Here’s the perfect story for some aspiring TV journalist passing through Cincinnati and eager for an award-winning clip: Ask hospitals and other institutions/businesses why they post their signs banning deadly weapons inside, where anyone who sees the warning may already have violated the law.
You know what I mean: red circle with red bar running over a handgun and text.
It would be a perfect story for the next job application.
• My College Hill Reader flagged a Nieman Foundation report, “Cincinnati TV station WCPO decides to declare (newspaper-style) war on local daily.”
I missed the declaration of war; too busy reading The Enquirer and wcpo.com.
But the Scripp’s TV station’s paywall Insider program pushed the idea with the hashtag, #dropthepaper.”
Enough said. Read both.
• That College Hill Reader wondered why the pro-development Enquirer was ignoring the for-sale sign at the former Mercy Mount Airy hospital land on Kipling Road. Now, College Hill Reader said, there are piles of rubble from the demolished building on this big chunk of land.
“I’m interested in what the zoning is and if there is a proposal to change it. What does the 51 acres include? Crosley estate, a Tri Health treatment center, professional buildings, other undemolished structures? Will the neighboring residential areas — the city and Springfield Township — have a say in the property use?”
Maybe it’s a scoop for wcpo.com.
• The New Day is a print-only daily begun in the hurly-burly of London’s newspaper world. New Day’s website gives away no content. For that, you have to buy a paper.
Coincidentally, The Independent, one of Britain’s best modern dailies, went online-only. It abandoned print.
Most British newspaper readers buy their copies at news stands; home delivery is far less common than in the States.
Those news stands are like candy shops of print with glossy magazines competing with “quality” dailies and sassy tabloids.
I congratulated editor Alison Phillips at The News Day, recalling my experience as the startup editor of a new daily half a century ago: Seeing our daughter born was the closest thing to watching the first edition come off the press.
• News media and commentariat finally are refining their stereotype of “evangelical” voters. Early primary voting patterns suggest that “evangelical” was shorthand for older, conservative white voters, irrespective of religious affiliations.
Now, some polls and voting results indicate that “evangelicals” are more conservative than they are evangelical, especially when analysts consider mutual loathings among some of their Christian denominations and Donald Trump’s personal qualities.
And even “evangelical” voters’ social/cultural conservatism is suspect where drug use, unplanned pregnancies, abortions and divorce equal or exceed national statistics.
Further complicating the news media clichés is the reality that “evangelical” and “conservative” characterizes a lot of African Americans and Hispanics.
Too many journalists — whether reporters or commentators — simplify to the point of incoherence. Failure to grasp complex roles of religion and cultural identification is a classic example.
• The Arizona House of Representatives — whose members may come in armed — adopted a rule requiring journalists to pass background checks if they want to retain access to non-public areas like the floor of the House.
Checks would include criminal and civil histories including driving records. Initially, reporters refused to comply and watched from the gallery.
Access to representatives is central to reporting, and Republican Speaker David Gowan concedes there has been no safety threat from any journalist. Some journalists suspect it’s Gowan’s retaliation for the Capitol Times’ probe that forced Gowan to repay $12,000 spent on travel.
The state Senate has no such access rule.
• News media always have faced demands of governments to “get on the team,” and it’s not limited to democracies or dictatorships.
Failure to comply invites retaliation from denial of access to assassination.
What’s new are documents suggesting that, to avoid being kicked out of Germany, the Associated Press went along with Nazi demands until America entered World War II. After other news media were kicked out, AP was the only western news agency in Germany. Then, it too was expelled.
As reported in London’s Guardian, historian Harriet Scharnberg’s research showed that “AP was only able to retain its access by entering into a mutually beneficial two-way cooperation with the Nazi regime. The New York-based agency ceded control of its output by signing up to the so-called Schriftleitergesetz (editor’s law), promising not to publish any material ‘calculated to weaken the strength of the Reich abroad or at home.’ This law required AP to hire reporters who also worked for the Nazi party’s propaganda division.”
The Guardian, then as now a liberal daily, was banned within a year of Nazis coming to power in 1933.
AP said Scharnberg’s report in Studies in Contemporary History “describes both individuals and their activities before and during the war that were unknown to AP” and that it is currently reviewing documents in and beyond its archives to “further our understanding of the period.”
An AP spokesperson told The Guardian: “As we continue to research this matter, AP rejects any notion that it deliberately ‘collaborated’ with the Nazi regime. … AP management resisted the pressure while working to gather accurate, vital and objective news in a dark and dangerous time.”
The Guardian said “the newly discovered information raises not just difficult questions about the role AP played in allowing Nazi Germany to conceal its true face during Hitler’s first years in power, but also about the agency’s relationship with contemporary totalitarian regimes.”
More than one critic has wondered aloud about AP’s relationship with North Korea. In 2012, it became the first Western news agency to open a bureau there.
But it’s not alone.
The Guardian said that when “the French news agency Agence France-Presse signed an agreement to open a bureau in Pyongyang in January this year, AP’s former Pyongyang bureau chief Jean Lee commented that it was a sign of the regime’s ‘increased confidence in its ability to keep foreign journalists under control.’ ”
However, the AP spokesperson denied AP submitted to censorship.
CONTACT BEN L. KAUFMAN: letters@citybeat.com
This article appears in Apr 20-27, 2016.
