And Review …
by June 29, 1998 12:00 am 82 views
Editor caught in undertow, swims with the school
When Jack Schnedler, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette assistant managing editor for features, used a recent book review as a forum to praise his employer, we had to take a second look.
Reviewing “Censored 1998: The News That Didn’t Make the News — The Year’s Top 25 Censored Stories,” Schnedler opined that the D-G bucked the rest of the miserable journalism industry by covering stories “censored” by other papers and by overlooking or downplaying what the book’s authors termed “junk food news.”
Reviewing Schnedler’s June 21 review, however, we take exception.
The No. 1 “censored story” of 1997 cited by the book and Schnedler was the Clinton administration’s “aggressive promotion of U.S. arms sales worldwide.” Schnedler went on to note that “perhaps the Democrat-Gazette doesn’t always swim in the media mainstream” because its Perspective section of June 14 featured two articles on that very topic.
Schnedler failed to mention, however, that the stories weren’t a D-G exclusive or even written by D-G staffers. The articles were written for the Washington Post and were published first in that newspaper, a mainstream publication by our account. The D-G certainly seems to be dog paddling in the mainstream wake.
Also, Schnedler suggested (with what we suspect was a heavy overtone of irony) that his paper “missed the boat” in the area of “junk food news stories” since it played news of Frank Sinatra’s death on Page 3 “while other publications were tripping over themselves to crank out special sections devoted to the latest Dead Celebrity of the Month.”
We suggest the D-G missed the significance of Sinatra’s death and underplayed the story. Also, Schnedler failed to note that his paper provided extensive staff coverage of the No. 2 “junk food news” story about Princess Diana and the British royal family. And the No. 10 junk food news story was Paula Jones. Surely we’ve read about her some place in the D-G news pages.