Tag: media criticism

In Gloucester, a murky clarification

Gloucester High School principal Joseph Sullivan deserves a lot of credit for (more or less) standing by his words and standing up to Mayor Carolyn Kirk. But his statement, published yesterday in the Gloucester Daily Times, clarifies nothing, and leaves the story exactly where it stood on March 7, when the local paper first reported Sullivan’s concern that some of his students were getting pregnant deliberately.

Of course, that hasn’t stopped the media from wrongly proclaiming that Sullivan is confirming a story in Time magazine, which reported last week and in a follow-up that the principal had revealed the existence of a “pregnancy pact.” As we all know, Time reporter Kathleen Kingsbury wrote that seven or eight young women had agreed ahead of time to get pregnant and raise their babies together. That very specific allegation is what set of a media feeding frenzy. And Sullivan, in his statement, doesn’t address it.

Let’s deal with Sullivan’s statement first. Here is the heart of it, as he describes the interview Kingsbury conducted with him:

Her direct question to me was whether I thought the distribution of birth control prescriptions or prophylactic devices at the Health Center would have prevented the spike in the number of pregnancies that have been reported this year. I told her “no” because my sources had informed me that a significant number of the pregnancies, especially among the younger students, were the result of deliberate and intentional behavior….

I honestly do not remember specifically using the word “pact” in my meeting with the Time magazine reporter, but I do specifically remember telling Ms. Kingsbury that my understanding was that a number of the pregnancies were intentional and that the students within this group were friendly with each other….

I believe everything I told Kathleen Kingsbury was and is accurate.

What’s crucial to our understanding of the story is whether, as Kingsbury contends, the students set out ahead of time, by agreement with each other, to get pregnant. Sullivan doesn’t even mention that. Though he says what he told Kingsbury was “accurate,” he not only does not say that what she wrote was accurate; but he adds that he doesn’t know whether he uttered the word “pact,” which she quoted him as using. Thus he is openly questioning her accuracy, even as he appears not to be. As for his reliability on the underlying facts, Sullivan is not very reassuring, writing:

My only direct source of information about the intentional pregnancies at the high school was the former nurse practitioner at the Health Center. My other sources are verbal staff reports and student/staff chatter, all of which I have found to be very reliable in my experience as a principal and all of which I filter myself for accuracy and keep confidential.

This is old news, telling us nothing we haven’t known since March 7. That’s when Gloucester Daily Times reporter Karen Grieco wrote that the high school’s unusual spike in teenage pregnancies may have been at least partly the result of deliberate behavior. Here is the top of that story:

Pregnancies at Gloucester High School have spiked to more than three times the normal number this year, and anecdotes of girls deciding to intentionally become pregnant have been reported by one school official.

“To have this many is extremely unusual,” said High School Principal Joseph Sullivan. “The volume frightens me.”

To get to the bottom of the problem, Sullivan investigated and came up with a startling revelation: According to his conversations with upperclassmen, some younger students may be becoming pregnant on purpose.

Kim Daly, nurse practitioner for the high school, was unable to confirm specifics but did say that the majority of students reporting pregnancies this school year were in the younger grades.

This story had been out there for slightly more than three months on June 11, when, Sullivan says, he was told that Kingsbury was outside his office, hoping for an interview. Thus Gloucester’s very real social problems were already well-known at that time. The gasoline that transformed this into a media conflagration was Time’s one additional touch — that there was a “pregnancy pact.” It’s helpful that Sullivan confirmed 95 percent of this sad story in his statement yesterday. But it’s the last 5 percent that’s in dispute.

Even so, Sullivan’s statement is being taken as vindication of Kingsbury’s reporting, especially by Kingsbury herself. Taking a slightly different tack is the Boston Herald’s Jessica Heslam, who suggested on Wednesday that Time’s story was crumbling. Today she dutifully reports Sullivan’s statement, but I detect a whiff of skepticism.

The Boston Globe’s James Vaznis, too, fails to acknowledge that Sullivan’s statement doesn’t really address the heart of Kingsbury’s story. Vaznis also makes no mention of his own paper’s June 6 story, by Tania deLuzuriaga, which followed up the Gloucester Daily Times’ reporting about allegations of intentional pregnancies. That’s ironic, because Sullivan yesterday essentially confirmed everything that the Globe had a week before Time.

