July 30, 2002
What do Warren Buffett's Buffalo News and Senator Joe Biden have in common with the Soviet Union's Pravda?
or,
There's more than one way to read a newspaper
or,
One more Rigas 3-hanky strokejob on page one of the Buffalo News
What do Warren Buffett's Buffalo News and Senator Joe Biden have in common with the Soviet Union's Pravda?
or,
There's more than one way to read a newspaper
or,
One more Rigas 3-hanky strokejob on page one of the Buffalo News
by Bruce Jackson
Reading Moscow
Many years ago a friend who was a graduate student in political science specializing in the Soviet Union told me something about Pravda that I thought really interesting. I no longer have the friend and there is no more Soviet Union. There is still a Pravda, but I don't know if what my former friend told me about it applies. But the lesson is useful with other newspapers, like the Buffalo News. The Pravda lesson applies perfectly well there.
Pravda, this graduate student in political science told me, was published every day in dozens of countries and scores of regional dialects. Accurate translation of subtle political information is always difficult, he said; doing it in a matter of hours for languages with no cognates and radically differing linguistic structures was impossible.
Which posed a real problem for officials in a political system that depended on everybody sharing the same point of view. In a world before fax and email, how could Party officials let the far-flung district Party functionaries know who was in and who was out? How to you let them know which public speech was just words in the wind and which articulated a real change in policy affecting everybody? How could you let people know what words meant exactly what they said and what words meant exactly the opposite of what they said? How do you, in other words, keep everybody on the same page?
"Placement," he said. "They did it with placement." The location and shape of an article didn't just give you some indication of how important the editors thought the article was, as is the case with almost every newspaper everywhere. They also told you, if you had the very secret official book explaining the meaning of every location and shape, what an article really meant. Very often, he said, location and shape told you more than the words themselves. The book was redone periodically to make it difficult for the West to know what was going on.
If you understood the code of placement and shape, the exact same words meant totally different things depending whether they appeared left, right, or center; above or below the fold; with a photograph or without a photograph. An article deep in a regional edition of Pravda might be far more important than an article above the fold on page one. An article full of praise for a smiling official, depicted in a very large photograph, might, in one position, mean the official was a rising star in the Party, or, in another position, that he was about to disappear, and perhaps already had.
Pravda in English means "truth," but the truth of an article in Pravda in the Soviet era was grounded as much or more in what the article looked like as in what its words said.
After that conversation I looked at all newspapers in a different way. I began to understand that we read every newspaper twice at the same time. One reading is in terms of the words; the other is in terms of what the article looks like. Most of the time the words and physical structure are headed in the same direction, delivering the same message. Sometimes they're not saying the same thing at all. Sometimes that disjunction is accidental; sometimes it's deliberate.
Is the Buffalo News in love with John Rigas?
The Buffalo News has been straightforward in its reporting of the decline of Adelphia but many people, including me, have found its handling of the apparent peculation by the Rigas family muted at best, irresponsibly kissy-kiss at worst. The News has published two long, front-page above the fold articles the entire content of which has been how difficult this has been for John Rigas and his sons and how well they're coping with it as a family. Those articles were more weeparino than journalism. You read them and, if you're sympathetic to the subject, you wipe your eye and say, "Aw, shucks, isn't that just so sad and aren't they so strong to be holding up under it." If you're not a fan, you read the two articles and wonder if they weren't ghost-written by a press agent hired by the family's criminal defense team.
Critics have been quick to point out that no local bank robber, mugger, murderer, car thief, drug addict, or bad check writer has ever been dipped in that kind of powdered sugar by the Buffalo News. On at least two occasions, Buffalo News editor Margaret Sullivan has used a significant part of her Sunday Jack Horner column to defend those stories, to claim they were really journalism.
