Month: April 2003

Petersons, Plagiarism, and Pandas

Post author By Bruce VanWyngarden
Post date April 25, 2003

Whew! Glad that’s over. The war in Iraq, I mean. Now we can get back to what’s really important: Who killed Laci Peterson?

To be sure, as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has stated, there is still some “untidiness” to deal with in Iraq, but that’s yesterday’s news. It’s not like we can expect the networks to embed reporters with troops that are trying to restore electricity or stop looters or guard museums. How boring. Rebuilding a country from scratch just doesn’t make for very good television. And after all, the POWs are home. It’s time to move on.

Besides, didn’t you hear? They found Laci Peterson’s body!

It pains me to say this, but American television journalism has never been in worse shape. Our cable news networks have been permanently “O.J.-ed” into a relentless pattern: devoting weeks of coverage, analysis, and second-guessing to spectacular crime cases. The war in Iraq was only an interruption, a brief respite separating the Elizabeth Smart case (formerly the most important story in America) from the Peterson case. The war was good for the networks only as long as they could show combat scenes. Without footage of explosions or firefights, it appears at this point that there will be little coverage of the world’s most important ongoing story.

How did we get to this point? The obvious answer is money. The media are no different from any other large corporations these days, answerable to their boards and stockholders for a profitable bottom line. The higher the ratings, the higher the rates that can be charged to advertisers. It’s simplistic, certainly, but the evidence is hard to deny.

The most distressing aspect of all this is how it now colors the coverage of the news. Despite the Fox network’s absurd claim of being “fair and balanced,” its flag-waving jingoism made for stellar ratings numbers. This was not surprising, since most polls showed 70 percent of Americans supported the war. In short order, we saw MSNBC and CNN make adjustments. MSNBC quickly came up with an imitation Bill O’Reilly, the equally smug Joe Scarborough (“Scarborough Country”). The truth had become obvious: Run too many stories about dead and wounded Iraqis, misguided cluster bombs, or friendly-fire investigations and ratings go down. Offer liberal-bashing hosts with stories about inspirational POW rescues, happy Iraqi children greeting coalition soldiers, and surgically exploding buildings, and everybody’s happy. Or at least 70 percent of us are.

Of course, all of the stories cited above were part of the fabric of the war and all warranted coverage. But the American people did not get the full story — and still aren’t. The media were criticized and demonized from the top down. Rumsfeld’s bizarre facial contortions made his disdain for tough queries from reporters quite obvious. But asking the tough questions is the media’s most important function in our democracy. If reporters don’t ask them, who will? Certainly not Joe Scarborough. The more important issue: If asking tough questions– and reporting the truth, no matter how “un-American” it may be perceived — results in lower ratings for television networks, will the networks stop asking them?

John Branston’s City Beat column in the Flyer last week documented rampant and ongoing plagiarism at the Tri-State Defender. It was a hard-hitting story, but the facts were undeniable: Under the byline of Larry Reeves, the Defender ran dozens of plagiarized stories taken from newsweeklies around the country over the past few years. When confronted by the evidence, owner Thomas Picou and publisher/editor Marzie Thomas claimed they had never met Larry Reeves, never paid him, and didn’t know where he was, even though his byline has appeared in the paper 142 times since 1995. Picou speculated that Reeves might be an 80-year-old white guy.

In an editorial “reponse” (yes, response was misspelled in the headline), the newspaper labeled the Flyer story an “attack on the African-American community” and claimed that they were “not the culprit, but rather the victim.”

Horsefeathers.

Sorry, folks, but you are the culprits and your readers are the victims. Branston’s follow-up column this week (page 9) makes it clear something is very rotten at the Tri-State Defender.

It’s all very distressing. None of us in the media are perfect, but the evidence grows that the Fourth Estate is in an increasingly bad state, pandering to popular tastes, wasting valuable air-time and column inches on cheerleading and fluff at the expense of real reporting. It may help the bottom line, but journalism is supposed to be about more than that.

