The Consumer News You Never See

...It shouldn't take the existence of "a movement"—with some requisite number of press conferences and sit-ins—to constitute news, especially when the stories in question have a tangible relationship to readers' lives...

...On the most explosive consumer stories the Post sometimes does this, providing an excellent combination of intelligent reporting and prominent play...

...In several of these cases, people had been injured, although there were no reports of deaths...

...Sari Horwitz, a Business reporter who covers consumer issues regularly, says, "A lot of people around here consider consumer problems a 'soft' beat, a ladies' beat—you know, what soap to buy...

...In the days before Nader first warned us about flip-flopping Corvairs, many newspapers treated consumer issues as something of interest only to housewives...

...Moreover, reporters who pursue major investigations in areas outside of politics, such as consumer affairs, tend to receive only sporadic encouragement at best...

...The truth is, the consumer movement is virtually dead ." That's a tough one for Ralph Nader—by all appearances, a healthy man—to swallow...

...Even so, putting the Mazda story in the "Federal Report," a collection of bureaucratic news, and under the column heading "Inside NHTSA," is only slightly more likely to catch the typical reader's eye than if the article were buried in the back of Business...

...The Nutone company decides to fix a quarter of a million ceiling fans it has sold because they sometimes fall from their fixtures during operation...

...It creates a moral setting in which revealing scandal and tracking the relationships of the politically powerful are the greatest goods...

...the list goes on and on...

...The numbers on the Ford seatbelt problem flash across the VDT screen of someone like Deputy Business Editor Jerry Knight, who makes an initial decision on what the paper will do with the information...

...You wonder how reporters are supposed to cover nonenforcement of regulatory laws if the issue only becomes "news" once it receives the government's blessing as such...

...Explaining why her stories didn't make the front page of Business—let alone the A section—Horwitz says, "It wasn't really considered news because there was no official recall and no official investigation...

...Sadly, consumer news is dogged by more than one peculiar journalistic orthodoxy...

...It's the kind of information that reminds us of how the failings of large corporations affect our lives...

...Great stories are waiting out there...

...to the right, on the lower left-hand corner of page 3, the regular feature, "What Stocks Did ." Many shoppers no doubt would be fascinated to learn what processing techniques bring turkeys in contact with metal fragments, not to mention whether their own supermarket stocks the suspect birds...

...What Swoboda frankly admits to is the familiar newsman's fear of getting bogged down by what his colleagues perceive as a stale story...

...To the left and above was "Hutton Barred From Some Business...

...All papers enjoy showing what their own people can dig up...

...But a huge majority of the actual consumer stories still run deep inside the section...

...The Post came into its own by breaking open Watergate and helping to bring down Richard Nixon...

...likewise, his reporters surely want to avoid being identified with a subject the boss sees as "virtually dead...

...A better explanation for the Post's downplaying of consumer safety stories begins with the way a major newspaper tends to classify some news as insignificant because it's not startlingly unique and doesn't involve conventional political power struggles...

...In addition, a story with a Post byline is more likely to get good play...

...Following the feds The way to bring attention to metal-laden poultry is to get them out of Business and into the general news sections, as Sam Zagoria recommends...

...Forgotten are the people who are supposed to benefit from the insight a major newspaper can provide...

...In other words, the Post provides little incentive for an enterprising reporter to pursue the story of a dangerous product before people actually get hurt and the feds decide to hold hearings...

...Covering the Maryland banking crisis, an entire squadron of Post reporters made an obvious effort to explain how consumers' savings and communities' stability had been endangered by egregious mismanagement...

...The Post probably is not immune to this phenomenon, but as a profitable company with little competition, it doesn't appear to be as vulnerable as the average small-town daily...

...Several Post employees confirm that once a consumer issue receives attention from the federal government, it often gets assigned to a reporter and played more prominently than it might otherwise...

...Story-ification is more important than you might think...

...In recent months, dozens of stories on dangerous products, ranging from cars to power saws to baby pacifiers, have received only passing coverage from the paper, often on page 3 of the Business section...

...There are certainly some recall notices that we didn't storyify that we should have...

...A lot of interesting consumer news gets buried in the Post...

...This spring, Sari Horwitz turned in some solid reporting on the widely publicized dangers of allterrain three-wheel vehicles...

...But these occasional displays of superior journalism only make the Post's frequent oversights more regrettable...

...Jerry Knight portrays a system in which little is left to chance...

...The Post ran many of its consumer stories on the "ladies' page," and later in the Style section...

...Yet [senior Post editors] systematically diverted him from that role...

...He was the lightning rod for these groups...

...I would have no sense of remorse," he says, "if a person got zapped by a killer toaster because he failed to look inside the financial section!' The implicit message from Business is that product mishaps aren't really consumer news at all...

...Newspapers and magazines are part of the marketplace process, contributing to (and profiting from) the sale of a great variety of products," Zagoria wrote...

