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Colleyville Family Medicine

DART to WREC, in Memphis, Tennessee, for less-than-divine journalism. Two weeks after the revelation by the city's bachelor mayor, Willie Herenton, that he was the father of a four-month-old boy, the child's mother, Claudine Marsh, granted an exclusive interview to the station's Andy Wise. The reason the journalist had been so blessed, he explained to viewers, was that "she and I have a bond ... We both believe in Jesus Christ." As Marsh's story proceeded to be told - told, Wise reported, because "Cod told her to" reveal it - Wise seemed to be sending a sign to the mayor to do the right thing: "A family," he intoned, "should be a mother, father, and son." For his final lesson, Wise invoked the biblical advice to sinners against casting the first stone. That admonition, however, did not impress the city's Commercial Appeal, which confessed to being "flummoxed" by "the newly pious preacher's (oops, reporter's) take." To which CJR can only say, Amen.

LAUREL to The Dallas Morning News, for muscular journalism. Last fall, when the weekly colleyville Courier in suburban Fort Worth published a story on the use of performance-enhancing steroids by local high school athletes - a story passed to the Courier by an alarmed mother who'd gone to school officials with the discovery that her son was taking the dangerous drugs, only to be breezily brushed off - the News picked up the ball and ran with it. Four months later, after more than a hundred interviews, filings under the Texas Public Information Act, and probing questions posed to the district board, the News was ready to kick off. From its daily reports, as well as a three-part series that explored the problem in depth, the public learned that nine student athletes, most of them on the football team, had confessed to using steroids, that the coach had loudly denounced the whistle-blowing mom as "a liar" and "crazy," and that in handling the matter, the school had fumbled badly. By early March, the paper was reporting that the coach had publicly apologized, that hundreds had attended a community-awareness program, and that the hunt was on for the supplier. In short, in the long-running game against football madness, sanity looked favored to win.

DART to the Anchorage Daily News, for leaving a hot book out in the cold. Last year, Joe E. LaRocca, a longtime journalist in Alaska whose résumé ranges from print reporter and broadcast correspondent to journalism-review publisher and undercover pipeline worker (and includes a master's degree in government from Harvard), brought out Alaska Agonistes, an anecdotal political history of, as the subtitle puts it, "How Big oil Bought Alaska." Tracking the ways the industry has managed to virtually rig just about everything in the state to its advantage, the controversial book has drawn thoughtful reviews from, among others, the journal Alaska History and two of the state's largest dailies, the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and the Juneau Empire, as well as respectful attention from the University of Alaska, where LaRocca was invited to give a series of public lectures in December, and from Slippery Rock University, where he lectured this April. Curiously, however, Alaska Agonistes seems to have been frozen out of the state's largest paper, the Anchorage Daily News, going unreviewed even in the paper's weekly Sunday feature called "Reading the North: New Books of Interest to Alaskans." Thus it is that Daily News readers know nothing about LaRocca's book. In particular, nothing about its sharply critical view of the "mostly mediocre media" - including, specifically, the Daily News - for their pumping coverage of the powerful oil companies and the elected officials who love them.

LAUREL to The Oregon/an, for a stimulating treatment of a sad, familiar story. Puzzled by a rapid rise in methamphetamine addiction in Oregon and other western states, staff writer Steve Suo embarked on what turned out to be a complicated duest The resulting five-part series which was two years in the making, took him to cities in the U.S., Canada, and India, and involved, among other things, an exhaustive comparative analysis of numerous diverse databases - connected enough dots to justify the series' title: "Unnecessary Epidemic." What Suo discovered was that government efforts in the 1990s to control the supply of the key ingredients needed for "meth'V'crank"/ "crystal"/"ice" - namely, ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, key ingredients in over-thecounter cough and cold remedies - had, in fact, been working. Addiction to meth, and the multiple social costs related to that addiction, had demonstrably declined. Suo also discovered that, thanks to pressure from the pharmaceutical industry and intervention from lawmakers (such as Utah's Senator Orrin Hatch) supporting legal loopholes, that success was short-lived. Still, the story does not - and need not - end there. As Suo reports, a version of a cold medicine from which pseudoephedrine cannot be extracted to make meth has already been patented (albeit unmarketed because of the drug company's doubts about its profitability). Other news outlets, including 60 Minutes, the Today show, and The New York Times Magazine, have helped bring the issue to national attention. And many states, as well as the federal government, are considering ways of regulating sales of the drug. If there is any chance of reclaiming the government's earlier success in controlling this "unnecessary epidemic," Suo's series would be a good place to start.

DART to KSTP-TV, in Minneapolis, for heisting counterfeit goods. Coveting an item in Skyway News in which the community weekly reported that ABC-TV was planning a remake of the popular 1970s sitcom Three's Company this one, though, to be set not in Santa Monica but in the ABC affiliate's own hometown KSTP could not resist. The plot, Skyway had revealed, would revolve around empty-nesters and twenty-somethings forced by soaring real estate prices to share an expensive high-rise condo in the city's regentrified Downtown. Without further ado, such as a confirming phone call or even the saving grace of credit to Skyway News, the station reported the story on its morning news show and posted it on its Web site. Which is where the star Tribune found it, picked it up, and put it in the paper with conscientious credit to KSTP but again, without the bother of checking it out. If either the station or the daily had done so, they would have learned that the story had originated in Skyway News'5 annual April Fool's Day parody issue, in which the weekly was having fun with the changing demographics downtown. (They also would have avoided those redfaced corrections.)

Darts and Laurels is written by Gloria Cooper, CJR'S deputy executive editor. Nominations: gc15@columbia.edu; 212-854-1887.

Copyright Columbia University, Graduate School of Journalism May/Jun 2005
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