Oh well, I guess I should look on the bright side. It’s Panda Week, after all.

Bruce VanWyngarden is editor of the Flyer.

Music Music Features

Sound Advice

Post author By
Post date April 25, 2003

Like so many Nashville artists who don’t dent the country charts, Kim Richey is more folk-rock than country, her tasteful, rootsy sound and sharp, smart songwriting having more in common with the likes of John Hiatt, Rosanne Cash, or labelmate Lucinda Williams than with anything you’ll hear on mainstream country radio. Though not as tormented as Williams or as flashy as, say, Shelby Lynne, Richey is nevertheless a talent of that caliber. And, though I prefer 1997’s more rock-oriented Bitter Sweet, Richey’s most recent album, 2002’s understated Lost Highway debut Rise, is generally considered a career peak. Richey will be performing locally Friday, April 25th, at Neil’s in Midtown in a move that, following last month’s appearance by noted singer-songwriter Willis Alan Ramsey, continues the venue’s stepped-up music bookings.

Richey will also be appearing Saturday, April 26th, at the Double Decker Festival at the lovely town square in Oxford, Mississippi. The headliner at Double Decker this year is Los Lobos, the eclectic L.A. roots band that can make a legitimate claim to being one of the very best bands of the past 20 years, with two should-be classics under their belt — 1984’s breakthrough, How Will the Wolf Survive?, and 1996’s underrated sonic tour de force, Colossal Head. Others scheduled to appear at Double Decker include Fat Possum bluesman T Model Ford and local standouts The North Mississippi Allstars, Lucero, and Cory Branan.

For those looking for something less rootsy, one of the post-punk scene’s great raconteurs and iconoclasts, Mike Watt, will be at the Hi-Tone Café Thursday, April 24th. Watt was the bassist for the seminal ’80s band the Minutemen, moving on to form fIREHOSE after the untimely death of Minutemen frontman D. Boon. Watt returned to recording with a vengeance in the mid-’90s, first with 1995’s all-star-laden Ball-Hog or Tugboat (featuring the righteous antinostalgia anthem “Against the ’70s,” sung by Eddie Vedder, of all people) and then with 1997’s “rock opera” Contemplating the Engine Room, which conflated his Minutemen days with his father’s Navy stint. Watt, more bass player than frontman, hasn’t released anything new since, but he remains one of the great spiritual heroes of the ’80s indie scene and one of the genuine characters still out there.

Finally, on the local scene, singer-songwriter Justice Naczycz will hold a record-release party at the Hi-Tone Saturday, April 26th, for his debut disc, Water for the Withered Root. The record is a mostly downbeat, strongly sung singer-songwriter set in the vein of Richard Buckner, Ron Sexsmith, or even Jeff Buckley. As a songwriter, Naczycz rejects the verse-chorus-bridge form in favor of straight-line storytelling, a perfectly reasonable style that could get wearying for those not hanging on every word. But, thankfully, Water for the Withered Root –recorded with Ross Rice, former Big Ass Trucker Steve Selvidge (who also produced), and Lucero bassist John Stubblefield –is strong and varied enough musically to keep from dragging. Naczycz will be joined at the Hi-Tone by His Visible Band, which includes Selvidge and sometime Alvin Youngblood Hart and Cory Branan sidemen Mark Stuart and John Argroves. —Chris Herrington

Editorial Opinion

Citizen Herenton

Post author By Editorial
Post date April 25, 2003

Willie Herenton, like the hero in a frontier melodrama, walked unarmed under a flag of truce into the enemy’s camp this week and made his case that Memphis and Shelby County should become one big Ponderosa.

Pretty good theater, not bad politics, and probably no lasting effects.

Herenton looks more and more like a man alone on the consolidation issue. His political allies, such as they are, are nearly all in the “yes, but” category. As in, “Yes, consolidation has some interesting points, but we must all come together and communicate with each other before doing anything rash.”