Which brings us back to where we were a few days ago. The one aspect of this story I don’t think anyone seriously disputed was the interview Sullivan gave to Kingsbury (although his statement now has me wondering). The real question, as I wrote on Tuesday, is what steps Kingsbury took to verify the information Sullivan gave her.

Though Kingsbury has not interviewed any of the seven or eight girls, she has claimed to have spoken with at least some of them. She implied that once again yesterday, writing, “So far, the students TIME has identified as allegedly setting out to get pregnant have declined to speak publicly about their reasons for doing so.”

On Wednesday, Kelly McBride wrote about the Gloucester story for the “Everyday Ethics” blog at Poynter.org. McBride faults Time for running with the story strictly on Sullivan’s say-so. I’m not sure I agree. Sullivan was and is an authoritative, on-the-record source, and Kingsbury backed him up with similar quotes from the school superintendent, Christopher Farmer. Plenty of journalism, good and bad, has been produced with no more than that.

But now we have a situation in which Sullivan has confirmed everything except the most explosive element of the story, and we still don’t know what else Kingsbury has as verification. Of this we can be reasonably sure: There’s more to come.

Verifying the Gloucester story

With the Gloucester “pregnancy pact” story up in the air, it’s too soon to offer a full assessment. But it’s not too soon to ask some questions about Time reporter Kathleen Kingsbury’s attempts to verify the story, and whether she should have done more.

I have not read and seen everything. Based on what I have seen, though, I’d say that she had enough to go with the story. She had Gloucester High School principal Joseph Sullivan gift-wrapping it and handing it to her. She had Gloucester school superintendent Christopher Farmer essentially confirming it. There are very few news organizations that wouldn’t go with such a story given Sullivan and Farmer’s status as on-the-record, authoritative sources.

It now appears, though, that Kingsbury’s reporting may have been accurate but not entirely true. And it raises the question of whether she was able to verify it, however tangentially, with any of the seven or eight young women themselves.

Kingsbury has not claimed to have interviewed any of them, but she has suggested rather strongly that she’s been in touch with them. In her original piece, she wrote:

The girls who made the pregnancy pact — some of whom, according to Sullivan, reacted to the news that they were expecting with high fives and plans for baby showers — declined to be interviewed. So did their parents.

That tells me that Kingsbury knows their names, knows how to contact them and made the attempt. Even though none would agree to be interviewed, to me that adds credibility to her reporting. In her follow-up, Kingsbury says this:

None of the rising juniors TIME identified as being members of the pact have come forward publicly, but nine Gloucester High students have talked to TIME about the girls who decided to get pregnant. Some described the pregnant teens as having little parental supervision. “They could stay out all night if they wanted,” says a classmate, whose parents requested that she not be identified by name. Others noted a herd mentality. “I think the plan was a lot about peer pressure,” says Nicole Jewell, a rising junior who describes herself as being friends with some of the girls involved. “But a lot of girls were excited to be a part of it.”

Again, Kingsbury is telling us that she knows who the girls are, and she even quotes one of their friends, on the record, who sort-of confirms the existence of the pact.

The plot thickens. Jeff Keating notes on the “Greater Boston” blog that Kingsbury told MSNBC she had “spoken to several of them myself” when asked if she had contacted any of the girls. As I’ve said, that’s consistent with the tone of Kingsbury’s two stories. (Keating also observes that NPR reported Kingsbury had actually interviewed the girls, but that may be an error on NPR’s part.)

Two more pieces to the puzzle. Today the New York Times’ Katie Zezima has an on-the-record quote from a 15-year-old named Nicole Mitchell, who backs up Time’s reporting in part and knocks it down in part:

Four teenagers walking around downtown Gloucester on Monday said they knew of two girls who were close friends and planned to become pregnant together, but no more.

“They wanted to get pregnant and raise their babies together,” said Nicole Mitchell, 15. “The two had a pact. The rest just got pregnant.”

And Jessica Fargen reports in the Boston Herald that Lindsey Oliver, herself a pregnant 17-year-old from Gloucester, appeared on “Good Morning America” today and denied there was any pact. Fargen quotes Oliver as follows:

There was a group of girls who decided that they were gonna — they were already pregnant before they decided this — that they were going to help each other with their kids so they could finish school … to do the right thing was their decision not let’s get pregnant as a group.

