August 26, 2002

 
 
 
 

Buffalo NewsWatch: sins of omission

Newspapers don't report the news; they make it. "If the headline is big enough," says newspaper publisher Charles Foster Kane in Orson Welles's classic Citizen Kane, "it makes the news big enough." The world is overfull of events. The news is that small portion of the world's events that news providers decide to cover in their pages or their on-air programs.                                   

News organizations wanting to influence your opinion in their news rather than editorial sections do it by telling you things they needn't and not telling you things they should—sinning by commission and sinning by omission. Those aren't the only ways they influence your opinion without telling you what they're doing, but they're two of the hardest to recognize.

In the 1970s, for example, the Buffalo Evening News (as the Buffalo News was then known) and the Buffalo Courier-Express both covered President Richard M. Nixon's Watergate woes. But they didn't cover it the same way. Through the whole affair, the Courier-Express provided far more prominent and detailed coverage than the Evening News. The News was then owned by Kate Butler, a serious Republican. Mrs. Butler did not like having the crimes and misdemeanors of her Republican president splayed over the front page, so, whenever possible and for as long as they could do it without appearing absurd, the Buffalo Evening News printed its Watergate stories deep in the paper and as inconspicuously as possible. A two-column above-the-fold page-one story in the Courier would be one column next to underwear ads on page 16 of the News. After the News was purchased by Green Stamps in 1975 and then by Warren Buffett in 1977, its political coverage became more balanced and scoundrels of either party, usually but not always, got equal coverage.

So far as I can tell, the News no longer filters stories on the basis of party, but it does filter them on the basis of personality and on the basis of issue. If the News likes or loathes you, you'll get treated well or badly in its news columns. Whatever side of an issue the News is on editorially is reflected in its news coverage of that issue. In this regard, it differs significantly from, say, the Wall Street Journal, where the editorial positions are consistently pro-business and the news coverage is generally objective.

If the editorial board of the Buffalo News looks upon you fondly, the paper's editorial and news coverage is gentle and sweet: you get benign human interest coverage and softening coverage of your most vile deeds—vide the hagiographic coverage of the suffering Rigas family (click here for Buffalo Report's  previous coverage of that relationship.)

If the editorial board of the Buffalo News does not look upon you fondly, you're doomed in the news pages. The editorial board of the Buffalo News, so far as I can tell, doesn't like Buffalo Common Council President James Pitts at all, and that perhaps explains its photographic sin of commission on the front page of its July 30 issue. They published a pair of photographs on the upper half of page one. The photo on the left showed Erie County Executive Joel Giambra, whom the News likes, looking sweet and beatific. The other showed Buffalo Common Council President James Pitts, whom the News dislikes, looking angry and satanic. (See "Truth to Order on Page 1," Buffalo Report 1 August 2002 for details.) Even if you didn't read the text of the article, you got the point from those two photographs. There are plenty of photos in the News's files of Giambra looking angry and of Pitts looking pleasant, and of both of them looking neutral, but it was beatific and satanic  the editors picked. Page-one above-the-fold picture choices are never random or accidental.

In an August 24 editorial, the News strongly endorsed the plan to abolish all four of the Common Council's at-large seats proposed by David Franczyk, adopted by the Council in a 7-6 vote on perfect racial lines and endorsed by Mayor Anthony Masiello. The editorial, "A decision for change,"   heaped calumny on anyone who attacked the plan on any but economic grounds. I wish they had the courage of their hypocrisy. The first four paragraphs will give you a taste of the whole piece:

It was an act of political courage for the mayor to sign the legislation calling for a Council of nine members. Many opponents have resorted to hyperbole, falsehoods and flat-out gutter talk in their efforts to defeat the plan.

And it will only get worse over the next 10 weeks, as the say-anything crowd unloads a cargo of red-hot rhetoric whose only goal is to freeze the city in its tracks, an outcome that will serve no one but the overpaid, overstaffed Council.

That's not to say that all critics of this proposal are disingenuous or that the plan, itself, is perfect. It's not. We'd have preferred a nine-member Council that included some citywide positions, for example, rather than one that simply eliminates the four at-large seats, leaving nine members to be elected from newly drawn districts.

Nevertheless, this is the plan that is available, and it's a reasonable one. It creates a Council that better reflects a city half the size of what it once was. Nor is it racist, as some opponents claim. It preserves minority representation at a ratio exceeding the city's minority population and provides a real chance for minorities to control the Council.

The news sections of the paper ratified that editorial sentiment, but invisibly.

There was, for example, the community spokesman role given to Buffalo developer and heavy campaign contributor Carl Paladino in Bryan Meyer's August 23 page-one article on Mayor Masiello's decision to sign and therefore send to Buffalo's voters the Common Council bill abolishing the position of Common Council president and the other three at-large seats.

