Tag Houston Chronicle

Falkenberg snaps the shutout and changes the law

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The Houston Chronicle is heckled within these walls as “Houston’s Leading Information Source” for two sarcastic reasons: that’s what it proclaimed itself to be for many years in a local advertising—er, excuse me, branding—campaign , and since the other, better local major daily was bought and smothered—er, excuse me, closed and had its assets acquired—by the Chronicle 20 years ago it’s only had local television and radio stations to compete against, and the less said about their journalism the better.  Yet today I come not to bury the Chron but to praise it, for the first Pulitzer Prize in its 114-year history.

The winner of the 2015 Pulitzer for Commentary is Chronicle Metro columnist Lisa Falkenberg, “for Falkenbergvividly-written, groundbreaking columns about grand jury abuses that led to a wrongful conviction and other egregious problems in the legal and immigration systems.”    In its story on her award today the paper puts Falkenberg’s series in perspective:

Falkenberg was awarded the prize for a series of columns she wrote about Alfred Dewayne Brown, who was condemned for the killing of a Houston police officer, a crime he very likely did not commit.

From documents leaked to her by sources, or obtained through court records and Freedom of Information Act requests, Falkenberg revealed how a witness, Brown’s former girlfriend, who could have provided him with an alibi, was threatened and intimidated by a grand jury into lying on the stand. She provided the key testimony that put Brown on death row.

She pulled back the curtain on the secretive Texas grand jury system, allowing a glimpse into the workings of the panel that indicted Brown. That panel, Falkenberg revealed, was headed by a Houston police officer.

And she documented how phone records placing Brown at his girlfriend’s apartment at the time of the crime which were in the hands of prosecutors were never handed over to his attorneys as required by law.

Ten years after being sentenced to death, Brown was granted a new trial. And as Falkenberg wrote just last Sunday, he is still waiting.

More to the point—albeit one the paper chose not to mention in its own story—Falkenberg’s series on Brown is credited with the push in the current state legislative session to do away with the “pick a pal” grand jury selection system, which she argues is at the heart of the problem that has Browne in jail for a crime he probably did not commit.  Way to go, Leading Information Source.

Congratulations, Lisa.

Hang down your head, Hearst Newspapers

Pat Ryan 1 Comment

There’s been a running argument over the last 20 years or so about whether or not newspapers should run ads on their front pages.  The front page is sacred, the old school guys insist: all news and only news, because this is how we show the reader that they’ve come to a serious source of news.  Yes, of course we need to sell ads to stay in business, but we don’t run them on the front page.  We just don’t.

This is one of those fights that the old school guys have been losing, slowly, one paper after another.  A few years back the American Journalism Review ran a good, short history of the issue and outlined reasons for and against.

Gene Patterson, former chairman of the Poynter Institute and former editor of the St. Petersburg Times, sees the page-one ad as a sign of painful economic times for newspapers. “I find the section-front ads to be acceptable; I find the page-one ads repugnant,” he says. “But if they are done tastefully and held down in size, I think perhaps we have to accept them… We have to police it and monitor it and be guided by taste, but I don’t think the advertisers want to ruin us. We are their vehicle, after all, and I think we can work with them to achieve compromises.”

Others want to hold the line. Gene Roberts, a former managing editor of the New York Times and executive editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, says front-page ads are just another in a series of industry mistakes triggered by short-term thinking. “It’s one more in this kind of death by a thousand cuts that the newspaper business seems to be administering to itself,” says Roberts, a journalism professor at the University of Maryland, which houses AJR. “In the long run, the big necessity is to get and maintain readers, and I think without question that front-page ads work against readership.”

(snip)

Page-one placement can spark visceral reactions not only from journalists but also from readers. Take the case in March of the fluorescent advertising stickers (for a motor oil company and a carpet-and-flooring company) pasted atop the front page of the Hartford Courant. Reader Representative Karen Hunter received several indignant comments on her blog. “That is disgusting to have advertising on the front page of my newspaper,” wrote one woman. Said another: “This has got to stop.” One reader took it further, accusing the Tribune Co., the Courant’s parent, of “absolutely whoring for advertising… It screams, ‘We’re desperate!’ It screams, ‘Ethics be damned!'”

