As was reported in June by the Free Times, the Columbia City Paper was hit with a $40,000 libel verdict regarding a 2007 story involving the divorce of the owner of Whit-Ash and remarks made about local attorney Rebecca West.
We wrote:
West sued, saying remarks about “two-bit lawyers,” “corruptible attorneys” and labeling her as an “entertainment lawyer” were libelous and damaged her reputation. Publisher Paul Blake, writer of the story and managing editor Todd Morehead and the paper itself are responsible for paying up, but Blake has said that they are appealing and expect to win.
Recently, the City Paper held a fundraiser at Goatfeathers, which managed to bump up the kitty. The paper is looking to fund its legal fees, and Morehead put out another appeal on Facebook on Wednesday.
“Building on the success of our recent Goatfeathers fundraiser, we’re kicking our online pledge drive into high gear. Thanks to our great readers and supporters, we are now less than $5,000 away from our Aug. 31 deadline,” he wrote. “If you’d like to contribute -– no amount is too small — please click here: http://columbiacitypaper.com/index.php/News-Commentary/Commentary/The-Good-Fight.html or go to ColumbiaCityPaper.com. Love us or loathe us, if you want to help us take alternative journalism before the S.C. higher court (and help us stay in print, by proxy) now is your chance to shine!”
The Charleston City Paper, who we like (seriously), had a bit of fun with their own random ads on Wednesday by taking a screen cap of their own site featuring an American Apparel ad that had a gentleman wearing a pink shirt that read, “legalize gay.”
For what it’s wort, we were initially as confused as anyone else, since the U.S. Supreme Court had already legalized sodomy between mixed- and same-sex couples. Pretty legal, aye? But, then, we noticed the small print, which read, “Repeal Prop 8 Now!”
Proposition 8 is the California referendum that was on the ballot last year that made gay marriages illegal in the Golden State. We think that sucks, but, hey, a friend of our’s marriage was still allowed, so that’s good for him. Oh, and he used to be a strident Republican (he’s a big-time entrepreneur), but had to flip because of the social conservatism. That should be a lesson, guys.
Thing is, Prop 8 has no standing in South Carolina. Thank God.
Finally, there is an answer to “Who does the public hate more, lawyers or reporters?” Earlier this month, in a story reported in this week’s Free Times, a jury handed down a $40,000 libel verdict against the Columbia City Paper regarding a 2007 story. The story, which was about the divorce of the owner of Whit-Ash, made typical City Paper jokes at the expense of people involved, but taking a few jabs at attorney Rebecca West turned out to be a mistake.
West sued, saying remarks about “two-bit lawyers,” “corruptible attorneys” and labeling her as an “entertainment lawyer” were libelous and damaged her reputation. Publisher Paul Blake, writer of the story and managing editor Todd Morehead and the paper itself are responsible for paying up, but Blake has said that they are appealing and expect to win.
Over time, City Paper has pissed off its share of people and local merchants, from Delaney’s bartenders to the Five Points Association. Gov. Mark Sanford probably wasn’t too happy when the paper put all of his phone numbers on the cover before a prisoner was to be executed.
“Maybe the suit was a long time coming – or ‘a’ suit was a longtime coming, sure,” said Corey Hutchins, who founded the paper with Blake in 2005 but sold his stake in the paper before the suit. “But, the judgment, I don’t know about that. I was surprised when I heard it. You know how hard it is to get a libel suit into court? It’s sharkskin tough to do that.”
Sean Rayford, a former designer for the paper, laid out the story in the Oct. 24, 2007 issue.
“I actually hadn’t read the entire story when I designed it,” Rayford said. “I actually can barely remember any of it. Most of the time when I would design a page I really didn’t have adequate time to read the piece and understand it in its entirety. Which makes designing difficult if you don’t have all the information. I knew that the story contained some things that could make certain people upset but that happens a lot when you’re not printing just press releases.”
In the four years since it first hit the stands around town, City Paper has gone in and out of financial troubles, buoyed by at times a loyal, but shrinking ad base. The chance is there for the paper to be sued out of existence, like the Saturday Evening Post. But, Hutchins thinks Blake will be churning out issues as long as he can.
