Putting Censorship to Good Use

Fear & Favor in the Newsroom is a nice show. Produced by independents Beth Sanders and Randy Baker of Seattle, it’s an hour long, narrated by Studs Terkel, and it makes the right points about powerful advertisers, old boys’ networks, interlocking directorates, and cozy cliques of civic pooh-bahs. We hear about Bill Kovach, who took on Coca-Cola and the downtown banks and lasted two years as editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution; Sydney Schanberg, whose muckraking metro column disappeared from the New York Times, Jonathan Kwitny, whose muckraking Kwitny Report on PBS won a Polk Award but lost its corporate underwriting; Jon Alpert, who shot tape in Iraq that made the gulf war look less like surgery than butchery and was dropped by NBC president Michael Gartner, who didn’t show the tape.

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Thanks to this campaign, a cassette of Fear & Favor came to my door. But the show won’t arrive at Channel 11 until November 9, when it’s fed to the nation’s PBS stations by satellite.

“We haven’t refused to show it at all,” says Anders Yocom, WTTW’s vice president of broadcasting. “We haven’t seen it yet. I’d rather have a chance to see it first before we agree to show it.”

“Actually,” she continued with admirable candor, “we plan to show Fear & Favor in the Newsroom to a select audience as a major fund-raiser just before our December 12 conference on ‘The Telecommunications Act and the First Amendment’…. Because of the importance of its message, Chicago Media Watch urges you to schedule the video–preferably after our fund-raiser.”

Hollinger management explained that the Sun-Times requires new presses, already ordered, “to simply maintain daily publication.” New presses can’t be afforded at “our current level of profitability.” Nor will new investors be attracted to Hollinger. Therefore management proposed certain measures it deemed economically responsible and fair to one and all.

The Newspaper Guild had already agreed to a rotating batch of interns who’d be known as “fellowship employees”–grunt labor hired to fill ranks that are about 30 journalists lighter than they were three years ago. (Hollinger has saved hundreds of thousands of dollars through understaffing.) And the guild had made an economic proposal of its own that it considered modest and conciliatory–5 percent raises for each of the next three years.

A Series of Errors?

The papers found a line to take with this year’s World Series, and they stuck to it. Bernie Lincicome: “The Series that no one cares about.” Paul Sullivan: “It has been deemed a critical flop, an artistic failure and a ratings disaster.” Jay Mariotti: “The game is dying before our eyes.”