On Sunday, July 28, the week following the disgusting perp walk dog-and-pony show arrest of the Rigases by the U.S. Postal Police and, other kinds of agents whose jackets we didn't get to see on national tv, the Buffalo News carried a page-one article about John Rigas by Jerry Zremski and Holly Auer titled "Fall from grace."
The article includes extensive quotations from academic experts at various institutions on why otherwise honest and successful people might turn to crookery. It says that John, the father, courted public approval and was well-liked but son Timothy was difficult to deal with, tight-fisted, and even, on occasion, had been observed being mean to his daddy.
It mentions their federal indictments and then tells us, in a standalone single-sentence paragraph, "What's more, they may not have realized they were doing it." That's not Zremski and Auer quoting some expert; that's them telling us that.
It's just as likely, perhaps a good deal more likely, that they knew exactly what they were doing (except the getting caught part), since John Rigas's three sons received their professional schools at Harvard Law School, Stanford Law School, and the Wharton School of Business. Why would a news article have a one-sided sentence like that? Do you remember a Buffalo News article about a group of bank robbers or ax murderer s or drunk drivers in which the reporter wrote, in a standalone single-sentence paragrah, "What's more, they may not have realized they were doing it?" I don't either.
The text ends with three paragraphs telling us that John Rigas loved being cheered at Sabres games and that it was very sad to hear him ask if he would be booed, on the day of his arrest, if when he next appeared in HSBC Arena.
If I had to sum up the article on one sentence, I would say, "John Rigas and his sons were tough businessmen and they may have violated the law and here are some psychosocial reasons why tough businessmen may slip into across the boundary separating the legal from the illegal and it's all so very sad."
You can read all the words in that article about why people in business occasionally go astray and about which of John Rigas's two unmarried sons is the more difficult to do business with, but there is a disconnect in it. It's like an article about a specific bunch of carrots that includes information what some people do with some carrots: you finish the article and you know more about carrots and what people do with them, but not necessarily anything useful about the specific bunch of carrots that occasioned the article in the first place.
Is it news to anybody who reads the newspapers or watches TV that high-powered executives are egocentric and that the Rigases are tough to do business with? How can anyone who pays attention to political life in this city forget the relentless wheeling and dealing to extract every penny from the city, county and state for their proposed downtown office building and the endless delays in their consummation of the Sabres deal? Tell us something new. That's what the news section of the paper is for. Or what it's ostensibly for.
The text of the article nearly a wash on the Rigases. It's not the total cotton-candy press-agent's-dream puff-piece they got the last two times out, but neither is it anything like the kind of profile your ordinary thief or embezzler would have gotten.
I said the text was nearly a wash. The article is not a wash. It's just like the other two. Maybe a little worse, because it's sneakier.
It's the pictures that tip the balance, that turn the article into something very different than it appears from the words alone. It's the pictures that turn it into the third in the series of page-one above-the-fold Buffalo News Rigas family stroke jobs.
Pictures trump words
The article includes five photographs, and they could have fallen in from an entirely different story, one written a year ago, when the Rigas world seemed all sweet and shiny. As soon as I saw them I thought about what my political science grad student friend had told me so many years ago: what's the truth when an article has pictures showing one thing and words saying something else?
Five photographs. The page-one photo is full color. It shows John Rigas at some point in what I presume is themorning of his arrest (he's not wearing a necktie), but there are no uniformed policemen or handcuffs in the shot. Three figures are in the background: part of a tall man to the left of Rigas with his hand coming around Rigas's back and touching his shoulder; a woman near the middle, looking off to the right at something out of the shot; and on the right, part of a tv camera. The tall man could be a cop or a lawyer or just somebody who likes John Rigas a lot. John Rigas has a wistful smile on his face.
The other four photographs, all black and white, form a large square on an inside page. The block itself is titled "The many faces of John J. Rigas." Under each is a title, followed by a bit of text. In "The Business Executive," John Rigas poses with his three smiling sons. In "The Sabres owner," John Rigas is smiling during a Sabres game or practice session. In "The Philanthropist," John Rigas sits with a group of apparently-happy adolescents who areholding band instruments. And in "The community leader," he is face to face, or rather face to thorax with George Pataki.
