THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, November 6, 1994 TAG: 9411050016
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: LYNN FEIGENBAUM
LENGTH: Long : 113 lines
Two days to elections and, if you ask me, people are weary of the whole game. That's not to say Virginia voters won't turn out at the polls in droves. I expect they will.
It's just that I'm sensing they've heard and read enough charges and countercharges, exposes and editorials, commentaries and analyses.
``I'm saturated,'' said Dorothy Burson of Virginia Beach. ``I could have voted two months ago.''
Aside from Burson's comment, there's my other unscientific ``indicator'' - a slight decline in the bombardment of election calls to the public editor's office.
It's true that election-oriented letters to the editor were still coming in at the rate of 70-80 a day this past week. But a look through my own logs showed that:
Fewer than a dozen readers called when The Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star decided not to endorse any of the three candidates for the U.S. Senate.
Only three readers complained about the Wednesday Ledger-Star headline, ``New evidence of North duplicity.'' Granted, the Ledger has a smaller readership than the Pilot, but North supporters didn't have to buy a Ledger to see that banner in newspaper boxes.
And just a handful complained that we waited too long to write about and explain the three constitutional amendments that will be on Tuesday's ballot. (A story ran on Friday.)
I expected more feedback from readers about Tuesday's editorial, ``1994: Voters' choice.'' It's been talked about in political circles, on radio talk shows and in other newspapers.
The editorial surveyed the three Virginia candidates for the U.S. Senate - incumbent Charles Robb and challengers Oliver North and Marshall Coleman - and concluded that ``we cannot offer our endorsement to any of the Senate candidates.''
In contrast, the Richmond Times-Dispatch endorsed North while The Washington Post, the Daily Press in Newport News and the Roanoke Times & World-News (like the Pilot and Ledger, a Landmark Communications paper) endorsed Robb.
Doris Posner of Virginia Beach called the Pilot-Ledger non-endorsement a ``disservice to the voter.'' How, she asked, is the average voter supposed to make a choice if the newspaper can't?
``You owe it to the readership to make some sort of suggestion,'' she said, ``not to tell readers to stay home.''
In a curious way, the non-endorsement may speak more eloquently to the dilemma of this Senate race than some of the halfhearted endorsements in other papers. But Posner has a point. Even if they complain later, readers look to the press to take a stand.
Or do they? At least two callers, from different political poles, praised the Pilot and Ledger for staying neutral.
Caroline Barnes, president of the Portsmouth Republican Party, was thrilled that the newspapers didn't endorse Chuck Robb, as she had expected. And Brigitte Caldwell, an independent, was relieved because they didn't endorse North, as she had feared.
That's splitting the vote right down the middle.
INFLAMMATORY SKETCH? For more than a week, the country followed the tragic disappearance of two South Carolina boys. Our front-page story last weekend described the mother's account of the alleged carjacking, while police expressed their frustration at the lack of leads. Accompanying the story were photos of the two boys and a composite sketch of the suspect.
One reader objected strongly to the juxtaposition. ``To put the pictures of these two cute little white boys on the front page and then this almost minstrel-faced black man is highly inflammatory.'' Especially, he added, when the crime was not local and the sketch was not apt to aid in the search.
The sketch bothered me too; it seemed generic and vague, a troublemaker. Our police reporters, however, disagreed. South Carolina is not that far away, they said, and it's important not to back down on portraying suspects, even if - on rare occasions - the report turns out to be bogus.
That's apparently what it was. Days later, on Thursday, came the grim revelation that the mother was charged with the boys' murder.
CRITICAL & DIACRITICAL. Considering the number of stories that run each day, the design work that goes into section fronts and the deadline constraints for writing and editing, it's amazing that we don't have more errors.
But readers keep watch. And here are some bloopers you all have noticed this past week:
``Writer behind FBI scandel speaks locally,'' said a headline. At least a half-dozen callers gave us a spelling lesson (``s-c-a-n-d-a-l'') and pronounced it a scandalous error.
A story described ``pre-Colombian'' gold artifacts in Norfolk. Some of the artifacts may have come from Colombia but they were ``pre-Columbian'' - meaning they existed before Christopher Columbus arrived in the Western Hemisphere.
We did a gender change on a music group this week. In a Preview listing, 88 Fingers Louie became 88 Fingers Louise. Oops!
And, in last weekend's green sheet, a photo of the TV program ``Babylon 5'' appeared under a description for ``Gone With The Wind.'' The photo was changed for most editions but a few nervous ``Babylon 5'' fans saw it. Did that mean, asked one, that their show was gone with the wind?
Sometimes we're right, but it's difficult to tell. A reader noticed that a Flavor recipe for ``Tripe With Coriander'' didn't list any coriander with the ingredients. An omission? Nope. As Flavor editor Pat Dooley pointed out, the recipe called for cilantro, a small leafy herb also known as coriander.
And finally, a reader wondered why we don't use an N with a tilde (the squiggly line) when we write names like Pena, as in Secretary of Transportation Federico Pena. That changes the sound from Peh-na to the correct Pehn-ya.
Right now, we can't easily typeset most diacritical marks, like the accents that appear on French and Spanish words. But I agree with our caller that having some basic foreign punctuation marks would make a difference to a lot of readers.
MEMO: Call the public editor at 446-2475, or send a computer message to
lynn@infi.net. by CNB