Letters   

WJR Censored Name Of Pentagon Official
To the editor:
I am not renewing my subscription to a magazine that practices and flaunts censorship. Re: The issue of the name of a Pentagon official deleted by WJR in the October issue (I'm sorry — "John Doeson," according to Bill Monroe).
Monroe wrote that the issue of privacy was more important in this case than the public's right to know, because [name deleted] ("Doeson") has "had no record of anti-gay activities." But the Department of Defense has a long and vicious record of anti-gay activities. [Name deleted] was quoted in the Advocate as being "completely comfortable with everything I do in my job for the Pentagon." If that is so, then his gayness is relevant to report. To compare this person's gayness to the Palm Beach rape case, as Monroe did, is to compare apples and oranges.
More disturbing than Monroe's piece, of course, was a column in (of all places) the "Free Press" section. Not only did WJR censor the name, but also the words and photo that appeared in the August issue of the Advocate. This blatant censorship only serves to insult the intelligence of your readers. I am not gay, but I am outraged at your magazine's conduct. My renewal money is not enclosed.

Hypocrisy Is News
To the editor:
Censorship.
That's what the Washington Journalism Review did regarding the Advocate story outing Pentagon official [name deleted].
It was censorship, pure and simple.
The Washington Journalism Review — the sword and shield of the First Amendment and the scourge of censors, news management and flackish spinmeisters — decided it, too, liked to wear the drag of the heavy-handed, self-righteous censor.
The perverse, twisted, obscene sense of noblesse oblige that motivated WJR and its editor to "protect" the so-called privacy of [name deleted] is sick.
Privacy wasn't being protected. Hypocrisy was.
Especially sick is Editor Bill Monroe's column justifying, even lauding, his decision to censor.
Heavily excerpting the telephone interview between the Advocate and [name deleted], Monroe conveniently left out a critical, timely exchange.
Monroe, attempting to smear the Advocate reporter, carefully avoided quoting [name deleted]'s response to the Advocate reporter that he [name deleted] was "completely comfortable" with Pentagon policies.
What makes this Monroe omission especially egregious is the fact that on the facing page of the Advocate is a transcript of [name deleted]'s responses on the record in press briefings on the Defense Department's positions regarding discrimination by the military against gays and lesbians. [Name deleted] ducked, dodged and defended these policies.
And that is why the outing of [name deleted] is news. And should have been reported. In full. Especially by the Washington Journalism Review.
Hypocrisy.
It is hypocrisy for [name deleted], a gay man, to have a security clearance and not be considered a security risk while at the same time the institution he [works] for routinely drums out of service thousands of gay men and lesbians because they are...security risks.
Honey, that's news.
Surely we can all understand that Washington reporters are dependent (co-dependent? addicted? slavish?) to their Washington sources — sources such as [name deleted] and his minions at the Pentagon.
Why are reporters and WJR not following up and asking when the Pentagon will either fire [name deleted] or stop the witch hunts against gay men and lesbians who serve their country honorably and with courage and valor in the American military? That's the issue.
The censorship of this issue and WJR's sick, self-righteous justification of censorship makes me want to vomit. Everyone at WJR involved in this Nixonian/Zieglerian decision to cover up the [name deleted] hypocrisy in high public office story should apologize or resign. If you don't want to cover the news, then get out. Sell shoes.
WJR and the national news media are unindicted co-conspirators in the continuing, pervasive and terroristic discrimination that is today being inflicted against the 30 million to 50 million Americans who are gay or lesbian. Wake up.
I demand that this letter be published in its entirety — that is, with [name deleted]'s name included .

Editor's Note: WJR offered to print Mr. Prentice's letter only with the Pentagon official's name deleted. He accepted that condition .

Cronkite On Bigart
To the editor:
Had to tell you that I thought Karen Rothmyer's piece on Homer Bigart in the November issue was fine, just fine.
Informative and warm, it was a nice snapshot to give the present generation a glimpse of a great journalist of the old school.

