If there’s a product that undergoes more scrutiny each day than the newspaper, I can’t think what it would be.
Hundreds of people here scrutinize various parts of the newspaper — from planning to punctuation — searching for problems. They know that the next morning thousands of people will scrutinize it again, and readers are very good at finding flaws that slip through.
Last week there were strong examples both of internal scrutiny that worked and external scrutiny that revealed a significantly distorted report on terrorism in Israel and Iraq.
Late Tuesday afternoon, the newsroom meeting area began filling with reporters and editors, some driving in from far-flung bureaus to the newsroom in downtown Minneapolis.
It was primary election day and in just a few hours the polls would close. Something akin to the huddle at the start of a big football game was about to occur. Soon 43 reporters, editors and photographers were sprawled around the conference table, awaiting details from Dennis McGrath, assistant managing editor for local news.
Soft-spoken and unflappable, the transplanted New Yorker calmly began a litany of instructions. When to file online reports. Whom to call with quotes and anecdotes.
There were warnings: “You can’t blow deadlines tonight,” McGrath told the assembled. Night supervisor Jim Durkin passed out an elaborate deadline spreadsheet, detailing the moment each reporter had to file a story, how many minutes the editor had to read it.
McGrath, a veteran of over 25 years of Minnesota elections, knows where to look for hazards and that even a meticulous plan needs scrutiny from lots of eyeballs.
“Make sure you talk to the writer on your story before you go out so you have your act together,” he told reporters who would call in to central writers on each story. Photography director Peter Koeleman cautioned photographers to “get to your sites early and make sure transmission isn’t going to be a problem.”
Soon they would scatter to campaign headquarters for a night of putting flesh on the bones of numerical election results with quotes and scenes. But for the moment all paused to scrutinize the plan for holes. McGrath asked for questions.
“When does the pizza arrive?” asked political reporter Conrad deFiebre. McGrath didn’t miss a beat. “It should be on the tables at 6:15 p.m.”
It all went off without a hitch.
Paul Maccabee looked over the map graphic in the Monday World section on terrorism attacks around the world since Sept. 11, 2001, and found his morning paper deeply disturbing — not for what was there, but for what had been omitted.
The map, sprinkled with dots representing terror attacks, showed not a single dot on Israel. Maccabee, president of the Minneapolis-based public relations agency Maccabee Group, found that puzzling. Scrutinizing further, he found this line in small type: “… excluding suicide bombings in Israel and violence in Iraq since the U.S. invasion.”
There was no explanation why those key targets of terrorists had been left out. So Maccabee contacted me to ask. So did Rabbi Aaron Brusso of Adath Jeshurun Congregation in Minnetonka, who also chairs the Minnesota Rabbinical Association; Rabbi Morris Allen of Beth Jacob Congregation in Mendota Heights, and Rabbi Adam Spilker of Mount Zion Temple in St. Paul.
The map graphic was provided by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. The McClatchy Co. owns the Star Tribune and co-owns the news service based in Washington, D.C. with Tribune Co., which owns the Chicago Tribune. I asked Patricia Carr, the daily graphics editor who created the graphic, why Israel and Iraq were excluded.
She said the omission was not because terror against Israel and Iraq were somehow less newsworthy, but because the sheer numbers of attacks would have made for a graphic so large no newspaper would have used it. She also said she had trouble finding independent sources who agreed on a precise number of attacks in the two countries.
Carr said she thought about adding a bar chart showing the increase in terror attacks in those countries, but didn’t have room. That’s when she added the line about the two countries being excluded.
She said in retrospect she wished she had made at least a brief reference to why they were left out and found a manageable way to visually represent that on the map.
Maccabee suggested the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism at www.tkb.org as an independent source. The institute is a nonprofit out of Oklahoma City developed after the terrorist bombing there. It lists 525 terrorist attacks on Israel since Sept. 11, 2001, that injured 3,254 people and killed 671. In Iraq, terror against civilians occurs daily.
Readers, Maccabee added, need to know “the unprecedented and uniquely savage toll” terrorism takes on men, women and children in Israel in order to understand daily developments in a region where some neighboring leaders regularly call for Israel’s annihilation.
It takes little room to explain the enormity of terrorism aimed at Israelis and Iraqis. Those horrifying numbers describe a gaping hole in understanding worldwide terrorism that their omission left in the original graphic.
