.
__________________________________________________________________
It's been one of my lifelong favorites, and I read it over and over again in full about every five years. More than anything else in my life,"The Complete Sherlock Holmes," with an insightful Introduction by Christopher Morley, influenced me to become a professional journalist and writer.
From time to time, I'll comment here on books I'm reading or have read, under the heading ABOUT BOOKS. With this inaugural book blog, I introduce readers to a book I wrote which was published in 2004 entitled "Alaska Agonistes: The Age of Petroleum - How Big Oil
Bought Alaska." "Agonistes," from the Greek, in this context, means "torn with inner conflict."
It's non-fiction based on my work as a newsman in Alaska over a period of 20 years and beyond. I'll begin here with a detailed description of the book's contents, followed by comments on and reviews of the book by critics and others.
Alaska Agonistes: The Age of Petroleum,
How Big Oil Bought Alaska, by Joe LaRocca,
Professional Press, Chapel Hill, N.C., 460 pps,
“Alaska Agonistes" is an anecdotal history of the modern oil industry in Alaska, the nation's most celebrated and denigrated oil province, and its social, political, environmental and economic
implications. It describes the tumultuous aftermath of the discovery in 1968 on Alaska's North Slope of the largest known oilfield in North America.
The sensational discovery, which shook the oil and financial world in the late 1960s, transformed Alaska from an obscure backwater into an international hotspot that drew armies of oil folks, financiers, news people, authors, tradesmen, technicians, lobbyists, public relations agents, would‑be entrepreneurs, and their colorful cadre of camp followers to the North Country by the tens of thousands.
Within a decade it would more than double Alaska's population, transforming its principal communities from small, sleepy frontier towns into thriving, strip mall‑pocked cities; bring unprecedented affluence to many of its residents and newcomers (and financial ruin to many
others); inflate the annual state budget from about $100 million to more than $6 billion, then gradually shrink it to less than $2 billion, bloating government bureaucracy at the local, state and federal levels; and foster wrenching social, cultural, economic and political change.
The book's broad purpose is to show how the invasion of Alaska by multi‑national oil companies in general, and the intrusion of the trans Alaska oil pipeline in particular has transmuted its social, political, cultural and environmental landscapes and re‑shaped them to conform to the needs, dictates and whims of Big Oil. The book makes the case that Alaska's democratic processes have been virtually taken over by the oil industry to the detriment of self‑government, but, oddly, with the consent of a majority of the governed, a shadow government that corrupts the body politic.
Oil money has also placed Alaskans at odds with most other Americans, both economically and environmentally, because their continued prosperity depends upon upward spiraling prices for consumer energy fuels, and the quest for additional crude oil and natural gas supplies in Alaska (for example, the national controversy over proposals to drill for oil within a tiny enclave in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge) to sustain optimum production. About 90 percent of Alaska's state budget derives from oil revenues.
Oil has also spawned the state's Permanent Fund Dividend Program, a grant exercise which now gives every man, woman and child who has lived in Alaska for at least six months an
annual stipend of up to $1,500 or more per year, derived from the state's unique constitutionally‑mandated Permanent Fund, fueled by oil revenues, now totaling more than $40 billion.
Perpetuation of the Fund and Dividend Program depends upon continuing state oil revenues, making virtually every Alaskan an advocate for the oil industry at any social and political cost, thus augmenting the industry's already over-whelming political base and power, giving it effective control over the electoral process in Alaska. The book also describes the tumultuous aftermath in Alaska of the discovery of the Prudhoe Bay oilfield on the North Slope in 1968.
While in Alaska, the author, the first newsman on the scene, covered the discovery and the ensuing construction of the $10 billion Trans Alaska oil pipeline from 1968 to 1977, the costliest privately-financed construction project in history which took nearly a decade, from 1969 to 1977 to complete.
The book traces the deterioration of the aging pipeline after 30 years of operation which, for reasons the book explains, is a disaster waiting to happen. It also covers the financial and field operations of the oil industry, from small independents to large multi‑national corporations like Exxon Mobile, British Petroleum, Conco Phillipsand others, and the politics of oil at the local, state and national levels.
The author writes extensively of the social, cultural, economic and environmental effects on Alaska and the nation of world‑scale oil production, including the construction and operation of the pipeline and related matters. Posing as a construction stiff, he worked for several months on the pipeline project undercover and incognito to sniff out and expose management and construction practices detrimental to the broad public interest.
The author covered the Alaska legislature and state government for 20 years. In the book, he discusses corruption of public officials stemming from Alaska's petrodollar wealth, and massive litigation between the state and members of the oil industry, including the largest and costliest civil rate case in the history of U. S. jurisprudence, implicating tens of billions of dollars.
The' book also covers in detail the sensational but under‑reported congressional hearings in the 1990s prompted by complaints of whistleblowers, working for the trans Alaska pipeline consortium alleging imminent threats and potentially disastrous consequences stemming
from mismanagement of the pipeline, some of which still prevail today.
It also discusses at length failed efforts over a period of five years to build a large diameter pipeline to carry North Slope natural gas through Alaska and Canada to U.S. and Canadian markets. That ill‑starred project collapsed under the weight of its gross and prohibitive costs, estimated in excess of $50 billion, and its highly politically‑charged genesis under the Carter administration.
As a result, the North Slope's vast natural gas reserves remain untapped, although now, 25 years later, there are on-going, but so far futile, efforts underway to resuscitate the gargantuan project in one form or another.
The book also analyzes the historic voyage in,1969 of the S.S. Manhattan on which the author sailed during its epic trip though the ice‑packed arctic waters of the fabled Northwest passage, an experiment sponsored by Humble Oil (now Exxon) to determine the feasibility of shipping
North Slope oil aboard supertankers through North America's northernmost archipelago to U.S. Eastern and European markets.
In another chapter, entitled, Hit & Run Journalism, Other Scriveners, the book critiques at length some fifteen non‑fiction books which have been written about Alaska oil and related matters since the 1968 North Slope oil discovery.
Copies of "Alaska Agonistes" may be obtained by writing to me at 23 Clinton St., North East, PA; jlar5553@verizon.net; or call (814) 725-8926.
READER COMMENTS
"The book arrived today. It was like being in a time warp. It covered things I had participated in but had clean forgotten. I judge it to be a great addition to Alaska history from a guy whose integrity was always at the top of the heap. Thanks." Steve Cowper, Austin, Texas; former Alaska Governor, former State Representative, Fairbanks.
"...this is an important book for these turbulent times, a book full of facts, conjecture and cautionary notes to guide us through the years to come, no matter who might be in charge here after the fall." Dan Davidson, BOOKENDS, (review), Whitehorse Daily Star, Whitehorse Yukon Territory, Canada
"This I gotta read. I still don't believe anyone got bought before Sheffield & Bill Allen, and that the deal didn't really close until Knowles; but, I'll wager you tell a different story. I've always said you were the best reporter I'd ever read, until the first time you wrote about me....." ROBERT LERESCHE, former Alaska Commissioner of Natural Resources.
