Author: Ed Weathers

FAKING THE NEWS

When The Memphis Flyer uncovered serial plagiarism and a pattern of bogus stories at the Tri-State Defender last month, I thought it was the worst case of journalistic fraud I would see for a while. After reading Sunday about the adventures of Jayson Blair at The New York Times, I’m not so sure.

The Tri-State Defender, according to insiders, has a circulation of about 6,000. Counting Internet subscribers, The New York Times has a circulation of millions. Blair, a 27-year-old reporter, made up quotes, datelines, and descriptions while also plagiarizing the work of others in at least 36 stories since last October.

The Defender made no effort to clear the record. The Times is making a huge effort. Both papers said they were victimized by a rogue reporter. That’s off the mark. Serial fraud can only happen when there’s trouble at the top. I say that based on my interviews with former key employees of the Defender, published accounts in the Times, and my own experience, including being plagiarized by the Times six years ago.

The Times, according to a spokeswoman quoted in The Wall Street Journal, wrote 50 corrections of Blair’s work during his career, only six of which were caused by other employees. That is a remarkable record of inaccuracy and a remarkably tolerant error policy. I have worked for three news outfits in 24 years — United Press International, The Commercial Appeal, and Contemporary Media, the parent of Memphis magazine and The Memphis Flyer, and freelanced for half a dozen more, including the Times. A string of unintentional errors (misspelled names, wrong titles, quotes misattributed or imprecisely recorded) in a month or two would earn you a reprimand and possibly a demotion or desk assignment. Falsifying a dateline, which is a news organization’s way of telling its audience that its reporter was on the scene, is a firing offense. I can only remember it happening a couple of times (once for a concert review), and it was the talk of the newsroom both times and raised lasting suspicions about the reporters who did it.

A rogue can fool readers who either have no way of detecting bogus stories or suspect them but don’t bother to do anything about it. But you can’t fool colleagues, who tend to be savvy, gossipy, and pretty honest when not covering their asses.

At the Defender, a second employee former classified-advertising manager Myron Hudson has come forward to support the accusation of former managing editor Virginia Porter that the plagiarist was the newspaper’s owner, Tom Picou, writing as a “consultant” under made-up bylines.

“As a former, 11-year employee, I can emphatically state that Tom Picou is Larry Reeves/Reginold Bundy or any other alias he might have used,” said Hudson. Picou said Reeves is an elderly white guy who wrote 142 stories for free and never came to the office.

The Times is doing a thorough investigation and disclosure of Blair’s sins and its internal policies, to a point. “Let’s not begin to demonize our executives — either the desk editors or the executive editor or, dare I say, the publisher,” cautioned publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. What’s next? The investigative Pulitzer? According to the Times account, some of Blair’s editors and colleagues were wise to Blair and complained about his errors and deceptions long before he resigned two weeks ago. P>I would say I can’t imagine higher-ups failing to heed such a stern warning, but thetrouble is, I can. In 1996, I wrote a package of stories for Memphis magazine about Tunica and the casinos. Three months later, on an autumn morning, I opened a copy of the Times we got at the office and was flattered to see several bits of my work in a front-page story on Tunica by a veteran Times reporter. The problem was, there was no attribution to me or Memphis whatsoever.

Once you know where to look, plagiarism is easy to spot, like shoplifting caught on tape. In this case, I had spent several weeks researching the stories and had plenty of time to loaf, rewrite, interview people, travel, collect stories, and play around with the abundant statistics in the monthly reports of the Mississippi Gaming Commission. I found the smoking guns right away, and Memphis publisher Kenneth Neill packaged them in a letter and dashed off a polite but firm objection and request for a printed apology and correction.

To make a long story short, it took us a month, a lawyer, and a few more letters to get it. Maybe that’s understandable. A newspaper’s first duty is to its employees. The “editor’s note” was roughly two parts defense of the Times and one part grudging apology. We asked for and got nothing more.

The Commercial Appeal and The Village Voice did articles about it. The big journalism watchdogs, Columbia Journalism Review and American Journalism Review, were silent even though they routinely write about similar sins of lesser papers. The Times also never mentioned this little incident when writing about plagiarism at other papers.