Herenton’s closest aides seemed not to have been told of his plans to speak to the Shelby County Commission (as “Citizen Herenton”) until Monday — though advance word had sneaked through to some media outlets. The mayor sat near the back of the auditorium and seemed prepared to wait his turn to speak until Chairman Walter Bailey insisted that he lead off the meeting. Herenton said little that he has not said before, except that he had just presented Trustee Bob Patterson with a check for his property taxes that morning and was smarting a bit from the county component.

Herenton attempted to let County mayor A C Wharton off the hook by blaming, without naming him, Wharton’s Republican predecessor Jim Rout for the need for a tax increase. But some commissioners, notably Democrat Cleo Kirk, took offense. That’s a bad omen for consolidation getting beyond the talking stage.

Might as well say it — some suburban mayors and county officials go to bed at night swearing allegiance to the idea of separate school systems and separate governments. If they could build a Great Wall of China between Memphis and the rest of the county they would do it. Typical are Shelby County schools superintendent Bobby Webb and county school board president David Pickler, who were on hand for Herenton’s presentation and suggested later that his criticism of a proposed new Arlington high school as “unnecessary” was a cover for a Herenton busing agenda. (Webb, it will be remembered, proclaimed out loud some months ago that new county schools should be built as far as possible from the city of Memphis annexation reserve.)

Other than the Memphis mayor himself, consolidation proponents are either wishy-washy or they have no more political clout than a newspaper editorial writer. Or both.

Herenton has made his point. No one can deny that he was perfectly clear about his goal and unafraid to state his case before hostile forces.

But consolidation looks like a loser. If Herenton intends to run for another four-year term as mayor, as he has said he does, he might as well turn his attention in his next term to the issue of underused schools — alluded to directly in his remarks to the commission on Monday — by putting pressure on the city school board to forthwith close as many of them as is feasible. Wasted construction costs and underused schools account for the majority of the potential savings in the recent outside audit of the Memphis City Schools system. That’s a battle Herenton can win, and his voice needs to be heard as often as possible.

Opinion Viewpoint

So Where Are They, Mr. Blair?

Post author By The Independent
Post date April 25, 2003

Editor’s note: The following ran as the lead editorial in the April 20th edition of The Independent, one of several daily newspapers published in London, England.

In case we forget, distracted by the thought of thousands of dead Iraqi civilians, looted museums, and gathering political chaos, the proclaimed purpose of this war, vainly pursued by Britain and the U.S. through the United Nations, was to disarm Saddam Hussein and to destroy weapons of mass destruction deemed a menace to the entire world.

A month has passed since American and British troops entered Iraq, more than a week since the fall of Baghdad. But thus far not even a sniff. Not a drum of VX or mustard gas, not a phial of botulin or anthrax, not a shred of evidence that Iraq was assembling a nuclear-weapons program.

But that wasn’t what they told us. Remember Colin Powell at the Security Council two months ago (though today it seems another age on another planet): the charts, the grainy intelligence satellite pictures, the crackly tapes of the intercepted phone conversations among Iraqi officials? How plausible it all sounded, especially when propounded by the most plausible figure in the Bush administration.

And what about those other claims, wheeled out on various occasions by Messrs. Bush, Blair, Cheney, and Rumsfeld? The Iraqi drones that were supposed to be able to attack the U.S. East Coast, the imports of aluminum tubes allegedly intended for centrifuges to enrich uranium, the unaccounted-for lethal nerve and germ agents, in quantities specified down to the last gallon or pound, as if exact numbers alone constituted proof. All, it seems, egregious products of the imagination of the intelligence services — one commodity whose existence need never be doubted.

Maybe the Saddam regime was diabolically cunning in the concealment of these weapons, but the shambolic manner of its passing suggests otherwise. Maybe, as those “U.S. officials” continue to suggest from behind their comfortable screen of anonymity, the weapons have been shipped to Syria for “safekeeping.” But that theory too is dismissed by independent experts.

Indeed, it collapses at the first serious examination. Why should Saddam part with his most effective means of defense, when the survival of his regime and himself was on the line? Nor will that hoary and disingenuous line advanced by our political masters wash any longer — oh yes, we know a lot more, but if we told you, we would be showing our hand to Saddam and endangering precious intelligence sources.

