Terry Thomas wasn’t the only reader who did a double take at the Confederate-reminiscent flag in Sunday’s Page One banner. Emblazoned with late auto racing legend Dale Earnhardt’s No. 3, it teased readers to “Earnhardt mementos / Who’s profiting? Who’s buying” in Sports.
On the Sports section front a subheading (“Unauthorized Earnhardt merchandise has been the subject of a trademark war”) captured quite well the essence of the article (“Cracking down on merchants of death”). But Mr. Thomas of West Palm Beach called to say he was offended by the front-page banner, which he found “in poor taste.” Mr. Thomas said editors “played past the implications that the flag emblem represents the dehumanization” of hundreds of thousands of African-American people. “Use it, but don’t put it on the front like that because it smacks of promotion. Put it in the appropriate context.”
The suggestion that the Confederate symbolism carried the imprimatur of the paper’s editors turned Mr. Thomas away from a pretty good story by staff writer Charles Elmore. That’s not the idea, said Managing Editor John Bartosek.
“On Monday morning, I told several editors involved that I cringed when I saw the image we selected to illustrate the front-page tease to that story,” said Mr. Bartosek. “In retrospect, it distracted readers from the point of the story, which is that Mr. Earnhardt’s death made things with his face and number enormously popular and therefore costly. The story was a good look at death, money and racing, and that’s all it was.
“When people see the flag and start thinking it’s about other things, we erred in not putting the attention where it should be. I wish we had used just a plain photo of Mr. Earnhardt instead.”
The paper ran a correction on Saturday that illustrated the difference a small typo can make. But the intriguing message from Sister Carol Stovall of the Catholic Diocese of Palm Beach’s Office of Social Concerns in Palm Beach Gardens earns an addendum.
The correction (of an announcement that ran Friday) was that her Sisters of St. Joseph in St. Augustine have served in Florida since 1866, rather than 1966. It turns out that 100 years’ difference has a certain significance. “We came over (from France) after the Civil War at the invitation of Bishop Verot (the first bishop of St. Augustine) to teach the freed slaves, since the state of Florida was not educating them,” said Sister Stovall. “That sort of makes us unique among the religious congregations in Florida.”
Pointing out that “A lot of Olympic events are represented in meters,” a reader called to ask: “Why not add in brackets how many feet or yards it is? I doubt many people know, and it is ridiculous that you won’t put it in parentheses. Don’t say ‘This is the way we always did it.’ ”
Tim Burke, assistant managing editor for sports, was frank in response. “I hesitate to clutter up the dozen or so Olympic stories we’re publishing each day with a barrage of brackets and parentheses after every metric number. However, I can offer at least a temporary solution through the end of the Games by publishing a daily metric conversion chart.”
Recalling how the phone rang in the past when, because of deadlines, there was no picture the next day of an African-American winner of the Miss America pageant (most recently, “There she isn’t: Miss America,” Sept. 23, 1993), it seems that editors deserve a bow for an Olympic-caliber deadline performance in most Wednesday editions.
Not only did readers get a front-and-center Page One photo of the winning women’s bobsled team of Jill Bakken and Vonetta Flowers – the latter the first black gold medalist in Winter Olympics history – editors also displayed the right touch in showing that the team won (“Historic bobsled run for U.S. pair,” atop the Sports page front), while also noting the historical highlight.