“Enjoyed reading your book. Your writing style makes for easy reading. I particularly liked your treatment of local media vis-a-vis oil... Secrecy in and out of industry and government, ‘confidential’ settlements, bad advice given and taken from ‘inept amateurs from governors and attorneys general on down.’ Your capture of the gas pipeline history deserves to be read by those here now still working on the project…Your legendary investigative reporting in Alaska is sorely missed. You were one of the great ones.” Jack Roderick, Anchorage - Author, Historian
“I've enjoyed reading ‘Alaska Agonistes’. I lent the book to a friend, a retired Canadian surgeon, and he spent two hours talking with me about it and the implications of matters he found in there.” Wallace Turner, Seattle WA, Author, Pulitzer Prize Winner (retired, New York Times).
“A VETERAN ALASKA journalist, Joe LaRocca, has written a provocative new book on the oil industry in Alaska. The book is ‘Alaska Agonistes: The Age of Petroleum, How Big Oil Bought Alaska.’ ‘Agonistes’ means ‘torn with innerconflict,’ and I suspect there will be a good deal of inner and outer conflict over the contents of this volume…(LaRocca) knows a great deal about state politics and the oil industry in Alaska. There are no journalists in Alaska today who know the background the way (he) does, and we have no experts on the oil industry, or the deals that brought us to where wea re now.”Dermot Cole,Columnist, Fairbanks Daily News-Miner
“Observing the low quality of our local media reporting on the oil industry and related Alaska affairs in general, I have on numerous occasions said to others something to the effect that I wished Joe LaRocca were still around and regularly reporting to us. So I was pleased to see Dermot Cole's column in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner on March 23,2004 mentioning (his) new book ‘Alaska Agonistes’. This morning's News-(Miner) carries three major stories on the oil business. Without reading “Agonistes,” I would not comprehend the implications of what is being said in these stories. The book certainly has given me a lot to think about and has increased my awareness of many things.”Neil Davis, Professor Emeritus, Director, Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska, Fairbanks.
“I find myself savoring each short chapter. I am learning from both the breadth of your overview and the knowledgeable selection of specific observations with which you support your conclusions.”Rich Fineberg, Consultant, Fairbanks
“Only having been in AK about four years, the book was, for me, insightful, and cleared up a lot of issues I had been wondering about. I suppose if I had been here during the time period of the pipeline that it would have been more meaningful, but as it was it was a good read from a different perspective than the media usually spins things here!” Jim Hall, Kenai, National Wildlife Refuge
“Thank you for writing this great book! It’s so important that the real story gets told. Keep up the good fight. ” Dan Lawn, environmental specialist,Valdez, Alaska.
"I remember ( Circa 1973) when Dennis Fradley and I asked (State Senate President) Terry Miller about your writing on the Trans Alaska Pipeline Right of Way Leasing Bill. He said “We’ll just have to see who’s proven right.” So now we know Joe’s right. But Terry is dead, as are Governor Bill Egan and most of the other suspects who were in the room holding weapons. The rest are on a beach in Hawaii or somewhere. Fred Pratt, Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, former reporter, columnist.
It's about time your perspective on that critical history got recognition here in Alaska. Hopefully some of the lessons will be understood. Kudo to you for taking the time to help. Gregg Erickson, Juneau, AK, Consultant, News Letter Editor/Publisher, The Alaska Budget Report.
Ken enjoyed your many articles over the years, and especially admired the fact that you presented (regardless of topic) factually “the other side” without spite, malice or a personal agenda. We always felt you were a brilliant writer.” Mrs. Ken (Olga) Carson, Anchorage, Alaska
I remember your uniquely brave journalism and the lonely trail you trod trying to make any kind of sense out of the Great Alaskan Feeding Fury. Bill Spear, Juneau, Alaska
For those of us who were here during "the pipeline years," Mr. La Rocca's tome is a trip down memory lane. It is also a textbook for the future--you know, for the next pipeline. Phil Deisher, Fairbanks,
You were one journalist in Alaska at that time who took pains to be objective on emotional natural resource issues. Dave Harbour, Anchorage, Alaska: Public Affairs, Consulting, commissioner / Alaska Regulatory Commission.
__________________________________________________________________
Review: Alaska Historical Society
ALASKA HISTORY Vol. 19, Nos. 1 & 2
Anchorage, Alaska 99510-0299http:
http://www.alaskahistoricalsociety.org/
By Jack Roderick
In Greek, the word agonistes means “torn with inner strife.” Former Alaska investigative journalist Joe LaRocca, uses the word in the title of his book, Alaska Agonistes: The Age of Petroleum, How Big Oil Bought Alaska.
According to LaRocca, Alaska has been “bought” by big oil companies and that Alaskans are naïve and unsophisticated about oil, despite its providing more than eighty percent of the state’s income. He thinks Alaska is riding Big Oil’s tiger.
And that things can get only worse.The author’s position is apparent even before the reader opens the book. Highlighted on the front cover fly-leaf are the words of former state senator John Butrovich, a Republican from Fairbanks.The highly-respected “Butro” spoke at a 1969 legislative hearing shortly after oil was discovered at Prudhoe Bay. “The majors are going to own the whole damn state,” said Butrovich. “The majors will own you. They have no souls – robber barons don’t change.”
In the epilogue, LaRocca reinforces Butrovich's words. “The state has virtually abdicated its regulatory and other responsibilities vis a vis the exploration, development, production, and regulation of oil, though it puts on a very convincing public relations and rhetorical show of hegemony.” (p438).
Arriving in Alaska from Pennsylvania in 1967, only months before the Prudhoe Bay discovery, LaRocca began reporting oil and politics for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. Covering the state legislature for 20 years (longer than any one else in the state's history), he eventually became an independent free lance reporter, correspondent, commentator and columnist for print and broadcast media, inside and outside Alaska, including The New York Times.
LaRocca’s aggressive, accurate and well-researched information gathering style became his hallmark, and he revels in the political intrigues both in Juneau and Washington, D.C.
After a short history of oil-related events in Alaska, the book moves to the North Slope where really big things were happening. The 1968 Prudhoe Bay discovery, authorization of the trans Alaska pipeline, construction delays mainly due to Native land rights issues, the S.S Manhattan’s trip from the East Coast to Prudhoe Bay, the state’s budget going from $100 million to billions of dollars following the 1969 state $900 million lease sale, development of the Alyeska Pipeline Service Company, drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, actual construction and operation of the pipeline – all these events and many others are documented in this book.
The chapter addressing the thirty-year effort trying to build a natural gas pipeline from Alaska to the “South 48” markets is particularly informative and should be required reading for those still trying to build it.
Former Governor Jay Hammond is one of many individuals considered by LaRocca to be a political villain. LaRocca claims Hammond mishandled Alaska Petrochemical Company’s attempt to build a petrochemical plant in the City of Valdez and that Hammond appeared to support the doomed Alpetco plan even though he wanted it to fail.
Hammond gets failing grades also for his refusal to veto repeal of the state’s “separate accounting” oil tax and the state’s personal income tax, both allowed to expire in 1981. Also taken to task are state politicians Ed Dankworth, Bill Sheffield and George Hohman.
LaRocca includes a very interesting section at the end of his book. “Part Eight: Other Scriveners” (sub-titled Hit-and-Run Literati). In his often acerbic but forthright style, he holds sixteen authors’ feet to the fire for their alleged writing weaknesses. This section may be well worth reading all by itself.
Anyone interested in knowing how Big Oil and Alaska fought and sometimes embraced during the past decades should read Alaska Agonistes. In my opinion, events are reported as they happened. Present day policy makers can get insight into the past, which may help them in the future.
In addition to the writing itself, many photographs of historical interest are included.