Imagine what they would say if they got a look at this Sunday’s edition in my hometown.  Today, over at Houston’s Leading Information Source, they threw in the towel on this argument.  Not only do we now run ads on the front page, we run two pages of ads in front of the front page!

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After the initial shock, I decided I’m not really surprised.  More’s the pity.

Dammit, Biggio is a sweetheart so elect him to the Hall already!

Pat Ryan 4 Comments

Craig Biggio did not win election to the Hall of Fame today.  Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine and Frank Thomas did, and they deserve it; congratulations to them.  For the second year in a row, his first two years of eligibility, the Houston Astros icon was the biggest vote-getter without getting the 75% of votes required from members of the Baseball Writers Association of America.  Last year, when the writers elected no one, Biggio was the leading candidate but came up 39 votes short; this time, it was two.  TWO VOTES, out of 571 569 (nope, now they say 571 after all)!  Don’t those people understand that Biggio is a great guy?

I mean, Houston’s Leading Information Source switched into full cheerleader mode last week (as it did this time last year), fulfilling its civic responsibility of promoting Biggio’s candidacy by reminding readers that he is…well, that he is a nice man.  Jose de Jesus Ortiz made the point that Biggio’s teammates think he’s a great guy, and that his agreeing to switch positions showed his further greatness; new guy Evan Drellich has found that even people who knew Biggio as a kid say he’s a lovely fellow.  (To a lesser degree the Chronicle tried to shine the same sweet sunlight on Biggio’s teammate and pal Jeff Bagwell, who carries credentials that match up pretty well with Frank Thomas but who also labors under the suspicion of having used performance-enhancing drugs; he was seventh on today’s list of candidates with more than 54% of the vote.)

But I’ve just discovered that even the local daily doesn’t know it all.  A tweet from Lance Zierlein led me to this eye-opening YouTube video that should convince any remaining skeptics who aren’t sold on Craig Biggio being a member of baseball’s Hall of Fame.  Just take a look for yourself.

What else must this man do?  I mean, really…

         

Furlough Journal: It’s starting to get serious

Pat Ryan 2 Comments

An update from my little corner of the partial government shutdown: it continues, but I’m just back.  This past week I’ve been on a vacation that was planned and approved well before the PGS began, but I haven’t missed a thing because late last week my employer, a company with a contract to provide certain services to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, told us it was fine for everyone to use accrued vacation time through October 11, and that if the shutdown continued we’d receive further instructions.  So while some of my colleagues who perform (apparently) essential tasks have been doing their regular work, and other folks have been getting paid for doing other tasks, albeit not from our government offices or using government equipment, I’ve been in a holiday frame of mind and oblivious to the impact of the inaction of our Congress to do its job.  Yesterday evening I checked back in and found those promised “further instructions.”  The tone has changed.

You see, on top of the 800,000 civil servants who were furloughed and aren’t being paid since the shutdown started October 1, part of the real fallout of non-essential elements of the government being shut down is that those government agencies don’t make their scheduled payments to their contractors, who as a result may not have funds available to keep paying their employees.

In our case, as a result of not receiving expected payments from the government our company advises us that as of now we cannot use our accrued vacation hours to keep getting paid; we can, however, take leave without pay.  (Oh goody.)  For those on our contract who are furloughed, the bosses advised them that they will stop accruing vacation as of the start of the new pay period next week and offered them instructions on how to apply for unemployment insurance payments.  Those of us who are (currently) not furloughed will continue to accrue vacation (that we can’t use yet) .  Health insurance benefits remain in effect for all.

But we’re not alone.  This morning Houston’s Leading Information Source offered this front-page localization of the government shutdown story: a prediction that the number of NASA contractors in Houston who are on furlough could triple by the end of next week if Congress doesn’t end the shutdown.  In this case at least—there may be other similar cases—the blame does not rest entirely on the members of Congress who failed to do the job we elected them to do; the bureaucratic mentality that runs our government is responsible for at least part of the pain:

Some of the pain could be eased if NASA paid contractors millions of dollars it owes them for completed work, Mitchell said. Just before payments were to be made to contractors, he said, Elizabeth Robinson, NASA chief financial officer, furloughed workers in the office where checks are written.

