The New York Times: journalism or public relations?

 

By Reginald Johnson

 

    Commentary

 

   The last few days I’ve headed over to the news stand (there are still a few left) to pick up a New York Times.

  I don’t normally do this, as I’ve grown increasingly disappointed with the quality of the Times’ reporting, both on the domestic side and the foreign policy side.

  But the Times is still considered the standard bearer for American journalism and in the interest of fairness, I wanted to be absolutely sure that the paper was in fact not covering  --- as critics charge --- one of the biggest potential corruption scandals in recent history.

   That story centers on the allegation made by an FBI informant that President Biden, when he was serving as vice president, and his son Hunter, took a total of $10 million worth of bribes from a Ukrainian businessman to get help from the US government in stopping a criminal investigation of his oil and gas firm.

   This story broke last week after the House Oversight committee, which has been investigating wrongdoing by Hunter Biden, was finally able to get the FBI to release a statement by the informant called  a “1023” which, while partially redacted, indicated that the two Bidens had received payments.

  The story exploded further on Monday when U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, got up on the Senate floor and said that he had received information that the Ukrainian businessman had audiotapes of his discussions with the two Bidens about the bribes.

  “According to the 1023, the foreign national possesses 15 audio recordings of phone calls between him and Hunter Biden,” Grassley said. “According to the 1023, the foreign national possesses two audio recordings of phone calls between him and then Vice President Joe Biden,” said a report on Fox News.

  The allegations obviously are shocking and are widely deserving of coverage. Anytime a President or top official in an administration is implicated in potential bribery that is a huge story.

 Yet, except for conservative outlets like Fox News and Newsmax, the electronic media has ignored the claims. That includes CBS News NBC News, ABC News, CNN and MSNBC.

 On the print side, outlets such as the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post have given the claims strong coverage.

  I wasn’t totally sure whether all the print outlets were ignoring the story, so that’s why I went to check on the Times. Surely, I thought, the Gray Lady, which throughout the decades covered governmental corruption quite well, would give some attention to these new claims, even if they haven’t been verified yet.

                                  

The New York Times building. (Photo, Wikimedia Commons)

 I mean, we’re talking about the President of the United States. What could be more important than that? Bribery is listed as one of the reasons why a President can be impeached, so certainly if a President is implicated in taking illegal payments, it’s paramount that any allegations related to that be checked out by the proper authorities in the government. But they should also be the subject of vigorous inquiry by the press.

 When mayors and governors are implicated in bribery or corruption schemes, that kind of thing is covered avidly by local papers and TV outlets, as it should be.

 Why should a President be any different?

 I must say I was disappointed after my review of the Times. I read three days of the Times, and I found not one reference to the Biden bribery claims.  

   Obviously, the last few days have been dominated by the Trump indictment and all outlets are giving this blanket coverage --- as they should be. This is a massive story --- the first time in US history that a former president has been indicted on federal charges ( he’s already been indicted on state charges in New York) so it deserves a huge amount of coverage. I have no problem with that.

  But the Biden story is big, too. Joe Biden is the current president, not former, and he’s the person who is overseeing the conduct of domestic and foreign policy affecting hundreds of millions of people and public expenditures worth trillions of dollars. If claims about criminality are made against him, that should be the subject of a laser focus by the media, and not just shunted aside.

  The fact that the New York Times --- probably the most widely known media outlet in the world and still one of the most respected --- does not give the story about the Bidens and potential bribery even a mention or a small story in the back pages, is a complete outrage. This is NOT reporting and it is NOT journalism. The Times is shirking its duties as a member of and the leader of the media.

  The press or what is known as the Fourth Estate is supposed to play a critical function in our society. The press traditionally is supposed to act as a “watchdog” against government wrongdoing. Right now, the New York Times and many other media outlets are not acting as that watchdog. Instead, they’re acting more like a guard who’s drunk on duty.