Jack Roderick is an Anchorage attorney considered one of the most knowledgeable historians of the Alaska oil industry, having been involved in it one way or another, both observer and participant, for more than 50 years. He is the author of a memoir, Crude Dreams, A Personal History of Oil & Politics in Alaska, Epicenter Press, 1997. He has servxd as Borough Mayor of Anchorage and Assistsant Commissioner of the Alaska Dept. of Natural Resources.
Monday, October 15, 2007
To shield or not to shield
(See correction: Reporters' shield)
While there are reasons both pro and con
as to whether a federal reporter’s shield law
should be enacted by Congress as advocated
in an editorial appearing in today’s Erie
Times-News, the cons far outweigh the pros.
Nothing in the editorial makes the case for
such a law. Au contraire.
The editorial cites as one example in favor of
a shield law the Watergate scandal of the
early 1970s which led to President Richard
Nixon’s resignation.
But the two famous reporters who broke
the stories on the scandal, Bob Woodward
and Carl Bernstein, based on information
provided them by a confidential source,
would not have been aided by a shield law
because they did not know the identity
of their prime source, known only as “Deep
Throat.”
Therefore, neither they nor their source
needed protection of a law barring a court
order forcing them to reveal the identity of
their source or be thrust into jail unless and
until they did. Strike one.
In another famous case cited by the editorial,
the Pentagon Papers, no confidential sources
were involved who could be threatened by
prosecutorial retaliation. There were several
parties involved in outing the Pentagon Papers,
including then-U.S. Senator, Mike Gravel, a
Democrat of Alaska, now a symbolic candidate
for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Protected by legislative immunity. Gravel (pro-
nounced gra-VELL), simply read the papers aloud
and verbatim in a public setting.
The principal legal issue involved in that contretemps
was whether the U.S. Justice Department could
exercise prior restraint by ordering the New York
Times and, as I recall, the Washington Post,
to refrain from publishing the Pentagon Papers,
first in their newspapers, and later in
hastily published paperback volumes for sale
in retail outlets. Both published the documents
in full with impunity. Strike two.
In the third case cited by the editorial, Judith
Miller of the New York Times was jailed not
because she refused to reveal the identity of
a source, but because she refused to testify before
a federal criminal grand jury, and was jailed
for criminal contempt. In fact, the source
of the information the federal prosecutor
sought from Miller, Scooter Libby, Vice President
Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, had signed a
waiver releasing her and other journalists
from their pledge of confidentiality.
But Miller, for reasons known only to her,
refused to accept its validity on grounds
that it was “coerced,” and continued to
refuse to testify, for which she was jailed. It
was actually Syndicated Columnist Robert
Kovak who identified Victoria Plame as a U.S.
covert agent, based on non-privileged infor-
mation he said he obtained from Libby, not
Miller, and he was unscathed by the revelation.
Libby, of course, was tried and convicted,not
for leaking classified information, but for lying
under oath that he had not leaked it (perjury)
and obstructing justice. Strike three.
Hence, none of the cases cited by the
Times-News editorial makes the case in
favor of a federal reporters’ shield law.
The main problem with a shield law is that it
protects unethical as well as ethical reporters.
With a shield law in force, an unethical reporter
can fabricate stories at will based on non-
existent sources, secure in the knowledge that
he or she couldn’t be threatened with the
prospect of criminal prosecution for refusing
to divulge them.
In more than 40 years as an investigative
journalist, I have often pledged anonymity
to sources, sometimes in cases where
a breach of confidentiality could endanger
a source’s life, limb, livelihood or family. But
I’ve never been in a position where I had
to reveal a source to whom I had pledged
confidentiality or face imprisonment. There
are techniques for eluding that quandary
in many, if not all cases.
The three sponsors of a proposed shield law in
the U.S. Senate, Spector, Lugar and Schumer
singled out by the editorial are among the
sharpest parlimentary and political heads
within that august body. They are baldly playing
to the press with the full knowledge that a
majority of their colleagues in both chambers
won't support an effective shield law.
If they thought for a minute one might actually
be enacted, they'd back off in a heartbeat. If
one should pass, it would be loaded with
exceptions and loopholes that would make the
status quo infinitely more to be desired.
Reporters have to make a choice. Either they
pledge anonymity to a source or they don’t.
If they do, they must be resigned to suffer
the consequences, if any. It’s their job. It’s as
simple as that.
While there are reasons both pro and con
as to whether a federal reporter’s shield law
should be enacted by Congress as advocated
in an editorial appearing in today’s Erie
Times-News, the cons far outweigh the pros.
Nothing in the editorial makes the case for
such a law. Au contraire.
The editorial cites as one example in favor of
a shield law the Watergate scandal of the
early 1970s which led to President Richard
Nixon’s resignation.
But the two famous reporters who broke
the stories on the scandal, Bob Woodward
and Carl Bernstein, based on information
provided them by a confidential source,
would not have been aided by a shield law
because they did not know the identity
of their prime source, known only as “Deep
Throat.”
Therefore, neither they nor their source
needed protection of a law barring a court
order forcing them to reveal the identity of
their source or be thrust into jail unless and
until they did. Strike one.
In another famous case cited by the editorial,
the Pentagon Papers, no confidential sources
were involved who could be threatened by
prosecutorial retaliation. There were several
parties involved in outing the Pentagon Papers,
including then-U.S. Senator, Mike Gravel, a
Democrat of Alaska, now a symbolic candidate
for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Protected by legislative immunity. Gravel (pro-
nounced gra-VELL), simply read the papers aloud
and verbatim in a public setting.
The principal legal issue involved in that contretemps
was whether the U.S. Justice Department could
exercise prior restraint by ordering the New York
Times and, as I recall, the Washington Post,
to refrain from publishing the Pentagon Papers,
first in their newspapers, and later in
hastily published paperback volumes for sale
in retail outlets. Both published the documents
in full with impunity. Strike two.
In the third case cited by the editorial, Judith
Miller of the New York Times was jailed not
because she refused to reveal the identity of
a source, but because she refused to testify before
a federal criminal grand jury, and was jailed
for criminal contempt. In fact, the source
of the information the federal prosecutor
sought from Miller, Scooter Libby, Vice President
Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, had signed a
waiver releasing her and other journalists
from their pledge of confidentiality.
But Miller, for reasons known only to her,
refused to accept its validity on grounds
that it was “coerced,” and continued to
refuse to testify, for which she was jailed. It
was actually Syndicated Columnist Robert
Kovak who identified Victoria Plame as a U.S.
covert agent, based on non-privileged infor-
mation he said he obtained from Libby, not
Miller, and he was unscathed by the revelation.
Libby, of course, was tried and convicted,not
for leaking classified information, but for lying
under oath that he had not leaked it (perjury)
and obstructing justice. Strike three.
Hence, none of the cases cited by the
Times-News editorial makes the case in
favor of a federal reporters’ shield law.
The main problem with a shield law is that it
protects unethical as well as ethical reporters.
With a shield law in force, an unethical reporter
can fabricate stories at will based on non-
existent sources, secure in the knowledge that
he or she couldn’t be threatened with the
prospect of criminal prosecution for refusing
to divulge them.
In more than 40 years as an investigative
journalist, I have often pledged anonymity
to sources, sometimes in cases where
a breach of confidentiality could endanger
a source’s life, limb, livelihood or family. But
I’ve never been in a position where I had
to reveal a source to whom I had pledged
confidentiality or face imprisonment. There
are techniques for eluding that quandary
in many, if not all cases.
