Posted on 06/20/2002 9:41:19 PM PDT by mhking
NEWS | FISHWRAPPER 06.19.02
AJC motto: Better really late than never
Daily claims credit for Business Chronicle and CL stories
BY JOHN SUGG
Pity the sadsack Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Its news-savvy-anemic editors must wrestle with near-terminal dysphoria as, with no other recourse, they are forced to rip off articles from the much smaller publications in town.
Shame, oh terrible shame.
Those victimized by the AJC's journalistic rapine include scribes here at CL, and, yes, I will get tediously self-serving in praising our own work. But that's a few paragraphs away.
First, I'll laud a worthy business newspaper and scourge one of the remaining few bright lights at the AJC, columnist Jay Bookman. In a missive last week, he railed about Georgia Department of Transportation Board Chairman William Hasty Sr.'s delusional threats to sue for libel if people keep pointing out the truth. You see, Hasty's son and grandson own big chunks of land near the planned route of the misbegotten Northern Arc, and the kinfolk likely will make a bundle if the road is built.
Nothing wrong with Bookman's comments lambasting the direly-in-need-of-Thorazine Hasty. But Bookman, in describing the brouhaha, used the term "as this newspaper has reported" referring to Hasty's very clear (to anyone but Georgia "public servants") ethical gangrene.
Technically, Bookman was accurate. The AJC did report the Hasty family's conflicts of interest. But the paper didn't do the spadework first, as Bookman implies. No, that paper's report in May came 19 days after the Atlanta Business Chronicle scored an uncontested slam-dunk with the news.
To its credit, AJC editorial writers did give a polite nod to the Chronicle's groundbreaking reports on Arc-related smarminess. That was before the AJC's news section staffers woke up and scrambled to pen articles as if they had unilaterally discovered the blossoming scandal. Since then, the AJC has been all over the many, many conflicts of interest among Arc touts, from Gov. Roy Barnes on down.
But the daily newspaper, still playing catch-up with the Chronicle, was indisputably a latecomer to what's arguably the biggest current corruption story in Georgia.
The question readers should be asking is: Why was the AJC so tardy in "discovering" the conflict stories? After all, this is Georgia, where self-enrichment at the public's expense is in the job description of virtually every influential official. Surely, they're not so dumb over at the AJC that it didn't occur to the editors that the Arc would be an irresistible temptation for politicians and their insider buddies to pocket mountains of sleazy profit.
Well, maybe not so surely. We're hearing from AJC staffers that the paper's new supreme newsroom being, Julia Wallace, is in a fine lather over her reporters' laggardly performance and has demanded to be told who knew what and when. That says something good about Wallace, but readers can be excused if they slap their foreheads in amazement and inquire, "Why in the name of the sainted Ralph McGill are we buying a newspaper that doesn't report the news?"
Before May, the AJC's Arc reporting focused mainly on citizen groups that opposed the hellish highway. Such reporting is easy -- and, not insignificantly, cheap -- journalism.
Meanwhile, over in Midtown, the Chronicle, which has maybe 3 percent the number of journalists on its payroll compared to the AJC, had been doing what real newspapers should do, mining for news.
That prospecting hasn't been just on the Arc. A few months ago, for example, Chronicle reporter Meredith Jordan got a tip. Now, "getting tips" is Journalism 101 stuff. At the AJC, they specialize in getting tips about new shopping centers opening and not much else. Fortunately for citizens, elsewhere in town there are reporters, such as Jordan, who get tips about other things.
Jordan had learned about a state plan to give tax breaks to some select companies. Since this is your money the state is generously handing out, the reporter asked which companies were lining up at the feeding trough. State officials slammed the door on public records, and the Chronicle sued. Barnes commendably backed a bill that ensured the records would be opened, and the business newspaper got the corporate names it had sought -- and won a victory for Georgia taxpayers.
On a roll, Chronicle Editor David Allison summoned two reporters, Sarah Rubenstein and Walter Woods. "He told us this road was a huge project, and that there had to be something in who owned land, who would benefit," Rubenstein recalls. " 'Start digging,' Allison said."
Keep in mind that the Chronicle has only about 10 reporters (compared to a couple of hundred writers at our local daily), and the assignment was both a commitment and a risk of scarce resources. Then again, that's how great journalism gets done.
"My job is to go to the meetings and go through the records, because the public doesn't have the time," Woods says. "Allison knew we'd find something. We didn't know it would be this big."
Allison dispatched his reporters to the four counties through which the Arc would run. The duo grabbed tons of records and dumped data into computers. "Almost on a lark," Allison says, "we cross-referenced [landowners' names] with officials. We were looking for developers."
Woods says that after a month of painstaking research, "Sarah came into my cubicle. She tells me, 'I've got this guy sitting on the DOT [Department of Transportation Board] who owns land where the Arc will go. What do you think of that?'"
In a word, the rejoinder was "Bingo!"
Since their first reports May 6, the two reporters have been smoking varmints out from under rocks -- disclosing a string of officials profiteering off the Arc, either directly or through relatives and business associates. In last Friday's paper, the reporters disclose how Atlanta Regional Commission member Richard Chandler Jr. doubles as the Department of Transportation's point man for acquiring right-of-way for the Arc. Chandler's law firm has pocketed $1.7 million for the work, the Chronicle reported. Chandler is also involved in a firm that sold Arc-route land to the state for $3.3 million. The regional panel, with Chandler as a voting member, is slated to approve this fall another $158 million for more land purchases.
Chandler's smelliness is rivaled by the AJC, which reacted to the Chronicle's scoop with another bit of larceny in Saturday's paper. Credit the Chronicle? Hahaha.
History reminder: Monday was the 30th anniversary of the break-in by GOP henchmen at Washington's Watergate complex. Two Washington Post reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who occasionally were ribbed with the moniker "Woodstein," probed the skullduggery, gave a new meaning to "Deep Throat," toppled Richard Nixon and came to symbolize fearless investigative reporting.
"Yeah, we've both watched All the President's Men," the Robert Redford/Dustin Hoffman movie about Watergate, says Rubenstein, who was seven years away from being born when the burglary occurred. Referring to the similarities in names of the Atlanta and Washington reporters, Woods adds: "They call us 'Woodstein' around the office. We don't mind."
And I don't really mind the AJC purloining CL stories; after all, no one owns the news. Nor do I expect the daily to expose its own impotency by crediting us (maybe occasionally would be really swell, however). But what does trouble me is that the AJC takes so damn long to commit the theft -- and occasionally that has put the public at risk.
I asked our reporters to tell me of stories they've broken that the AJC later lifted. The list had dozens of contenders. Here are three:
Senior Editor John Sugg -- who says he calls his column "Fishwrapper" because he wouldn't dishonor a dead mackerel with the daily in town -- can be reached at 404-614-1241 or at john.sugg@creativeloafing.com.
Too bad the AJC wants to claim the work of others as their own.
PS. Please put this melanin challenged native Atlantan on your black conservative ping list.
Thank you.
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