Coogler: Worst in the Business
"Coogler: Worst in the Business" pick about the adequacy of the Bell companies' efforts to open up local markets before they are allowed to enter long distance.The Division usually comes down on tile side that more regulation is...
...lmpoverished children dying young of mysterious diseases...
...The environment is in peril...
...the people ate dirt...
...After this honor, a Pulitzer beckoned...
...Fish submerged in [a creek coating from the factory] turned belly-up within 10 seconds...
...Headlined 'Monsanto Hid Decades of pollution: PCBs drenched Alabama town but no one was ever told;' a story of corporate malevolence and mendacity unfolds for some five thousand words of Pulitzer pathos...
...Thin year, owing to an especially stupid and ill-informed newspaper piece that George Gilder discovered in the course of his liberating work on the environment, the Coogler Committee has been inspired to expand its work to the consideration of daily journalists...
...2002 COOGLER PRIZE FOR DAILY JOURNALISM For PCBs to become the next mother lode to be mined by Erin Brockovich wannabes and terrorized local clients (see page 52), the press will have to do its part...
...This expansion is not without precedenr.The Pulitzer Prizes began with only eight categories...
...See, for example, Dismal Science Fictions by Stan Liehowitz and Stephen Margolis, published by the Cato Institute, and "Is Heightened Scrutiny Appropriate for Software Markets by current FTC Chairman Timothy I. Muris, included in a volume on the Microsoft case published by the Progress and Freedom Foundation...
...Now they include 21, though the judges still COOGLERs...
...that is masterful in its misrepresentation of biochemistry, the Monsanto Corporation and its corporate offspring Solutia, and the tastes of some rural southerners...
...a man whose view of the proper role of the regulator is stunningly expansive...
...The piece "Now strange are dreams...
...Noble raptors pining pathetically over oozing eggs...
...J SOROON regal 1# 4tees-s9ei) After disposing of the chemicals in brooks and rivers near their plant in Anniston, Alabama, and after being alerted by scientists and environmentalists of the menace of their product, so goes the story...
...The antitrust establishment loves a theory called "network externalities" (a.k.a...
...Future Pulitzer prizes and David Br]wer Sierra Club Awards are at stakel Wonderfully op port tine, therefore, was a story flaunted on the front page of the Washington Post on January 1, 2002...
...The special section for-networks and technology" also rings .in alarm...
...The author is a 1992 Harvard graduate in liberal arts named Michael Grunwald...
...I dreamed the other night 1 A dream that made me tremble, I Not with fear, but with a kind of strange re aIity: My supper...
...The antitrust establishment enthuses over network analysis because it promises them action, power and a fountain of fees...
...As an opener-, it surely punched and grabbed...
...path dependence" or "iock-in").The problem is that disinterested analysis shows that the examples usually used to support this theory are embarrassingly wrong, and much of it is merely good old economies-of-scale in new clothes...
...winner of the Sierra Club's year 2000 David Brower Award for a series on the alleged environmental devastation inflicted on rivers by the Army Corps of Engineers...
...They didn't know that their dirt and yards and bass [fish] and kids...were all contaminated with chemicals...
...No one could have predicted his emergence as a strong candidate for the coveted new Laurels of the J. Gordon Coogler journalism prize...
...spurting blood and shedding skin as if dunked into boiling water...
...W irh this issue we auspicate an innovation the venerable J. Gordon Coogler Awani, named in honor of the eponymous 19th-century South Carolina printer whose shop offered "Poems Written While You Wait" I•Iitherto...
...But the poison that reportedly eviscerated the fish was apparently not PCBs but mercury, and Monsanto imrunediarely halted its flow into the 22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ' JANUARYIFESAUARY 2002...
...consisted of no cheese...
...pick about the adequacy of the Bell companies' efforts to open up local markets before they are allowed to enter long distance.The Division usually comes down on tile side that more regulation is needed, not that the markets should be unchained...
...They know that their purpose is to acknowledge the worst...
...It must point to pathetic throngs of poor people withered by insidious poisons...
...The Coogler judges are more clear-sighted...
...It must present a titanic conflict between good and evil-between idealistic activists and malevolent corpocrats-that yields floods of new contributions and mandated government money for environmental groups...
...New nomenclature may seem like a mere straw in the wind, perhaps, but were I a private lawyer or economist representing high-tech companies on antitrust issues, I would order up the new Mercedes (and make it the top of the line model, too...
...WORST labor under the delusion that they are giving their awards for excellence...
...thong) late...
...Some useful work exists, but serious skepticism is in order, and creating a new Antitrust Division section entitled "Networks" assumes the validity of a highly debatable conclusion...
...Michael Grunwald, for an environmental tearjerker set in Aniiiston, Alabama...
...This stance bodes ill far future Division actions on telecom...
...If in the process it must demonize the companies and people who supplied crucial chemicals and lifesaving pharmaceuticals through World War II and the industrial boons that followed, so be it...
...It also raises a distressing possibility that an industrial policy mindset will be engrafted onto analysis of efforts to restructure the media world to reflect the realities of new technologies, especially because Michael Katz, the AAG (Economics), is a former chief economist for the FCC under Chairman Reed Flundt...
...In conferring our first J. Gordon Coogler Award for the Worst Journalism of the Year, we how in celebration of Mr...
...They called it 'Alabama clay' and cooked it for extra flavor...
...Monsanto executives failed to warn the residents as they callously poisoned them...
...Following the canonical pattern, Grunwald's hid for fame begins with gullible class-war rhetoric worthy of Janet Cooke of yore: "Din the west side ofAnnicton, the poor side...
...the Coogler Committee has limited itself to honoring the Worst Book of the Year...
Vol. 35 • January 2002 • No. 1
