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NEWS RELEASE
FOR
IMMEDIATE RELEASE
DATE: June 24. 2002
CONTACTS:
-
Vivian
Houghton, Delaware Attorney General Candidate, Green Party
Phone - (302) 658-0158 or 652-0670
Cell - (302) 521-6110
Email - Houghton@delanet.com
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Robert
Bohm, Coordinator
Committee to Elect Vivian Houghton Attorney General
Phone - (302) 239-2572
Fax - (302) 239-7391
Email - RebSalerno@msn.com
Attorney
General Campaign Accuses Delaware’s Largest Newspaper
of Unethical Reporting
The Vivian Houghton Campaign
for Attorney General today accused Delaware’s largest newspaper of distorted
reporting in a story published on Sunday, June 23, 2002. The story, which
purported to summarize part of a diversity dispute among the candidates that
began during a televised interview on June 16, was labeled by Houghton, the
Green Party candidate, as an example of “journalists and editors acting as if
they aren’t news reporters but news controllers.”
“Unfortunately,” Houghton
added, “The News Journal’s methods of generating news are drawn not from the
wealth of free-expression ideas that supposedly provide the foundation for the
nation’s press, but rather from public relations manuals on how to
“invent” reality as opposed to writing about it as it actually is.”
The source of Houghton’s
frustration was an article, “Brady’s Minority Hire Record Taken to Task”
which appeared in Sunday News Journal’s “Campaign Notes” section. In the
article, journalist Molly Murray reported that “Attorney General Jane Brady
and her Democratic challenger, Carl Schnee, are in the middle of a dispute over
whether minority hiring has significantly improved within Brady’s tenure . . .
It (the debate) started during a joint appearance on a community cable talk
show.” Murray’s description of both the nature of the “diversity”
discussion that arose during the debate and her implication that the debate
focused entirely on the minority hiring issue was wrong on a number of accounts.
First, the cable show debate,
which was hosted by Wilmington City Councilperson Norman Oliver, was not merely
a joint appearance between Brady and Schnee. Vivian Houghton also participated
in the debate as the Green Party candidate for attorney general. Not only did
she participate but, judging from the number of unsolicited responses the
campaign received afterwards, it was clear that many observers were enthused by
a debate in which a third party candidate performed at least as well as, and
maybe better, than the Republican and Democrat candidates and, in doing so,
dictated much of the debate’s tone.
Second, regarding the
diversity part of the debate, although Schnee mentioned the issue of hiring
minorities, the discussion of that issue immediately moved in another direction
when Houghton challenged Schnee about his hesitation to apply his so-called
diversity thinking to issues beyond hiring. She pointed out that the race
relations question is not merely a matter of implementing racially fair hiring
practices, although that is certainly important, but is also a matter,
especially for an Attorney General, of looking at how racism impacts on the
criminal justice system’s decisions about who to arrest, try, imprison, and
give the harshest sentences to.
Houghton gave two examples of
race-related behavior within the criminal justice system: (1) the fact that the
majority of persons on death row in Delaware are people of color in spite of the
fact that they make up only a fragment of the population and (2) a comparison
between the Grossberg-Peterson and Caliboso-Ocampo cases, both of which entailed
the young parents of newborns killing those newborns. As most people in the
state know, in the Grossberg-Peterson case the white couple received 2.5 and 2
years respectively whereas in the Caliboso-Ocampo case the Filipino couple
received 5 year sentences in spite of the fact that they were more helpful to
the police that were the two white New Jersey youths. As Houghton told Schnee,
“That at least raises the question of racism” within the system. When later
in the show Schnee responded to Houghton’s remarks about the death penalty, he
agreed there were problems with how capital punishment was applied, but then
whitewashed those problems by praising the status quo. “I think Delaware is
unique,” he said. “We have good judges, great judges, a great public
defenders system, as good as humans can make it.”
Such a comment is a nice bit
of home team rah-rah, but the truth is that Schnee danced around the issue. The
issue isn’t whether individual judges are decent people or public defenders
work hard. The issue is this: that the majority of death-row inmates in Delaware
are people of color. Not surprisingly, this fact is related to another fact:
that for every white person arrested in Delaware, more than 9 African-Americans
are arrested. The state is playing with fire by refusing to correct such
problems, yet neither Schnee nor Brady possess the will to tackle them.
The News Journal’s reporter
chose to act as if none of this happened. But it all did happen, and it was all
newsworthy. Yet rather than covering the depth and breadth of the debate
regarding racism within the criminal justice system, The News Journal instead
chose to “play down” the fullness of the discussion and mislead its readers
into thinking that (1) the debate was merely one about hiring practices and (2)
that the debate occurred only between two candidates, where as in reality three
candidates participated. Not only did three candidates participate, but
Houghton’s participation aroused at least as much interest as the
participation of the other two candidates. So, why did The News Journal choose
to act as if Ms. Houghton was not there?
The
Houghton Campaign hopes that for the remainder of the Attorney General’s race
The News Journal’s reporters start prioritizing professionalism over their
dismissiveness of ideas and campaigns against which they apparently have biases.
When a monopoly like The News Journal misrepresents a political story in order
to shape the news, this is a problem for all of us, whether we are politically
“left” or “right” or “center” or “independent.”
The News Journal, in acting as if it is more important than the
population it supposedly serves, sets itself up as justified in under-reporting
or outright ignoring people’s causes and interests whenever it chooses to so.
This is news control, not news delivery. For all our sakes, this type of
reporting must end.
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