Pierpoint On Bigart
To the editor:
I was delighted and saddened to read Karen Rothmyer's tribute to Homer Bigart; delighted to know that he was so honored by his colleagues at his departure and saddened that I was not there to participate. Here is another reminiscence from my brief time with Homer:
We were covering the evacuation of the Tachen Islands off the coast of China by the Nationalist government. The U.S. Navy had one of its best public relations men on the mission, Capt. William Lederer, a well-known author and, like Bigart, a stutterer. Lederer and Bigart had never met, and when they were introduced, Bill said, "H — h-how do you d-d-do, Homer." In mock anger Bigart barked, "Are you k-k-kidding me?" The rest of us broke up laughing.
It was always wonderful to see Homer go to work on an officer or official. In his gentle, almost professorial manner, he would question the individual, writing down the answers carefully in his small notebook. The more officious or ridiculous the answer, the more seriously studious Homer became. The victim never knew what hit him until he read the story days or weeks later, and we all learned what we had missed. We miss Homer now.

Real Estate: No Spin
To the editor:
Elizabeth Lesly's November article about real estate advertorial sections was on target in terms of newspapers eroding their credibility and the failure of advertorials to serve either readers or advertisers in the long run.
In fairness to the professional journalists at the News [in Boca Raton] who hold advertorials in disdain, the Lesly article also should have stated:
•The advertising department writer of advertorials who was quoted and identified as "real estate editor" does not have that title. That title was removed some time ago at the insistence of the newsroom.
•The assertion that the "news staff does not cover real estate with any regularity" came as a surprise to the newsroom business writer who devotes most of her time to the real estate beat. Several news columns are devoted to real estate news every Saturday, for example.
•The suggestion that most of what our readers "know about real estate has a pronounced industry spin" is off the mark. First, the advertorial section focuses on the narrow topics of residential developers and realty companies. Second, the newsroom's writers have aggressively told readers about the secret reprimand of a prominent local Realtor, the politics of racial integration in new developments, code-enforcement abuses by developers, homeowner complaints and lawsuits against developers, the financial misfortunes of prominent developers, and how to sell without using a real estate agent.
Hardly the stuff of industry spin.

Credo: Do It Straight
To the editor:
I read your November articles on real estate journalism with interest; many of the issues raised are extremely pertinent. Some of the assertions and interpretations in Wendy Williams's article, however, are not backed up by either her data or her anecdotes.
Specifically, to say that the Chicago Tribune's real estate coverage had "elements...that raised questions about who was making the editorial decisions — editors or advertisers" is not supportable. Our advertising department and some of its real estate clients would regard that as news in itself, given the number of stories that have caused advertisers to pull their business. In fact, each of our three separate weekly real estate sections is edited with readers, not advertisers, in mind.
That is what leads us to run stories that contain what Williams almost disparagingly called "basic, time-honored advice," as well as articles that fall into her category of "soft features." If readers are seeking advice (as the success of our newest, relentlessly helpful section, "Your Place," would indicate) or looking for well-written features on a topic in which they are interested, we want them to rely on the Tribune to provide that.
And I don't think it's a failing that what Williams calls "hard news" on real estate may sometimes appear in other places in the newspaper — in the Tribune's case, in the business section, metropolitan section or on Page One. Again, that comes down to editing for the reader: Where will the most readers get an important story, and in the most timely fashion? Not only is the readership of all of our daily general-interest sections higher than that of the special-interest ones, but the real estate sections themselves are preprinted with advanced deadlines. It often is better to cover a Wednesday night zoning brouhaha in the metro section on Thursday than to wait 10 days for the next available real estate section. That doesn't make the Tribune, as Williams characterized us, "gun-shy"; it makes us an integrated newspaper instead of a collection of 18 unrelated sections.
When I was put in charge of our real estate operation in 1988, my instructions from Jack Fuller, then executive editor and now editor of the Tribune, were simple and clear: "Do it straight." So we do. And, prodded by findings like those in your two articles, we intend to keep doing it better.

Reporting Tools
To the editor:
Thank you for Katherine Corcoran's well-balanced piece on computer-assisted reporting.
She ably conveyed the simple fact that computer-assisted reporting is nothing more than traditional public-records reporting that uses contemporary tools.
How can we not do it?

I loved Bernard Roshco's profile of Elmer Davis in your December issue. But the contents-page teaser, headline and lead for the story have one error. It was not a Smithsonian exhibit but a Library of Congress exhibit that "forgot" Davis. As guest curator of "The American Journalist" exhibit, let me accept responsibility — responsibility, however, not for forgetting Davis but for deciding Murrow, Kaltenborn, Winchell, etc., took priority. Trying to compress 300 years of journalism into one exhibit required many such unpleasant decisions.