June 30, 2002

 
 
 
 

The Rigas family and the Buffalo News: giving hagiography a bad name

    Hagiography. ha•gi•og•ra•phy. noun (1821)
    1: biography of saints or venerated persons.
 2 idealizing or idolizing biography

    Gonif. go•nif. noun (Yiddish).
    common thief

    hamarteia ha•mar•tei•a. (anc. Greek, archery).
    missing the mark

the journalistic context

Most of us who write and edit alternative newspapers and magazines spend little time harping on the failures of will, imagination or common sense in the mainline press. Those failures are the sole reason we exist, so noting the fact of them would be akin to a fish announcing "The reason I'm swimming is because there's a lot of water around here."

If, for example, the Buffalo News had done a halfway adequate job of looking at the scam being run on Buffalo by a bunch of steel companies, cross-border manufacturers and Fort Erie patronage junkies three years ago, Tom Schofield and I would never have written nearly 70 articles on the subject for Artvoice, Blue Dog, and Buffalo Report. We wouldn't have had to write them and readers wouldn't have had to go to the alternative press to find what they wanted and needed to know.

Much of the time the alternative press gets its subjects because of innocent priorities rather than chicanery or malevolence. A daily newspaper in a one-newspaper town has to cover everything, so its editors no doubt spend a lot of time making priority decisions: we'll send someone out to cover this or we won't, we'll give it ten inches two columns wide on page one or we'll give it however much space we haven't filled at the back of the section. In the alternative press, especially online, there are no space limitations: we can go as long as we think necessary, provide whatever links we think the reader will find most useful, show pictures, play sounds, do everything except pour the wine.

The only time the message bearer becomes a legitimate part of our concern is when the message bearer moves inside the story. That is, I think, what happened with the Buffalo News and the Peace Bridge and it is what seems to be happening now with the Buffalo News and the Rigas family.

the greed context

The Rigas family built up and then destroyed the Adelphia empire. They built it up with ambition, imagination and energy; they tore it down with arrogance, greed, and narcissism. There was no failure of information here: the three sons who, with their father, ran the corporation knew perfectly well about the difference between shareholders' money and the family's money, the difference between debt shown on the corporate books and debt not shown on the corporate books. Those sons took their professional degrees at Harvard, Stanford and the Wharton School. Adelphia wasn't brought down by a crew of corporate barracuda who took over and consumed everything in sight; it was brought down by kids who grew up in the corporation, went to the best schools in the country to learn how to manage its affairs, then came home and in collusion with one another proceeded to pillage everything in sight.

what the news did last month

On June 9, the Buffalo News ran a page-one story by Lou Michel and Michael Beebe, "Rigas sons say family battered but strong." The piece summarized and quoted from an interview with the three Rigas sons. It was, save for one sentence saying they didn't want to talk about any of the bad stuff, entirely sugar and goo. If you didn't know the context, those three lads could have been lamenting the failure of the family's tulip crop because of a surprise freeze in the early dawn while the entire family was at church.

A lot of people I know commented on it. One friend said, "So is the News doing PR for the Rigas family now? That article should have said 'paid advertisement' at the top." I wrote a piece about it for Buffalo Report, "Time to end the Rigas pity-party" (11 June 2002) that got more comments than anything else I ran that week. I assume I wasn't the only one whose response to the piece made it to the News's editorial room because later that week News editor Margaret Sullivan spent much of her weekly column arguing that the single sentence at the end of the interview saying the Rigases didn't want to talk about anything unpleasant made the page-one piece responsible journalism. ("One 'very strange' phone call began the story of Adelphia's slide," Buffalo News, 16 June).

That didn't stop the talk. Now people giggled at the story and how the News was trying to justify the story: "I wasn't stealing cookies. I was just looking for my watch." My assumption was that the paper had hung those guys out to dry by running that dumb story as if it were news, so now Margaret was doing the decent thing by letting everyone know that the paper was standing behind them. She was being the good soldier, saying it wasn't all their fault.

back to the rug

I assumed that until I took this Sunday's Buffalo News out of the wrapper and found they'd done the same damned thing again, only gooier. Journalism metaphors fail me. This is like the dog whom you catch pissing on the rug—you yell for a while, you make friends again, it wags its tail, and then it pisses on the same damned spot.

