March 2004 Archives

By Vincent Safuto staff writer

March 13, 2004

Many years ago, when I was a rebellious teenager, I was an avid reader of Mad Magazine.

I was thinking of one of its cartoons recently as I went to vote in the primary, and especially after the flap over the "Voting is for Old People" T-shirt someone has started selling.

The cartoon was in the magazine just after the passage of the 26th Amendment, which gave 18-year-olds the right to vote. It had one young person telling another that he had just turned 18, and that now the politicians were really going to hear from him.

I don't remember the exact wording, but the young man seemed vehement that now that he had the vote, it was going to change everything. His companion noted that there was an election the next week, and did he plan to vote?

No, the newly enfranchised man said, he was boycotting the election to protest the political system.

So I was thinking about this while driving to my polling place March 9. The poll workers were happy to see me, as the place was empty, and I joked with them that they needed to put up signs saying "No pushing" and "One at a time, please."

It's a sad commentary that even general elections have such low turnout. It upsets me when people complain that they don't have time to register or vote. "Oh, the lines are so long," "Oh, I have to go fill out the forms" and "Oh, I might get called for jury duty." (The latter isn't true anymore, by the way.)

People have suffered and even died for that right to vote, not just in some foreign country under a dictatorship, but right here in the United States.

Go to a country sometime where elections are rigged or where "election violence" leaves people dead, and then tell me that we don't live in the greatest country in the world.

Read about the countries where the leaders have set up a system in which even the slightest hint of a desire to choose the next leader results in mass death for those who dare to speak up, and then go ahead and whine about how voting is for older people, as that stupid T-shirt declared.

Whenever I have moved to a new home, after getting the furniture moved, the utilities set up, the newspaper subscribed to and the cats settled in, my next step has always been to register to vote and show up on the appointed day to cast a ballot.

For voting isn't just some nebulous right or a privilege granted by citizenship, it's an obligation. It not only lets the government know where you stand, it pays tribute to those who went before, who fought and sometimes died so that we could reap the benefits of living in a democratic republic.

Forget the T-shirts and the cuckoo "anarchists" who babble about the system. Register to vote and, most importantly, be sure to vote on Election Day.

Vincent F. Safuto is a copy editor for the Press Journal. Reach him at Vincent.Safuto@scripps.com.


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By Vincent Safuto staff writer

March 6, 2004

By the time you read this, Jayson Blair's magnum opus about his time at The New York Times will be available in stores.

Normally, I'd be interested in a book by or about a journalist. As for "Burning Down My Masters' House: My Life at The New York Times," no way. It's offensive and a slap in the face at the honest, dedicated journalists I've worked with to think that someone like Blair, after the stunts he's pulled, would have the audacity to show his face again.

Yet here he is, in all his glory. A liar, a fabricator and a whiner who invented facts and wrote stories from his Brooklyn apartment and pretended he was at a far-off location when he did it.

He's a poor excuse for a person who used the opportunities offered by a newspaper to an underqualified reporter to wreck its credibility. True to form, Blair subsequently made lame excuses for his behavior. In the months that followed his dismissal, he played the race card, the I-was-under-pressure card and every other rationalization he could think of to try to excuse his disgraceful behavior.

What sickens me more is that people who read his book may come to the conclusion that you can't trust newspapers and the people who write for them.

The Blair affair has been a wake-up call not only for the Times, but for newspapers from the smallest coupon shopper to the major dailies. The message: We have to be vigilant and make sure that if someone is playing fast and loose with the facts, that person is rooted out and prevented from doing any more damage to the paper and business we work in.

Last year, when an Associated Press reporter was found to have fabricated sources in stories he wrote, the wire service moved quickly to deal with the reporter and let the newspapers know which of his stories were suspect. I was upset because I had picked a story that reporter wrote and gave it prominent play.

Knowing it was based on invented interviews and statistics made me part of the deception. But there was a difference: I was willing to run the AP's correction, and glad to do so, even if it made me look less than able. My only consolation was that I wasn't the only editor in the country who was fooled by the story.

I've often found it ironic that many people who have made a career of cultivating media attention — such as politicians — love to expound on the unreliability of that same news media with such deathless declarations as "You can't trust everything you read in the newspaper."

Thanks to Jayson Blair, that's true. Just the thought that he's making money off his unprofessionalism makes me want to cry for the future of the news business.

Vincent F. Safuto is a copy editor for the Press Journal. Reach him at (Vincent.Safuto@scripps.com).


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