Trust and faith are funny things
sometimes.
This occurred to me while vacationing last week at a large resort in the
Bahamas. As I as preparing to take a dip, I thought about how much
I trusted my fellow swimmers not to pee in the pool. And I
had faith that they didn't.
But I know some of them did.
It's like that with The Hartford Courant. As
the only daily newspaper in many of the city's communities, I trust its
editorial commentary to be even-handed and carefully- assembled.
And I open its pages with faith that it is.
But I know it isn't.
Take, for example, the Courant's handling of the
reaction to a story it reprinted from the Chicago Tribune summarizing a
sociological study. It reported the findings of a couple of
eggheads who ran some statistics and concluded that crime is down today
because 20 years ago legalized abortion allowed more poor, uneducated,
teenage minority mothers to terminate their pregnancies.
To anyone who has ever looked at the backgrounds of
prison inmates or juvenile delinquents (oops, I mean students at
alternative learning centers), the notion that fewer poor, uneducated,
teen minority mothers translates into fewer criminals is not shocking.
The study did not condone abortion or advocate some
sort of sterilization so that the downward crime trend continues –
topics which would be the legitimate focus of some debate – so you
might think there wouldn't be much genuine controversy about it.
Or you might unless you worked for the Courant.
In the days immediately following the article's publication, the Courant
must have felt an overwhelming need to apologize for the story. It
ran opinion pieces by columnists Amy Pagnozzi, Vivian Martin and several
letters from readers, including UConn professor Noel Cazenove (claim to
fame: taught a class entitled "White Racism"), all of
which spouted off about things like eugenics, Hitler and genocide.
The Courant also passed on running one of its regular
syndicated columnists, Ellen Goodman, presumably because she wrote that
the study "has the whiff of common sense."
Like a skunk has a "whiff" of a bad smell.
You would think that Goodman's Pulitzer Prize would give her enough
clout (not that I would know) to keep the Courant's political
correctness posse from hogtying off her voice, but you would be
wrong.
Perhaps feeling a little guilty after its one-night
stand with one-sidedness, the Courant then ran a piece from its reader
representative Elissa Papirno purporting to explain the circumstances
which led to the uneven coverage given this story. I've read it a
couple of times and as soon as I figure out what it says, I'll be sure
and let you know.
The Courant's behavior in this episode was the
equivalent of publishing Christopher Columbus' diary statements that the
world is indeed round – and then printing ten countervailing letters
from members of the Flat Earth Society. Or running a piece from
Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel about his time spent in a concentration
camp and then giving equal coverage to letters from skinheads and
neo-Nazis who claim the Holocaust never took place.
A few years ago when I lived in Hartford, I
would pen an occasional piece for the Courant's op ed page. I
submitted one about the reasons none of my white friends would even
consider buying a home in Hartford. One of the concerns I
heard voiced was a a desire to avoid a school system overburdened by a
student population which is over one-half Hispanic.
The commentary editor sent my piece back to me marked
up with her comments. One of them questioned where I got the
percentages of minority students. "I thought Hartford's
school system was predominately African-American, no?" she wrote.
I sent her back a clipping from . . . .The Hartford
Courant . . . .from a few months earlier which had a headline to the
effect that the number of Hispanic students in Hartford had just gone
over 50 percent, establishing them as the largest group in the school
system.
After some more back and forth with that piece, it
was rejected. My byline hasn't appeared in that paper since.
Now, I don't know enough about the craft of editing
to say if she is a good editor or not. To me, a good editor is one
who keeps his or her paws off my paragraphs.But it has always troubled
me that the person charged by the Courant to manage its commentary was
unfamiliar with something so fundamental as the racial composition of
Hartford's schools.
I still read that paper every day. And I still
swim in pools. Like I said, trust and faith are funny things
sometimes.
September 7, 1999