by Steve Miller
copyright © 1996, Electric Nevada
 She was a reporter from one of
the better papers in the region, checking out the
scene here at Electric Nevada, and the conversation
turned to the Reno Gazette-Journal. |
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| She said that while her
arrangement with her editor allowed her to sell
free-lance stories to other publications, she
wouldn't sell to the Gannett chain's local product
because she didn't respect it as a newspaper. At
times, she said, when she compared what had happened
before her own eyes at a news event with what
appeared in the Gazette-Journal, she wondered
"if they were on drugs." "And
then," she said, "there are all the stories
that they don't cover. I guess they don't think
they're important." This
idea -- that the only reason Gannett's local editors
don't assign reporters to certain stories is that, in
their judgment, those stories aren't important -- is
an impression the Electric Nevada team has run into
repeatedly in the past few weeks when talking to news
sources and prospective writers and reporters.
It's
a reasonable enough assumption to make. No business,
much less a newspaper, has unlimited resources;
priorities have to be set. The assumption is also
generous -- it assumes that no hidden agenda is in
operation at Gannett's Reno operation to bias its
local news coverage. That
last point, however, has been brought into serious
question because of recent developments in a current
East Coast court case. Plaintiff
attorneys in a wrongful-termination suit against one
of Gannett's 93 papers -- Burlington, Vermont's Free
Press -- used legal discovery to explore documents at
Gannett corporate headquarters. They emerged with
internal Gannett papers showing that chain
headquarters uses a race-quota system to measure the
racial correctness of individual chain papers'
reporting of news touching on race and minority
topics. Gannett also then ties compensation and
career security for the chain's top editors and
executives to their scores on this scale, which it
calls its "All American Contest."
Writing
in the March 18 Wall Street Journal, William McGowan
reports that the "contest" is "an
annual numerical review that judges editors on how
successful they have been at achieving racial balance
on their news staffs and their news pages."
Similarly, he says, Gannett mandates that papers in
the chain follow a policy called
"mainstreaming," under which the news is
covered by racial numbers, reporters are distinctly
encouraged to maintain and consult minority source
lists, and special efforts are made to integrate
positive images of minorities in news coverage and
photos. In
Vermont, minorities represent less than 3% of the
population. Consequently in 1993 Gannett's Burlington
paper had some of the lowest "All American"
scores in the corporation's entire newspaper
division. Internal Gannett documents showed that the
Gannett headquarters was exerting pressure on the
local editor to raise those scores. This
was the context in March of that year when a
community forum on racism was held in Burlington and
a white woman trying to defend Vermonters against
angry accusations of white racism was cut off at the
microphone by the moderator, a black aide to the
mayor. Announcing that the meeting was
"specifically designed for people of color"
to describe their "ethnic experiences" of
living in Vermont, the aide had the woman ejected
from the meeting.
The
Free Press reporter covering the meeting agreed with
the woman's characterization of the incident as
reverse racism, and judged that newsworthy, since it
happened at a community forum on race relations. When
the story appeared the next day, minority activists
charged that the story was "ugly" and
"distorted" and that it "inflamed
racial tensions." Leading the attack was the
mayoral aide, who threatened a lawsuit and a march on
the paper unless the reporter was fired and apology
published. That
evening, in a 90-second meeeting, the Free Press
editor terminated the reporter, writes McGowan,
"without giving him a chance to defend himself,
reviewing a videotape that
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supported the reporter's account or talking to any officials in attendance" -- officials who also confirmed the reporter's account. The blackballed reporter has since tried to make ends meet with a string of low-paying, short-term jobs.
Attorneys
for the reporter (now the plaintiff in the
defamation/wrongful-dismissal case against Gannett
and its Burlington paper) argue that Gannett's system
encourages hyper-sensitivity and double standards,
and is thoroughly inappropriate in a setting where
minorities represent a small proportion of the
population. They also argue that Gannett's system --
by tying an executive's compensation and career
security to how well his or her paper conforms to
company doctrines of racial correctness -- made the
Burlington editor highly susceptible to the mayoral
aide's threats. The "mainstreaming" policy
mandated by Gannett headquarters -- covering the news
by racial numbers -- could not be implemented if an
alienated black community stopped taking calls from
the paper's reporters. In
a deposition to the fired reporter's lawyers, the
editor conceded that he had subsequently taken
implementation of the Gannett "news by the
racial numbers" doctrine to the point of
decreeing that one out of six faces in a photo series
called Vermont Voices should be a person of color.
Another deposition, from the paper's star columnist,
disclosed that the editor had instructed him in a
memo that at least one column in four should be about
a minority or address a diversity issue. What
is the relevance of this Vermont case to the
situation here in western Nevada? With a uniform
policy across the 93-paper Gannett empire, do editors
at the Reno Gazette-Journal feel they have to operate
under that same constraints as did the editor of the
Burlington Free Press?
Definitive
answers are elusive, but an incident that this
reporter witnessed a few years ago may be relevant.
It was during an especially active period of Hispanic
gang warfare in the Truckee Meadows, when a small
Hispanic child had just been killed by a suspect
identified, by local law enforcement and federal
Immigration and Naturalization Service sources, as an
illegal immigrant. At
the time, the same sources were also alleging that
over 50 percent of the population of the Nevada state
penitentiary in Carson City were in the United States
illegally. But when it was proposed that the
Gazette-Journal do a story determining whether or not
the allegations were true, the executive editor was
very skittish toward the idea. Rather
than focusing on the savings to Nevada taxpayers
(Hispanic or otherwise) if illegal-immigrant convicts
could be deported back to their home countries, and
rather than focusing on the potential increase in
safety to local residents (Hispanic or otherwise) if
immigration law could be enforced on out-of-control
local gangs, the Gannett-appointed top editor, for
some reason, only chose to see any news coverage in
the paper of the role of illegal immigration in the
local gang-war situation as an "attack" on
the entire Hispanic community. And rather than
exercise his own editorial authority to insure that
reporting on the issue did not approach anything like
such an "attack," he simply vetoed the
whole idea. So that entire important dimension of a
weighty community problem was never discussed in the
Gazette-Journal. "At
the time," recalls the story advocate, "it
just looked to me like the guy was just a
politically-correct twit. Now, though, even if that
is true, he could also have had his perks, salary and
long-term career success with Gannett in mind."
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