We were the first to agree it was hard to believe, not at all like the Times. But there it was in black and white with “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” I still read and enjoy the Times, but I’ve never looked at it quite the same way. Now I suppose other readers won’t either.

AN EMBARRASSMENT OF RICHES

My favorite columnist is Paul Krugman, of The New York Times. An economist at Princeton by way of Yale and M.I.T., Krugman eviscerates the policies of whoever is in power. He does this by using the sharpest of scalpels: hard economic facts. Krugman operates on the pages of the Times twice a week. He once dissected Bill Clinton’s policies. Now he does the same to George W. Bush, and it’s a pleasure to watch. Krugman was recently named Editor & Publisher‘s columnist of the year.

In the October 20, 2002 issue of The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Krugman wrote an essay that is must reading for everyone who is sickened by American greed. The essay is called “For Richer.” Warning: Unless you make more than, say, $2 million a year, his essay will make you angry. If you do make more than $2 million a year, it should make you ashamed.

The idea of Krugman’s essay is simple: America, he says, has returned to the Gilded Age, when the world was divided between the super-rich, who lived in obscene luxury in their Newport and Long Island mansions, and the average Joes, who lived, well, as best they could. Immediately after the Depression and World War II, says Krugman, this divide between the super-rich and the average Joe narrowed significantly. But today the divide is as great as ever it was during the age of the robber barons. Writes Krugman:

“Over the past 30 years most people have seen only modest salary increases: the average annual salary in America, expressed in 1998 dollars (that is, adjusted for inflation), rose from $32,522 in 1970 to $35,864 in 1999. That’s about a 10 percent increase over 29 years–progress, but not much. Over the same period, however, according to Fortune magazine, the average real annual compensation of the top 100 C.E.O.’s went from $1.3 million–39 times the pay of an average worker–to $37.5 million, more than 1,000 times the pay of ordinary workers.”

Krugman points out that in the years after the Depression and WW II, corporate C.E.O.’s would have been embarrassed to make so much more than their workers. It would have been a slap in the face of the GIs who had fought the war and of the wives and mothers who had scrimped and sacrificed to keep their families alive during the greed-induced Depression.

Having taken Krugman’s point, I think it’s time to embarrass the C.E.O.’s again. I hereby propose a new piece of federal legislation: the national “Parade of Pigs” Act.

The act will work like this: Every year, after tax forms are submitted, the IRS will make a list of all Americans who made more than $1,071,200 in gross income that year. The list will include actual incomes next to actual names. The IRS will publish that list under the title “The Parade of Pigs.” (The name will be mandated by law.) The list will be made available to every newspaper and television station in America, and will be placed on a federal web site called “www.pigsty.gov.”

Why $1,071,200? Because that’s exactly 100 times the annual wage of a worker who puts in 40 hours per week, 52 weeks per year at the federal minimum wage of $5.15 per hour. (You may claim that most C.E.O.s put in more than 40 hours per week. I’ve spent a good deal of time around C.E.O.’s. Most of the C.E.O.’s I’ve seen were playing golf during workday hours, or eating at someone else’s expense. I’m sure they called it work.)

Today there is a substantial movement under way on the Internet and elsewhere to legislate an actual “maximum wage” in the United States. One of the more provocative books on the subject is The Maximum Wage: A Common Sense Prescription for Revitalizing America by Taxing the Very Rich, by Sam Pizzigati (138 pages, $15.95, The Apex Press/The Bootstrap Press). Pizzigati and most of those who agree with him recommend a maximum wage of 10 times the minimum wage. In other words, anything you make over, say, $107,120 per year would be taxed at 100%. Pizzigati makes a strong case that this will not only narrow the dangerous gap between the rich and the poor (the first result will almost certainly be to raise the minimum wage), but it will also lead to a greater demand for goods and services (since poor people spend most of their money instead of hoarding it), thereby boosting the economy. It would also create stronger companies that use job satisfaction and the opportunity for creativity as incentives, rather than mere money.