The three sponsors of a proposed shield law in
the U.S. Senate, Spector, Lugar and Schumer
singled out by the editorial are among the
sharpest parlimentary and political heads
within that august body. They are baldly playing
to the press with the full knowledge that a
majority of their colleagues in both chambers
won't support an effective shield law.
If they thought for a minute one might actually
be enacted, they'd back off in a heartbeat. If
one should pass, it would be loaded with
exceptions and loopholes that would make the
status quo infinitely more to be desired.
Reporters have to make a choice. Either they
pledge anonymity to a source or they don’t.
If they do, they must be resigned to suffer
the consequences, if any. It’s their job. It’s as
simple as that.
No anonymous plaudits please
If by any remote chance there's anyone out there who for some unaccountable reason feels inclined to post a complimentary comment about me on Jack Tirak's splendid "Eriemediablog," I would appreciate it if, for obvious reasons, you would identify yourself. No anons please.
Thanks
Joe LaRocca
Thanks
Joe LaRocca
Sunday, October 14, 2007
Barker's cover story
Times-News Reporter Ed Pallatella fell hook, line and sinker for School Superintendent James Barker's fancy spiel about how the school district may have paid an unknown but presumably excessive amount in fees to the broker, J.P. Morgan, which managed the refinancing of $37 million in bonded indebtedness for the district back in 2003.
If Barker had couched his tale of woe in memorandum form it could have been called what is colloquially known as a CYA Memo, and I don't believe I have to spell that out.
Don't know if Barker ever heard the old saw "The buck stops here," and "here" is directly on his oversized desk. Yet he managed by inference to blame everyone but himself for the school district's loss, whatever it is, although it appears to be at least $750,000, or half of what the school board was told its profit would be from the refinancing scheme, plus whatever excess fees may have been paid to the broker, if any, plus the $60,000 the district paid to a downstate financial firm to advise it (badly, it appears) on how to handle the refinacing.
But I suspect, and I believe Barker knows the loss will be significant, or he wouldn't have gone to the lengths he did to concoct his convoluted cover story.
Then, of course, there will also be the huge but unknown prospective expense the school district's taxpayers will have to bear to litigate Barker's faux pax, thus compounding the loss, coupled with the prospect that the outcome of the litigation may be a big fat zero for the school district. There's no doubt Barker is the culprit here, but you'd never know it without reading between the lines of Pallatella's story, which provides an elaborate if convenient escape route for the superintendent.
He's the high-priced expert the board pays to guide them through financial morasses like this one. And it appears all he had to do in 2003 was insist on knowing what the refinancing fee would be, a no brainer in most business environments except, apparently, in the superintendent's suite. But instead, he allowed himself and the school board to be stiffed, assuming pending litigation shows that's what happened.
A further irony is that it took an enterprising reporter with Bloomberg News in New York City to uncover a major story in the Times-News's own backyard. Perhaps, in its defense, the local rag can invoke the NIMBY syndrome.
If Barker had couched his tale of woe in memorandum form it could have been called what is colloquially known as a CYA Memo, and I don't believe I have to spell that out.
Don't know if Barker ever heard the old saw "The buck stops here," and "here" is directly on his oversized desk. Yet he managed by inference to blame everyone but himself for the school district's loss, whatever it is, although it appears to be at least $750,000, or half of what the school board was told its profit would be from the refinancing scheme, plus whatever excess fees may have been paid to the broker, if any, plus the $60,000 the district paid to a downstate financial firm to advise it (badly, it appears) on how to handle the refinacing.
But I suspect, and I believe Barker knows the loss will be significant, or he wouldn't have gone to the lengths he did to concoct his convoluted cover story.
Then, of course, there will also be the huge but unknown prospective expense the school district's taxpayers will have to bear to litigate Barker's faux pax, thus compounding the loss, coupled with the prospect that the outcome of the litigation may be a big fat zero for the school district. There's no doubt Barker is the culprit here, but you'd never know it without reading between the lines of Pallatella's story, which provides an elaborate if convenient escape route for the superintendent.
He's the high-priced expert the board pays to guide them through financial morasses like this one. And it appears all he had to do in 2003 was insist on knowing what the refinancing fee would be, a no brainer in most business environments except, apparently, in the superintendent's suite. But instead, he allowed himself and the school board to be stiffed, assuming pending litigation shows that's what happened.
A further irony is that it took an enterprising reporter with Bloomberg News in New York City to uncover a major story in the Times-News's own backyard. Perhaps, in its defense, the local rag can invoke the NIMBY syndrome.
Judge Joyce and the Ford Explorer
While there is emphatically the presumption of innocence, Judge Michael Joyce’s indictment by a federal grand jury recently on insurance fraud and related charges casts suspicion, not only on his lengthy bench service, but on that of every local judge and judges everywhere.
One wonders why the local news media have never identified and interviewed the driver of the
Ford Explorer which rear-ended Judge Joyce’s vehicle, and which caused so little damage that it wasn’t even reported to the local police. Surely that driver, whoever he or she is, could provide some compelling insight into the judge’s behavior and conduct in the wake of the accident, or perhaps even contradict his version of events.
Is it possible, for example that Judge Joyce not only fabricated the extent of his injuries, if he did, but also deliberately caused the other driver to collide with his vehicle in order to set up his allegedly fraudulent insurance claims. That’s a growing trend in auto insurance fraud in some venues. If the judge were capable of fabricating the fraudulent aftermath of the “accident,” why not the accident itself?
Even if in the end Judge Joyce is vindicated and the indictment found to be, as he has asserted,”without merit,” the known circumstances imply a level of culpability that cannot be vouchsafed. Nor can this episode be viewed as simply an isolated incident. There are too many opportunities for temptation and corruption within the ambit of judges. Now that we know even those at the top can be compromised, gone forever, within the local context at least, is the presumed or implied infallibility of jurists.
How can judge Joyce or his attorney explain away the stark contradiction between two key documents in evidence which he himself reportedly prepared: one, the letter to the insurance company claiming debilitating injuries and, two, his contemporaneous application for a pilot’s license asserting requisite physical fitness?
In this light, one can only wonder whether Judge Joyce – or any other judge - has putatively committed other illicit acts throughout his or her tenure which have heretofore gone unseen. And, since it could happen to him, so high on the state juridical hierarchy, why not to any other jurist on the federal, state, or county bench? It was not, after all, the court system which ferreted out this alleged egregious misconduct from among its own, but outside investigative agencies.
This further suggests that the court system cannot police or discipline its own. It may be argued that judicial malpractices like those implicit here are not rare; just rarely uncovered, because of the courts’ entrenched lack of transparency, their unchecked power and influence, and the timidity of the local news media.
It also raises the troubling question of the integrity of the insurance industry generally, and Erie Insurance Co. and State Farm in particular. They were obviously intimidated by the official court logo over Judge Joyce’s letter claiming damages, failing to undertake even the most rudimentary or superficial investigation into his claims. Why? Because of his past and prospective jurisdiction over their commercial transactions and other activities. Who must pay for this, and perhaps other prodigious failures unseen or unacknowledged by Erie Insurance, but insurance consumers generally lacking the judicial power of a sitting judge, many of whom can ill afford to?