Just believe us, old boy, the government told us, and you’ll see we were right all along. And the British, being on the whole a reasonable and trusting people, mostly accepted the word of their rulers.

Well, Saddam is now gone. And with him has disappeared any conceivable risk to those intelligence sources (assuming they ever existed). So just what was this information on the basis of which Washington and its faithful ally launched an unprovoked invasion of a ramshackle third-world country? A country with a very nasty regime to be sure but not a great deal nastier than some other potential candidates for “liberation” in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Having rushed into war to suit its own military and domestic electoral timetable, the Bush administration now has the nerve to claim that a year may be required to establish the whereabouts of the WMD — and that it may never do so unless led to them by cooperative Iraqis. But no longer can London and Washington rely simply on the impossibility for the former Iraqi regime to prove a negative, that the weapons do not exist. It is up to the coalition of two to provide proof positive that they do.

This pointless war cannot be unmade. But we urgently need to know that the invasion was not illegal as well. With Britain and the U.S. in full control of Iraq, a month should suffice. If no “smoking gun” has turned up by then, a full parliamentary inquiry is essential — into the competence and accountability of the intelligence services and into how our government used them to sell a mistaken and reckless policy.

News The Fly-By

SIGN-O-THE-TIMES

Post author By Chris Davis
Post date April 24, 2003

Okay, maybe we’re just way out of touch with contemporary trends in public signage, but we found this bit of prohibitive iconography at Peabody Place rather puzzling. Does the sign below mean:

A: Absolutely, positively no scoliosis victims allowed on the premises.

B: No being all like, “Hey, I wanna go out with you,” then being like all, “But I don’t want to stand like next to you or anything.”

C: No busting out your classic 1970s dance moves like the bump without a partner, loser.

OR …

D: This sidewalk is very self-conscious about its weight. Please don’t stare.

We Recommend We Recommend

thursday, 24

Post author By Tim Sampson
Post date April 24, 2003

Okay, here s a quick bulletin. I don t have a lot of time or space for a lot of nonsense here this week. There is a lot going on in the next seven days and because this is a free paper and is made possible by the nice folks who run advertisements in it, the editors can t just give me a few extra pages. Oh, I could whine about how jealous I am after reading that there s a 40-foot replica of a twisted human colon on display in Little Rock, designed so that children can crawl through it to learn more about the body organ. Call it the Colossal Colon, if you will, and just hope with all you have in you that this becomes a thrill ride at Libertyland someday, when you too can journey through the colon at breakneck speed strapped into little polyp cars. Or I could go into great detail about excited I got when I read about a police chase that started here in Memphis and ended up somewhere in Mississippi the other day. Seems that some undercover Memphis police officers were posing as customers for prostitutes out by the airport and ran into one that was a bit wilder than they had foreseen. While they were trying to arrest her, she jumped in their red pickup and truck and zoomed off, injuring, but not too badly, thank goodness, two of the officers. When they finally caught up with her and tried to detain her before taking her to an arrest van, she apparently got behind the wheel of another officer s car and this, as a police witness said, is what happened next: The officer was holding onto the car and she was doing doughnuts in the parking lot trying to throw him off. While doing her doughnuts, she hit another squad car and injured another officer. He and the officer hanging onto the car were taken to The Med with noncritical injuries. So she took off again and huge chase ensued that involved police helicopters and all manner of other mayhem, until they finally caught her in Mississippi. This has reality television written all over it. Slut Survival. Hooker Factor. American Prostitute. Who s Your Pimp Daddy? The show could be hosted by Heidi Fleiss, but feature only Memphis hookers. I think we have enough. They could be judged on how many Lee Press-On Nails they keep on during each scuffle. How many times their wigs fly off during police chases. It might not be as cool as the Colossal Colon ride, but it could help put Memphis a little more on the map. And speaking of putting Memphis on the map, I ve got to get on with this, because starting Sunday, we will be making history like we haven t seen in decades in this town and I don t have a lot of time to write about anything else. So here s an abbreviated look at some of what else is going on around town. Tonight, at David-Kidd Booksellers, you will finally get a chance to meet the elusive Memphis magazine columnist and Memphis trivia trove, the much-loved and highly mysterious Vance Lauderdale, who will be there signing copies of his new column compilation, Ask Vance. Today kicks off the yearly Africa in April festival in Robert Church Park, this year honoring Morocco. The Memphis Redbirds start a four-day run against Omaha tonight. The Scott Sudbury Band is at the Flying Saucer. And the legendary Mike Watt & The Secondmen with Mad Happy and the Duration are at the Hi-Tone.