The maximum wage is a good idea, and I wish it would happen. But it won’t–at least not in the United States, not yet. It could happen someday down the line, when the neoconservatives finally do try to grab the last dollar from the last wage worker to give to some rich guy flying off to the Bahamas in his Gulfstream, and the workers revolt.

But “The Parade of Pigs” is easy, cheap and doable, and it might have at least some small effect. The avoidance of shame, I believe, is still a powerful motivation for most Americans. I’m more generous than Pizzigati. I’m willing to give folks 100 times the minimum wage before they are pilloried for their greed. Heck, I’m even willing to compromise: As a concession to those who (unlike the current attorney general) still believe that the right to privacy should be guaranteed in our system of government, I’m willing to leave off from the final list the exact amount each Pig makes.

Back to Krugman’s article: In 1998, he writes, “the 13,000 richest families in America had almost as much [combined] income as the 20 million poorest households.”

So today let us address those 13,000 in a language they can understand: Oink.

JACKSON, TN. Tornadoes aren’t supposed to

smash downtowns. They’re supposed to destroy

subdivisions, trailer parks, and little towns out in the country.

Sheriff’s deputies and dispatchers aren’t

supposed to huddle under tables and scramble into

bathrooms for shelter. They’re supposed to ride around with

their flashing lights on, scouting the path of the storm

or manning their post at the radio.

Tornado monuments are supposed to be

sacred memorials for the ages, not targets for an even

worse tornado less than two years later.

And brave boys caught in the storm rescue

their mothers while clinging to a pole for dear life in

the movies, not in real life.

But the people of Jackson the unluckiest city

in America this week saw all those things happen

in the terrifying storm that struck Sunday night.

Anyone who ever watched the Weather Channel

and wondered what a decent-sized downtown would

look like if it took a direct hit from one of those

fearsomely photogenic tornadoes found out this week in

Jackson. Cemeteries, historic downtown churches,

eight-story buildings, utility plants, the police station, the

sheriff’s department, the jail, and the Carl Perkins Civic

Center all took major hits. So did the fortress-like building

where the Tennessee Supreme Court meets, and the two

federal buildings, and the most popular downtown

restaurants. The Civil War memorial on the square was

still standing, but not many of the trees around it.

Johnny Williams, CEO of the Jackson Energy

Agency, called it “the most severe disaster in Jackson I have

experienced in 30 years, as far as utilities.” Both of the

city’s water treatment plants were damaged and lost water

pressure. The day after the storm, you couldn’t get a drink

of water downtown, and a single glow-stick lit the

otherwise darkened restroom at the police station.

Unity Park, a memorial to Jackson’s deadly 1999

tornado that was dedicated on October 24, 2001, was

a popular focal point for photographers and television

news crews. One of eight huge concrete balls

commemorating victims of that tornado had been blown off its

pedestal and the little park was littered with storm debris.

Jackson residents marveled that the damage

wasn’t even worse. “I picked up a hailstone as big as a

softball in my front yard,” said David Burke, 53,

who teaches theater at Union University in Jackson.

Curtis Love, 50, was working at a homeless

shelter near downtown when the tornado approached.

As lightning flashed, he could see the outline of the

funnel trailing pale green flashes “that looked like

green lightning” as transformers exploded. “It was

awesome,” Love said. “It was the worst thing I have

ever seen in my life.”

The roof and half of the sanctuary were gone at

St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, built in 1845, making it

the oldest building in continuous use in Madison

County. Members of the church were climbing a pile of

rubble to pick out bricks and stacking them on the sidewalk.

“We will rebuild,” promised the Rev.

Charles Filiatreau.

There was a nervous hour Monday afternoon

when the sky got dark once again and rain began to

fall. People driving through town spread the word

that another tornado watch had been issued for

Madison County and a tornado was on the ground

somewhere out in the country.