One wonders why the local news media have never identified and interviewed the driver of the
Ford Explorer which rear-ended Judge Joyce’s vehicle, and which caused so little damage that it wasn’t even reported to the local police. Surely that driver, whoever he or she is, could provide some compelling insight into the judge’s behavior and conduct in the wake of the accident, or perhaps even contradict his version of events.
Is it possible, for example that Judge Joyce not only fabricated the extent of his injuries, if he did, but also deliberately caused the other driver to collide with his vehicle in order to set up his allegedly fraudulent insurance claims. That’s a growing trend in auto insurance fraud in some venues. If the judge were capable of fabricating the fraudulent aftermath of the “accident,” why not the accident itself?
Even if in the end Judge Joyce is vindicated and the indictment found to be, as he has asserted,”without merit,” the known circumstances imply a level of culpability that cannot be vouchsafed. Nor can this episode be viewed as simply an isolated incident. There are too many opportunities for temptation and corruption within the ambit of judges. Now that we know even those at the top can be compromised, gone forever, within the local context at least, is the presumed or implied infallibility of jurists.
How can judge Joyce or his attorney explain away the stark contradiction between two key documents in evidence which he himself reportedly prepared: one, the letter to the insurance company claiming debilitating injuries and, two, his contemporaneous application for a pilot’s license asserting requisite physical fitness?
In this light, one can only wonder whether Judge Joyce – or any other judge - has putatively committed other illicit acts throughout his or her tenure which have heretofore gone unseen. And, since it could happen to him, so high on the state juridical hierarchy, why not to any other jurist on the federal, state, or county bench? It was not, after all, the court system which ferreted out this alleged egregious misconduct from among its own, but outside investigative agencies.
This further suggests that the court system cannot police or discipline its own. It may be argued that judicial malpractices like those implicit here are not rare; just rarely uncovered, because of the courts’ entrenched lack of transparency, their unchecked power and influence, and the timidity of the local news media.
It also raises the troubling question of the integrity of the insurance industry generally, and Erie Insurance Co. and State Farm in particular. They were obviously intimidated by the official court logo over Judge Joyce’s letter claiming damages, failing to undertake even the most rudimentary or superficial investigation into his claims. Why? Because of his past and prospective jurisdiction over their commercial transactions and other activities. Who must pay for this, and perhaps other prodigious failures unseen or unacknowledged by Erie Insurance, but insurance consumers generally lacking the judicial power of a sitting judge, many of whom can ill afford to?
Where's the beef?
Where's the beef?
The article in today’s Times-News by Reporter
Jim Martin entitled “Ribbon to be cut at biofuels
plant” raises more questions than it answers.
The headline’s vacuity was echoed in the story’s
lead paragraph which reads:”Erie Management
Group will kick off operations at Lake Erie Biofuels
with a ribbon-cutting ceremony this morning.”
It then gave us the astonishing news that “Owner
Samuel P. (Pat) Black is expected to be on hand
along with Erie Mayor Joe Sinnot and U.S.
Representative Phil English of Erie.” Wow!
This is the stuff of self-serving company press
releases, hardly warranting a reporter’s byline,
which usually implies that the reporter has
actually done some original legwork on a story,
not merely lip-synced the corporate line. Except
for the riveting ribbon-cutting action, the rest of
the article was old hat, warmed over recent
history
According to the article, the $50 million plant
“meets new voluntary quality assurance
standards.” What in the world does that mean?
It appears to mean that quality control is whatever
the company says it is, which is no standard at all.
But we’re not sure. The reporter didn’t ask.
Why should Erieites care about the opening of
this plant? How many jobs will it create? Will its
product lower the cost of fuel locally. If so, how
much. If not, why not? The reporter didn't ask.
In an earlier article touching on this subject,
Reporter Martin quoted a municipal port
authority official as saying Erie Biofuels expects
to export 1.5 million gallons per month of its
product through the Port of Erie to a European
market. That’s more than one-fourth of the
plant’s annual output.
Why would Erie Biofuel export any of its product
when there’s a serious shortage of fuels in the
U.S.?We don’t know, because the reporter didn’t
ask the question.
Last question. Where are the Times-News
editors who are presumed to review reporters’
work and keep them focused on the pertinent facts?
The article in today’s Times-News by Reporter
Jim Martin entitled “Ribbon to be cut at biofuels
plant” raises more questions than it answers.
The headline’s vacuity was echoed in the story’s
lead paragraph which reads:”Erie Management
Group will kick off operations at Lake Erie Biofuels
with a ribbon-cutting ceremony this morning.”
It then gave us the astonishing news that “Owner
Samuel P. (Pat) Black is expected to be on hand
along with Erie Mayor Joe Sinnot and U.S.
Representative Phil English of Erie.” Wow!
This is the stuff of self-serving company press
releases, hardly warranting a reporter’s byline,
which usually implies that the reporter has
actually done some original legwork on a story,
not merely lip-synced the corporate line. Except
for the riveting ribbon-cutting action, the rest of
the article was old hat, warmed over recent
history
According to the article, the $50 million plant
“meets new voluntary quality assurance
standards.” What in the world does that mean?
It appears to mean that quality control is whatever
the company says it is, which is no standard at all.
But we’re not sure. The reporter didn’t ask.
Why should Erieites care about the opening of
this plant? How many jobs will it create? Will its
product lower the cost of fuel locally. If so, how
much. If not, why not? The reporter didn't ask.
In an earlier article touching on this subject,
Reporter Martin quoted a municipal port
authority official as saying Erie Biofuels expects
to export 1.5 million gallons per month of its
product through the Port of Erie to a European
market. That’s more than one-fourth of the
plant’s annual output.
Why would Erie Biofuel export any of its product
when there’s a serious shortage of fuels in the
U.S.?We don’t know, because the reporter didn’t
ask the question.
Last question. Where are the Times-News
editors who are presumed to review reporters’
work and keep them focused on the pertinent facts?
The Erie Times-News & Presque Isle Downs & Casino
The Sunday, August 26 edition of the Erie Times-News fulfilled its role as an uncritical booster and cheerleader for the new Presque Isle Downs and Casino, a full-blown mecca for local and out-of-town gamblers from the tri-state area.
The lead story on Page One was devoted to a heady celebration of the six month anniversary of the new casino. Since it opened, the Times-News enthusiastically reported, $1 billion in total wagers had been placed, with $900 million returned to gamblers. These lofty totals were considerably higher than the expectations of its owners and the public officials involved in its launching earlier this summer.
The article bore the headline: “A project that (in war type) PAYS OFF.” It ran a total of 145 column inches, including photos (roughly one and one-third pages). The author, Reporter John Guerriero, euphemistically characterized the gamblers as “players.”
This is not one isolated example of journalistic drum-beating. In recent months, the Times-News has published about 50 related articles, most of them lavishly boosting the casino. Makes one wonder whether any one at the Times-News has a financial interest in the casino other than the hefty newspaper advertising it generates.
One hundred and 33 of the article’s 145 column inches were generously laced with superlatives casting a positive spin on the new operation. But only 12 column inches - buried on the jump page at the end of the article – were devoted to the adverse impacts, identified in the article only as “Crime and compulsion” (as in “compulsive gambling.”) While the article copiously quotes supporters and celebrants of the casino, no coverage whatsoever is given to its multitude of critics.
Simply acknowleging the "Crime and compulsion" generated by the casino over the past six months doesn't begin to tell to the community-at-large the true social costs of this high-level gambling operation.