It's another page-one above-the-fold piece, this time by Lou Michel working alone. The headline is "Rigas, in interview, laments failing the 'ordinary people.'" The accompanying color photo is a full-head shot of father John Rigas captioned, "'It's a Greek tragedy. It's very ironic.' Former Adelphia Communications CEO John J. Rigas."

The first three paragraphs are each one sentence long:

It's not easy falling from grace.

John J. Rigas knows it better than anyone.

The Adelphia cable television empire he created is in shambles, and the dreams he had of helping pull Buffalo out of its economic strife are now beyond his control.

Grace? John J. Rigas never lived in a state of grace. He was a guy who made a huge amount of money and acquired a huge amount of power, and he and his family played fast and loose trying to get more of both and got caught at it.

He didn't fall from grace; he got caught taking money from somebody else's bank account. Calling that "falling from grace" is like saying a bank robber who is scooped up by the FBI before he gets away fell from grace.

Rigas didn't fall from grace. Rigas got caught. That is not a minor distinction.

The first sentence of the third paragraph says that Rigas has suffered chest pains since the family's financial chicanery was discovered and made public. The rest of the paragraph says, "But he also said he has received many encouraging letters from Western New Yorkers."

Isn't that nice?

Michel writes, "there is very little he can discuss about the ongoing investigations into Adelphia." That is no doubt true: the family is facing an enormous range of civil suit and felony charges. With all they're looking at, a good attorney wouldn't let them order pizza without having the prose checked beforehand and the rules of engagement agreed to by both sides. As I assume was the case with this interview.

Rigas is grateful, Michel writes, to "the people of the Buffalo Niagara region who have embraced him and his family in the good times and now the bad times."

"And he vows that if he has any say in the matter, the Buffalo Sabres will remain here." There's more about the Sabres, including, "In a life filled with many triumphs, Rigas said his association with the Sabres stands out as one of his greatest blessings."

What's with all the religious diction? "And he vows"—that's not a vow. It's a line to a reporter doing an interview. Owning the Sabres is "one of his greatest blessings"? Blessing from whom?

Then Michel drops into the passive voice, always a signal that somebody is avoiding saying what ought to be said: "Since the financial debacle began at Adelphia, Rigas has had his struggles."

The passive voice in narration like this means bad things happen, but nobody did them. You know: you see glass all over the kitchen floor, you look at Junior, and Junior says, "It fell." Fell it did, but surely someone helped it along. The passive voice lets you talk about things without having to talk about the person who caused them to happen.

We're told twice more about the chest pains, again about Rigas's depression. We're told that Rigas "Worries that he let down the 'ordinary people' of Buffalo whose financial lot he wanted to improve," and that it's hard for him to come "to terms with Adelphia's decision not to pursue the waterfront office tower at this time." It's still as if all this had been caused by someone else, as if Rigas was just standing in the road when the truck jumped the median.

Rigas, the article says, "wants to drive from his home in Coudersport, Pa., to Buffalo and speak with the many people whom he and his family forged 'an extraordinary relationship with over the years.'"

He wants to make the drive? So why doesn't he make the drive? A lot of people around here have questions they'd love to ask him. Which is why he's not going to make the drive.

The more important question is, Why does Lou Michel let Rigas get away with platitudes like that without asking the logical followup question: "So, Mr. Rigas, why don't you make the drive?" Why doesn't he let Rigas take responsibility for the empty words instead of giving him that sanctimonious free ride? Merely presenting them is that puffpiece context is PR; showing them up for what they are would have been journalism.

It's not over. What does Rigas do with his time? "Sometimes he just sits and reads the hundreds of notes, cards and letters supporters have sent to him." These letters, Rigas says, "have been very inspirational to me and my family. I read them throughout the day. I go through them when I'm down and need a little extra support." "And sometimes," Michel writes,

he finds himself weeping as he sifts through these gestures of support.