...The classic explanation for a newspaper seeming to avoid consumer coverage is that the publisher fears a loss of advertising profits...

...It's not hard to find people at the Post somewhat less confident than Knight regarding the seamlessness of the decision-making process...

...Several editors flatly dismiss Zagoria's concerns as unimportant, while others explain them away by citing his tenure from 1978 to 1984 on the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission...

...Peter Silberman, Business editor until 1982 and now a deputy managing editor, argues that his innovation of running recall stories under a regular column heading has helped readers find their way to consumer news...

...Several outside critics, including this magazine, have chided the Post for downplaying news that has a direct and potentially immediate impact on its readers...

...On a more practical level, it's also the kind of information you might like to have on your way into a showroom full of shiny new autos...

...This information—these lifeless six-digit numbers—aren't presented to warn buyers about bad cars...

...By failing to take on the problem of defective products in a systematic way, the Post has passed up an opportunity to expose the corporate culture which tolerates risks to consumers and shamelessly covers up dangerous failures...

...It was a matter of that darned dishwasher acting up again, not systematic negligence by faceless corporate executives or deep problems in the manufacture of American products...

...Even a hypothetical recall maven, who lives for revelations of exploding gas tanks, would have trouble finding his favorites in the Post...

...Many consumer safety stories— most recall stories, for example—come to the Post's attention in this way...

...It's a sad fact that the consumer beat has become a back-burner beat that lots of people take for granted," says Swoboda...

...But at the Post, consumer affairs reporters still have to bear some of the beat's outmoded sexist baggage...

...they're there to tip off investors and stock brokers that GM or Ford had a little setback...

...Somewhere there are a handful of people who were truly alarmed by the ITC's having to intervene in the Canadian fruit situation...

...Knight's Rule has the ring of a Holmesian legal test...

...At the Post, the bias toward officially sanctioned consumer news is only one part of a larger syndrome—widely acknowledged by the staff— that favors coverage of national politics over all else...

...Some of them might be right here in Washington— members of the raspberry lobby, perhaps...

...Leonard Downie Jr., the paper's managing editor, concedes that article play "depends to a large extent on a given editor's judgment on a given day, and what the other news is...

...Politics puts a little backbone in that "soft" beat...

...The Consumer News You Never See by Tony Blinken L ast August, The Washington Post Business section revealed that the International Trade Commission had mobilized to stem the flow into the United States of inexpensive Canadian raspberries...

...But several people familiar with the Post concurred in interviews that Mintz's work, while occasionally given prominent play over the years, has never earned him the respect accorded lessskilled reporters specializing in politics...

...Horwitz adds, "That's a stereotype that I'd like to help change!' Get the lead out Almost schizophrenically, the Post has made gestures indicating recognition of its spotty consumer coverage, but without seriously attempting to improve it...

...They also raise the question of how a consumer story sometimes does get into the spotlight...

...One former Post staff member recalls proposing a series of consumer affairs stories and having them "rejected because, the editors said, `These are nothing but Nader stories, nothing new...

...The same syndrome affects the direction and success of individual reporters' careers...

...According to numerous accounts, the vehicles have been responsible for injuries to riders, especially children...

...When any of these go sour, for whatever reasons, I believe the media should share responsibility with the manufacturer and retailer to alert customers to the danger and help them obtain appropriate redress...

...In response to Swoboda's eulogy on the consumer movement, Nadar asks angrily, "Is his obligation to serve the readers or to be a political antenna...

...Canadian raspberries become hot news as soon as the International Trade Commission gets involved...

...As an editor, Swoboda wants to blaze new trails...

...From the inside, Sam Zagoria, the Post's ombudsman, wrote in his column last July that many more stories about consumer safety should receive prominent play—some in the National section...

...If Business thinks it has a particularly important article on its hands, Frank Swoboda, the section's top editor, will pitch it to National at the daily afternoon conference of all of the paper's ranking editors...

...When you keep the [storyification] criteria in mind," he says, "I think you'd be hard pressed to find a consumer story that we didn't play right ." That depends, of course, on what you consider to be "big" numbers or "imminent danger...

...Morton Mintz's series this spring on the ongoing Dalkon Shield scandal was one such front-page success...

...The answer is simple: an official authority, namely, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, investigated the cases and announced that these were big consumer stories...

...Of course, Nader's kind of investigations are still needed because Detroit still produces faulty cars and drug companies still sell dangerous medications...

...Knight explains that the Post has certain set standards for determining, first, whether a dispatch merits any attention at all and, second, whether it is important enough to be "story-ified," or assigned to a Post reporter for further investigation and possibly prominent billing...

...Why, though, did faulty steering mechanisms in Mazda cars recently end up at the top of the "Federal Report" page in National...

...And why was there outstanding coverage of brake problems in GM's X-cars...