Politics Politics Beat Blog

POLITICS

Post author By Ed Weathers
Post date April 23, 2003

DOUBLE-HEADER

It was a precedent-shattering day for the Shelby County Commission Monday. The assembled commissioners were addressed by two mayors — county mayor A C Wharton in the morning, pitching his proposed new Adequate Facilities Tax, and Memphis mayor Willie Herenton in the afternoon, stumping for city/county consolidation. But the key moment may have come at the very end of the commissioners’ long day, when, just before adjournment, Commissioner Joe Ford announced, almost as a throwaway line, “I’m going to vote for development every time it comes by here,” and proceeded to make the case that adding property to the tax rolls was the summum bonum for country government, transcending considerations of “Smart Growth,” urban sprawl, school funding, or whatever.

Ford’s declaration followed a close and controversial vote on an east Shelby County subdivision project proposed by developer Rusty Hyneman, which in itself was an appropriate capper for a day’s worth of high-urgency policy debate — much of which centered, explicitly or implicitly, on that selfsame issue of development. The morning’s activity focused on Wharton’s presentation of the case for an Adequate Facilities Tax as a lynchpin of his “Smart Growth” plan, technically delivered to the commission’s budget and finance committee but made before a de facto meeting of the whole commission, reconvened for the purpose in the first-floor auditorium in the county administration building. The afternoon saw “Willie W. Herenton, citizen” (as the city mayor insisted on calling himself) make what — considering the advance buildup — was actually an anti-climactic and understated plea for consolidation.

The intertwined issues of development and school funding as they impact the county’s worsening financial predicament underlay both presentations and the discussions that ensued from them.

The Adequate Facilities Tax that Wharton proposes — and which he had first introduced to the commission in a preliminary budget projection last week — would impose fees of $1 per square foot for new residential development and 75 cents per square foot for new nonresidential projects. Citing the fact that “our property taxes are among the highest in the region,” resulting in a “tremendous loss” of population and industrial clients to DeSoto County, Wharton said he intended the A.F.T. — which is close cousin to an “impact fee” on new development — to “take pressure off the property tax.” But he added, “I’m looking for workable solutions,” offhandedly throwing out a number of other possibilities, including that of a payroll tax.

Commissioner Deidre Malone grabbed that ball and ran with it, pointing out that a payroll tax would be an appropriate means of getting help on infrastructure costs from out-migrants who live elsewhere but still work in Shelby County or rely on the county’s shopping, recreational, and entertainment facilities. And, though commission chairman Walter Bailey dutifully pointed out that the scope of Monday morning’s discussion was limited to the proposed new tax or to the county mayor’s Smart Growth concept or his budgetary proposals in general, the payroll-tax idea kept resurfacing. Commissioner Joyce Avery, who represents an outer-county district, added her approval of it, twice calling the payroll tax — either in a Freudian slip or as an imaginative analogy — a “poll tax.”

And a sizeable host of developers and their spokesmen on hand were like-minded. A series of speakers, beginning with former Office of Planning and Development director Dexter Muller, who now represents commercial developers, and continuing with several officers of the state and local Home Builders Associations, deplored the effect of the proposed new tax on what they described as an already depressed homebuilding industry and talked up the alternative of a payroll tax. Homebuilder Frank Uhlhorn, a Germantown alderman, was typical in suggesting that the right tactic was not to penalize local developers but to target those who “have chosen to cut and run.” Ron Belz, president of Belz Enterprises, said county entrepreneurs trying to attract warehousing and other commercial clients could “lose deals over pennies” and that the proposed A.F.F. could tilt the balance, however minutely, in such negotiations.