  We don’t know whether the Biden allegations are true. Maybe the informant is not to be trusted. But the point is, this needs to be checked out. The FBI has sat on this story for several years and it took a lot of cajoling and threats of a contempt citation by the House Oversight committee to finally get FBI Director Christopher Ray to release the document prepared by the informant. Then parts of it, apparently those dealing with the audiotapes, were redacted.

  So there’s been some prevarications by the FBI in terms of investigating this issue and that’s also part of the wider story. It’s not just about whether the President and his son took bribes but also whether the agency that is supposed to be ferreting out information about possible criminal misconduct is doing its job. Right now, it doesn’t look like they are.

  The New York Times and much of the rest of the media have to get back on track and report on the basics of news. When officeholders are involved in possible corruption that’s one of those basics and they must report on it. They cannot put something aside simply because somebody is a favored political person and covering that particular person in a negative way might hurt their electoral chances. I hope the Times has not been thinking like this but it kind of looks like they have been.

  If you’re a reporter or journalist with a daily news operation, you MUST cover corruption. If you’re not, you’re not a reporter and you’re not a journalist. It’s really that simple.

  The New York Times has to decide whether they’re still in the news business or whether they’re in public relations. Shame on them if it’s the latter.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Media Bias on Syria

                          

 By Reginald Johnson

    Over the past several years, traditional rules of journalistic fairness and objectivity seem to have disappeared on the subject of Syria.

  American reporters and commentators repeatedly present just one side of the conflict --- the American side --- and little else. Syrian leader Bashar al—Assad is portrayed as a demon, carrying out a brutal campaign to retain power in a fight with rebel forces, who are being aided by the United States.

  When terrible things happen in this conflict, such as civilians getting bombed or poisoned, the blame is always laid at the doorstep of the Syrian government. Claims of misdeeds by Assad’s forces are spit out almost word for word from State Department releases. There’s rarely any attempt to seek comment or get the Syrian side of the story.

  In these reports or commentaries, there’s rarely any mention of the fact that the United States has been involved in Syria for five years, first covertly aiding the anti-Assad forces, some of whom are al-Qaeda spinoffs, and now bombing areas held by the terrorist group, ISIS. There’s no mention in the reporting that the American presence is completely illegal under international law, since Syria never attacked the U.S., the United Nations never authorized any intervention, and Syria never gave permission to the Americans to conduct bombing raids against ISIS in its sovereign territory.

  The United States is simply there in Syria, along with its “NATO allies” because it thinks it has the automatic right to be there, and the terrible Mr. Assad and ISIS, must be removed.

  The New York Times on April 29 ran a piece entitled “Divided Syrian City Plunges Back Into War as Hospital Is Destroyed,” which was an example of the one-sided reporting. The story described the carnage that resulted from an air attack on the al-Quds hospital in Aleppo, which resulted in 27 deaths, including children and staff. The article, written by a reporter in Beirut, simply said that “government forces” had carried out the attack, according to “witnesses and health workers.” There was no comment from the government.

  The bombing of a hospital is certainly a terrible crime, and it is in fact a war crime. It may well be true that Assad’s forces are guilty of this horrendous attack. But isn’t it incumbent on the newspaper reporting this information to get a response from the alleged perpetrator? Just because they are likely to deny the claim doesn’t mean you don’t try to get their side.

  The article later said that “groups such as Physicians for Human Rights” maintain that they had tracked “a deliberate targeting of health services by government forces.”

   Now this is a sweeping claim, that the government is deliberately bombing health facilities, committing multiple war crimes. It cries out for additional verification, statements from other named sources, any witnesses or corroboration by an independent journalist who investigated the charges. It also demands a response from the government. But none of that was in the Times’ story.

  Also left out of this article was context. There should have been some background given --- that this is a five-year-old conflict, with rebels aided by the United States, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, attempting to overthrow Assad, and the government, aided by Russia (whose help Assad requested) and Hezbollah and Iran trying to keep Assad in power.

   Another one-sided report came surprisingly in a piece by Chris Hayes of MSNBC, on May 5.  Taking the word of the State Department that the Syrian government was responsible for the al-Quds hospital attack, Hayes blasted the Assad regime for what he said were repeated human rights violations.

