De Commerciele Massamedia 58

'Dishonorable Non-Mention: Juan Gonzalez and the Daily News’ 9/11 Pulitzer
By Village Voice.

Millionaire Mort Zuckerman sounded like a man of the people last week in his Pulitzer victory speech to the Daily News staff. His paper had just won the prize for editorializing about sick 9/11 first responders, and as his employees sipped champagne, he proclaimed that the honor “reaffirms my belief that this paper fights for people who too often have no voice in this city.”
But the News journalist who does most of that fighting, especially on the 9/11 health issue, Juan Gonzalez, was conspicuously absent from both the party and the speeches. Gonzalez had been the first reporter in the city to deliver the radioactively controversial news in the fall of 2001 that the air near Ground Zero was far less safe than federal and local officials were saying.
City officials, trying to discredit Gonzalez’s scoop, called a press conference, at which Mayor Rudy Giuliani declared that “the problems created . . . are not health-threatening.” In the back channels, as Gonzalez himself later wrote in his book Fallout: The Environmental Consequences of the World Trade Center Collapse, “one of Giuliani’s deputy mayors called a top editor at the News to complain.” The head of the New York City Partnership and Chamber of Commerce fired off a letter calling Gonzalez’s column “a sick Halloween prank.” EPA director Christie Whitman immediately wrote Zuckerman, accusing Gonzalez of trying to “alarm” people, and her complaint ran on the op-ed page days later. Its opening could scarcely have been more patronizing: “Those of us in government and the media share an obligation to provide members of the public, in a responsible and calm manner . . . ” Gonzalez’s attempts to follow up his scoop were met with the “obvious displeasure of the paper’s top editors,” who delayed and sometimes killed his columns, he wrote in his book. What stories he did get published were relegated to the back of the paper—”behind a refrigerator ad,” as his Democracy Now co-host Amy Goodman put it.'

Lees verder:
http://www.mediachannel.org/wordpress/2007/04/25/dishonorable-non-mention-juan-gonzalez-and-the-daily-news-911-pulitzer/

Zie ook: http://www.villagevoice.com/