Commissioner Tom Moss, himself a developer, was skeptical of the limited yield — $4 to $7 million annually, Wharton has estimated — from an Adequate Facilities Tax and quipped sarcastically that “we could go for some real money” by applying the proposed tax retroactively to developments already completed. That, said Wharton aide Kelly Rayne straight-facedly, would be unconstitutional.

The lone testifier on behalf of the tax was Cordova homemaker Stacy Heydrich, who said that the morning session seemed “skewed” on behalf of homebuilders and developers and lamented the fact of pell-mell development in her area. Mentioning specifically the Hyneman project on Macon Road that would be voted on later in the afternoon, Heydrich cited the difficulty of funding new schools and other infrastructure that she said would arise from that and other new development and proclaimed, “If you don’t have the money, you have two choices: Don’t build, or tax builders and developers.”

What Wharton was asking the commission to do was not to enact his proposed new tax but merely to pass it on to the legislature, where, if the Shelby County delegation supports it with what amounts to unanimity, enabling legislation could be passed, and the tax could be forwarded back to the commission for definitive action. With that in mind, such undecided commissioners as Marilyn Loeffel and Avery voted with a 6-to-4 majority to pass the proposed measure on for action in Nashville, where, as Wharton pointed out, the General Assembly is heading toward an early-May adjournment.

Though his afternoon appearance had been much ballyhooed, Herenton added little to the consolidation agenda which he had previously proposed, though his declaration before the assembled commissioners — and in the presence of Wharton, his mayoral counterpart — that “we cannot continue to support two separate governments and two separate school systems” had inherent symbolic power. Like Wharton, Herenton pronounced that local taxpayers could not continue to be burdened with add-on property taxes. Underscoring the implicit comparison between his own no-new-taxes budget and the county’s revenue difficulties, certain to require additional taxes of some sort, the Memphis mayor-qua-Shelby County “citizen” said, “As a taxpayer, I expect better policies and better management.”

One result of that was a somewhat testy back-and-forth between Herenton and commission budget chairman Cleo Kirk, who at one point asked Herenton what the city’s bond rating was. “Double-A,” the city mayor said proudly. “Well, ours is Double-A-plus,” responded Kirk. “We can’t have been doing things all that badly.”

At some point, the idea of a “summit” to discuss the issues of schools and local governance got bruited, and Herenton said, “I am hoping that Chairman [Walter] Bailey, in his great wisdom, would call the summit.” To which Bailey replied. “I trust your hopes will be realized.” As they were ultimately, with the commission voting 11-1 to hold such a meeting of local officials — time, place, agenda and other particulars yet to be defined.

Commission Capsules: The Hyneman proposal — for 85 new dwellings in the Macon Road/Houston Levee Rd. area — was deferred for two weeks, with Smart Growth advocates like Bruce Thompson, who cited Land Use Board and OPD rejections, and pro-development advocates, like Ford and Moss, who called OPD “rudderless,” girding for a showdownÉ.A redesigned proposal by Commissioner John Willingham to authorize a private company’s research into converting The Pyramid into a casino sneaked through a rump session of a commission committee virtually unnoticed; it will come before the full commission at its next meeting. Willingham indicated his threat to ask reconsideration of a rural school bonds proposal may not materialize if further cuts are made in the budget for a proposed new Arlington school.

News News Feature

CITY BEAT

Post author By Ed Weathers
Post date April 23, 2003

ANATOMY OF A LIE

Plagiarism at the Tri-State Defender was much more extensive and, at times, malicious than we reported last week, according to additional research and interviews with former staff members. And the former managing editor, Virginia Porter, said it was carried out by the African-American newspaper’s current owner, Tom Picou, using the aliases Larry Reeves and Reginold Bundy.