At the Madison County Sheriff’s Office,

battered squad cars with broken windows were draped in

black plastic and most of the doors and windows of the

building itself had been blown out. The warning sirens

had also been knocked out and weren’t able to sound

the alarm when, incredibly, a second tornado warning

was issued at 2:45 p.m. Sheriff David L. Woolfork and

a couple dozen employees were as helpless as everyone

else as hail and sideways rain pelted the windows that

hadn’t been broken and wind and water blew through the

open space where the front doors used to be.

“I’ve got this one,” Woolfork joked as he headed for a

bathroom that had already drawn a small crowd. “It’s kind of

like driving around in a Volkswagen.”

That brief storm proved to be just a scare. The funnel

cloud that had been spotted near the rural Denmark

Elementary School south of downtown didn’t touch down this time.

But the big one the night before had ripped a path three miles

long through the community of small homes, farms, and trailers.

On a driveway at the bottom of a hill in front of two piles

of rubble, Anita Rhodes came up to talk to a reporter who wanted

to know what happened in Denmark. She considered the

question for a few seconds and then waved a hand at the piles of sticks.

“This is what happened in Denmark,” she said.

In a weary voice, she told an incredible story. Her

sister-in-law, Rhonda McLaughlin, and her two sons had been in their

trailer when it flipped several times into the woods. During a

pause in the storm, 15-year-old T.J. found his mother in the

woods, lifted two trees off her, and toted her toward the shelter of

a car. But the wind picked up again, and he had to wrap

one arm around a post while clutching his mother with the

other one. Finally he got her to the car, then set off again in

search of his 7-year-old brother Lee and their grandfather,

Larry Kiddy, who lived in the other trailer and was

recuperating from heart surgery.

T.J. found Kiddy and put a tarp over him to

protect him from debris. He was later taken to a Jackson

hospital where he is in intensive care. Mrs. McLaughlin

was taken by helicopter to a hospital in Memphis.

Lee’s body was found in the woods, one of nine

fatalities in Denmark.

ZONE RANGER

Although I would consider myself to be a communitarian in my political views, I am enough of a libertarian to disdain attempts to control some forms of human behavior, especially the totalitarian efforts for which exclusive neighborhoods are known: dictating the color of Christmas lights or limiting the number and kind of vehicles that may be parked in a driveway.

Having once worked in the corporate identity department of FedEx, I can also attest to the difficulty of securing signage with correct company colors amidst persistent efforts of many landlords to create commercial zones that are as colorful as a gray and cream-hued, Depression-era photograph. If America is indeed the land of the free, then a man’s home or business ought to be his castle, and unless the house or yard or enterprise constitutes some kind of safety hazard to others, he should be allowed to indulge in all the bad taste he wishes.

But a recent trip to my hometown for a high school reunion has caused me to wonder whether the neighborhood nazis and architecture arbiters I have mocked for years, have motives more legitimate than a consummate confidence in their own superior sense of style.

I moved to Memphis in 1972, having been born and reared in Daytona Beach, Florida. Daytona is known for its wide beaches where cars cruise the hard-packed sand between the gently crashing waves of the Atlantic Ocean and row upon row of oil-slathered sunbathers. My memories of growing up in walking distance of “The World’s Most Famous Beach” are fond: days of near constant sunshine punctuated by afternoon thunderstorms, brightly colored plastic pails and shovels purchased at the five-and-dime, Christmas mornings too warm to wear the new sweater from Santa, and of course, tourists–the boom and bane of every local’s existence.

What I don’t remember are the seedy bars, tacky souvenir emporiums, garish pawn shops, and the neon shrouded tattoo parlors which now seem to occupy every square foot of commercial space within a beach ball’s throw of the sand. This lack of zoning and architectural codes in much of my hometown has created an almost surreal experience where once charming and quaint edifices that hosted banks and boutiques now boast of two-for-one body piercing specials. At times on my recent sojourn, I did not recognize the once familiar haunts of my childhood.

I was pleased then, to read that a number of Daytonans who apparently share my dismay at the current face of my hometown, are now attempting to prohibit certain kinds of businesses in areas targeted for redevelopment.

