Letters   

Reporter's Case For Outing Salaries
To the editor :
Ouch! Until John O'Toole ("Outing Salaries," September) no one had ever compared my journalistic techniques to proctology. Mr. O'Toole, president of the American Association of Advertising Agencies, took umbrage when I and my employer, National Journal , published his salary in a survey of association executives' pay. "It seems she had unearthed an obscure clause in IRS regulations that required most tax-exempt organizations to make some esoteric reporting form accessible to the public," he lamented.
Like most trade groups, the AAAA is exempt from federal taxes. In lieu of a tax return, it files an annual IRS report listing revenues and expenses, including management pay. Copies of this "esoteric" form, as Mr. O'Toole would have it, have been available from the IRS for years. But IRS disclosure is notoriously slow, and in 1987 Congress voted to require groups themselves to keep copies available for inspection. Realizing that some groups might not be too happy about this, Congress decided to slap a $10-a-day fine on those who refused to comply. (So much for Mr. O'Toole's assertion that lawmakers couldn't have intended to cause so much grief.)
But, as Mr O'Toole points out, we should distinguish between "what is legal to publish versus what is right to publish." So, Mr. O'Toole, here's why I think it was right to publish your salary.
More than 800,000 organizations have been granted tax-exempt status after telling Uncle Sam that they are nonprofit and serve a public purpose. In exchange for the tax break, they must disclose their IRS filings. That seems reasonable, considering that tax-exempts spend more than $200 billion annually, and only about 2.5 percent are audited by the IRS each year. I'm not suggesting that most of these groups have something sleazy to hide. But just as unions, public corporations and government agencies have to disclose management salaries, shouldn't taxpayers have access to the same information on tax-exempt groups that they, in effect, subsidize?
The tax-exempt sector is fertile territory for enterprising reporters. Investigations on tax-exempt charity scams have won several Pulitzers. Most of Charles Keating's political contributions flowed through tax-exempt groups. On my Washington lobbying beat, I routinely ask for interest groups' IRS filings. Seeing what they spend on direct mail, consulting fees and ? yes, salaries ? helps me understand how they operate. When the American Newspaper Publishers Association hired Cathleen Black as its new president, reporters noted that she would be paid far more than her predecessor, evidence of the group's desire to heighten its profile.
So believe me, Mr. O'Toole, it's nothing personal. And try not to think of our survey as a sigmoidoscopy. Maybe a root canal?

Salaries High and Low
To the editor :
Please say that you made a mistake in reporting the salary of Cathy Black, president and CEO of the American Newspaper Publishers Association ("Bylines," June).
The newspaper industry is said to be suffering financial and circulation problems yet pays its leader $600,000 a year.
In the same issue, an unidentified television news director, in a story headlined, "Rising Pay and Perks for News Directors," is quoted as saying, "If my staff knew how much I made, I'd have serious morale problems."
As a reporter on a large daily, I had a colleague who qualified for food stamps. I've since learned of another reporter, then an employee of one of the country's top newspapers, who also qualified. It's not uncommon to find journalists who must have a rent-sharing roommate or settle for apartments in low-rent and high-crime areas. More than a few first-person stories have been written about what it's like to be a burglary victim. It's also not uncommon to find journalists retiring with no pensions.
Most people are reporters because they love their work. They are aware that many publishers take advantage of this and that the high profits papers have generated have been made possible in part through relatively low labor costs.
Now, the industry is in a financial decline. Publishers are demanding more work from fewer reporters. At the same time, the gap between reporting and management salaries seems to be rising. From a management standpoint, it may not make sense to hike the salaries of reporters. There's always someone willing to work for peanuts. But to so lavishly reward management while reporters are so poorly compensated is unjust. If a religious organization or government entity were doing the same (some do), publishers and broadcasters would be sending a reporter out to ask why.

Rebutting Manshel
To the editor :
Lisa Manshel's biased discussion of the Kelly Michael's case ("Reporters for the Defense in a Child Abuse Case," July/August) really needs rebuttal. Ms. Manshel, who your teaser says "wrote the book on the case" ( the book, not a book?), seems especially upset that not everyone agrees with her conclusion, which was indeed the jury's conclusion, that Ms. Michaels was guilty. As the case is on appeal and strong evidence of improper questioning of child witnesses, contamination of testimony, lost or not recorded initial interviews, and questions as to the credentials and skills of therapists who were key prosecution witnesses have emerged, it would seem that Ms. Manshel has a vested interest in keeping Kelly Michaels in jail. Manshel misleads us by stating, in the sidebar, that many mass abuse cases have ended in convictions when it would be more accurate to say that most of these convictions have been overturned on appeal, as Debbie Nathan has more than adequately documented. The hysteria over mass child abuse in day-care settings is just that ? hysteria. But from this hysteria people have been wrongly jailed and that is the story that Debbie Nathan, for one, has sought to tell. It is the story that Lisa Manshel refuses to deal with.
Manshel never really comes to grips with the charges by Nathan and Dorothy Rabinowitz that there is an historical line in these cases going back to the original 17th-century witch trials. This analogy holds quite well. While Manshel picks at details, she misses the bigger story ? one of presumption of innocence denied and "the rule of reason" stood on its head. I see no heroism in Manshel's attempt to keep someone in jail. I do applaud journalists like Nathan and Rabinowitz who by their investigations and analyses attempt to right miscarriages of justice.
Finally, to assert that by publishing articles questioning Kelly Michaels' indictment and conviction Harper's magazine and The Village Voice have taken up her cause is absurd. Is WJR filing a brief attesting to Michaels' guilt by running Manshel's article?
Manshel's self-serving article seems to indicate her fear that her conclusions of guilt, in a case that is not as clear-cut as she wishes it to appear, may fall to an appeals court. She should be more concerned with justice being done. Nathan and Rabinowitz were.

Lisa Manshel replies: It would be inaccurate to say that most mass abuse convictions result in reversal. I suspect that Mr. Squire has confused that which the media chooses to cover with the sum of all cases. However, this question illustrates the need for a national clearinghouse of trial data.
The list of wrongdoings for which Mr. Squire has "strong evidence" simply recapitulates the distorted reports on the Wee Care case, but does not derive from the evidence in the case itself. Michaels may well win an appeal, and somewhere in the country a prosecutor may be overzealously pursuing a defendant, and once upon a time innocents may have died as "witches." However, none of these things authorizes Nathan and Rabinowitz to misreport the facts. Their error-riddled reporting was the subject of my article ? not the fairness of Michaels' trial or her incarceration.

Bravo, Naked Mama
To the editor :
Bravo! I was thrilled and delighted to read Bill Monroe's September column on the Vanity Fair cover featuring Demi Moore.
When the issue appeared, the disapproving buzz around my conservative corporate office was not really unexpected. What I did find surprising was the fact that not only men but young and mid-aged women were also cluck-clucking about it, despite the fact that many of them are mothers.
I thought that perhaps it was because I have a 6-month-old baby myself that I was cheered and invigorated by the photo. But your piece revealed to me that that has little to do with it. Most Americans retain only too well a primal memory of our Puritan heritage and must indeed be slightly embarrassed about the earthy side of pregnancy and the attendant sex that must have preceded it.
I was basically alone in my office in championing the luminously lovely Demi for her pride of production. My faith in much of humanity, however, and especially in men, was renewed by your piece, which I of course lovingly shared with everyone I work with.
Thanks a million.