Picou, who lives in Chicago, is the nephew of the late John Sengstacke, founder of the Tri-State Defender and the Chicago Defender and other newspapers that serve the black community. Picou is the CEO of Real Times, which bought the Tri-State Defender and three other newspapers in Detroit, Chicago, and Pittsburgh earlier this year for a reported $11 million.

Picou told the Flyer last week that Larry Reeves was an unpaid freelance writer whom he never met in person although Reeves authored 142 articles in the Tri-State Defender. Picou said he believes Reeves was an elderly white man who has since moved to Arkansas. He declined to speak to the Flyer this week. Asked if he is Reginold Bundy and Larry Reeves, he said, “Absolutely not. I’m finished with this issue and that’s the end of it,” before hanging up the phone.

Like “Larry Reeves,” “Reginold Bundy” was a prolific plagiarist, changing datelines and place-names to relocate stories to Memphis or other cities in the Mid-South. By doing a computer search, the Flyer was able to conclusively establish that several stories were stolen. We offered to show the evidence to Tri-State Defender publisher/editor Marzie Thomas at her office. She declined three times.

á In 1995, Bundy stole parts of a story about crimes of passion in Miami from Miami New Times and transposed it to Memphis, changing real Hispanic people to fictional African Americans and editorializing about violence in the black community.

á In 1995, he stole parts of a story, “Open Hearts,” about an autistic child, from the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel.

á In 2001, he stole parts of “Who’s Sorry Now?,” about the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s mistress, from The Village Voice.

But “Reginold Bundy” was a much more creative and complex persona than “Larry Reeves.” Reeves was a space-filler, “author” of long, front-page stories that were lifted nearly verbatim from other weekly newspapers far enough away that the actual reporters probably would not notice the theft. Bundy had an agenda. In 54 stories found in our computer search, he often editorialized about actual politicians and events in Memphis or West Tennessee and apparently constructed passages of dialogue to embellish his creative efforts.

For example, in 1995 Bundy stole part of a feature story about donating cheap cameras to the homeless in Miami from Miami New Times. But he transposed the story to Memphis, inventing tourists and locals who crassly shot pictures of a homeless man in Court Square “who goes by the name Tattoo George.”

“Tattoo George” speaks to “Reginold Bundy” in a pathetic parody of black dialect, saying, “It’s like dey got nothin’ else to shoot. So day shoot us.”

In a 1996 story, Bundy writes about the

burning of four black churches in rural West Tennessee: “In fact, in many rural counties in Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, the TSD learned, the state of social conditions haven’t really changed over the past 40 years despite changing laws and national mandates. To target Black churches in the wake of exceeding racial intolerance is no more of a novelty than the alleged continued lynchings in the Mississippi Delta region.”

Sources include “the FBI’s Hate Division,” “documents released in 1968 by the Congress of Racial Equality,” and “an official who preferred not to be identified.”

A 1,415-word 1995 Bundy story attacking state Sen. John Ford includes no sources other than ” close friend” and “one unidentified man in a local restaurant.”

Porter, 62, told the Flyer she was managing editor at the Tri-State Defender from 1995 until 2002, when she was laid off. She now lives in Kankakee, Illinois. She formerly worked as a copy editor for The Sacramento Bee and other newspapers.

She said “I would stake my life on it” that Picou is Reeves and Bundy. She said anyone who questioned procedures at the Tri-State Defender “was abruptly let go.”

“He [Picou] was the big boss,” she said. “Why fight with him over his product?”

She said the make-up work for the Tri-State Defender’s front page, page three, and jump page (where front-page stories are continued) was done in Chicago and sent to Memphis.

“I used to tell him [Picou] all the time, ‘One day you’re going to get the Tri-State Defender sued because I know this stuff is either made up or ridiculous,'” she said.

The Chicago Reader, a weekly newspaper that has written about Picou, describes him as going to work for the Chicago Defender as a teenager and rising from baseball writer to editor to president of Sengstacke Enterprises before leaving the company in 1984 “because he couldn’t put up with the boss.”

