Tennessean editor Frank Sutherland told this year’s class of Leadership Nashville that “murders are not the news they used to be,” that local political power has “shifted away from the mayor’s office” and that the secret videotaping of Nashville Kats cheerleaders wasn’t “important” enough to warrant Page One coverage.
Appearing last Thursday on a panel with City Paper editor Catherine Mayhew and WSMV-Channel 4 assignment editor Michael Kilbane, Sutherland also charged that the Scene’s five-part series on The Tennessean was unfair and inaccurate and that investigative reporter Willy Stern “had an agenda and went after it.”
Although Leadership Nashville declined to allow the Scene to cover the panel, several of those present described Sutherland’s comments in detail.
The cheerleader story got buried inside the paper because, “We couldn’t figure out exactly what the truth was...whether it was just a titillating story or whether it was serious.... It wasn’t [about] naked cheerleaders. That’s not how we were treating it. [We saw it more as] an invasion of privacy.”
The more likely explanation for the paper’s poor coverage is that The Tennessean typically downplays any story broken first on the evening news.
“We [don’t] have half of [Nashville’s] murders in the newspaper,” Sutherland also told the group. Since Nashville has about “a hundred murders” a year, “if I put all the murders [on the front of the Local News section], you’d start to think life’s over. When we used to report every murder, there were only about 20 a year,” he said.
Actually, in 1963, about when Sutherland started working for the paper, there were 45 murders in the city. The number of murders has not been that low since. Today, there are about five murders a month in Metro.
Tom Lee, a former television reporter, asked the panelists if any of them could name the current chairman of the Metro Council’s Budget and Finance Committee. None could. (It’s Jim Shulman.)
Sutherland explained his ignorance by saying “power has shifted...out of the courthouse...away from the mayor’s office...into neighborhood groups.” If you go down to the courthouse, he said, “you don’t have a clue” about what’s going on in the community or what “affects people’s lives.”
That’s certainly good news for Mayor Bill Purcell, arguably the city’s most powerful political figure in 50 years. As long as Sutherland is editor, the mayor won’t have to worry about pesky reporters looking over his shoulder.
Next, Sutherland was questioned about Stern’s series. “Was it fair, was it accurate, has it changed in any way how The Tennessean goes about its business?” Lee asked. “No, no and no,” the editor answered. Asked for specifics, Sutherland said he “got a stack of letters from folks” who claimed Stern had misquoted them. “I can’t complain much about that,” he quickly added, “because we’ve done that to people ourselves.”
As Sutherland knows, Stern is one of those rare reporters who calls every source back and reads, verbatim, quotes as they will appear in print. Stern says that every quote in the series, including the ones from Sutherland, was double-checked.
As Sutherland’s comments reveal, the editor of the state’s largest daily paper is a Gannett mouthpiece who glibly defends his paper’s shallow journalism with exaggerations, corporate slogans and marketing double-talk.
He’d be better off keeping quiet.
Bad timing
Speaking of people who should keep a low profile.... Just chosen as one of Nashville’s “25 Most Beautiful People” in the current issue of Nashville Lifestyles, Fred Toler seems to have life by the tail.
Pictured cuddling his adoring wife, Toler is glowingly described as one of the “most popular” Elvis impersonators in the country. According to the magazine, the celebrity-like pair often can be found eating and shopping in Hillsboro Village, where they are a “valuable asset to the entire community.”
Toler, who also works as a massage therapist, is the father of a new baby girl who just “couldn’t have been born into a more encouraging atmosphere.”
For the time being, that is.
The handsome Mr. Toler goes to trial Dec. 10 on felony charges of child rape and aggravated sexual assault. Arrested last year for fondling two girls, ages 6 and 9, he reportedly told police he was giving the children massage therapy.
Nashville Lifestyles publisher Stacie Standifer explains that the magazine’s annual “Most Beautiful” list is culled from hundreds of nominations and that her staff never would have picked Toler (whose name is misprinted as Taylor) if they’d known about the pending charges. “No one would,” she says.
The magazine is “reviewing the selection process,” she adds, so that next year’s gallery of pretty people won’t include anyone under indictment.
Toler himself apparently doesn’t appreciate the incongruity of posing with his wife for a high-profile glamour shot a few weeks before going to trial for molesting children. His attorney, Wendy Tucker, declined comment.
