TVA ratepayers, including customers of Nashville Electric Service, have paid nearly $100,000 over the last six months to send TVA employees and consultants to China. Participants in the junkets have included TVA chairman and ex-Tennessean reporter Craven Crowell, two of Crowell’s former coworkers at The Tennessean, the wife of another former Tennessean staffer, and the brother of former Tennessean publisher John Seigenthaler, according to the lead story in Sunday’s Knoxville News-Sentinel.
Public relations consultant Tom Seigenthaler, brother of The Tennessean’s former publisher and uncle of Channel 2’s soon-departing anchor John Seigenthaler, visited China last November along with former Tennessean reporter Wendell “Sonny” Rawls, The News-Sentinel reported. The agency hired the two men as consultants to provide advice on economic development in China. Neither had been to China before. The trips were approved by TVA executive Alan Carmichael, another former Tennessean staffer. Other TVA employees visiting China at ratepayer expense include Frank Cason, who worked at The Tennessean with Crowell, and Molly Pratt, wife of former Tennessean reporter James Pratt.
“Readers in this area just aren’t interested in these TVA contracts,” said Tennessean editor Frank Sutherland, explaining why his own news staff has virtually ignored the TVA-Tennessean connections. Sutherland didn’t say why he believes readers don’t care about electric rates. He also argued that the paper has no special obligation to investigate a story involving so many of its former staffers.
Ten years ago, when John Seigenthaler ran The Tennessean, the paper launched what many believed was a misguided assault on congressman-soon-to-be-Mayor Bill Boner, who was then at the height of his popularity and political influence. Despite hundreds of angry letters, canceled subscriptions and warnings from the pro-Boner business community, the paper relentlessly pursued Boner, uncovering questionable financial deals and personal miscues that suggested, as the paper often pointed out, that Boner had no moral compass and was unfit to hold public office. Even now, as Boner plots a modest political comeback, Tennessean columnist Larry Daughtrey reminds readers, “Once a dog, always a dog.”
When the paper began its attack on Boner, no one asked if readers were interested in reading about arcane financial deals involving a popular congressman. It may have been The Tennessean’s last hurrah, the kind of solitary political crusade that the paper’s current editor is unlikely to start.
Odds and ends
There will be one less Seigenthaler in town beginning in June, when WKRN-Channel 2 anchor John Seigenthaler leaves for New York to work for Microsoft-NBC, an all-news network that will compete with CNN.
♦ The headline stretched across the top of the Banner’s front page: “Ex-Shoney’s Chief has golden’ contract worth $504K.” Rookie reporter Trebor Banstetter described excitedly how former Shoney’s executive Taylor Henry “is still feeding at the company’s financial buffet,” earning $42,000 a month under a two-year consulting contract. Taylor retired more than a year ago, but Banstetter said the terms of Henry’s contract “weren’t disclosed until Shoney’s proxy statement was released.” Henry was unavailable for comment, and Shoney’s recently hired spokeswoman Mimi Bliss apparently thought of nothing to say except that the payments to Henry are “part of his contract when he left the company.”
Breaking news? Hardly. Henry’s consulting contract was explained to stockholders in last year’s proxy statement—when Bliss was still at Channel 2 and Banstetter was living in St. Louis.
♦Reporter bylines, once reserved for important stories, now appear even on community event announcements. Editors think that a byline “humanizes” the news and makes the reporter a little more careful about errors. But bylines are conspicuously missing from The Tennessean’s “Bicentennial Snapshots,” a daily feature “compiled by the editorial staff and copy desk” to commemorate events and people in Tennessee history.
A good idea in theory, the “Snapshots” have been plagued lately by errors and questionable judgment: Porter Wagoner’s name was misspelled; John Overton was misidentified; the Tennessee flag was shown upside down; the wrong date was given for Andrew Johnson’s infamous loyalty oath proclamation; and March 15, Andrew Jackson’s birthday, was commemorated for the “Siege of Tiptonville,” an obscure Civil War battle not even mentioned in standard history books.
Sometimes the historical paragraphs, like a recent description of Piggly Wiggly founder Clarence Saunders, are well done. Others, like the one recalling the day Pat Boone declared bankruptcy, border on parody. Sunday’s “Snapshot” was one of the worst yet, confusing 19th-century Freemasons—members of an ancient social fraternity—with craftsmen who lay bricks. “White freemasons,” an anonymous staffer wrote, “competed with slave masons” who were “rented out by their owners at much cheaper rates.”
It’s time to admit who’s responsible for this stuff.
♦An outline sketch of a nude woman, drawn by local artist Jack Isenhour, didn’t last long in the trendy, Music Row lobby of Warner Reprise Records. Hung on a wall leading to the men’s room, the painting is little more than a line drawing resembling Goya’s famous “Maja Unclothed,” a nude reclining on an ottoman. But that was all it took for an employee of a Christian record label, located in the same building, to complain about the drawing to Warner employees, who promptly asked that the sketch be removed. Isenhour, by the way, works at the First Amendment Center located a few blocks from Warner-Reprise.
To comment or complain about the media, leave a message for Henry at the Scene (244-7989, ext. 445), call him directly at 252-2363 or send an e-mail to hwalker@bccb.com.