   Hayes said the Syrian leader had “engaged in one of the most ghastly campaigns of slaughter and war crimes in this century and there is no just solution or any solution for the horror of Syria that does not hold him accountable.”

  Hayes' statement seemed to mirror the Obama administration's position that there could be no settlement in Syria unless Assad is removed.

   Hayes, like the Times, didn’t provide any response from a Syrian representative and failed to mention that the United States was deeply involved in the Syrian conflict, funneling arms to anti-government forces, and prolonging the war.

The MSNBC commentator noted with disgust that the Syrian government had been responsible for 183,827 deaths since the conflict began, without breaking that number down between combatants and civilians, and without giving a source.

 But a lot of other people have been killed in this conflict, also. According to the UN, about 100,000 government or pro-government fighters have been killed by the U.S.-backed forces, but that fact apparently wasn’t worth mentioning in Hayes’ report. Are members of the government military not people too?

  CNN has often presented a slanted view on foreign affairs, and their Syrian coverage has fit the pattern. The network has consistently aired reports giving a pro-America, rebel perspective, while casting Assad and his allies, like Russia, in a negative light.

  Just last week Wolf Blitzer ran a segment on Russia’s continuing involvement in Syria, months after Russian President Vladimir Putin said his nation was going to withdraw some of its forces. While showing a video captioned “Russia still has a strong military presence in Syria,” a reporter said that “Violence still rages in most of the countryside. Conciliation seems nowhere in sight and neither is an end to Russia's involvement in the conflict.”

   Neither the reporter nor Blitzer bothered to note America’s continuing involvement in Syria --- that U.S. planes have been bombing the Syrian countryside since last fall, that 250 special forces were recently sent to Syria allegedly to fight ISIS, and that U.S. proxies Turkey and Saudi Arabia have been giving weaponry to the anti-Assad forces for years.

  I’m wondering if CNN will ever run a news video with the caption “America still bombing Syria.”

   I don’t think so.

 

 

 

 

Journalism and Government Corruption

                           

By Reginald Johnson

                       BRIDGEPORT ---- It was good to see the Connecticut Post recently published a long, front-page story detailing the many crimes of former mayor Joseph P. Ganim during his time running this city in the 1990s, before law enforcement officials finally nailed him and sent him off to prison.

     Ganim --- who was released from jail in 2010 and is now campaigning to be mayor again ---  ran a pay-to-play scheme in City Hall, steering contracts to favored developers, and taking bribes and kickbacks in the process.

  The corruption cost the city dearly, with millions of dollars in public money being either stolen or wasted and opportunities for development and job growth squandered.

 The Ganim years were a big setback for Bridgeport, a one-time industrial powerhouse which has been struggling to remake itself following the exodus of factories like GE, Remington and Westinghouse.

   The Post laid it all out clearly in the October 11^th story, when the corruption began,  who the players were, the amounts of money involved, and what happened to them.

  The article, entitled “Legacy of Greed” was a nice piece, authored by veteran reporter Bill Cummings.

   But what the Post didn’t focus on, and is not likely to, is how the corruption went on for many years unnoticed and unchecked.

  Municipal corruption can take place anywhere, it’s not just limited to Bridgeport.  In New England alone, we’ve seen city corruption cases in Danbury, Waterbury and Providence, R.I. in the past several decades.

   But corruption is more likely to get started and flourish where those institutions that are supposed to be ‘minding the store’ are not doing their job. In Bridgeport, as in most cities, the watchdog role falls on the local legislative body, or city council, and on the local newspaper.

Bridgeport City Hall. Voters in Connecticut's largest city will go to the polls Nov. 3 to determine who will be their next mayor.

    The local council and newspaper are the ones that on a steady basis are in a position to monitor what’s going in city hall, how money is being spent, who’s spending it, whether there’s any irregularities, etc.  A local states attorney or police department may occasionally get involved in municipal corruption investigations, but for the most part, they’ve got their hands full handling property crime, street crime and acts of violence.

