Letters to the Editor

TASB's award elicts mixed emotions

To Editor & TPA President Willis Webb,

I just read your column in the September issue of the Texas Press Messenger and couldn’t agree more.

I have one of those pesky TASB awards on my wall (in my office, not in the lobby along side our Sweepstakes Awards) and have decidedly mixed emotions about it. I mean, I don’t want to insult the superintendent (who thought it was a big deal) yet I’m not very excited about hanging it on my wall.

We were presented the award last year, after supporting a critically needed school bond issue and working for its passage. Of course, we now have our doubts about how the bond money is being spent. Further, over the last six or eight months, the administration has been making other news that they do not consider flattering. Indeed, the superintendent is so upset by the news coming out of his office, he recently cancelled his personal subscription to the paper just so he wouldn’t have to read about it. Likely, we won’t be getting the TASB award this year. Alas.

That award is a poorly disguised carrot intended to stroke the ego of publishers and editors who suck up to school administrators by printing only the warm and fuzzy “news” the district makes.

Richard Stone
Editor & Publisher
The Cameron Herald, The Rosebud News & Thorndale Champion

TASB award helps build relationships

Dear Editor:

I just read Willis Webb’s column headlined “TASB media award criteria bothersome” (TPA Messenger, September 2003), and I must express an opposing viewpoint.

In his column, Webb seems to express concern that newspapers which accept the Media Honor Roll from a public school district are, consciously or unconsciously, serving as rubber stamps for the district by accepting the criteria for the award.

At one point, Webb writes, “The second part of the criteria, merely as stated, isn’t problematic: ‘report school news in a fair, accurate and balanced manner.’ But whose criteria and judgment accords ‘fair’, ‘accurate’, and ‘balanced manner’? If it’s an editor’s criteria and judgment, then I don’t have a problem. Any reader can and will judge us, but if they do I want them to judge us on what we report and write according to our criteria for ‘fair’, ‘accurate’, and ‘balanced’.”

Webb’s journalistic ideals are laudable. However, he may not be aware that a 1997 court case set a precedent that has the potential to severely limit what a newspaper or other news organization may or may not say about the actions of a public body.

In 1994, the corporation that publishes the Forney Messenger, a weekly in Forney, Texas, filed suit against the City of Forney over the city’s withdrawal of its public notice advertising in the wake of a series of editorials that were critical of certain actions of the City Council.

The Forney Messenger and two of the attorneys who were representing the paper in the lawsuit tried, unsuccessfully, to get TPA to weigh in on the side of the Forney Messenger. However, TPA declined to get involved in the case. That case (Case No. 3:94-CV-1796-P) went to trial in November, 1997 — and it took a jury just 45 minutes to render a decision against the paper. The case set a precedent that a public body may, indeed, punish a newspaper for its editorial stand, if it chooses. When that decision was rendered, Americans lost a big slice of freedom of the press, but few people, in or out of the journalism profession, realize it.

I should know. I was a plaintiff in that case.

But the Forney Messenger wasn’t the only casualty of a negative public attitude toward the press. The Eagle Pass, Texas News-Guide got almost the same treatment from a jury in a nearly identical case which went to trial a month or two before the Forney Messenger case did.

Editors should be aware that if they choose to publish a critical piece against a city, school district or any other public body, all an alert attorney for that body has to do is find the jury decision in either the Eagle Pass or the Forney case — or both. When that happens, it will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, for a news organization to legally defend the critical article or editorial — at least, not in a jury trial.

The Forney Messenger has accepted the Media Honor Roll from Forney Independent School District for three consecutive years, and we are not ashamed to have done so. We publish a lot of school and school-related news, and at least half of our subscribers take the paper because of that news. Could our school administrators — or those of any school district — make it hard for reporters to gain access to sources of school news if the paper displeased them? Yes! In view of the freedom juries seem to be giving governmental entities to retaliate against the media, this publisher wouldn’t care to risk it.

Cary Griffin,
Publisher
The Forney Messenger