THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 19, 1995 TAG: 9502190079
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A2 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: EDITOR'S NOTEBOOK
SOURCE: Cole C. Campbell, Editor
LENGTH: Medium: 71 lines
In today's paper, staff writers Dale Eisman, Jack Dorsey and Mylene Mangalindan write about Hampton Roads' prospects in the impending round of base closings and realignments.
A lot is potentially at stake in Hampton Roads. The region is home to 12 major defense installations and more than 180,000 military and civilian employees of the Defense Department.
By one estimate, cutting three jobs from that complement could cost nearly two jobs in the civilian community, from the local businesses that supply the military installations and their employees.
The Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission is expected on March 1 to release its list of bases that should be shuttered or reorganized.
Virginia is among the handful of states that could take heavy losses in this round of closings.
But the Navy may not be a prime target this year, given the hit it took in the last round of closings.
And in Hampton Roads, community leaders don't expect a hard hit. Nonetheless, they're working hard to minimize the chance.
The local effort is being supported by the Hampton Roads Planning District Commission, a research and information clearinghouse for local governments from the Oceanfront to well up the Peninsula.
The commission has compiled some economic-impact data, but Executive Director Arthur Collins has declined to release it - unless a local base makes the closure list. He argues that other communities could use the data against Hampton Roads.
In fact, there are community leaders who believe the newspaper should not report on what's happening on the base-closings front.
To get routine basic data, such as employment figures, our reporters have had to make calls up the chains of command of the Navy and federal officials. There, the information - which is public and normally distributed locally without the blink of a calculator - is released.
If something important to Hampton Roads is under way, we're obligated to you to report about it.
The only information we can get is information insiders are willing to share or that is part of the public record available to anyone's inspection. Therefore, it's not likely that we are reporting anything not known to the other communities - or at least to their leaders.
Why should Hampton Roads citizens be left in the dark?
Suppose local leaders were not actively looking out for Hampton Roads' interests - or had missed ideas or information that others in the community could put forward? Should that go unreported as well?
Suppose newspapers covering Jacksonville, Fla., or Cherry Point, N.C., were aggressively covering the base-closure process - and we weren't? What good would that do the citizens of this region?
The process is set up to preclude public inspection, in a naive belief that this will insulate it from politics.
In fact, the sensitivity about information flowing freely to the community reflects the reality that lobbying and politicking is and has been going on.
``If media influence counted for anything, the boosterism by the Charleston Post and Courier in 1993 might have scored that poor place some points,'' notes Dennis Joyce, the editor who leads our global team responsible for military, world and national news. ``It didn't.''
Charleston's efforts to remove the Charleston Naval Station and Naval Shipyard from the list came too late - perhaps because the people weren't alerted soon enough to what was - or wasn't - happening on their behalf.
Would we want that to happen here? by CNB