“Paul Blake will put out that paper until the apocalypse stops him,” Hutchins said. “We were living together once, and I came home really late one night, and Paul was passed out in the living room. And when I came in, I was tying to be quiet and step around him, and then, in his passed-out-ness, he reaches over to where there’s a stack of the papers and he kind of drags a couple of them and pulls them over him. I mean, the A/C was on, it was getting chilly, and the guy, it was…it was visceral, it was umbilical almost, the way he was attached to that paper. He was using it as a blanket. He didn’t know I was watching him do that. I mean, he’s worked probably 80 hours a week for as long as I’ve known him on it. So my answer is no, I don’t think Columbia City Paper is done, whatever happens. I mean, a lawsuit? Someone once set our house on fire.”
Most people would thing that the conventional wisdom going into the 2010 elections is that, no matter who is running the party or who the gubernatorial nominee is, Republicans will most likely clean up. There simply doesn’t seem to be the momentum or the money on the Democratic side for South Carolina’s minority party to present a decent challenge. But, if you were reading The State on Sunday, you would have received a different impression.
Gina Smith, in one of her better stories, wrote that Dems are ready to capitalize on the failures of the administration of Gov. Mark Sanford and take advantage of the poor economy that has South Carolina in the top tier of states in unemployment. She quotes Tim Kelly of Indigo Journal, who said, “There’s a lot of talk in many [Democratic] circles that no candidate is generating much enthusiasm right now. But so much energy has gone toward this stimulus fight in the last couple of months. There’s still plenty of time for the right candidate to garner support.” Professor Scott Huffmon of Winthrop said that 2010 looks much better for Democrats than the near-total failure of the 2006 cycle.
John O’Connor, in a story headlined, “Economy, Sanford baggage could burden GOP,” wrote a similar story to Smith’s, but from a different point of view.
The campaigns of South Carolina’s Republican gubernatorial hopefuls will likely be dominated by the nation’s economy, with one year to go before primary day, observers said.
Campaign donations will be harder to come by. Voters will ask tough questions about jobs and economic issues. Economic policies from bank bailouts to the stimulus could impact candidates.
After the economy, experts said, the competition among South Carolina’s geographic regions and the legacy of Gov. Mark Sanford will also likely affect the race.
It’s understandable why S.C.’s largest newspaper would pick up this meme, not the least of which is to fill space or to look at a different take on the elections. But, let’s face it: this is a conservative state with a conservative electorate. If the state Democratic Party is going to pull of another cycle like 1998, it will take a massive amount of money and — this is key — moderates and some conservatives that are so disaffected with the way things have been going that they will switch to the Dems and not just look for a better Republican to elect.
But, that just doesn’t seem very likely right now. Whichever Republican that can make it out of what is going to be a contentious primary for the gubernatorial nomination will start out with a large fundraising base and a solid amount of voter support. It’s much more probable, not to mention likely, that the 2010 elections will look more like 2006 and 2002 than 1998.
It’s bad out there for artists of the printed word — especially for laid-off journalists who don’t have the name ID to pull a cush gig at a university, pubic relations firm or politician. Steve McGookin, a writer who’s been unemployed for about a year, has taken to toting his guitar down to the subway station and playing like any other busker in New York City.
But, before you think the man is playing for dimes to subsidize his diet (one supposes) of 40s, ramen and each of the city’s major papers, he’s just in it for the short haul.
June 8th is the one year anniversary of the day I quit my job, and 14th Street is the station I used to ride to every morning to go to work.
A hundred feet above my head, people will be going about their daily lives, but I’ll be starting a new musical journey underground.
I’m planning to play on the platform for a while to get a sense of what the city’s buskers face every day and be able to tell their stories a little better. Then, for the price of a Metrocard, I’ll go wherever the music leads me; I’ll talk to the musicians it leads me to and I’ll introduce them to you.
I’ll do the same thing at a different station around the MTA map, at different times of the day, for forty-eight days.
Why 48? Well, I’m guessing that as it goes on, every day will feel like a year, so I figured I’d do one day for every year I’ve been around just to remind myself how good it is to be alive and able to do this.
While it sounds like a funny story, it’s actually not. This gentleman worked for the Financial Times for 17 years and Forbes for a a year after that. He’s held teaching positions at Michigan and Cambridge. He can afford to pull of a silly freelance project like this and see if it goes somewhere, without worrying how he’s going to pay the bills.
That’s irritating. And, he’s not really unemployed. In addition to this project, he’s doing editorial consulting for The Daily Telegraph and writing freelance pieces for Scientific American. That’s not bad for “unemployed.”
Monday, the Associated Press reported that the New York Times supposedly got the Watergate story first, before The Washington Post’s Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward tracked the break-in at DNC headquarters to the Oval Office.
