From the Buffalo Report archives...
Buffalo Newswatch
The Buffalo News "I-did-not-have-sex-with-that- Business-Council" interoffice memo. How did Buffalo News managing editor Steve Bell justify his work-for-hire fluffery and what are the real ethical questions his waffling apology to the News staff raised? (16 November 2002)
How the murderer James C. Kopp took control of the Buffalo News. James C. Kopp told Buffalo News reporters Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck that he was the sniper who fired the bullet that killed Amherst physician Bernard Slepian. Kopp's jailhouse confession made a great story for the Buffalo News on November 20. In the seven days that followed, the Buffalo News did everything James C. Kopp might have hoped it would do in the areas of anti-abortion storytelling and jury-pool polluting. So who got the real scoop—the Buffalo News or the murderer James C. Kopp? (1 December 2002)
More on the Buffalo News abortion coverage. Comments on the previous article from four readers. Two of them (attorneys) raise interesting legal questions. The other two (women) raise thornier issues. (7 December 2002)
Editorial Moonlight at One News Plaza. Why is the managing editor of the Buffalo News spreading sugar for New York's chamber of commerce? (15 October 2002)
Buffalo Newswatch: Color-coded justice. How do we skew the news? Let me count the ways... The Buffalo News article seems to be giving you two sides of Judge John T. Curtin and his involvement in the Common Council downsizing and city redistricting dispute, but a close reading shows that some sides get a lot more space than others. And that a third side that should be there isn't included at all. (15 September 2002)
Nailing the Lackawanna Six: Political innuendo and poison in the jury pool. So what, if anything, did the Lackawanna Six actually do that was illegal? Is the Buffalo News reporting what's going on or poisoning the jury pool? Is this anything other than a White House pre-election media event? (30 September 2002)
Buffalo NewsWatch: The war against James Pitts heats up. The Buffalo News makes up "facts" about James Pitts then editorializes about what it made up as if truth had any part of this. And we've got two months to go until the election! (2 September 2002)
Buffalo Newswatch: sins of omission. What with this creepy lovey-dovey relationship between the Buffalo News and downdown developer and local campaign contributor Carl Paladino? Why are they aligned against Jim Pitts? Why are they both so hot to restructure Buffalo's government? (26 August 2002). Plus a p.s.: they did it again on August 28—another lead that is an assertion masking as fact and another instance of Carl Paladino as the only representative of the Buffalo business community, making snotty remarks about James PittsThe lead article in the Aug.10 web edition of CounterPunch, "Buffalo in Black and White," consists of material drawn from several recent Buffalo Report articles on the Common Council resizing fiasco and the way the Buffalo News has become a participant in—rather than observer of—that grim and divisive affair. The CounterPunch site receives 5-7 million hits per month. (10 August 2002)
Truth to order on page 1. In side by side front page photographs, the Buffalo News portrays Joel Giambra as a kindly teacher and James Pitts as angry and ready to bite. Take a look at the pictures and decide for yourself: are they reporting the news or manufacturing it? (1 August 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. The Buffalo News has done another page-one press-agent's-dream Rigas puff-pieces, only this time they used a technology perfected by Pravda during the Cold War. Are they getting better at it or regressing? (30 July 2002)
Why did Jeff Simon stick it to Leslie Fiedler? Buffalo News critic Jeff Simon trashed Mark Winchell's new book on Leslie Fiedler even though he tells us very late in his review that he really thinks the book is excellent. So the trashing is about something else. Most of Simon's review is innuendo and errors of fact. Here's a literary critique of the latest screed by the Buffalo News's literary gatekeeper. (19 July 2002)
The Rigas family and the Buffalo News: giving hagiography a bad name. The News has another page-one above-the-fold three-hankie puffpiece about one of the Rigases. Warren Buffett says CEOs who get caught eating their companies should be punished, so how come his newspaper is giving these guys soul-kisses? (30 June 2002)
Time to end the Rigas pity-party. What's with the three-hanky newspaper coverage of the tribulations of the Rigas family? That powerful father and the Harvard law, Stanford law Wharton Business School sons planned everything they did – except getting caught at it.They got rich on and played fast and loose with other people's money, screwed thousands of working stiffs out of their investments, cooked the company books, took credit for gifts paid for by other people, and made most of Buffalo's city government look like idiots (they had a good deal of help there, we must admit). They're not the sweet baronial family in the big mansion on the hill looking out for the village folk, and this is no classical tragedy. They're corporate clones of the Enron bastards – and it's white-collar crime. (11 June 2002).
Tom Toles's chair. So where are they going to store Tom Toles's chair? If you're the least bit interested in politics, you know that Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist Tom Toles is going to Washington. Did you wonder who the Buffalo News was going to get to occupy Tom's chair? If so, you asked the wrong question. (7 June 2002)