The Business Executive...The Sabres owner...The Philanthropist...The Community leader. The wistfully smiling elderly man in full color....
I haven't a doubt that on Sunday morning John Rigas's criminal lawyer looked at that display in the Buffalo News and danced around the breakfast table in perfect glee. Or that he opened the window and yelled to the world in joy, "Yes!!!" Like the two puff-pieces that preceded it, that article was like a holiday greeting card from the Rigas family to the Erie County jury pool.
Smiling Joe's duplicitous face
There's a physiognomic counterpart to this device of having words say one thing but the delivery mechanism imply something else: people whose face says one thing and words say another. It's like the face is saying, "Don't hold me accountable for what these words are saying. I'm just the delivery boy." If someone is really good at it, they can say really tough things and you come away thinking they've just been so sweet and they're your pal. If they're not really good at it, if you notice it, you get more angry than you would have otherwise because, in addition to the unpleasant message, you come away knowing the speaker was trying to manipulate you, to con you.
This most annoying person I ever saw doing this was Senator Joe Biden (former boss of Joel Giambra's major domo Bruce Fisher), who for years impressed a lot of people as the most mendacious Democrat in the U.S. Senate. It wasn't because he was the most mendacious Democrat in the U.S. Senate, but rather because the worse the thing he was saying, the wider Biden's smile got. The smile would flick on and off, like an electric sign, as if he had to keep reminding himself to do it. Joe Biden's smile and words existed in perfect inverse relationship to one another. If Biden was saying someone was a crook or some country should be bombed or if he was beating up on a witness at the table in front of his committee, you got to see damned near every tooth in Biden's mouth. Again and again. It was really horrible to watch.
If you were watching him on television and you hit the mute button on your remote, you'd think Biden was saying just all kinds of sweet things about whatever. If you left the sound on but closed your eyes, you'd think he was about to skewer someone for indefensible villainy.
Then Biden stopped doing it. I think it happened about the time he wanted to run for president and got his hair transplant. I always assumed that a media consultant told him that a politician whose face says one thing when his words are saying the opposite can't be elected president, so he worked really hard and managed to stop doing it. Joe Biden's disconnected smile disappeared. (Biden's campaign never got off the ground, but it wasn't because he hadn't gotten his face under control: his campaign fizzled after he got busted for being a plagiarist. Maybe his staff had done it, but he was the one who got the blame.)
You see and hear Joe Biden now, and his words and face are mostly going in the same direction. Most of us do that naturally. People who don't or people who for whatever reason have come to do it backwards, can learn to do it right, if they want to. Newspapers probably can, too. If they want to.
Late-breaking addendum: Shortly after this article was posted on Buffalo Report I read the July 30 Buffalo News and found a FOURTH sugar-coated jury-pool-conditioning page one story! This one is by Lou Michel and it is titled "Rigas confident of vindication." The photograph is a close-up head shot of John Rigas, his glance slightly upward. You can see part of his shoulders and some of his collar, but not enough to know whether or not he's wearing a tie. It's only white showing, so he might even be wearing a clerical collar. Lou Michel's article ends:O, be still, my beating heart.And he hopes to soon return to Buffalo.He says that he has been turning down invitations to see friends in the Buffalo Niagara region but that this might change.
"I've been getting a lot of hugs and a lot of cards. They're still coming in," Rigas said. "They mean a lot."
Earlier Buffalo Report articles on the Buffalo News coverage of the Rigas family and on Rigas shenanegans:
The Rigsas family and the Buffalo News: Giving hagiography a bad name (Buffalo Report 30 June 2002)
Time to end the Rigas pity-party (Buffalo Report 11 June 2002)
And the "Rigas Money Magic" section of the Buffalo Report Archive page