Paladino is cited or quoted in three of the five sections of Meyer's article. He gets about 10% of the article's space—135 out of 1381 words, including subheads. These are the three Paladinos:

(In the first section)
But advocates - including a prominent downtown business leader - said they're confident that voters will approve a measure that "right-sizes" city government by eliminating the Council president's seat and all three at-large representatives.

(Leading off the second section)
Carl P. Paladino, a business leader whose Ellicott Development Co. owns several parcels in Buffalo, praised Masiello's action. He said the Council restructuring is as much "symbolic" as it is an effort to trim costs, claiming the current Council is "totally dysfunctional."

Paladino predicted that business leaders and others will mobilize in an effort to win passage in November.

"I think the business community will be there. So will neighborhood groups and other groups," he said.           

(In the fourth section)

Paladino agreed, disputing claims that most African-Americans oppose the downsizing plans.

"I'm telling you right now, the minority community is not galvanized against this issue," he said.

With what authority does Carl Paladino get to characterize whether or not the minority community is galvanized or not galvanized against anything? Why would the Buffalo News quote Carl Paladino on political mood of the minority community? What minority community is he talking about, anyway? African American? Hispanic? Asian? Indian? Does he lump them all together into a mass of "them"? Does the Buffalo News lump them all together into a mass of "them"?

Carl Paladino is the only businessperson alluded to or quoted in the article. Paladino owns a huge amount of downtown office and residential property; he is currently building or converting a number of downtown buildings for high-end residential use; and he, along with people like Larry Quinn and Paul Ciminelli, is part of that small group of insiders that get major concessions from City Hall. Paladino is a major player in Buffalo econopolitics. That, perhaps, is why the Buffalo News accords him spokesman status.

But Carl Paladino is not just a "prominent downtown business leader," and this key fact the Buffalo News knew but did not tell you: he is a leader in the campaign to abolish the political career of James Pitts. He, along with Buffalo Niagara Partnership CEO and Robert Wilmers watercarrier Andrew Rudnick, were major investors in the failed 1999 campaign of David Franczyk for Pitts's job as Common Council president. It was David Franczyk who presented the nine-district plan that the seven white members of the Buffalo Common Council voted on and which Mayor Anthony Masiello signed and which the Buffalo News endorsed. David Franczyk is in large part a creation of Carl Paladino and Andrew Rudnick.

How might your reading of Brian Meyer's article have differed if the Buffalo News had told you that the single voice from the Buffalo business community they quoted was a man deeply involved in the political warfare that has been going on in the Council for the past three years?

The Buffalo News is the only daily newspaper in town. It is the only newspaper that reaches all of Erie county and southern Ontario. It has tremendous power. The news pages and the editorial pages look different and they're located in different places. But like two pools of paint on the same surface, they leak into one another, color one another, structure one another. All facts are not the same.

Carl Paladino has an agenda. I don't know what it is, but the fact that he's poured so much money into campaigns to defeat James Pitts suggests that his goals are more than theoretical. I presume the Buffalo News also has an agenda. I don't know what it is, whom they really serve, and what they get for that service, but the fact that they've so often glorified Carl Paladino suggests that their goals are more than theoretical.

I don't use the phrase "glorified Carl Paladino" carelessly. Not very long ago, they even put a large caption over a photo of him: "Carl Paladino, 55, developer/philosopher king."

Really? Philosopher king? Like the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius? Or the phulakes Plato wrote of in The Republic, the wise rulers who were the only people fit to govern? The Buffalo News wants you to think of developer Carl Paladino as a philosopher king? Philosopher king in Buffalo, New York? A phulakes in Buffalo, New York?

You'll probably never have to deal with Paladino directly, so you don't have to be warned to be careful about him. But you will read the Buffalo News. Be careful. Or, as the philosopher kings put it back in the days when philosopher kings worth their salt didn't need somebody to translate phrases like this for them, caveat emptor. Buyer beware.

---

P.S. (the Beat Goes on Department): On August 28, the News did it again. The first paragraph of Brian Meyer's page-one article, "Amid a downsizing battle, some expect Council gridlock," was a single sentence: "The plan to reduce the size of the Common Council aims to improve efficiency in city government." That line is presented as simple objective fact, without ascription to anyone. It's the Buffalo News telling you that. What about all the other aims people have claimed for the plan, ranging from getting rid of James Pitts to changing the power relationship between the mayor's office and the Council to changing the power relationship within the Council itself? They're gone, flushed away in that unambiguous statement telling you that the plan has a simple, single aim: efficiency in city government. 

And once again, the single person from the business community quoted is downtown developer and casino advocate Carl Paladino: "Business leader Carl P. Paladino, whose Ellicott Development Co. owns a substantial amount of real estate in Buffalo, was equally critical of Pitts' comments. 'Isn't that pretty? Here's a guy who, because he's going to lose his seat, says he'll refuse to do his job. Maybe we need to get a recall petition going against Pitts.'" The News once again fails to mention that Paladino has been spearheading a group trying to get rid of Pitts, by any means possible, for years.

 

 

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