To begin with, one must assess the cost of providing enhanced police, crime -fighting, public safety and anti-compulsive gambling services against the economic gains the article so readily touts. It didn’t come close to doing that.
For example, the article quotes State Police Sergeant Eric Lacey, office commander, as saying he believes “the police presence has deterred crime” at the casino. But he can't verify that any more than he can quantify it. One question that needs to be answered in this context is how many more police officers - state and/or local - were assigned to surveil the casino during its highly-publicized opening, and at what cost to taxpayers, if any? It's a well-known fact that local constabulary are chronically short of personpower, their resources stretched to the limit. Or were they drawn from other law enforcement or public protection assignments elsewhere, thus leaving some segment of the population unprotected and vulnerable?
The article states that 21 crimes committed at the casino had been reported by local law enforcement authorities from the time the casino opened six months ago, through July. But it conspicuously ignored the dog that didn’t bark: how many crimes have been committed that have not been apprehended or reported?
Is there a growing but so far unseen criminal element and activity attracted by the huge sums of money generated by the casino? By definition, of course, no one knows. But that has happened at every other high stakes gambling venue ever established. There’s no reason to believe it hasn’t, or won’t happen here. How much will these adverse impacts escalate once the companion racetrack, a whole new phase of gambling, is in full operation?
The bottom line question which must be asked, but so far hasn’t been: does this high profile private sector development pay its own way? That is, does the share of its gross earnings or profits - reportedly two percent - which is spun off to state and local governments to pay for the real impacts - exceed or fall short of the cost of those impacts to government infrastructure and the local private sector not benefited by casino spin-offs ? Simply citing a six month billion dollar take and one billion payout doesn't answer that question. The issue is whether it's proportional.
Is it development for development's sake, irrespective of whether it imposes more costs upon the community than benefits. No one really knows because there has been no independent, comprehensive and objective cost /benefit analysis.
In addition, any assessment of social costs must take into account a myriad of other impacts on the community's infrastructure and services. These include road and highway traffic, hospitals, public safety, health and medical professionals, schools and colleges, water and sewer, trash and garbage, telecommunications, energy sources, religious and recreational facilities, and water and air quality, to name a few.
For example, higher vehicular traffic volumes inevitably lead to higher levels of frustration and delays, to more accidents, fatalities and injuries, which in turn lead to increased EMT and medivac services, intensified hospital emergency room usage (the highest cost medical services), as well as long term chronic care in home, hospital or nursing homes for traumatic injuries or catastrophic conditions requiring extended care.
This also puts a greater demand upon doctors, nurses and other medical facilities, leading to a deterioration of medical care available to the general non-gambling public.
Ask the residents and business folks on Rte. 97 who have been plagued for months by delays, frustrations and obstructions which the extensive highway reconstruction in conjunction with the racetrack has engendered whether the project is the bonanza relentlessly portrayed in the Times-News columns.
While the sponsors, promoters and supporters of the casino have touted the number of new temporary and permanent jobs the casino has engendered, there’s been no analysis of who’s filling those jobs, whether they provide living wages and minimal benefits, whether local hire initiatives have been accommodated, or whether in-migration has led or will lead to a higher burden on schools, affordable housing and public utilities, thus incurring higher potential costs for infrastructure expansion and development.
The lead story on Page One was devoted to a heady celebration of the six month anniversary of the new casino. Since it opened, the Times-News enthusiastically reported, $1 billion in total wagers had been placed, with $900 million returned to gamblers. These lofty totals were considerably higher than the expectations of its owners and the public officials involved in its launching earlier this summer.
The article bore the headline: “A project that (in war type) PAYS OFF.” It ran a total of 145 column inches, including photos (roughly one and one-third pages). The author, Reporter John Guerriero, euphemistically characterized the gamblers as “players.”
This is not one isolated example of journalistic drum-beating. In recent months, the Times-News has published about 50 related articles, most of them lavishly boosting the casino. Makes one wonder whether any one at the Times-News has a financial interest in the casino other than the hefty newspaper advertising it generates.
One hundred and 33 of the article’s 145 column inches were generously laced with superlatives casting a positive spin on the new operation. But only 12 column inches - buried on the jump page at the end of the article – were devoted to the adverse impacts, identified in the article only as “Crime and compulsion” (as in “compulsive gambling.”) While the article copiously quotes supporters and celebrants of the casino, no coverage whatsoever is given to its multitude of critics.
Simply acknowleging the "Crime and compulsion" generated by the casino over the past six months doesn't begin to tell to the community-at-large the true social costs of this high-level gambling operation.
To begin with, one must assess the cost of providing enhanced police, crime -fighting, public safety and anti-compulsive gambling services against the economic gains the article so readily touts. It didn’t come close to doing that.
For example, the article quotes State Police Sergeant Eric Lacey, office commander, as saying he believes “the police presence has deterred crime” at the casino. But he can't verify that any more than he can quantify it. One question that needs to be answered in this context is how many more police officers - state and/or local - were assigned to surveil the casino during its highly-publicized opening, and at what cost to taxpayers, if any? It's a well-known fact that local constabulary are chronically short of personpower, their resources stretched to the limit. Or were they drawn from other law enforcement or public protection assignments elsewhere, thus leaving some segment of the population unprotected and vulnerable?
The article states that 21 crimes committed at the casino had been reported by local law enforcement authorities from the time the casino opened six months ago, through July. But it conspicuously ignored the dog that didn’t bark: how many crimes have been committed that have not been apprehended or reported?
Is there a growing but so far unseen criminal element and activity attracted by the huge sums of money generated by the casino? By definition, of course, no one knows. But that has happened at every other high stakes gambling venue ever established. There’s no reason to believe it hasn’t, or won’t happen here. How much will these adverse impacts escalate once the companion racetrack, a whole new phase of gambling, is in full operation?
The bottom line question which must be asked, but so far hasn’t been: does this high profile private sector development pay its own way? That is, does the share of its gross earnings or profits - reportedly two percent - which is spun off to state and local governments to pay for the real impacts - exceed or fall short of the cost of those impacts to government infrastructure and the local private sector not benefited by casino spin-offs ? Simply citing a six month billion dollar take and one billion payout doesn't answer that question. The issue is whether it's proportional.
Is it development for development's sake, irrespective of whether it imposes more costs upon the community than benefits. No one really knows because there has been no independent, comprehensive and objective cost /benefit analysis.
In addition, any assessment of social costs must take into account a myriad of other impacts on the community's infrastructure and services. These include road and highway traffic, hospitals, public safety, health and medical professionals, schools and colleges, water and sewer, trash and garbage, telecommunications, energy sources, religious and recreational facilities, and water and air quality, to name a few.
For example, higher vehicular traffic volumes inevitably lead to higher levels of frustration and delays, to more accidents, fatalities and injuries, which in turn lead to increased EMT and medivac services, intensified hospital emergency room usage (the highest cost medical services), as well as long term chronic care in home, hospital or nursing homes for traumatic injuries or catastrophic conditions requiring extended care.
This also puts a greater demand upon doctors, nurses and other medical facilities, leading to a deterioration of medical care available to the general non-gambling public.
Ask the residents and business folks on Rte. 97 who have been plagued for months by delays, frustrations and obstructions which the extensive highway reconstruction in conjunction with the racetrack has engendered whether the project is the bonanza relentlessly portrayed in the Times-News columns.