   In Bridgeport, both the city council and the Post failed to adequately monitor what was going on in the Ganim administration with respect to contracts and financial expenditures.

    Both institutions, you could say, were asleep at the switch when Ganim and his henchmen were playing their games.

   While some members of the council during the Ganim years tried to raise questions about issues related to multi-million dollar contract proposals that came before them, many of them did not. As a result, things like the sewage treatment contracts for the PSG firm pushed by Ganim got approved in the end.

  Federal officials later investigated those contracts, and found that Ganim had been given kickbacks and bribes as part of the deals.

  But the Post --- and this was the only print media in town --- did even less than the council in watching city government. This writer, who was employed as an editor by the Post during the 1990s, had a pretty good view of what was going on in the newsroom in terms of Bridgeport news coverage.

   To put it simply, there wasn’t much of it. During the mid and late 1990s, there literally were only 1-2 reporters actively covering City Hall. This was in a city of 135,000 people, with operating budgets of $100 to $200 million.

   Basically, city reporters hit the highlights, and that was it. Major announcements, key council actions and commission meetings were covered, but not much else. There wasn’t time to do anything in-depth, because the limited resources wouldn’t allow it.

  So a lot of unanswered questions or subjects that deserved to get a second look, didn’t get it.

   A little background here is in order. There hadn’t always been a shortage of reporters at the Post. In 1989, under the old Post Publishing Company, there were about 15-20 reporters covering the city, working for either the Post or the Telegram, which was the morning paper. But that same year, the family that owned the Post decided to sell out to media giant Thomson Corporation of Canada, reportedly for about $240 million.

   Thomson immediately dispatched a lawyer/hatchet man to the Post to begin downsizing. First there were buyouts, the Telegram was shut down and staff was cut by one-third. Staff numbers were further reduced through attrition --- as people left for other jobs, they weren’t replaced.

  City staffing was weakened again when the new management  --- believing that Bridgeport no longer provided a lucrative circulation or advertising base --- moved reporters into more suburban and regional coverage,

  It wasn’t for lack of money that the Post was short on staffing. When I was there, we were told at an annual meeting in the late ‘90s  that the paper was doing well and had made over $2 million in net profit the previous year. Management had the money to hire more; they just didn’t want to.

  The company’s penny-pinching also meant that top editors didn’t want to encourage time-consuming investigative projects. 

 I think some people still on the city staff and others sensed that something was amiss with the Ganim administration, and wanted to investigate certain areas, but didn't get much backing. It seemed that editors at the time felt there just wasn't the time or the personnel to do city investigations, and Bridgeport was longer the focus.

 So things that should have been gotten dug into, like the PSG contract, the delays on a $1 billion harbor development project and Ganim’s continual favoritism of the United Properties firm as a developer (United Properties was owned by Al Lenoci, Sr. and his son Al Lenoci, Jr, who both were later convicted for their role in city corruption) were never investigated by the Post.

    It took some complaints to the FBI and then a wide-ranging investigation by that agency that finally uncovered the morass of corruption that was going on in Bridgeport. When all was said and done, Ganim and ten of his cohorts were indicted, convicted and sent off to the prison for their crimes. Ganim was found guilty of 16 felony counts and spent seven years in prison.

   There’s an obvious lesson in this story for today. A city council and the local media have to hold municipal officials accountable for the job they’re doing. It’s not enough for a local council to just rubberstamp what a mayor wants without asking questions. And it’s not enough for a paper or television station for that matter to just churn out stories about accidents, shootings, announcements by the mayor and votes by boards together with a few light features. There has to be more.

   Cities large and small are spending hundreds of millions of dollars in public money and it’s imperative that that money be used wisely. In Bridgeport alone, between the city budget and Board of Education budget, more than $500 million in public funds are being spent this year. (It should be noted as well, that Bridgeport raises a lot of that money by hitting its residents with one of the highest property tax rates in the nation.)