Interestingly, that fits perfectly with information I had picked up in the course of my own inquiries.

I’m not sure where this leaves us. I do think it’s telling that the media are mainly interested in whether these young women had promised each other to try to get pregnant. Even if, as Kingsbury acknowledges, that can never be proven one way or the other, what we do know is cause for concern.

The teenage pregnancy rate is on the rise in Gloucester. And at least some of the girls have been thrilled when they find out they’re expecting. That’s a pretty grim commentary on what they’ve learned from their families, their friends and — yes — from their school.

Wednesday morning clarification: Though NPR apparently erred in reporting that Kingsbury had “interviewed” the girls, this Herald timeline makes it clear that Kingsbury did say she had “spoken to many of them.” This is consistent with what Kingsbury told MSNBC.

Headline news

A couple of odd headlines in today’s Boston Globe:

  • “Judge resists push for prison for drunk driver.” In fact, the judge sentenced the guy to three years in the House of Correction, with about a year off for time already served. Not good enough for the sister of the victim, but prison nevertheless.
  • “25-year sentence in pornography case.” The pornography, in this instance, was produced by the perpetrator, who filmed himself having sex with girls as young as 6 and 8. This is about rape, not porn. (Note: The online headline, as you will see, is slightly different.)

Pivoting away from a cliché

The cliché of the 2008 campaign is “pivot,” as in: When will Hillary Clinton drop out so that Barack Obama can pivot to the race against John McCain? Of course, Clinton has now pivoted back to her Senate seat, allowing the media to pivot on to the next story.

According to a LexisNexis search of U.S. newspapers and wire services, the word “pivot” appeared 370 times between Jan. 1 and today in stories that also included the words “Obama” or “McCain.” In the same period during 2004, “pivot” popped up only 147 times alongside “Kerry” or “Bush.” Granted, there’s much more interest this time around, and much more pivoting to be done. But that’s still a lot of pivots.

The New York Times strikes me as a particularly egregious offender. In just the past week, Jodi Kantor has asked whether Clinton would “pivot millions of supporters in the direction of Mr. Obama”; Frank Rich has written of Clinton and McCain’s alleged “inability to pivot even briefly from partisan self-interest”; Maureen Dowd has snickered that Obama had “been trying to shake off Hillary and pivot for quite a long time now”; and David Brooks has opined that neither Obama nor McCain “is planning a major pivot for the fall.”

A quick search of Google News shows that the Times is hardly alone.

Enough.

An old lie recycled

Unexpectedly, it’s turned into Charlie Pierce Week here at Media Nation. Why? Because conservative media critic Tim Graham is smearing Pierce with a five-year-old lie — a lie that Graham had a hand in spreading in the first place.

Pierce has a story in the new Esquire on the presidential campaign. Graham doesn’t like it very much. Fair enough. But Graham, writing for NewsBusters, begins with this:

Charles Pierce is the infamous Boston Globe writer who tried to insist in 2003 that if Mary Jo Kopechne had survived Chappaquiddick, she would enjoy all the senior citizen benefits provided by Ted Kennedy’s beneficent policies.

Graham links to an old item at his own organization, the Media Research Center, which later bestowed on Pierce its “Quote of the Year” for what it considered his extreme liberal bias.

I’ve written about this several times before, and I don’t feel like doing it again; just read this and this. As you will see, Graham deliberately misconstrues what may be the single meanest thing ever written about Ted Kennedy (by a liberal, anyway), strips out the irony and sarcasm, and then pretends that Pierce is tastelessly using Kopechne’s death to praise Kennedy.

Since the record has been corrected several times, Graham is no longer mistaken. Now he’s lying.

“Russert Watch” watch

Question: Would Todd Gitlin be capable of writing an interesting analysis of Tim Russert’s interview with Barack Obama if he weren’t trying to thread the needle of producing a weekly column for the Columbia Journalism Review called “Russert Watch” after having outed himself as an Obama supporter — a fact that he does not disclose even though it is still probably not widely known?

Answer: I have no idea. I do know that this certainly isn’t interesting.