However, business owners eyeing commercial space in these enterprise zones are asking why it is more noble to sell watches in a jewelry store than a pawn shop, and whether a guy who makes charcoal sketches of strolling tourists is any more an artist than the guy who decorates proffered body parts with a needle. Good questions, both, and they have me wondering about the proper balance between individual and collective rights.

This is not just an exercise in nostalgia by a person who is clinging tightly to her childhood as she stares fifty in the face. I am merely wondering what proscriptions are legitimate in controlling legal enterprises that may cross our personal taste threshold. And what those limits mean for the rights of citizens to freely pursue the happiness guaranteed in our constitution.

A local example exists in the brouhaha over closing Christal’s Cordova store, where opponents of the sex shop insist it is a clear case of community standards being violated. But “community standards” becomes problematic in this instance when one realizes that the decision of Christal’s owners to open a store in Cordova was almost certainly based on zip code data collected in its other stores, making any casual observer wonder why Cordovans wouldn’t want a place they obviously patronize to be closer to their own “community?”

And why it is OK to sell such “obscene” merchandise in one area of town and not in another? Don’t the neighborhoods around Parkway Village and Raleigh, where Christal’s operates its other stores, deserve to be protected from this pernicious pox on the polity, too? Returning to the tattoo parlors for a moment, is it the province of zoning boards to restrict the commercial activities of citizens who are engaging in legal, but perhaps “unsavory” enterprises? Unsavory at least, by the standards of a handful of people who consider themselves protectors of the public good?

I am part of the generation that eschewed judgment of others based on appearance, created music obsessed with promoting freedom and tolerance, and hurled the epithet “fascist” at any who attempted to curb our right to express ourselves.

I don’t have the answer to the question of where the rights of the individual end and the rights of the community begin, but I do know that Daytona Beach is not a better place for having provided no curbs on the kinds of businesses that have been allowed to dominate the streetscape.

We’ve written so much about the Tri-State Defender and multi-talented owner Tom Picou in the last two weeks that we felt like we should get his picture. Here it is, courtesy of the Chicago Tribune.

Former Defender managing editor Virginia Porter told the Flyer last week that Picou, nephew by marriage to John Sengstacke, founder of the Tri-State Defender and the Chicago Defender, was behind the weekly newspaper’s long-running plagiarism scheme.

Porter said Picou “wrote” at least 184 stories and commentaries under the aliases Larry Reeves and Reginold Bundy. Many of the stories were stolen from other weekly newspapers.

Picou denied the charge but declined to talk about it. He earlier said that Reeves was an elderly white freelance writer who worked for free and was never seen in the office.

“Writers are a dime a dozen,” Picou told us before he stopped talking. So are thieves.

ADOLESCENTS VS. GROWN-UPS

Watching world leaders over the last few months, I have taken to dividing them into two camps: the adolescents and the grown-ups.

Among the adolescents are George W. Bush and Jacques Chirac, as well as Kim Jong Il, (the late?) Saddam Hussein and nearly all other dictators.

Among the grown-ups are Tony Blair, Colin Powell, Kofi Annan, and Vladimir Putin.

There are a few adolescents who make a good show of pretending to be grown-ups: Donald Rumsfeld comes to mind.

On the other hand, there are a few grown-ups who seem on casual first glance to be adolescents: Bill Clinton, for example.

The adolescent/grown-up divide does not match up with age or political positions. It has to do more with a certain tendency of mind.

The defining characteristic of the adolescent world leader is his unwavering belief (or, at least, his pose) that, when it comes to world affairs, he knows all the answers, the same way your 16-year-old son or daughter knows all the answers. The adolescent’s defining mode of communication is bluster. His language is moralistic and repetitious. He entertains no contradictions; he will not even listen if you tell him he is wrong. The adolescent never goes “off message,” because he knows only one message: I’m right, and you’re an idiot, a phony, a villain, or all three. (Think of Donald Rumsfeld’s press briefings.)

If the adolescent has experienced pain or sadness, he pretends it has not affected him. If he is uncertain, he pretends he is absolutely sure. If he is insecure–and the adolescent always is–he just flexes his muscles and blusters some more. Short-term results matter to the adolescent much more than long-term consequences, just as they do to your teenage son or daughter. The United States, I am not the first to point out, is an adolescent nation.