While the sponsors, promoters and supporters of the casino have touted the number of new temporary and permanent jobs the casino has engendered, there’s been no analysis of who’s filling those jobs, whether they provide living wages and minimal benefits, whether local hire initiatives have been accommodated, or whether in-migration has led or will lead to a higher burden on schools, affordable housing and public utilities, thus incurring higher potential costs for infrastructure expansion and development.
The myth of the Times-News's 'public editor'
Several years ago, in an one of many attempts to curb its dwindling circulation and advertising lineage, the management at the Erie Times-News, the monopoly daily in Erie County, did what many newspapers around the country have done in recent years for the same reason, including the prestigious New York Times. It appointed a “public editor” on its staff.
It was an attempt by newspapers to humanize their image as detached purveyors of news, and cozy up to the communities they served in hopes of drawing more readers into their subscription folds in order to grow advertising revenues. They have been falling alarmingly throughout the industry in recent years as a result of the proliferation of news and informational sources touched off by the digital revolution and the world wide web. The public editor, readers were told, would be “their editor,” representing them and giving them a voice within the Fourth Estate’s halls of received wisdom.
Though paid by the newspaper, the public editor would be an advocate of and for the readers, taking their side if their position or complaint were deemed valid by the public editor, even when it contradicted the staff position; and expressing the readers' views even when they came into conflict with the newspapers’ editorial version of news events or editorial conceits, providing a corrective lens whenever a newspaper was perceived to stray into error or down the wrong pathway, as they‘re frequently wont to do.
Among other things, a responsible public editor’s role is to respond to complaints and questions from readers by bringing them to the attention of the newspaper’s news and editorial staffs and finding a resolution between the two; but not one which necessarily accommodates the staff’s position.
The public editor in other venues also typically publishes letters from readers pertaining to his role or, on occasion, letters which the newspaper fails to publish in its regular letters section.
If warranted, in a regularly published column in the newspaper, the public editor would publicly take the newspaper staff to task for perceived errors or viewpoints, and issue corrections on the readers’ behalf if the newspaper itself didn’t.
Needless to say, if approached and executed correctly, the public editor’s job is no piece of cake. He or she must sit uneasily on a fence betwixt and between satisfying the “public” constituency,” without – if possible, but not at the risk of compromising his or her crededibility and independence from the official voice of the newspaper - alienating her or his newspaper bosses and colleagues. But there’s no danger of that ever happening at the Times-News. There, the public editor is public editor in name only, seldom in practice.
THE FIRST PUBLIC EDITOR
The first public editor at the Times-News was Jeff Pinski . After a long career as a reporter and editor there, he was demoted to that position, a sort of putting-out-to-pasture. Jeff served as public editor for several years.
Then, suddenly, without any notice, Pinski was gone without a trace; quietly replaced about a year ago by the current “public editor,” Kevin Cuneo. He’s another career Times Publishing Co. employee, following in his legendary father’s (Gene’s) footsteps, for years back in the post-WW II years the paper’s colorful and charismatic sports editor. The subtle announcement of Kevin Cuneo’s appointment as public editor came in the form of his first byline accompanying his first column in that capacity.
Not surprisingly, the bar for public editors has been set highest among those newspapers which have appointed them, by the New York Times. There have been three there over the past several years since the Times created that position, none a woman. All of them have been hired from outside the Times, coming with impeccable credentials, all of them limited at the outset to a term of about 18 months.
That’s about the optimum time it’s believed any person can tolerate the stress level involved in maintaining a credible balancing act between his or her public constituency and the staff of the newspaper which pays his or her salary.
At the NYTimes, all three have come from outside the newspaper and, when their terms were completed, the first two have returned to other prestigious lives in journalism, as will the third, Clark Hoyt, when he completes his term.
At the NYT, the public editor writes a column for publication twice a month responding to reader's feedback, or on his own initiative taking on perceived journalistic wrongdoing on the part of the newspaper staff, serving as its ethical conscience.
By contrast, The Times-News’s first public editor, Jeff Pinski, came from within the newspaper staff, where he had cultivated many loyalties and allegiances over the years, then served in the public editor’s position for several years.
That alone tells the story. Pinski was too wedded to the past and had too many friends there to carve a new path for the future as public editor. A nice guy and competent journalist, Pinski served far longer in that job (too long to be effective) at the Times-News than his counterparts at the New York Times, because he made no pretense of representing or advocating on behalf of the readers, thus avoiding the debilitating tension inherent in a real public editor’s role.
At best, he served as the newspaper’s go-between vis a vis the readers; at worst, as an apologist for the newspaper. While there were occasions when Pinski fulfilled the legitimate role of a public editor, they were few and far between, and he rarely, if ever, embarrassed or put the newspaper in a bad light even when it deserved to be.
Cuneo, also a nice guy, competent journalist and first-rate writer, during his tenure to date, has taken Pinski's mockery of the true role of a public editor even further. He has transformed the position into a fullblown advocate for the newspaper, rather than for the readers, wholly rejecting the well-established journalistic model.
In an e-mail to Cuneo shortly after he took over as "public editor," I told him his approach to the role was at odds with the norm. He cryptically replied: "We're not the New York Times. And Erie isn't New York." He got that right.
When complaints arise about the Times-News's coverage or editorial positions, his first impulse is to defend or counterattack, regardless of the legitimacy of the complaint. On rare occasion, he will make grudging concessions to the complainants when the paper's position or conduct is clearly indefensible.
I was once a victim of the public editor's recalcitrance in the face of demonstrable error on the part of the newspaper, as illustrated by this letter I e-mailed to Cuneo a couple months ago:
Dear Kevin,
On May 30, the Times-News ran an editorial lavishly praising the late Pennsylvanian Rachael Carson for her pioneering role in the environmental movement of the 20th Century and the repopulation of bald eagles in some regions of the U.S. The editorial ignores the journalistic adage that there's always more than one side to every story.
In the early 1960s, Ms. Carson demonized the use of the pesticide Dichloro-Diphenyl-Trichloroethane (DDT), leading to a widespread ban on its use. The revival of bald eagle populations in the U.S is often attributed to the DDT ban.
It may or may not be true that the banning of DDT saved bald eagles from extinction. Some reputable scientests of late vigorously disagree, citing massive land drainage and critical habitat loss instead. Some of them refer to Ms. Carson's writing as "junk science."
Baldies were never an endangered species in the Pacific Northwest, Alaska or Canada. In fact, they have always been plentiful there. In some environs, they are so numerous they are considered pests.
There's an irrefutable downside and incalculable human cost attached to the ban precipitated by Ms. Carson on the use of DDT as a pesticide. Though she did not advocate a total ban, her writings prompted them in the U.S. and elsewhere.
Untold tens of thousands of people have died of maleria, typhus and other infections contracted from legions of disease-carrying mosquitoes which the judicious use of DDT would have eradicated. For example, according to Wikipedia, from 1934 to 1955, there were an estimated one and a half million cases of maleria in Sri Lanka, resulting in 80,000 deaths. After the country invested in an extensive anti-mosquito program with DDT, there were only 17 cases reported in 1963. Thereafter, due to the influence of "Silent Spring,"the program was abandoned, and maleria in Sri Lanka rose to about 600,000 cases in 1968-69.
