Letters   

Hatchet Job on TV News
If your hatchet job on television news was intended to provoke an angry reaction from journalists like myself, you've succeeded. It paints us with a brush so broad that it reads like the local television news your critics claim to see: simplistic, inaccurate and sensational ("Bad News," September).
Sure, there are local television stations that don't quite measure up. But aren't there newspapers that embarrass your critics?
Would your critics think it fair to use the New York Post as a microcosm of American print journalism? It's easy to find the examples to trash any form of journalism, if that's your mission.
Perhaps your critics will consider these facts about local news in Boston: The three network affiliates here have strong investigative news units. Each has brought about change and reform. WBZ reported a story about sexual abuse by a priest that changed the way the Catholic Church handles such cases.
Each station extensively covers politics and state government. Education is a regular beat at both WCVB and WHDH.
WCVB was perhaps the first local station in the country to cover the environment as a beat. Every station in the city has a medical reporter.
One critic cited ABC's "American Agenda" as a model for local television. Your critic probably doesn't know that it began over a decade ago at WCVB. We call it "Checkpoint."
Your critics make much of local television's emphasis on crime, suggesting it's not quite the problem television might make it appear. Yet a recent poll done by WCVB found a third of Boston residents know someone who has been a crime victim in the last year. More than half of Boston's voters think crime is the most important issue facing the city. These facts suggest it's an issue more important to our viewers than your critics.

Freedom of the press is wonderful! It allows AJR to print the opinions of people like Howard Rosenberg and Jamie Malanowski on local television news. I take issue with so much of the article that I have trouble deciding where to begin.
Rosenberg, a television critic, takes his title literally, and finds very little to like about television news in Los Angeles. In many instances, I agree with him. But as often happens, our print brethren forget that television news is a business. My television station, just like his newspaper, has to continue to show a profit if Howard wants to continue his criticism, and I want to continue my newscasts.
There is a lot wrong with television news..but we do some things well. Maybe Howard should get away from the major market atmosphere of the Left Coast and see how we do it here in the Midwest.
Besides the inflammatory story title (newspapers complain when we do "teases" like that), my major complaint is that none of your panel of writers — even your former television news director — have had any day-to-day exposure to a medium- or small-market newscast. Los Angeles, Chicago and New York do what they do to compete, and so do we in Duluth, Des Moines and Rockford. Don't paint all of us with the same brush. We're trying to live up to the responsibility that the public places on us — providing them with the news of the day and how it affects them. We must be doing a good job — they keep coming back.

Base Closing Coverage Not Black and White
Brigid Schulte, the €uthor of "Off Base" (September), a review of reporting on military base closings, needs to recast some of her journalistic premises. But first, some housekeeping:
At the very least, put the Griffiss Air Force Base in Rome, New York, where it belongs — not Utica.
And if you are going to extract a Daily Sentinel headline to support your points, choose one in context — the one taken out of context from the Daily Sentinel, in fact, accurately reported the position of a clearly identified base support group making its statement. You can't possibly suggest we not report it because the news supported a position at odds with politically correct defense reduction?
On to the premises:
• Newspaper base-saving efforts jaundiced reporting . We did print a banner — a big colorful one. We are an advocate for the community and have been for the last century-and-a-half. Our editorial page is not our news page and neither of those pages are beholden to our advertisements. The base was in the long-term interest of our community. A banner is nothing more than a large advertisement in support of that — support independent of our reporters and editors.
• Newspapers became so preoccupied with parochial interests they forgot the government was closing bases because they were no longer needed . The author appears to believe that you are either on the bus or off the bus — that you were parochial and self-serving or you stood for Mom, apple pie and smaller defense. In a country rife with simplistic bipolar logic — Republican-Democrat, pro- and anti-abortion, liberal-conservative — it is understandable that she would have overlooked any other alternative, however viable. Isn't it just possible that the country needs to cut defense spending and that the process of selection was flawed?
Our procedure covering the base closings was to learn as much as we could, follow the facts where they led, and report what we learned, pro or con. We reported the competing bases' advantages and disadvantages. The facts we gathered demonstrated that the Air Force had blundered the selection process. We reported it squarely.
The real journalism on base closings has yet to be done: The process of collecting large aircraft base data was either an exercise in mismanagement guaranteed to come up with the wrong answer or a dodge to support a predetermined conclusion. And the official position was supported because the conclusions were official, not necessarily because they were correct.
• The specter of lost revenue jaundiced reporting . Without a doubt this is a trendy topic of the year for state press association meetings, journalism reviews and J-school masters' theses. It doesn't wash.
• Newspapers resorted to boosterism at the expense of facts * While the facts overwhelmingly supported Griffiss, we knew that facts were not votes. Our editors discussed and clearly understood their responsibility to keep everything in perspective.
The author and her favored critics remind me of the dreadful trend of pseudo-objectivity promoted by journalism educators and by weaker journalists since the death of H.L. Mencken. The politically correct, pseudo-journalist dutifully allocates half of the story to one side and the remainder to the other; obliged to write that A said the color was red while B said it was green without adding that the reporter found A's story to be more credible.

