HAIR BALLS’ RICH CONNELLY engages in a bit of the media criticism once practiced at the Houston Press many years ago (before the quest for pageviews led to the proliferation of so much amateurish online content at Village Voice Houston). In this post, Connelly criticizes the Chronicle‘s agreement to embargo the UH/KTRU story in exchange for the exclusive right effectively to post the university’s press release ahead of other media. Village Voice Houston, to its credit, heard rumors of the planned purchase and posted them, forcing the Chron to post their UH press release early.
As Connelly laments, the earliest version of the story — which we still have, thanks to the wonders of the Diigo cache — truly reads like a press release:
[E]mbargoed stories are rarely critical of the entity you’ve made the embargo agreement with.
Chron.com later “updated” the story in that annoying, nontransparent fashion of theirs to add a little balance.
This really shouldn’t surprise, of course. The Chronicle is a pro-establishment newspaper, and that has frequently been reflected in the newspaper’s coverage of various local entities (whether it was Jesus Ortiz’s homages to Astros owner Drayton McLane over the years, or various METRO beat writers’ sloppy kisses to METRO, or even Jeannie Kever’s most recent article celebrating the UH chancellor’s big raise, due to “world-class” performance!).
No, it’s not the best journalism, and like Connelly we have little use for most news embargoes or the journalists who agree to them. We’d rather see the newspaper more often reflect the perspective of readers/taxpayers instead of so many of the newspaper’s favored sources, and be much more aggressive in its watchdog role. But that’s just not the institutional perspective at Jeff Cohen’s Chron, unfortunately.