"I must say that most of the cards end with a message that is most meaningful and that is that 'you are in our prayers.' It does bring a tear to my eye. It's indicative of the people of Buffalo, caring and loving."

In those heart-wrenching moments, Rigas said, it is impossible not to relive the dreams and aspirations he had for the Sabres and Buffalo.

Owning the Sabres and building a new office building in Buffalo, Michel says

are now goals out of his reach, which once was golden. He is in the twilight of life and in the unlikely position of preparing for some of his biggest challenges. He faces legal fights with the government, which is conducting two grand jury investigations into Adelphia and his family, and trying to prove that his intentions were driven by honest motives.

He said he wants to believe that his humility and sincerity will carry the day. Those qualities, Rigas said, come from his parents, James and Eleni, who emigrated from Greece and opened a hot dog stand in Wellsville, which still operates.

"Heart-wrenching," "his reach, which was once golden," "humility and sincerity" are Michel's descriptive terms, not Rigas's claims. I'm not making any of this up. That prose is really on page one of the Buffalo News, Sunday, June 30, 2002. It's online free for a week, but then you have to pay to see it.

Next we get the immigrant-rising narrative: how Rigas commuted 80 miles a day to work, bought and operated the Coudersport Theater himself, even making the popcorn, founded Adelphia, and how his life has changed of late.

The piece ends with Rigas saying, "It is a Greek tragedy," he said. "It's very ironic."
               
Rigas's Greek is bad           

There's not a bit of irony here. What is ironic about getting caught cooking a corporation's books to hide your private use of huge amounts of other people's money? Can you imagine a judge saying, after the evidence has been heard and evaluated, "What we've got here is a lot of irony?" That is not the word the judge will use, I assure you.

And neither is there any tragedy. This smarmy, sneaky business doesn't get into the same theater with tragedy.

Greek tragedy, as Aristotle wrote in his famous essay "The Poetics," is grounded in the notion of hamarteia, a Greek word often mistranslated as "tragic flaw" but which actually is a term from archery that means "missing the mark." It is similar to what we nowadays call "unintended consequences." The protagonist of Greek tragedy initiates an action that has a result characterized by hamarteia, after which he takes responsibility for both the intended and unintended consequences.

It's not hamarteia when you are unsuccessful getting away with something that is illegal. I haven't heard one Rigas say one word about being sorry for the harm that they've caused. They say they're sorry they're losing the hockey team or not getting to build the new office building—that is, they don't like things happening to them now—or that they feel sorry for people who are suffering—that is, things they seem to have no connection with or responsibility for. But they haven't said (and presumably won't until they can trade it for something before a judge) the key line: "I did it, and I'm sorry I did it."

They got caught and they haven't owned the actions that got them caught. The protagonists of tragedy own their actions; that's why we respect them, and honor them in their falls from grace. There is no irony there and there is no tragedy there. Neither is there any fall from grace.

I can understand why the Rigases are like that. I've known lots of people who tried to avoid guilt or responsibility after they've gotten caught at something they know and we know they perfectly well shouldn't have been doing.

What I do not understand is why the Buffalo News continues printing these saccharine non-interviews with all the religious rhetoric, acting as family flack, as image-maker rather than as fact-finder. There was not one word in Lou Michel's 993-word piece telling you that this guy getting all those churchly words like "vow" and "grace" is the head of a family of gonifs. There should have been a word telling you that.

Substitute some names. Say it's an insurance company or construction company built up and driven into insolvency by a guy with an Italian or Jewish surname. Would Warren Buffett's Buffalo News consider for one minute a page-one above-the-fold article hagiography like this?

Of course not.

Why should the Rigas family get publicity and image-making rather than the kind of tough criticism the press—and Warren Buffett—has given all the other CEO's who couldn't keep themselves from darkside accounting?

That's a story I don't know how to write, yet. But I do know how I'd write the last line of the hagiography by Lou Michel that appeared in the June 30, 2002, Buffalo News. Instead of
                   
            "It is a Greek tragedy," he said. "It's very ironic."

I'd write,

        "It's an old story. It's about greed."