Byron Calame, the public editor of the New York Times, admits on his web journal that his newspaper was slow to cover the story of Air America’s alleged peculiar financial transactions with the Gloria Wise Boys and Girls Club:
Readers of The Times were poorly served by the paper’s slowness to cover official investigations into questionable financial transactions involving Air America, the liberal radio network. The Times’s first article on the investigations finally appeared last Friday after weeks of articles by other newspapers in New York and elsewhere.
The Times’s recent slowness stands in contrast to its flurry of articles about Air America in the spring of 2004, when the network was launched. “Liberal Voices (Some Sharp) Get New Home on Radio Dial,” read the headline on The Times’s article the morning of March 31 when the network went on the air. The article noted that the network had a staff headlined by comedian Al Franken and hopes of establishing a counterpoint to conservative radio personalities such as Rush Limbaugh.
Two months later, The Times reported that the network had come close to running out of money in April but had received an infusion of an undisclosed amount of cash from sources that weren’t identified. The article noted that Evan M. Cohen, a primary early backer and the chairman of the network, had resigned.
[snip]
It has become clearer in the past week or so that Air America hasn’t yet fully repaid the “loans” from the club, and its financial condition remains murky even in The Times’s article Friday. So the future of the radio network seems to be a key question for The Times to answer.
Locally, Calame’s equivalent at the Houston Chronicle had this reaction to the matter in response to a reader:
I’m not aware of the story regarding the accounting practices used by Air America. I will ask an editor to look into it.
That was posted on August 16.
Apparently, the editors are still looking into it, as we’ve not seen any stories on the matter posted to the Chronicle, and couldn’t find any we might have inadvertently missed in our search of the Chron.com archives and Google news.