    There’s a lot of programs and contracts out there and opportunities for not only money to be wasted, but unfortunately, for some money to be stolen.

   A local paper has to hire enough reporters to be able to go out and really follow what municipal officials are up to, how money is being spent, who’s benefiting from contracts and spot any troubling patterns. If red flags pop up, a paper has to respond.

  If they don’t, it’s not journalism.

  I don’t want to hear this talk about how ‘we don’t have money.’ It is true that papers are not as strong as they used to be financially, and some have floundered in recent years. But an awful lot of papers, such as the Post and the Hartford Courant (Tribune Company) are owned by large, diversified corporations. They are making money.

   Hearst Corporation, which now owns the Post, earned $10.3 billion in revenues in 2014, a more than 6 percent advance over the previous year, according to a business article in the New York Post.

  Hearst has the money to hire more reporters and editors at the Connecticut Post. The paper now has --- like the 1990s ---  one or two reporters covering Bridgeport City Hall on a daily basis. That’s not enough, even though the staff that is there is doing a good job. The paper, to its credit, now has an investigative team that from time to time will do regional or Bridgeport stories. But more staff is needed to really follow what’s going on in the city on an active basis.

  Next week Bridgeport will hold municipal elections. Joe Ganim, who now admits his wrongdoing, is trying to make a comeback. He won the Democratic Party nomination in a September primary, and may well win the election. Also running are Republican Enrique Torres and Independents Mary-Jane Foster and Charles Coviello.

  It will be critical that in the years ahead, the local media, principally the Post, closely follow whoever becomes mayor and watch how public money is being spent.

  Bridgeport can’t afford a repeat.

 

 

    

  

    

   .   

      

A Travesty of Reporting

                                       

By Reginald Johnson

               I’ve always felt The New York Times is a schizophrenic paper --- alternately very good or very bad.

             The “paper of record” has won a myriad of Pulitzer Prizes over the years for coverage of a variety issues, such as environmental problems and questionable business practices abroad by U.S. corporations.

            Reporters like Charlie Savage and James Risen have turned out some great stories on civil liberties and national security issues.

            But the Times has fallen down badly on other occasions, particularly with respect to foreign policy and war coverage.  The paper’s reporting in late 2002 and 2003 on Iraq, which presented thinly-sourced stories claiming that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, helped the Bush administration build its public case that Iraq had to be invaded and Saddam Hussein removed.

   Months later, the stories were discredited when inspection teams could find no WMD.  But the damage had already been done --- an invasion of Iraq took place in March, 2003. That set off a brutal ten-year war which cost over 5,000 American lives and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives.

   It emerged later that the Times’ stories before the war had relied heavily on the claims of one Iraqi expatriate leader, Ahmed Chalabi, who wanted to return to power and stood to benefit from Saddam’s removal.

  Now the Times is failing again in its reporting on another overseas issue: Ukraine.

  From the onset of this crisis in early 2014 --- when street demonstrations led to a coup in Kiev and a  pro-western faction ousted the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovcyh  --- to the civil war pitting the regime’s military against pro-Russian separatists in the east, the Times coverage of Ukraine has been atrocious.

   The reporting has been decidedly slanted against the Russian separatists and Russia, and has mirrored the U.S.government view on Ukraine. It’s been heavily tilted in favor of the new Ukrainian government, despite the questionable background of some members of that regime, fascist elements in their armed forces and the fact that the regime itself is illegal, having come about through a violent coup. There’s been one-sided reporting, misuse of photos and unprofessional editing.

  In one example, which recalled the Times’ stories in the lead-up to the Iraq War, an article was done which purported to show the presence of Russian military personnel in Ukraine fighting alongside the separatists. The story, featuring photos of Russian officers, bolstered the claim of the U.S. government that Russia is directly involved in the Ukraine civil war, and committing “aggression.”

   But later the story fell apart, when it turned out the identifications of the soldiers in the photos were incorrect, and there was no proof in fact that Russian fighters were in  Ukraine. The Times later published a back-page correction.