Marzie Thomas has been advertising director of the Tri-State Defender since 1991 and was named editor/publisher this year. In a Commercial Appeal profile in February, Thomas, 50, says, “Our mission has always been to tell the truth. We have no other purpose but to make sure the truth gets out.”

In an editorial last week, Thomas wrote that “a free-lance reporter may well have plagiarized stories” and that the Defender “was not the culprit, but rather the victim.”

Opinion Viewpoint

TRANSLATION: MEMPHIS: Untouched by Human Hands

Post author By Jenn Hall
Post date April 23, 2003

Recently a friend and I got into a conversation about the pros and cons of Wal-Mart as it pertains to the enhancement or degradation of the community fabric of America.

By now, of course, this has become a common topic of debate.

Inevitably, you end up with those on the hell, it’s super-convenient and cheap side, and those who bemoan the chain’s lack of personality and uncanny ability to bring a drought to local business.

I remember a roommate in college giving me a bumper sticker with the slogan “Wal-Mart sucks the life out of your town.” Somebody in her family was an active protester, out in the trenches, camped out by the glow of the fluorescent parking lot light.

What cannot be debated, though, is the fact that everyday life and technology will become ever-closer bedfellows as we trek toward the future. Such is the temperament of progress.

Beyond Wal-Mart’s model of distribution and marketing, of course, there are a host of other advances that are slowly reshaping the consumer experience in America.

I, for example, adore the U-Scan lanes at our local Kroger stores.

I guess I like to check myself out. Ha ha…

And I know that by participating in such a thing, I could theoretically be labeled a non-supporter of human interaction, a destroyer of jobs, a demon of depersonalization.

But alas, I am hooked, even as I experience strange pangs of guilt while swiping my Hot Pockets across the scanner.

The newest technological focal point for my curiosity, though, is Smartmart, a fully automated convenience store, billed as “the world’s first,” that is set to open at the corner of Park and White Station later this month.

The company is based out of Memphis.

I am enchanted and I am terrified.

If you drive by the intersection, just across from the Eastgate shopping complex, you can see what will soon be our “store of the future.”

Actually, the car wash and fuel pumps are already open, but that’s not so exciting, now is it? We’re all familiar with “pay at the pump.” Its entry has been logged in the annuls of convenience.

Essentially, Smartmart is a large shipping container which holds merchandise that can be purchased by navigating an infrared touch screen display.

This is a step up from the “Keedoozle” that Clarence Saunders of Piggly Wiggly fame experimented with in the thirties. This was a key-activated device that sent merchandise along a conveyor belt and to a checkout stand. What is it about Memphis and convenience-shopping technology?

But back to the Smartmart.

Nobody works there. Nobody.

To be sure, there will be the occasional maintenance worker, or a computer systems expert there to tweak the thing, but otherwise it’s really just a big ole’ vending machine.

And truthfully, I think it’s kind of scary. Not quite the Jetsons, but definitely not small town America, either.

I don’t know why, and maybe I’m crazy, but the whole thing really reminds me of the episode of King of the Hill where the Hill family goes to Japan. In a couple of scenes Bobby is seen dancing with a girl at one of those outdoor video-game dancing machines.

Hell, I have no idea what they’re called, or exactly what the association is. But I do think they should set one of those up at the Smartmart as well. (I think Jillian’s already has one.)

Park and White Station could then become our designated corner for techno-gadgetry.

Overall, I’m not sure if I will embrace the Smartmart as I do the U-Scan. I love my “Shell lady” too much to forsake her like that.

But it is certainly kind of odd, intriguing, futuristic and disturbing. It will be even more so if they get the retinal-scan payment option in place, as has been discussed.

And that may be where I draw the line.

If you want to try out the Smartmart process for yourself, you can go to smartmartinc.com, where there is a sample transaction demo. Just click on the “take a tour” prompt, and buy a Coke from nobody.

Weird.