A politician`s dream-a world without reporters-may beckon as journalists keep dropping like flies. Or ants.
A New York Times reporter was suspended, and a Washington Post reporter canned, for plagiarizing, while Denver TV reporter Wendy Bergen is on trial for allegedly staging illegal pit-bull fights for a four-part series on such activity. Now welcome Katie Sherrod.
Sherrod, a columnist since 1983 for the Capital Cities/ABC-owned Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, was fired for plagiarizing a six-month-old Washington Post feature on ants. Many Texas colleagues were stunned by the whole affair.
Sherrod, 44 and no relation to longtime Dallas sportswriter Blackie Sherrod, joined the paper in 1969 and once was metropolitan editor. She`s known for strong writing on women`s-rights issues: Her reporting on battered women prompted creation of county government agencies for such women. She`s in the Texas Women`s Hall of Fame and began an op-ed column in 1983.
Her literary self-immolation involves a piece that used an incident at the National Zoo in Washington to discourse on institutional foolishness. Here are tidbits from a Dec. 13 Post story and Sherrod`s June 19 column.
Post: There has been an accident, a terrible accident at the National Zoo. The caretakers at the Invertebrate House are in shock. It seems the ants that live in a glass-fronted display case in the Invertebrate House got excited. . . . What the worker ants did, quite by mistake, was remove the head of their queen.
Sherrod: Last year, there was an accident, a terrible accident at the Natonal Zoo in Washington, D.C. The ants who live in a big glass display case in the Invertebrate House beheaded their queen. They didn`t mean to do this, you understand.
Post: Apparently, the workers were trying to transfer their egg-laying monarch from the chamber where she has resided since being shipped almost four years ago from the Cincinnati Zoo. Apparently, the hole they were trying to pull her through was small. The queen was big. Pop.
Sherrod: As near as their keeper can figure, the worker ants were trying to transfer their egg-laying queen from one chamber to another. But the hole through which they were trying to pull her was small. And a queen ant is big. Pop. There went her head.
Post: There her body hangs, on display, her headless thorax and abdomen suspended from the ceiling of her royal chamber, her back to the room, her legs dangling.
Sherrod: Her headless thorax and abdomen hung suspended from the ceiling of her royal chamber, her legs dangling.
The columnist says she took notes of a January radio story about the incident, presumably based quite literally on the Post`s account, and felt that the words were in ”the public domain.” Further, she claims she`s a victim of management retribution because she bashed the paper for using the name of the accuser in the William Kennedy Smith rape case.
Any post-firing debate at the paper has been over the severity of the punishment, not whether some was warranted (”She`s a gifted writer and didn`t have to do that,” says a veteran reporter and Sherrod fan).
But scan those examples again. Deputy metropolitan editor Mike Menichini is right: ”This isn`t a close call.”
So what`s going on here? Figure that for every reporter caught, a few others are cribbing in undetected serenity. Perhaps we all should be terminated and, in a deal with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, replaced by the next 10,000 immigrants arriving on our shores-presumably clean as jeweler`s cotton when it comes to underhanded press practices.
It`s either that or footnotes.
I don`t mean to make a running item of the guy, but did ABC-owned, normally astutely run WLS-Ch. 7 have to send self-absorbed sportscaster Jim Rose to Berlin to transmit back a lengthy tape Thursday of himself dancing at a nightclub as part of all-encompassing coverage of the Bears-49ers game?
Maybe CBS-owned WBBM-Ch. 2 should have countered by contracting out its coverage to Deney Terrio, former host of ”Dance Fever.”
In case your subscription to the quarterly Newspaper Research Journal has run out:
There are just over 1,700 fulltime journalists representing U.S. media overseas, according to a survey by Ralph Kliesch of Ohio University`s E.W. Scripps School of Journalism, seventh in a series of surveys begun in 1951 and last compiled in 1975. That`s up from 676 in 1975 and includes just over 800 Americans. One-fourth of the 1,700 are females (the Tribune contingent is currently all-male, but women will shortly take over in Warsaw and South Africa).
For the first time, European staffing is less than half the total, at 42 percent. Middle East coverage has tripled since 1975: 142 reporters are assigned to 10 nations, 51 percent based in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. The totals for Japan (185) and the Soviet Union (82) have doubled since 1975.
Africa remains a dark continent to most editors, the least-staffed region, with 68 correspondents.
Two perspectives on the Jeffrey Dahmer serial-murder case in Milwaukee:
– Actor Scott Glenn was walking near Chicago`s Wrigley Building when spied by a reporter (me) who had just seen him as Jodie Foster`s FBI boss in
”The Silence of the Lambs,” about serial killing. Glenn, who`s from Idaho, wanted to know where the Wrigley Building was (he had work in a sound studio), so an exchange of information took place.
What did he think of the Dahmer case?
”I spent a month with guys at the FBI behavioral science services unit at Quantico, Va., before doing `Silence of the Lambs,` ” he said, referring to an FBI section that investigates serial killers and assorted wackos.
”After being there, nothing about this surprises me.”
– Jeff McCourt, editor of the very good gay publication Windy City Times, argues that much coverage reflects an unconsciously anti-gay bias by focusing on the sexuality of the victims and the gay community.
He contends that when a serial killer and victims are heterosexual (as in the Ted Bundy case), the same sort of implicit questioning of lifestyle isn`t raised. And he notes that the ”fine line between safety and danger” in sometimes leaving a bar or party with someone you don`t really know is no different with straights than gays.
A sign of media-managing times: The Cincinnati Reds star relief pitcher Rob Dibble, who has endured a suspension for nutsy behavior and has feuded with teammates, announced last week that he`d seek counseling to ”deal with some of my emotions.” But it came not from his active mouth but from a press release crafted by Hamilton Projects Sports Inc., a Cincinnati merchandising and marketing firm whose clients include Dibble and former Reds` stars Pete Rose and Johnny Bench.
The Postal Service doesn`t get a cut as the Tribune and Sun-Times turn to dueling ”postcards” from far-flung correspondents.
The travelogue ”postcard”-in this case, from Sun-Times coverage of the Bears` Berlin trek and Tribune reporting on the Pan American Games in Cuba-is a somewhat worn gambit that, a colleague claimed, was invented by Tom Patterson, a former Tribune sports editor, during tenure at the Denver Post.
Patterson, unemployed but well-compensated after the demise of the National sports daily, says no, it wasn`t he. He ripped it off from others-he can`t remember who-but believes he brought it to Chicago. Thanks.
U.S. Rep. Gus Savage (D-Ill.), Congress` finest race-baiter, just sent a press release lauding his role in getting a new federal building in Chicago named for Ralph Metcalfe, the late congressman and Olympic track hero.
An inelegantly phrased release noted that the two current federal buildings here are named for ”former white congressmen. It declared that
”some white news commentators” predicted the measure would fail, but lauded the aid of the Sun-Times` Vernon Jarrett, a black.
The release concluded, ”Savage`s belligerent pressure but skillful perseverance” won out, whatever that means.