According to the World Health Organization, after South Africa stopped using DDT in 1996, the number of malaria cases in Kwa Zulu Natal province rose from 8,000 to 42,000 cases. By 2000, there had been an approximate 400 percent increase in malaria deaths. Today, after the reintroduction of DDT, the number of deaths from malaria in the region is fewer than 50 per year.
Joe LaRocca
Cuneo never acknowledged my letter nor corrected the errors in the editorial, a common malpractice at the Times-News.
It was an attempt by newspapers to humanize their image as detached purveyors of news, and cozy up to the communities they served in hopes of drawing more readers into their subscription folds in order to grow advertising revenues. They have been falling alarmingly throughout the industry in recent years as a result of the proliferation of news and informational sources touched off by the digital revolution and the world wide web. The public editor, readers were told, would be “their editor,” representing them and giving them a voice within the Fourth Estate’s halls of received wisdom.
Though paid by the newspaper, the public editor would be an advocate of and for the readers, taking their side if their position or complaint were deemed valid by the public editor, even when it contradicted the staff position; and expressing the readers' views even when they came into conflict with the newspapers’ editorial version of news events or editorial conceits, providing a corrective lens whenever a newspaper was perceived to stray into error or down the wrong pathway, as they‘re frequently wont to do.
Among other things, a responsible public editor’s role is to respond to complaints and questions from readers by bringing them to the attention of the newspaper’s news and editorial staffs and finding a resolution between the two; but not one which necessarily accommodates the staff’s position.
The public editor in other venues also typically publishes letters from readers pertaining to his role or, on occasion, letters which the newspaper fails to publish in its regular letters section.
If warranted, in a regularly published column in the newspaper, the public editor would publicly take the newspaper staff to task for perceived errors or viewpoints, and issue corrections on the readers’ behalf if the newspaper itself didn’t.
Needless to say, if approached and executed correctly, the public editor’s job is no piece of cake. He or she must sit uneasily on a fence betwixt and between satisfying the “public” constituency,” without – if possible, but not at the risk of compromising his or her crededibility and independence from the official voice of the newspaper - alienating her or his newspaper bosses and colleagues. But there’s no danger of that ever happening at the Times-News. There, the public editor is public editor in name only, seldom in practice.
THE FIRST PUBLIC EDITOR
The first public editor at the Times-News was Jeff Pinski . After a long career as a reporter and editor there, he was demoted to that position, a sort of putting-out-to-pasture. Jeff served as public editor for several years.
Then, suddenly, without any notice, Pinski was gone without a trace; quietly replaced about a year ago by the current “public editor,” Kevin Cuneo. He’s another career Times Publishing Co. employee, following in his legendary father’s (Gene’s) footsteps, for years back in the post-WW II years the paper’s colorful and charismatic sports editor. The subtle announcement of Kevin Cuneo’s appointment as public editor came in the form of his first byline accompanying his first column in that capacity.
Not surprisingly, the bar for public editors has been set highest among those newspapers which have appointed them, by the New York Times. There have been three there over the past several years since the Times created that position, none a woman. All of them have been hired from outside the Times, coming with impeccable credentials, all of them limited at the outset to a term of about 18 months.
That’s about the optimum time it’s believed any person can tolerate the stress level involved in maintaining a credible balancing act between his or her public constituency and the staff of the newspaper which pays his or her salary.
At the NYTimes, all three have come from outside the newspaper and, when their terms were completed, the first two have returned to other prestigious lives in journalism, as will the third, Clark Hoyt, when he completes his term.
At the NYT, the public editor writes a column for publication twice a month responding to reader's feedback, or on his own initiative taking on perceived journalistic wrongdoing on the part of the newspaper staff, serving as its ethical conscience.
By contrast, The Times-News’s first public editor, Jeff Pinski, came from within the newspaper staff, where he had cultivated many loyalties and allegiances over the years, then served in the public editor’s position for several years.
That alone tells the story. Pinski was too wedded to the past and had too many friends there to carve a new path for the future as public editor. A nice guy and competent journalist, Pinski served far longer in that job (too long to be effective) at the Times-News than his counterparts at the New York Times, because he made no pretense of representing or advocating on behalf of the readers, thus avoiding the debilitating tension inherent in a real public editor’s role.
At best, he served as the newspaper’s go-between vis a vis the readers; at worst, as an apologist for the newspaper. While there were occasions when Pinski fulfilled the legitimate role of a public editor, they were few and far between, and he rarely, if ever, embarrassed or put the newspaper in a bad light even when it deserved to be.
Cuneo, also a nice guy, competent journalist and first-rate writer, during his tenure to date, has taken Pinski's mockery of the true role of a public editor even further. He has transformed the position into a fullblown advocate for the newspaper, rather than for the readers, wholly rejecting the well-established journalistic model.
In an e-mail to Cuneo shortly after he took over as "public editor," I told him his approach to the role was at odds with the norm. He cryptically replied: "We're not the New York Times. And Erie isn't New York." He got that right.
When complaints arise about the Times-News's coverage or editorial positions, his first impulse is to defend or counterattack, regardless of the legitimacy of the complaint. On rare occasion, he will make grudging concessions to the complainants when the paper's position or conduct is clearly indefensible.
I was once a victim of the public editor's recalcitrance in the face of demonstrable error on the part of the newspaper, as illustrated by this letter I e-mailed to Cuneo a couple months ago:
Dear Kevin,
On May 30, the Times-News ran an editorial lavishly praising the late Pennsylvanian Rachael Carson for her pioneering role in the environmental movement of the 20th Century and the repopulation of bald eagles in some regions of the U.S. The editorial ignores the journalistic adage that there's always more than one side to every story.
In the early 1960s, Ms. Carson demonized the use of the pesticide Dichloro-Diphenyl-Trichloroethane (DDT), leading to a widespread ban on its use. The revival of bald eagle populations in the U.S is often attributed to the DDT ban.
It may or may not be true that the banning of DDT saved bald eagles from extinction. Some reputable scientests of late vigorously disagree, citing massive land drainage and critical habitat loss instead. Some of them refer to Ms. Carson's writing as "junk science."
Baldies were never an endangered species in the Pacific Northwest, Alaska or Canada. In fact, they have always been plentiful there. In some environs, they are so numerous they are considered pests.
There's an irrefutable downside and incalculable human cost attached to the ban precipitated by Ms. Carson on the use of DDT as a pesticide. Though she did not advocate a total ban, her writings prompted them in the U.S. and elsewhere.
Untold tens of thousands of people have died of maleria, typhus and other infections contracted from legions of disease-carrying mosquitoes which the judicious use of DDT would have eradicated. For example, according to Wikipedia, from 1934 to 1955, there were an estimated one and a half million cases of maleria in Sri Lanka, resulting in 80,000 deaths. After the country invested in an extensive anti-mosquito program with DDT, there were only 17 cases reported in 1963. Thereafter, due to the influence of "Silent Spring,"the program was abandoned, and maleria in Sri Lanka rose to about 600,000 cases in 1968-69.
According to the World Health Organization, after South Africa stopped using DDT in 1996, the number of malaria cases in Kwa Zulu Natal province rose from 8,000 to 42,000 cases. By 2000, there had been an approximate 400 percent increase in malaria deaths. Today, after the reintroduction of DDT, the number of deaths from malaria in the region is fewer than 50 per year.
Joe LaRocca
Cuneo never acknowledged my letter nor corrected the errors in the editorial, a common malpractice at the Times-News.
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