   Another example of the Times’ unprofessional coverage in Ukraine has been the paper’s virtual whitewashing of the role neo-Nazis and fascists have played both in the regime and in the military campaign against the separatists.

   The Ukrainian government forces and right-wing militias in the past year have waged brutal assaults against cities in eastern Ukraine, with hundreds being killed. In several of these attacks, young neo-Nazi fighters, with Nazi insignias on their shirts or helmets, have been involved in some of the fiercest fighting. In an attack on a trade union building last year in Odessa, dozens of separatists were trapped inside as militias fired on the building and threw stun grenades and tear gas cannisters. The building caught on fire, and when people jumped out, fascist militants from the Right Sector beat them with bats and chains, according to one person who survived. 

  All total, 39 people perished in the attack, either from injuries sustained after jumping from higher floors, suffocating from smoke inhalation or burning alive.

   In September of last year, members of the “Azov Battalion” --- fighters who have the wolfsangel, a Nazi symbol, emblazoned on their group banner --- played a central role in the fighting with separatists at Mariupol. The Azov Battalion is under the direction of the Ukrainian Interior Ministry.

   Papers such as the London Telegraph have documented the presence of Nazi elements fighting with the Ukrainian government forces, with articles and photos, but major press in the U.S., like the Times, have not. You would think that a paper like the Times that frequently has done stories in other parts of Europe detailing the rise of neo-Nazis and fascists --- such as in Germany or Greece --- would eagerly report on the substantial role that far-right extremists are playing in the Ukrainian conflict, but that hasn’t been the case.

     The Times has also avoided doing a major investigative piece on just how the coup in Ukraine took place in February of last year.  Abundant evidence has emerged showing how the taxpayer-funded National Endowment for Democracy worked to undermine the Yanukovych regime, and how State Department officials like Victoria Nuland and U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. openly fanned the flames of rebellion by meeting with and encouraging the demonstrators during the Maidan protests. When those demonstrations turned violent, right-wing militias took over government buildings, and Yanukovych fled for his life.

  

    But the Times has taken the position that the government overthrow in Kiev last year wasn’t really a coup. According to Robert Parry, the editor of Consortiumnews.com and a journalist who has done an outstanding job covering the Ukraine crisis, the Times in early January of this year wrote a long piece which claimed that the Yanukovych regime wasn’t really overthrown. Instead, the government just collapsed as allies deserted Yanukovych amid the rising tide of violence in the streets.

    The Times said that the idea that the government was overthrown in a coup as a result of attacks by fascist militants and western intrigue, was a propaganda line put out by Russia.

   As Parry pointed out, even the global intelligence firm Stratfor disagrees. The overthrow of Yanukovcyh was “the most blatant coup in history” according to Stratfor’s founder George Friedman.

   It appears during this whole process of reporting on Ukraine, The New York Times has swallowed the U.S. State Department line about events in Ukraine: Russia is a rogue nation bent on expansion; its dictatorial leader, Vladimir Putin, can’t be trusted; the Russian separatists are a ruthless group who were responsible for the shootdown of the MH-17 airliner over Ukraine last year, which killed over 283 people on board (although no investigation has confirmed who was responsible).

    Meanwhile, according the American government view, the United States and leaders of the coup regime in Kiev are simply trying to reunite Ukraine, defend it from Russian aggression and create a more prosperous country more closely integrated with Europe.

   Why is this simplistic, black and white narrative --- which is clearly contradicted by the facts --- being presented by the Times?

   

    There can only be two conclusions. Either the reporters and editors working on the Ukraine issue are grossly incompetent, and ignore the facts, or they essentially agree with the neo-con policy being pushed by the U.S., aimed at pulling Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit, neutralizing Russia, and eventually forcing regime change in that nation.

   If the latter is the case, then we have so-called journalists engaging in deliberate propaganda on behalf of the U.S. government.

   Whatever the reason for what’s going on, the result has been the Ukraine reporting has been awful. It has been, as Parry calls it, “journalistic malfeasance.”