The question asks itself – why didn’t the NYT jump on it, especially since the story was leaked by then-acting FBI director L. Patrick Gray? Maybe it has something to do with the culture of the NYT, which was described by former editor Howell Raines as the sort of place where people get journalistically lazy. The point being that once you have reached the NYT newsroom, where is the motivation to reach that next pinnacle?
One thing Woodward and Bernstein had going for them was that they were on the bottom of the totem pole, and, in sports parlance, wanted it more. In the movie adaptation of their book, All The President’s Men, metro editor Harry Rosenfeld (played by Jack Warden) says to managing editor Howard Simons (played by Martin Balsam), “Howard, they’re hungry. Remember when you were hungry?”
So, it comes as no surprise that the Times missed out, and two guys living in tiny, cluttered apartments got the story. Sometimes you’ve just got to want it more.
In the past, as in the most recent election cycle, Gov. Mark Sanford used his coterie of independent groups to run ads favorable to his slate of candidates, who were, ironically, running against fellow Republicans.
The Governor has taken to the airwaves again, this time courtesy of his group, “Carolinians for Reform.” Of course, the names and staff for these organizations are basically interchangeable, so the name barely matters.
However, and here is the kicker: CfR was the group Sanford gave state grant money to after the National Governors Association convention. Maybe the Governor does not understand that people know how to use Google (he should probably tell Mr. Kuyk that). Maybe he does not care, period. In the event that taxes may have to be raised, it does not take a brilliant pollster to find out that people would be willing to shell out an extra couple bucks for good schools and secure prisons.
Wonkette is already on top of the matter and reposted the video below.
Interestingly today, Sanford combined this ad with bypassing the S.C. media and going directly to The Washington Post. After a number of years of digesting and dissecting the Governor’s pablum, most journalists in this state have figured out how to separate the wheat from the chaff, and that is not good for Sanford’s ambitions.
So, he went to talk to Chris Cillizza. In the interview, Sanford admitted that the issue was a political loser. But, that is what gets him off. If he really thinks that pulling stunts like this is what is going to get him the Republican nomination in 2012, then he truly is out to lunch. The national Republican Party does not nominate people like Sanford to be its presidential candidate these days. Normally, it is someone who has bided their time (McCain, Dole), an establishment figure (Dole, Bush Sr.) a legacy (Bush Jr.), or preferably a combination of any two of the three factors.
And, has been said many times, Sanford does not play well with others. This appears to be another one of those circumstances.
During the next two weeks, the General Assembly is on furlough. WR will do its best to fill the time with stories, commentaries and analyses that are a little out of the norm.
In the summer of 2007, the Columbia City Paper ran a cover story on Columbia’s crack problem, going so far as, apropos, driving down to MLK Park on a Sunday and scoring a rock.
Crack is a major problem, not only here, but all over the place. Just sit down with a cop one day, or follow city and county police reports, and it will hit you with full force.
In this week’s police blotter in the Free Times, there is a story about two gentleman at a Millwood Avenue residence. One, smoking crack, stripped down and was masturbating with the door open. The other man, who did not take kindly to this, hit the first fella with a stick. The wanker grabbed the stick and hit back.
I wish I could say this is the weirdest story involving crack that I know.
When I was a reporter in a rural Florida county, I covered cops and courts, and damn near everything else (despite the fact there were two other news reporters and a news editor — my executive editor was a sadist). Resultantly, I would spend at least an hour a day at the sheriff’s office, perusing reports from the day before.
It took longer on Mondays, as the freaks came out on the weekends. Also, we had a standing editorial rule: no misdemeanors. There were so many felonies committed on a daily basis, it was silly to run a report on simple assault.
So, one day I roll in and start going through the reports. I run across one that mentions that one of our news carriers, and her son, had a gun pulled on them early one morning. Apparently, they went to a door to deliver the paper, and a naked man opened it, brandishing a handgun. The son and the naked man fought over the gun, the son obtained it, and the naked man ran off into the woods.
And now, for the rest of the story.
Two days later, there is another report on the same incident. It turned out that the naked man, in his early 30s, had been up all night with his paramour, a man in his 50s. They were smoking crack, drinking booze and getting their thing on into the early hours. But, they got into an argument and the older man said he was leaving. The younger man pulled a gun and fired a shot into the wall. It was shortly afterward that the news carrier showed up.
