—Henry Walker
Editor’s Note: After 13 years spent pillorying local journalists, chronicling their mistakes, describing ad nauseum their greed, egotism, temper tantrums, alcoholism and assorted other personal liabilities, Desperately Seeking the News is officially coming to an end.
Basically, like everything else that runs in a newspaper, Desperately just seems on the last legs of its journalistic life span. The column has become far too formulaic and predictable. That we keep finding incompetence at The Tennessean is apparently no longer news. Instead, it’s cause for a big yawn.
When Desperately began, a media column was a very different animal. Offering unkind words about either the morning paper or the afternoon Banner meant taking one’s life into one’s hands and risking the enmity of two very powerful publishers. But the Scene leaped into the fray happily, and the outraged phone calls that ensued often blew the decibel levels off the charts.
Reporters are the most thin-skinned species alive, and covering them has been a pleasurable exercise. There have been some great reporters in this city. It’s been a joy to read them and to praise their work where appropriate. But quite a few members of the media in this city have proved to be no different than your average government hack—greedy, sloppy, egotistical and sometimes just outright stupid. It’s been a joy to cover them too.
We’re still going to write about media in this city. We’re just not going to force ourselves to do it every week. Regardless, send in your news tips: hwalker@nashvillescene.com or mpulle@nashvillescene.com. Meanwhile, as of this week, Desperately has run out of ink.
— Bruce Dobie
Memory lane
Bruce is wrong, as editors often are, but he’s also the guy who offered Matt and me this column. What the editor giveth, He can taketh away.
Bruce himself created Desperately in 1989, the year the Scene morphed into an alternative weekly, and continued writing the column until late 1994. I wrote it from December 1994 until April 1999 (when I was fired). Matt Pulle carried it by himself until January 2001 (when I was rehired). For the last year and a half, Matt and I have been writing on alternate weeks. From my own biased perspective, here are some highlights from the column’s 13-year run. I quote from the stories verbatim.
Television
♦ After warning that terrorist saboteurs might try to poison Metro water with “anthrax” or “smallpox,” WTVF-Channel 5 reporter Rob Manning thought he’d show viewers how easily that could happen by dramatically crawling under a wire fence just “a few hundred yards” from the city’s “water supply.” Instead of cracking security at one of Metro’s water collection facilities, located several miles away, Manning had only managed to break into the sewage treatment plant. (October 2001)
♦ The driver, a tall, heavyset man, looks like a former football player now gone to seed. He seems a little unsteady and says he’s had a couple of drinks, vodka or something. His license is at home. The officer notices that the man’s right pant leg is soaked nearly to the knee. The driver explains he had an accident in a portable toilet. Holding his arms out for balance, he tries to walk a straight line. He flunks but shows the officer that he’s wearing a leg brace. The officer tells the suspect, who has refused a breath test, that he’s under arrest for drunk driving. The man seems upset. Lit by the officer’s spotlight, trousers wet, the driver at one point turns to the officer and says: “You know I work for Channel 4 News.” (January 2001)
The Tennessean
♦ An experimental new policy at The Tennessean requires reporters to say whether they have made an effort to contact minorities before writing their stories. Needless to say, some reporters are furious. (June 1991)
♦ Tennessean editor Frank Sutherland angrily disputes a statement made in last week’s column that The Tennessean “apparently had no legal right” to reprint an investigative news series from a California paper. Sutherland says The Tennessean intends to sue the Scene for libel if a retraction is not made. “Our lawyers will be serving you with notice tomorrow,” Sutherland said last Wednesday, adding that he believed that this reporter, and the locally owned Scene, are “out to get” the state’s largest newspaper. Six days later, however, the Scene had not heard from The Tennessean’s attorneys. (October 1996)
♦ Veteran Tennessean sports reporter Larry Woody’s pre-race story about the Kentucky Derby was apparently plagiarized, in part, from a Louisville Courier-Journal story, according to journalism ethics experts who reviewed both articles. (May 1997)
♦ The Tennessean’s paint-by-numbers story formula (as posted in the newsroom, June 1997): “Environment: three times a week; how tax dollars are spent: every day; health and fitness: three times a week; education: every day; places to go and things to do: every day; coping: four times a week; seasonal sports: every day; the arts, especially personalities: three times a week; growth: twice a week.”
