"HMMMmMMMmMMmmMMMMMmmmmmmMMMm!"
Posted on 11/05/2003 7:06:54 PM PST by GOPcapitalist
A Hard-on for Numbers: The Chron tries to stay, uh, abreast of circulation counts
Newspapers everywhere are desperate to come up with new ways to produce high circulation figures. If the claims in a Harris County lawsuit are to be believed, the Houston Chronicle is a real leader in that effort.
What was the Chron's trick? Offering readers compelling takes on hot topics? Brightening up its dreary pages with lively writing?
No. Instead, the paper's reps took the independent auditors who monitor the circulation figures out to titty bars and kept them happy, liquored up and too distracted to count.
That claim comes from depositions in a suit filed by Houston attorney Jerry Payne, best known for his long battle with the IRS over a stock deal. (A stock deal involving a "gentleman's club" Payne owned, coincidentally enough.)
Payne represents former Chron distributors who say the paper routinely inflated its circulation, through either lascivious entertainment or such ruses as delivering hundreds of extra papers to schools involved in a reading program. The plaintiffs say they were fired for refusing to go along with the schemes.
"It's all very real," Payne says. "There's no way in the world a jury will listen to these [former] managers and not believe it didn't happen." The trouble will be getting past the Chron's motion to dismiss the managers' case before trial through Texas's "employment at will" law, which offers workers few options to sue over termination.
Chronicle attorney William Ogden calls the suit "frivolous" and the claims about bogus circulation numbers "completely false."
As for the titty-bar allegations, Ogden labels them "a scurrilous thing that has nothing to do with this lawsuit."
This time they are being sued for pressuring circulation auditors to inflate their distribution numbers in exchange for booze, strippers, and nudie bar visits.
Its called 'Newspapers in Education' right?? The Dallas Morning News and others do it too. Oh and Dallas is the world HQ for "Gentlemen's Clubs"
Not to take a business associate to a nudie bar is considered a breach of business etiquette.
I haven't bought a Comical in years although I do thumb through one at times. Gives me something to look for online later to bring back to FR...
"HMMMmMMMmMMmmMMMMMmmmmmmMMMm!"
"Please Don't tell Chin-Stroking Daddy who's working the bar!"
The nudie bar?!!! They went to The Nudie Bar?!!!
And here the Comical has been boasting about all of the bars downtown (just around the corner from their offices). I guess that the answer is that Houston needs some nudie bars in the theater district (they'll go so well with that aquarium).
But since there is no real alternative to this wretched newspaper in town, it's going to be hard to demonstrate any real damage done by the false figures. If the figures are off by 10%, so what?
I like anything which hurts the truly evil people who run the Chronicle, but this probably won't hurt them at all. Any conservative who subscribes already knows that they lie. We only subscribe to track the lies.
It's curious that they don't mention those ones. Then again, the Chron's left wing editorialist Cragg Hines did recently write a column telling Tom DeLay to "save the unctuousity, baby cakes." But that's the type of language used at disreputable establishments of another type...
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