Barbara Walters’ twice-told tale

Barbara Walters must think that if you wait for everyone to forget, you can trot out an old affair and tout it as news. The media world is buzzing softly (very softly) over Walters’ revelation that she had an affair with then-senator Ed Brooke in the 1970s. She is, of course, peddling a book.

Maybe it’s because I’m old, but my first reaction was: “I knew that.” It sounded very familiar to me when we talked about it on “Beat the Press” yesterday on WGBH-TV (Channel 2). When I started searching, I found this line from a March 5, 2000, Globe profile of Brooke by staff writer Sally Jacobs, referring to his life in the ’70s: “A regular at the lavish parties at the Iranian Embassy, he did the hustle with Elizabeth Taylor and squired Barbara Walters about town.”

There’s also this, from a Feb. 17, 1980, story on Walters by then-staffer Marian Christy:

Walters has dated Alexis Lichine, the wine expert who was once married to Arlene Dahl. She used to count among her friends former Sen. Ed Brooke and Secretary General of the Organization of American States Alex Orfila. Both Brooke and Orfila are married now and, for some years, Walters’ closest friend has been Alan Greenspan, the financial wizard.

Do we not understand the plain meaning of this? Especially that Brooke became a “former” friend of Walters after he got married?

Unfortunately, the Globe’s online archives only go back to 1980, and this isn’t exactly worth an afternoon in the microfilm room. But these two tidbits make me think I’m not hallucinating about having seen gossip items in the papers during the 1970s, when the Walters-Brooke affair took place.

I don’t recall people as caring much back then. I can’t imagine anyone cares now.

More: Media Nation reader Esther points to a New York Magazine item reporting that the Walters-Brooke affair made the Washington Post gossip column, “VIP,” way back in 1975.

Brian Williams protects his friends

That’s not an accusation. NBC News anchor Brian Williams actually comes right out and says it in response to complaints that he’s been silent about a recent New York Times article regarding retired generals and other military officers who analyze the war in Iraq for NBC and other news organizations.

To recap briefly — these officers are working as well-compensated executives for military contractors, which are, in turn, highly dependent on the good graces of the White House and the Defense Department. And Bush administration officials have not been not shy about telling the officers what to say.

Here’s a chunk of what Williams writes on his blog:

I read the article with great interest. I’ve worked with two men since I’ve had this job — both retired, heavily-decorated U.S. Army four-star Generals — Wayne Downing and Barry McCaffrey. As I’m sure is obvious to even a casual viewer, I quickly entered into a close friendship with both men. I wish Wayne were alive today to respond to the article himself.

The “picking on the dead” motif is a nice touch, don’t you think? Anyway, Williams goes on to say that he’s seen no need to comment on the Times article because, in his view, the officers were “tough, honest critics of the U.S. military effort in Iraq.”

And you know what? Perhaps they were, at least sometimes. But the thing about conflicts of interest is that viewers have a right to know what associations commentators have regardless of what comes tumbling out of their mouths. What Williams seems to be saying is that there was no need for such disclosure in these two cases because, in his personal opinion, neither man was susceptible to being spun. Is that the standard at NBC News?

In Salon, Glenn Greenwald notes that both Downing and McCaffrey were founding members of something called the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, headed by a slew of pro-war neocons such as Bill Kristol, Newt Gingrich and Richard Perle. According to Greenwald, this fact was never disclosed in Downing’s and McCaffrey’s numerous appearances on NBC. Here is a choice tidbit from the committee’s stated purpose:

The Committee for the Liberation of Iraq will engage in educational and advocacy efforts to mobilize domestic and international support for policies aimed at ending the aggression of Saddam Hussein and freeing the Iraqi people from tyranny.

You can call this idealism. But it makes laughable Williams’ assertion that his “friends” were independent. To make matters worse, Greenwald also documents the two officers’ ties to the military industry, making it clear that they could have lost a lot of money both for themselves and their employers if they had gone too far in their “tough, honest” analysis.

Recently I called the Times’ revelations “as sickening a media scandal as we have seen in our lifetime.” I was wrong. The larger scandal is that folks like Brian Williams, whom I’ve always considered to be a straight shooter, have been allowed to sweep this story under the rug.

Thanks to Media Nation reader M.T.S. for calling my attention to Greenwald’s piece.

Williams photo by David Shankbone, and republished here under a GNU Free Documentation License.