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| February 14, 2005 |
By: Review staff |
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Bad news on news biz
A panel of distinguished journalists had to strain a bit last week when asked to give Florida International University students a good reason to choose a career in journalism.
“The general trends in the media aren’t good,” said James Warren, Chicago Tribune deputy managing editor for features. “But there are still places like the Tribune where people are imbued with getting the story right.”
As an example, Warren cited Tribune assistant city editor William Rood, who last year, to the surprise of his newsroom colleagues, wrote a first-person article about commanding the swift boat behind the one skippered by John Kerry on the Dong Cung River in Vietnam on Feb. 28, 1969. Rood powerfully rebutted the charges of the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, whose ads cast doubt on Kerry’s heroics that day which earned him a Silver Star.
The subject of the forum, co-sponsored by the Wolfsonian museum, was “Media, Propaganda, and the Forming of Opinions.” The other panelists were “Dateline NBC” correspondent John Hockenberry and Jane Hall, a former Los Angeles Times media writer currently teaching at American University in Washington, D.C.
The three journalists discussed troubling pressures that affect the ability of news organizations to report the truth. A major one is that with consolidation of news organizations into conglomerates like Time Warner, news outlets have numerous conflicts between their business interests and their reporting.
While NBC reports on the U.S. occupation of Iraq, its parent company, General Electric, has a half-billion dollar contract with the U.S. government to provide power generation in Iraq.
Warren said relatively smaller news companies like the Tribune, whose holdings include the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, probably have only one way to grow and catch up to companies like Time Warner and Viacom, and that’s to merge with other players.
In addition, the panelists said, the media are facing a blizzard of lies and propaganda from corporations and the government. But journalists at mainstream news organizations don’t feel free, under the conventions of “fair and balanced” journalism, to call a lie a lie, Hall said.
“Too many of us have become too passive,” Warren said. Journalists are scared of angering administration sources and losing access to Washington officials, which he mocked as “access to get lied to.”
Then there are more personal risks. Warren, obviously no fan of the Bush administration or its invasion of Iraq, is married to Tribune editorial writer Cornelia Grumman. The Tribune editorial page endorsed George W. Bush for president in both 2000 and 2004.
Hockenberry got a huge laugh when he asked Warren, “Do you actually live with your wife or in a separate house?”
— Harris Meyer
John Hockenberry photo by Bob Pepping, Contra Costa Times
It’s Arby’s to go
Hold the onions but toss some on Atlanta.
A month after Arby’s parent Triarc Cos. confirmed that it’s in talks to merge Arby’s and Triarc franchisee RTM Restaurant Group, real estate brokers are dishing big helpings of gossip: The Fort Lauderdale-based seller of roast beef sandwiches is hoofin’ it out of town for Atlanta.
Though it’s all hush-hush, Atlanta apparently is a no-brainer. The city is RTM’s home. Arby’s Doug Benham, named president and chief executive a year ago, spent more than a decade with RTM in various top-level management positions.
Benham did not return phone calls. Triarc spokeswoman Anne Tarbell in New York said the company doesn’t comment on rumors.
But Arby’s spokeswoman Cathie Koch in Atlanta lent credence to the gossip by saying that no contracts have been signed and a deal is incomplete.
Arby’s real estate broker, David Brown of Studley in Fort Lauderdale, declined comment. So did the broker for landlord Leo Ghitis, Trammell Crow’s Adam Starr.
Ghitis, a former Crow exec, said only that he’d know more in a week.
But CB Richard Ellis broker Deanna Lobinsky in Fort Lauderdale and four other brokers who asked not to be named knew from reliable insiders that Arby’s was packing for Atlanta. Arby’s employs an estimated 100 people at the headquarters.
The company is housed in about 60,000 square feet, or about half, of the Radice Corporate Center III building at 1000 Corporate Drive in Fort Lauderdale’s Cypress Creek submarket.
The lease there expires in June.
How bad a hit that vacancy will be for the long-troubled, soft Cypress Creek market isn’t clear.
The area’s vacancy, once at 24 percent or more, had dropped to 14 percent at the end of the fourth quarter, according to CB Richard Ellis statistics.
That largely was due to educational service provider Kaplan Inc.’s lease of almost 100,000 square feet in one of the Cypress Creek Concourse buildings.
Though the submarket still struggles more than others in Broward, there are enough tenants looking for chunks of 10,000 to 30,000 square feet of space that “it will survive the loss,” Lobinsky said.
— Terry Sheridan
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