In contrast, the defining characteristic of the grown-up world leader is his recognition that everything in world affairs is complicated and that no one knows how things will turn out. The grown-up’s defining mode of communication is debate–that is, he listens to his opponents and shapes answers that directly address their objections.

A grown-up will sometimes appear to contradict himself, because he feels it when the tectonic plates of the world are shifting beneath him. Grown-ups have experienced pain and sadness (not necessarily first hand) and they acknowledge them and make them part of their character. (Clinton’s troubles with his step-father as a youth are one of the reasons the black community has always recognized him as a grown-up, despite his sexual immaturity.) A grown-up is not afraid to express his uncertainty, even while making the either-or decisions all leaders must make. He accepts his insecurities and does not pretend to be more than he is, except when that pretense is necessary in order for him to lead (see Franklin Roosevelt’s pretending to be healthy). I am not the first to point out that most European nations are grown up.

U.N. chief arms inspector Hans Blix is a grown-up, and so of course are Nelson Mandela, Vaclav Havel and Jimmy Carter.

Actually, now that I think about it, there aren’t a lot of grown-ups among world leaders. Grown-ups don’t often go into politics.

Among leaders from the not-too-distant past, Mao Tse-tung, Lyndon Johnson, Charles DeGaulle, Nikita Kruschev, Margaret Thatcher and the Ayatollah Komeini were adolescents. Winston Churchill was pretty much an adolescent blusterer to the end, though a valuable one.

In the category of grown-ups from the past, I’d include F.D.R., Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon (grown-ups are not necessarily nice), Jimmy Carter, Gorbachev, and George Bush the elder. J.F.K. started as an adolescent but became a grown-up sometime around the Cuban Missile Crisis. I suspect Ronald Reagan became a grown-up when he realized he was losing his mind. Most veterans of the military who have seen actual combat are grown-ups; that’s why voters would love to vote for Colin Powell.

The difference between an adolescent and a grown-up is most vivid in George W. Bush and Tony Blair. In the run-up to the Iraq War, Bush gave a single press conference, at which, no matter the question asked by whatever pre-selected reporter, he gave one of three prefabricated, always-on-message answers. Blair, on the other hand, regularly stood scriptless before the House of Commons in full debate mode, taking on the inflammatory objections, not to mention the catcalls, of the opposition, and he had to answer them extemporaneously and directly, else he would have been the laughingstock of his nation. Blair, in other words, had to entertain opposing positions and think on his feet.

It would be interesting to see how George W. would perform if forced to defend his policies before a hooting House of Representatives. (An aside: How many of you think George W. Bush will agree to more than two debates before the 2004 presidential elections? Raise your hands. Now: How spontaneous do you think his handlers will allow those debates to be?)

Go back and look at how Bush and Blair made their arguments for the Iraq War. For Bush, it was all simplicity: We’re good, Saddam is bad, we’ll make the world a better place in short order, by golly, and anybody who thinks otherwise or worries about what this means for the world’s future (read: the French) is a weasel. For Blair, it was more complicated than that: Saddam is dangerous and, regrettably, we must risk the sad, uncertain consequences of war to get rid of him, and anybody who thinks otherwise may be well-intentioned but is, well, mistaken.

Bush seemed downright eager to go to war. Blair, at least, seemed reluctant, although committed. When millions of Americans protested against the war, Bush went to Camp David, dismissing the protesters as misguided; he could be confident that the majority of the American public will always follow the bluster of a war-promoting president. Blair faced a tougher, grown-up public, and he had to defend the war in the face of polls that showed his electorate solidly and stubbornly against it. Would Karl Rove have allowed Bush to prosecute the war if 65% of the American public had remained against it? Don’t make me laugh.

Though I think he was wrong on the Iraq War, I respect Tony Blair. He’s a smart grown-up in a grown-up country. George Bush, on the other hand, is like a 15-year-old with a gun: He simply makes the world afraid. And as for the United States, well, we will earn the respect of the world when we once again elect a grown-up.