New version of Toledo Talk

The Blade receiving credit - Last week, the Toledo Blade published an investigative series about an elite army unit's brutality in Vietnam and the U.S. government's coverup of their actions. I guess due to the articles, it's reported today that "Army officials have reopened the case to find out why no one was charged despite evidence that the unit violently lost control in 1967." The Blade's work has been noticed by others in the media. "The series of stories about Tiger Force seems certain to put The Blade in contention for a Pulitzer Prize this year."

"It was a huge scoop. Yet the newspaper that uncovered the atrocity was not the venerable New York Times or the Washington Post, still resting on its Watergate laurels. Nor was it the New Yorker, famed for its in-depth journalism. It was The Blade, a daily newspaper with a circulation of just 150,000 that serves the Ohio city of Toledo, by Lake Erie."

"The Blade is rare in modern America in being owned by a wealthy local family, the Robinson Blocks, who have a strong commitment to investigative journalism. That means money and time is available for The Blade's reporters to bring in a major scoop."

"Another Blade investigation - into the effects of a deadly industrial hazard - was shortlisted for the Pulitzer in 2000."

(I believe this would be the Brush Wellman beryllium investigation.)

"... until the 1920s The Blade was a big player in the US newspaper industry, with a national circulation."

Hemingway mentioned the Blade in one of his earliest short stories called "Up in Michigan." The story was set in Hortons Bay. "In the evenings he read The Toledo Blade and the Grand Rapids paper by the lamp in the front room or went out spearing fish in the bay ..."
posted by jr to media at 2:16 P.M. EST     (2 Comments)

Comments ...

Seymour Hersh has a good piece about the Blade series in this week's New Yorker:

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?031110ta_talk_hersh

"Terrible things always happen in war, and the responsibility of the press is to do exactly what the Blade has done — to find, verify, and publish the truth."
posted by Guest at 01:21 P.M. EST on Thu Nov 06, 2003     #

I have heard some people complain about the timing of this series, but I have to agree with the Blade on this point:

"We can’t have this kind of information and sit on it, because then we’d be a party to a coverup."

This is interesting:

"The Blade’s extraordinary investigation of Tiger Force, however, remains all but invisible. None of the four major television networks have picked it up (although CBS and NBC have been in touch with the Blade), and most major newspapers have either ignored the story or limited themselves to publishing an Associated Press summary."

It could be that some of the major media outlets are waiting for what they think is a better time to run this story due to:

"There is, of course, a hesitancy in time of war—and, in particular, during an increasingly unpopular war against an entrenched guerrilla enemy—to publish stories that could be interpreted as undermining military morale."

I don't think the Blade investigative series will undermine current military operations.

A lot of us take shots at the Blade, but the newspaper is needed. Newspapers inform and help the public, and newspapers are good at uncovering corporate and government scams. But the Blade and other newspapers are not perfect, and there flaws will be mentioned here along with their good works.

Now, I just wish the media would quit referring to the Blade in this way:

"... the Blade, a mid-sized family-owned newspaper published in Toledo, Ohio ..."

That's a little too wholesome, Waltons-like sounding. Feels like Ma and Pa are hammering out stories on an old, battered Royal typewriter and cranking out copies with the cool-smelling purple ink-based mimegraph machines :)
posted by jr at 10:09 P.M. EST on Thu Nov 06, 2003     #

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