For every one salacious story like the one above, there were hundreds of other mundane cases. When crack hit Central Florida in the late ’80s, crime spiked. Now, crack still drives most crimes in the area. If a crackhead needed money, he would break into a shed and steal a lawnmower and try to sell it. Really, crackheads will take just about whatever they can get their hands on and try to sell it for crack. One tactic used was, a crackhead would sell his car for crack, then report it stolen.
These things happen.
The biggest case in the area that year dealt with a family that ran a labor farm. They built cinderblock residences where farmhands slept three to a room in the most base of circumstances. The family would send the workers out to local potato and cabbage farms, and the farms would pay the family. In order to keep the workers around, many of which were picked up from homeless shelters around the South, they kept them in debt, like a mine town company store. They sold the workers untaxed cigarettes, untaxed beer and crack, which was wrapped in aluminum foil and called “bells.”
The most galling part? The family sold the workers crack at prices at least five dollars more a rock than it would cost outside the compound.
For all of these illegal, unethical and downright evil actions, the compound was shut down and the father, mother and son convicted of multiple crimes. The son, to his credit, rolled on his parents to get a better deal. But, funny enough, it took an EPA investigation to get law enforcement inside the compound and eventually expose the entire operation. You see, they were running a pipe from the bathrooms that emptied out into a creek that was a tributary to the St. Johns River. Yes, they were polluting a major river, as well.
So, go ahead and scratch the surface of your reality. There will almost certainly be crack laying beneath it.
Local political journalism, especially in South Carolina, is having troubles. On TV, there is not enough time to properly analyze important issues to voters. In previous years, one would go to newspapers for in-depth reporting, but that is not possible anymore.
For major papers, like The State, declining ad revenue and circulation have led the paper to cut back on staff, redistribute reporters to other beats and seriously limit the amount of pages in each edition. Newsprint and ink are expensive, and have been growing in cost with each passing year.
When it comes to smaller papers, the ad revenue is there. Small papers fill a news niche in which readers cannot get the same local news from any other media outlet. However, many smaller papers are purveyors of the status quo, unwilling to rock the boat (Wolfe Reports knows this from personal experience).
With the advent of the Internet, blogs and Web journalism, reporters and bloggers on the Web have jumped in to fill the void.
“It definitely seems that the political blogs are gaining influence in moving stories mainstream,” said Jennifer Read of the liberal blog Indigo Journal. “I know for us, for Indigo Journal, it’s been really great to see that candidates and progressive ideas have more voice. One thing that’s really interesting about Indigo Journal is that it’s a user-driven Web site. It’s opened up the process to a lot of lay people, and we’re noticing that we have a lot of people who aren’t necessarily politicos, not so much insider baseball anymore, more ordinary folks getting involved in the blogging process.”
Will Folks, former spokesman for Gov. Mark Sanford and proprietor of conservative blog FITSNews, agrees with the assessment that blogs and Internet reporting have taken up the slack for under-resourced and overstretched mainstream media.
One of the reasons he believes Web-based reporting has become more successful is its ability to give more access to anonymous sources. In recent years, newspapers have begun to discourage or outright ban journalists from using anonymous quotes.
“In fact, I have heard from several mainstream reporters, who got the same quotes I got, only they weren’t allowed to use them,” he said. “That benefits what we do. Obviously, there are people who don’t like the use of anonymous sources, but it’s a tradition that is established in the mainstream media, as well as the blogs, and I think being upset at blogs for using anonymous sources is pretty hypocritical considering the mainstream media is using them every day.”
Folks continued, “I was particularly disappointed in Sarah Palin the other day, ripping on anonymous blogs, blogs using anonymous sources. It’s part of the business. People want to tell you things, and they’re afraid of the consequences. You can say what you want about that on an ethical level, but if the information checks out, that’s the way it goes.”
While some journalists have bemoaned the development of blogs and their effect on the industry, Read said that the groups benefit from each other.
“I will say that I think it’s a mutually-beneficial relationship,” she said. “Obviously, we highlight articles that journalists write, and we help advance stories that they write. Also, now, it’s so easy to create a blog and put an idea out there, and we can float ideas…. Ross Shealy is a great example, with his investigative reporting on the [South Carolinians for Responsible Government] crowd.”
Folks, with a different perspective and citing a remark he heard from legendary S.C. reporter Lee Bandy, said reporters and bloggers have a duty to engage in an adversarial relationship with their subjects. He also said, though, that Internet reporting has become an established force.
“It’s definitely having an impact, it’s definitely here to stay, and I think that people can ignore it, but they do so at their own peril,” he said.
