Letters   

Give Kemp Credit
I read Andre Shashaty's May cover story, "Jack Kemp's Free Ride," with great interest. However, I was left with the feeling that he had a real ax to grind.
Anybody familiar with the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the late 1980s would agree that Jack Kemp inherited an agency wracked by corruption, neglect and mismanagement.
Within a very short time Kemp instituted several reforms. He acted quickly to close down the rental assistance program that was at the heart of the HUD scandal. He championed the HUD Reform Act, which set tough new standards and cleaned up corruption. This, along with stringent new accounting measures, angered many special interest groups, developers, lobbyists and lawyers who had to justify the resources they were getting and the projects they were promoting.
I find it as no surprise that these people's complaints form the basis of Shashaty's article. Most would find ending political corruption to be praiseworthy; Shashaty seems to think it's only grandstanding.
Shashaty's analysis of Kemp's "narrow agenda" was completely off the mark. He criticizes an empowerment agenda that was never fully implemented. There are four pillars on which the agenda is built: housing vouchers, tenant ownership (HOPE), tenant management and enterprise zones.
Housing vouchers would empower the poor to choose where they want to live and thereby allow them to escape crime-ridden neighborhoods and choose the schools their children attend. Housing vouchers were never mentioned by Shashaty. They were never enacted into policy because Congress refused to consider the idea.
HOPE, much maligned by Shashaty, was also dead on arrival to Capitol Hill. If it were not for a renegade southern Democrat, now secretary of Agriculture, Mike Espy, HOPE would not have been even considered. Only with Espy's help was it able to get its meager funding.
Tenant management is a great idea as part of a comprehensive package. It can not stand alone, as it was forced to do.
Enterprise zones, which are key to revitalizing and employing the inner city, were passed after 12 years of crusading by Kemp. (He championed them as a congressman.) However, the urban aid bill that contained them was vetoed by President Bush.
With only one ally in Congress, a hostile White House and limited budgets, there was little Kemp could do but clean house and cheerlead. He did both very well.

Andre Shashaty responds : Tom Knisely is correct that, as my article noted, Jack Kemp deserves credit for cleaning up political corruption at HUD and cheerleading for the cause of the urban poor. But Knisely's attempt to defend Kemp's record by blaming others and dismissing his many critics only underscores the weakness of that record. Cheerleading is helpful, but to use an analogy Kemp would under-stand, it doesn't win the game. Halting corruption is laudable, as well, but isn't that the bare minimum we should expect from a cabinet secretary?
Kemp's ideas for empowering the poor may have potential, but his single-minded focus on tenant ownership of public housing may have done more harm than good. The merits of the policy were highly questionable, it engendered strong opposition and it distracted Kemp from active management of many other existing HUD programs that have been very effective in housing low-income Americans.
Time will tell how much Kemp's empowerment plan accomplishes — after all, the HOPE program did receive substantial funding. But the fact remains that the national press probably won't do much to put the policy or Kemp's record in perspective.

Seconding Gitlin
AJR is to be commended. "Whiplash," Todd Gitlin's essay on media coverage of Clinton's initial days as president (April) represented an important first step in fathoming the nigh reportorial and editorial hysteria which has accompanied the new administration.
Now it remains to ask more fundamental questions. Can our national news organizations bring themselves to cover the whole story with some measure of detachment and balance?
Coverage of the Senate Republican filibuster of the Clinton stimulus-and-jobs package offers scant incentive to be hopeful.
That filibuster, we were told ad nauseam on the evening news, was an effort to block passage of a measure ladened with "pork" destined to pay off the president's debts to his big-city political buddies.
The administration denied these charges, of course; but few in the national press bothered to make independent assessments. Thus the GOP line stood unchallenged.
As a political columnist and reporter whose work is distributed by a small regional Southwest news service, I found this all quite disturbing. Since New Mexico Republican Sen. Pete Domenici was one of the linchpins in the filibuster, I felt some obligation to plumb this story. What I discovered in the process was far more interesting, if not the reverse, of the mainline reports coming out of Washington.
In New Mexico, I was informed by the director of the state's municipal league, the benefits of the president's proposal would have fallen not to large urban areas — of which there is but one, Albuquerque, in any event — but to small towns and cities.
Time and again small town mayors, city councilors and county officials told the same tale. "We don't look at this as 'pork' in any way shape or form," one snapped. "For us it is needed help to small towns which are financially strapped and unable to deal with some damn serious problems."
Why, asked another local official, aren't the news media looking into "this nonsense about the president paying off his big city pals? Hell, I didn't even vote for Clinton so he doesn't owe me [expletive deleted]. But I give him credit for trying to help us solve some problems we have in small towns like ours."
I could not answer his question as to why the national media almost uniformly failed to consult with small town and county officials in the face of the line being advanced by Senate Republicans during their filibuster.
Nor could I assure him that something approximating balance would soon find its way into reportage coming out of the nation's capital.
Small wonder the credibility of political journalism has fallen on hard times. Thank God, however, that AJR has shown some interest in getting on the case.