A base closing, which affects not only a newspaper, its advertisers and its readership, should be considered a catastrophe. You are talking about the life and death of a great many communities. If all the bases in a particular state were closed tomorrow, consider how many people would be hurt directly and indirectly. As a rule of thumb, for every person on the base, there are 10 or more civilian suppliers providing the infrastructure, food and miscellaneous goods and services that make a base go. These service providers don't exist in a vacuum.
The military is going to shed some 1.8 million people in the next six years. Just what effect do you think that will have on our depressed economy? There are some very large consequences of some poorly conceived plans and actions. How many retrained people can you send out to nonexistent jobs?
Certainly the media cannot see beyond its own collective nose, and the forboding signs are all over. Look at the drop in ad lineage and local broadcast commercials. Add a base closing and kiss a lot of papers and radio and television stations goodbye.

Covering "Miracles"
Bill Triplett's piece in AJR's September issue, "Visitation Rites," quoted me accurately that in my opinion the media generally aren't skeptical enough when reporting mysterious religious phenomena or claims about the supernatural.
But all journalists shouldn't be tarred with the same brush.
A couple of years ago my own newspaper — when confronted with reports that an apparition of the Virgin Mary was appearing daily on the wall of a small-town church near Sacramento — did the right thing.
The Bee invited a physics professor from a local university, an optics expert, to take an unobtrusive look at the multicolored image that was drawing thousands of people (and much media attention) to the little church.
He determined — and the Bee prominently reported — that what many thought was an apparition was nothing more than the interplay of sunlight, a stained-glass window and a hanging lamp.
The local bishop agreed with the finding, thanked the paper, and the entire matter mercifully ended.
If I didn't relate this example of responsible reporting to Bill, I should have.

The Last Bother
I wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed Reese Cleghorn's "The Last Bother" (September). I found myself ultimately chuckling and nodding my head vigorously. Seems as if "Don't let the truth stand in the way of a good story" is the motto of a growing number of writers, sad to say.

Shotgun Shuba?!
From the memories of my childhood, I can report with some degree of accuracy that Shotgun Shuba played outfield for the Mobile Bears of the Southern Association ("And Who Was Shotgun Shuba?" Free Press, September). He was with the Bears in the late 1940s and moved up to the Dodgers in the early 1950s. He may have been on the famous team of 1951.
And in reference to the same sidebar on the same page, your publication pictures Sal the Barber in a Dodger uniform. I would have bet you a good cup of coffee that he was with the New York Giants.

Editor's Note: We also think of Sal Maglie as a New York Giant — he was one, after all, for seven years — and tend to forget that he pitched for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1956 and 1957.

WKRC Did Its Job
I had to re-read "The Power of the Court" (Bylines, September) several times to make sure I wasn't missing something.
WKRC-TV reporter Chris Yaw sees government employees sleeping on the job at a Cincinnati court house. His boss tells him to use hidden cameras to record it, and when the judges find out their loafing taxpayer-funded minions have been exposed they call in the FBI. Then the station fires Yaw, suspends the news director and assistant news director and the general manager makes an on-air apology.
For what? WKRC did its job regardless of the federal rules being used here to cover up obvious waste in government. Whose courthouse is it anyway? Who pays the judges? What else can the station offer here to make up for its effort to expose what really goes on at the Cincinnati courthouse? How about live team coverage of Law Day?
It's ironic you reported this story in the edition with the cover story "Why is Local TV News So Bad." Here's a clear case of when the use of hidden cameras was justified and the station caves in like some local yokel operation that wouldn't do a story on rip-offs by car dealers because it might affect the general manager's Cadillac trade.
Sleep on, Cincinnati court employees. WKRC-TV will turn out the lights!