♦ To maintain current advertising rates, which were based on the combined circulation of The Tennessean and the now defunct Banner, it appears The Tennessean is giving away thousands of papers each week day and counting them as paid circulation. (April 1998)
♦ Local media watchers are scratching their heads trying to explain the bizarre behavior of Tennessean editor Frank Sutherland, who last week attempted to have Scene editor Bruce Dobie arrested for trying to secretly get copies of 19-year-old news stories from The Tennessean’s files. (April 1999)
The Banner
♦ In a bizarre incident, even by Banner newsroom standards, veteran reporter Jeff Wilkinson was fired for “disloyalty” last Tuesday and then rehired 24 hours later. According to several sources familiar with the incident, Wilkinson was summarily fired by Banner publisher Irby Simpkins Tuesday afternoon. The sources said Simpkins reportedly handed Wilkinson a one-sentence letter of dismissal and informed the bewildered reporter that the publisher had “incontrovertible proof” of Wilkinson’s “disloyalty” to the newspaper. (November 1997)
♦ The first woman to serve as deputy to the governor is bright and funny; she is also rough-edged and ambitious, a middle-class version of Pamela Harriman. But throughout Peaches Simpkins’ tenure on Capitol Hill, her husband’s refusal to do what any ethical reporter would have done—recuse himself from handling stores involving his wife—put the paper, its staff and the deputy herself in a no-win position. Everybody deserved better. (December 1996)
♦ Eventually, of course, Nashville will have only one daily paper. The Gannett Co., the nation’s largest newspaper chain and owner of The Tennessean, will buy the Banner and shut it down. (January 1997)
♦ The secret is out: The Banner sold for a lump-sum payment of $65 million, according to documents on file with the U.S. Department of Justice. When it closed, Irby Simpkins talked in general terms about the paper’s declining circulation and the economic problems of afternoon papers nationwide. As recently as last week, he told a Nashville audience that he and Currey received only a “nominal” return on their investment. Simpkins, Currey and Nashville businessman John Jay Hooker bought the Banner in 1979 for $25 million. The $65 million sale price confirms, however, that the Banner was an extremely profitable newspaper, thanks to the Joint Operating Agreement (JOA), and probably could have stayed in business until the JOA expired in 2016. The sale price seems to corroborate reports that Simpkins and Currey were each pocketing as much as $1 million a year in profits from the paper while they owned it. The $65 million represents a payout to each owner of about $1.4 million a year until the expiration of the JOA. (June 1998)
The Scene
♦ The Scene “is a very white newspaper” that doesn’t have a clue about what’s going on in the city’s African American community, Village Voice publisher David Schneiderman concluded Friday during an in-house critique on the Scene’s strengths and weaknesses. Challenged by investigative reporter Willy Stern, Scene editor and co-owner Bruce Dobie acknowledged that the paper’s original business plan focused on reaching “affluent, well-educated” West Nashville readers, not the city as a whole. (March 1999)
♦ Irby Simpkins, then-publisher of the Banner, attempted last July to “merge” the Scene with his own paper, Scene publisher Albie Del Favero acknowledged last week. The “confidential” negotiations came to light recently after Simpkins, who sold the Banner in February, angered Del Favero by telling a group of downtown businessmen that the Scene soon would be out of business. “If he thinks that, why did he try to buy us last summer?” Del Favero said after being told of Simpkins’ remarks. “Oops, I wasn’t supposed to say that,” he added. “It was a confidential discussion. But if Simpkins is telling people that we’re going out of business, to hell with it.” (June 1998)
♦ When The Tennessean offered to purchase the Scene, the Scene declined. (December 1994)
♦ In the Scene’s early years, a brasher, younger Dobie enjoyed needling the city’s business and community leaders by referring to them in print as “bizpigs.” This week, the paper’s new co-owner, now husband, father and budding socialite, defended the secrecy surrounding the newspaper’s sale: “I guess you could say that, as Albie and I grow to become bizpigs, we choose to act like bizpigs.” (August 1996)
♦ Sources say Dobie has applied for membership at the Belle Meade Country Club. (December 2000)
♦ “Henry, I’ve got to fire you.” Scene editor Bruce Dobie got straight to the point. “I can’t have a media critic who lies to the press.” He was right, on both points. I had lied, repeatedly, to reporters from The Tennessean, The Banner, The Commercial Appeal and the Tennessee Journal, all of whom had called to ask if I’d been present at the much-discussed Scene staff party where state Sen. Steve Cohen either did or didn’t join reporters in puffing on a joint. I was at the party, all right, and I’m sorry I lied. But that’s all I’ll say. If anyone asks who else was there, or whether anyone puffed on a joint, I won’t tell them. It was a private party, and, as far as I’m concerned, that’s how it should have stayed. (October 1997)
Odds and ends
♦ If the public no longer takes newspapers seriously, it’s because the papers themselves are no longer serious about ideas. A newspaper that purports to tell readers how to vote in both the Democratic and Republican primaries—or endorses a candidate who shares none of the paper’s editorial views—has no principles of its own and no claim to moral or political leadership in the community. A newspaper that caters to everyone is a newspaper that matters to no one. (November 1996)
♦ Less than a year after hiring new staffers and announcing ambitious expansion plans, the weekly, black-oriented Urban Journal has missed several issues and has billed advertisers for papers that were apparently never published. (December 1998)
♦ “I am a cocksucker,” began Anna Cielinski, whose pleasing photograph runs with her column. “Exactly what is so bad about being a cocksucker?” (February 2002)
And finally...
♦ The real news, the nuts-and-bolts stuff people need to know, is not in the alternative press. It’s in the daily papers and on the evening news, those white-bread chain outlets the alternatives love to criticize. (About half the alternatives have a media criticism column.) If the editors at the Banner and Tennessean really believe that the Scene is a competitive threat, here’s a sure-fire solution: Forget the 35 cents and just give the dailies away. The Scene and most other alternative weeklies will fade into journalism history. (June 1995)