Don't Forget Seldes
Conspicuous by his absence in your imperfect tribute to journalistic autobiographies (April) was George Seldes, one of America's greatest and, ironically, least heralded, journalists.
"Witness To A Century: Encounters With the Noted, the Notorious, and the Three SOBs," published by Ballantine Books in 1987, thrills its readers with more than three quarters of a century of Seldes' superb work.

Kudos to Cobb
Jean Cobb did a super job of reporting and handling a web of information in her piece, "Super Bowl-Battered Women Link?" in the May issue. She's produced whole cloth!

Kudos to Cleghorn
Reese Cleghorn's "A Scream From New York..For Us" ("Top of the Review," May), on the New York Post, is one of the finest pieces of writing I have seen recently.

The Dance is the Same
I'd like to respond to the piece "Cleveland Curmudgeon" in the April issue (Free Press) that diminishes my work of 25 years by making it seem its content is trivial. The article also quotes two critics I've attacked to label me a journalistic anachronism.
I always remember a line from Murray Kempton, that "habit conditions more deplorable scenes than conspiracy could contrive." I cover the habits of Cleveland's leaders, and believe me, they are deplorable. Every city of a major size has a corporate agenda that is set by business leaders who are in turn protected from criticism by editorial apologists like the two critics used to label me a has- been. Whether the 1960s or the 1990s, the song may be different but the dance is the same. I react to these injustices the same now as I did in the 1960s. Has that gone out of journalistic style at AJR?
A major issue for me in the past couple of years has been the shameless siphoning of public funds for a new baseball stadium, an arena and a rock 'n' roll hall of fame. I have tenaciously attacked prominent politicians and business leaders who earmarked about $1 billion in primarily public funds for the three facilities and pointed out that they tolerate schools that lose half their students before final graduation, poorly educate the other half, and tolerate a population more than 40 percent impoverished.
One of the principal beneficiaries of the public subsidies has been Cleveland Indians owner Richard Jacobs, also a developer. He has then been a chief target of my newsletter. That makes suspect the criticisms articulated by Michael Roberts, formerly editor of Cleveland Magazine and now of Boston Magazine. Roberts is so close to Jacobs that he was invited by the Cleveland owner and sat in his loge for opening day, and has had use of Jacobs' American League owners' courtesy seats at Fenway Park.
My newsletter, Point of View, goes far beyond making fun of people, as the article highlights. I've also had lasting accomplishments, not the least of which was playing an instrumental role in getting information to the public that helped save the city's electric light system. In the past eight years, the city's system has saved Cleveland customers more than $100 million in rates lower than the private utility.
Finally, writer Frank Kuznik's choice of critics presents a problem for a journalism review since Kuznik worked as associate editor to Roberts at Cleveland Magazine and has currently freelanced for Roberts at Boston Magazine. It brings further into question why he chose Roberts and Brent Larkin, director of the editorial page of the Plain Dealer, who also has written for Roberts in Cleveland, as the only two people to assess my work.

The Good Old Days
I hope Roger Helms, former reporter and now self-taught computer programmer, will permit this former sportswriter and editor to respond to your piece in the April issue, "One Sportswriter, No Attitude" (Free Press), and tell him what Friday and Saturday nights were like on a small morning daily.
Just about 50 years ago, carrying with him the same portable typewriter that this letter is being composed on, a young and inexperienced sports editor was hired by the now defunct Poughkeepsie, New York, Eagle-News.
Helms' computer program would have been a great comfort to that young writer-editor, who had to cover high school football and basketball games on Friday nights and Saturday afternoons. The coaches, the players and the faithful called in the results of 35 or more games both nights. And the big game on Friday night and Saturday afternoon usually had to be covered in person. The coaches cooperated by calling in their reports at prearranged hours.
No doubt Helms' program could have spit out the 30 or 40 "stories," probably more, in a couple of hours. However, we didn't push buttons to edit copy, write headlines, correct scores. We pushed words and phrases with our pencils, and there was satisfaction around 3:30 or 4 a.m. when you held open the sports section (usually two, two-page spreads) — all yours.

Saving Newspapers
Three words about Carl Sessions Stepp's April cover story, "How to Save America's Newspapers": The People, Stupid.
You can keep your expanded definitions of news, varied story forms and layered coverage. You can forget diversifying sources, increasing commentary and customization. And you can ignore watchdog journalism, sizzle and pizzazz.
It's all as useless as yesterday's page one if you don't have the people behind it.
Too many times, we editors get too caught up in the hour's production chore to make time for the people we charge with getting the job done. We do so at a high cost to them.
We are editors, we counter, not managers. Editors don't have to nurture. They don't have to counsel. They don't have to have manners or be nice.
Wrong. It's an office. And we're charged with motivating those we supervise to get the job done. We're not charged with backstabbing, ridicule and personal attacks. And we're not charged with contributing to low morale.
Mr. Stepp, your points are well-taken. But you waited until number 10, the catch-all item, to state the most critical challenge facing newspapers today: improving newsroom management.

"Sea Change" Sickness
Thank you, thank you for acknowledging "sea change" in your May "Clichù Corner!" I was getting heartily sick of it.
Now how about researching "paradigm," "paradigmatic," or (to my disgust and horror) "paradigmatically?" Enough, already!