 

  

 

 

                   

Commentary

Ignoring the cities


By Reginald Johnson
February 19, 2012



Newspapers like the Connecticut Post and New Haven Register for years have been backing away from covering issues in the cities where they’re based, focusing instead on topics of interest to residents in wealthier suburban enclaves.

The trend has been driven in large part by a business mindset at papers, where newspaper owners have tried to please advertisers, who are trying to attract an “upscale audience” and who really don’t care too much about the less affluent folk residing in urban areas.

The result has been that publications like the Post (based in Bridgeport), the Register and even The Hartford Courant --- once a very strong daily --- have fewer and fewer stories of interest to the urban reader. And even those pieces dealing with a subject of interest that’s important to city residents are often written so that suburban voices are featured, not city people.

This journalistic disrespect for city residents was on display again last week when a major legal settlement between large banks and state and federal officials concerning fraudulent foreclosure practices was announced. The settlement will see $25 billion provided nationwide to many states, including Connecticut, to settle the claims that the banks had illegally handled thousands of foreclosures, through the practice of robo-signing documents.

Connecticut will get $190 million out of the pot, with the money earmarked for helping homeowners win loan modifications and get refinancing to avoid foreclosure.

There’s been some criticism that the agreement will not do that much good for homeowners and the government did too little to punish banks for their wrongful behavior.

Nonetheless the story is of keen interest to hundreds if not thousands of people in Connecticut’s cities, who are struggling to pay their mortgage and in some cases are actually going through foreclosure. In Bridgeport alone, there’s more than 500 people in the foreclosure process. In New Haven and Harftford, there’s hundreds more such cases.

But here’s how the state’s three biggest dailies treated the story. The Post ran stories over two days, prominently featured, with good information. Only one problem, they didn’t interview anyone in Bridgeport. The reporters talked with a nice gentleman from Stratford on his problems trying to negotiate a better loan deal with a bank. His story sounded legitimate. But that was it for homeowner quotes.

Ironically, the Post did quote the city’s senior manager of Office of Grants and Community Development, who said money from the settlement might help homeowners in Bridgeport, which she described as “one of the ‘crisis cities’ in the state with regard to foreclosure.”

So why didn’t the Post get a comment from a foreclosure victim in the ‘crisis city?’

The Hartford Courant ran a decent front-page piece on the settlement and it’s implications, but, like the Post, couldn’t bring itself to get comments from a city resident struggling with bank payments. It really wouldn’t have been hard. Just pick up the phone and call a neighborhood group or even a housing advocate and you could get plenty of names.

Instead the reporter/paper chose to quote a man from Bloomfield, a suburb of Hartford, who’s been fighting with Bank of America to make the terms of his loan more favorable.

If the Post and Courant added voices from their cities to their coverage, they would have made the stories more meaningful for city residents. But these papers don’t seem to care what urban residents feel.

The New Haven Register blew off the bank settlement story altogether, not even bothering to run a wire piece. This is really a disgrace given the potential ramifications of the settlement on residents in New Haven.

It should be noted that two of three papers mentioned ---- the Register and Courant ---- have cut their staff in recent years, citing financial problems.

Despite the cuts, papers like the Register are still able to send people out to cover shootings, court cases or accidents. If you can do that, you can certainly do a local story about a major foreclosure prevention program that could impact hundreds of local residents.

It’s really a question of priorties. It seems that the three papers mentioned so far --- as well as, I’m afraid, many other papers around the country --- prefer to devote their resources to covering crime and disaster, suburban subjects, and superficial celebrity and sports stories, instead of the deeper social, economic and governmental issues affecting people living in cities.

By the way, I should mention I worked for a number of years at the Post and for a short time at the Register as well.

I can say that there are many fine people at both these papers, and left alone, they can do a good job both editing and reporting.

But the priorities set by owners and publishers in recent years --- the direction they’ve set for these publications --- is the real problem.

Ignoring the needs of the center cities is not only a disservice to the people who live there but antithetical to good journalism.