“There is no reason NASA can’t pay these small contractors the money due to them,” Mitchell said. “It’s in the bank, it’s due to them, and she’s not paying them because she considers people who pay bills for NASA non-essential.”

Some contractors are owed for as much as two months of work, he said.

Neither Robinson nor a NASA representative could be reached because of the shutdown.

Of course.

The TV news is an ass, the sequel

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I failed to give credit where it was due when I wrote early yesterday about how television “news” ignored the dramatic events at the Texas state capitol.  There was a filibuster-to-adjournment over a bill that would drastically reduce the availability of abortions in Texas and that caused citizens to fill the galleries, and later to express their anger when they saw, plain as day, the lieutenant governor and his supporters try to railroad the process, and at one point saw that an official record of a vote had been changed.  I was annoyed that I couldn’t follow the story on television–it was not being covered on any of my local stations in Houston nor on any of the national cable “news” channels.  I was keeping up on Twitter.

What I neglected to do was to consult other avenues available on the Inter-Webs, and I was reminded of that today by Time and by Rachel Sklar.  The state senate was live-streaming itself, and the big show was available on other live streams, too, with some great work done by the Austin American-Statesman.  Congratulations to them all for recognizing a newsworthy event when they saw one and doing something to let the rest of us keep up.

Time: “As protesters massed in the gallery, the GOP majority attempted to close debate and bring a vote, and Democrats maneuvered to stall after their rivals forced [Senator Wendy] Davis to stop speaking on procedural grounds, well over 100,000 YouTube viewers were tuned to the channel–closer to 200,000 as zero hour approached. That’s a six-figure viewership, after primetime in most time zones, watching legislators argue over Robert’s Rules of Order and who properly held the floor.”

Sklar: “The clock struck midnight. Victory! They had run out the clock! The chants continued. Twitter exploded. But that was weird, it seemed like that vague roll call was still going on. What, exactly, was going on in that huddle by the Chair?

This is what was going on: They were taking the vote. It was after midnight, and suddenly that strict adherence to rules didn’t seem so strict anymore. Whispers were trickling out, confirmed by the AP: SB5 had passed, 17-12.

Twitter was going bananas. I checked the networks again. CNN was re-running Anderson Cooper. MSNBC was re-running Lawrence O’Donnell. Fox was re-running Greta van Susteren. Journalist Lizzie O’Leary tweeted, ‘Interesting choice you made tonight, cable news executives.'”

By now you’ve heard how it turned out: the good old boys intent on changing a law that most Texans thought didn’t need changing (and despite having failed in their effort to change the law during the regular session, by the way) were gobsmacked at the reaction of the crowd, yet tried to push ahead and took a vote on the bill after the deadline and declared victory, only to be confronted with not only the evidence of their failure to act within the rules of the chamber but evidence that someone messed with the records (Anthony De Rosa posted screenshots of the evidence, here and then here) and ultimately conceded defeat of the bill on other technical grounds.  And just as expected, Governor Haircut issued a call for another special session starting next week so legislators can have a third bite at the apple.

Yeah, but we didn’t need to see any of that live as it happened, did we…

UPDATE 6/28 8:00 am CT: Patti Kilday Hart at Houston’s Leading Information Source solves the mystery over the conflicting reports of when the Texas Senate voted on the abortion restriction bill, and it turns out there was no hanky-panky.  The respected secretary of the Senate Patsy Spaw explains that the vote started before the special session ended at midnight–she knows because it’s her job to check the clock before starting the roll call–and the rules allow such a vote to count; because of the noise in the chamber the staffer charged with recording the vote had to leave her desk to hear the result, and it was past midnight when she returned to her workstation to enter the result; someone later manually changed the date in the system to reflect the correct date of passage.  But the bill ultimately was not passed legally because, as Lt. Gov. Dewhurst said at the time, it hadn’t been signed by the presiding officer “in the presence of the Senate” as required by the state constitution: all official action of the special session ended the moment the senators left the chamber (because of the noise) after midnight, and could not resume when they returned some time later Wednesday morning.