...Known as the "dean of consumer reporting," Mintz, 63, broke the story of the health risks of Thalidomide in 1962...

...While Nader acknowledges that his young lobbyists are no longer a novelty on Capitol Hill, he argues that interest in consumer victimization has never been more widespread...

...Only gradually, in the late sixties and early seventies, did consumer coverage migrate out of Style and into the Metro and Business sections...

...The assumption was that once you train readers to look in a certain place, they will find them ." Silberman seems to think that people burrow through a newspaper to find recall stories with the determination of a Wall Street investor looking for the stock quotes...

...I felt they should be anchored in one place," says Silberman...

...This attitude leaves reporters assuming "that Nader's kind of investigation" on consumer issues "isn't for us," says the former reporter...

...The science of 'story-ification' A lot of what newspapers publish comes prepackaged in the form of press releases or wire service reports...

...the path to real recognition inevitably leads to the National or Foreign staffs...

...Tony Blinken, formerly a reporter for The New Republic, is a free lance writer...

...Meanwhile, Business, as well as National, give front-page placement to the regular avalanches of statistics from the Labor Department or Federal Reserve Board, regardless of how obscure and irrelevant this information is to most readers...

...But with all the consumer products crowding our lives, we don't think about possible defects in our braking system or baby stroller until the news hits us, and that's precisely why such news should be featured prominently...

...The Post could easily devote some of its vast energies to prompting recalls—and truly protecting consumers—rather than merely reciting the grim numbers after the fact...

...Mintz had the best network of consumeroriented groups," says a former Post reporter who also wrote about consumer affairs...

...By having a reporter track down a recall notice, the Business section greatly increases the odds that readers will get more than an array of statistics...

...Zagoria's admonishment, as well as follow-up discussions he had with Post writers and editors, have had no noticeable impact...

...This goal, however, has its dark side as well...

...past the agate-type daily stock, bond, and commodity reports...

...We are constantly trying to go against this tendency in order to give consumer stories, or even human interest stories, more emphasis...

...Swoboda says that he hopes consumer news will attract new readers to Business...

...Consider another recent item about the recall of 6,000 Land O'Lakes turkey roasts which may have contained fragments of metal...

...That question cuts to the heart of the matter...

...The red peril from the north was cutting into the profits of American growers, the Post reported: "Canadians appear to be taking advantage of a quirk in U.S...

...duty-free during the July and August growing seasons...

...Even Leonard Downie concedes that there is "a natural inclination for this paper to give political, governmental, and diplomatic stories a lot of play...

...In a short item on page 3 the same day, the Post noted that Ford Motor Company had recalled 361,900 of its 1981-84 cars because they had defective seat belts that might break during front-end crashes...

...Morton Mintz's career is instructive in this context...

...The near collapse of a neighboring state's banking system would probably make it every time...

...In addition to the Ford recall of 361,900 cars, the Post has recently buried call-backs involving 31,000 GM sports cars (brake problems), 68,000 GM trucks (transmission and brake defects), and 91,000 Ford trucks (brakes...

...As just one measure, he points out, the circulation of the magazine Consumer Reports has hit an all-time high of 3.2 million...

...Today, Mintz, who declines comment on this matter, is thought of as an isolated veteran who gets only rare opportunities, such as the Dalkon Shield series, to demonstrate his considerable talent...

...Matters of day-to-day concern to readers become filler for the back of the Business section...

...Frank Swoboda, for example, has claimed the topic as Business section turf—this despite his opinion that the beat is lifeless...

...the Drew Pearson/ Jack Anderson of consumerism...

...herbal" arthritis pills available over-the-counter in 40 states are found to contain potentially dangerous levels of prescription drugs...

...The Post ran the tiny blurb in the lower right-hand corner of page two of the Business section...

...whenever possible, editors like to reward reporters' efforts with favorable exposure...

...But a lot more people would probably like to know about seat belts that won't protect them and their families in case of an accident...

...Clearly, the defective vehicles posed a threat to anyone driving them...

...Our perceptions of the pressing events of the day are shaped in large measure by such behind-the-scenes pigeon-holing, as well as by the culture of the newsroom, which at the Post draws reporters' attention toward the doings of official Washington and away from potentially deadly automobiles...

...customs law that allows them to ship unfrozen raspberries into the U.S...

...The raspberry story ran on the front of the Business section...

...In order to qualify for story-ification, he says, "it has to be a big recall in terms of numbers, or there must be an imminent danger of injury or death, or the product in question must be widely available in the Washington area...

...all the way back to the lower right-hand corner of page D10 to find—admittedly, under the heading, "Recall"--a five-inch wire service report that GM had called back 197,000 Buicks equipped with bumpers that could fracture on impact and puncture the cars' fuel tanks...

...Metro and Business reporters tend to be treated as second-class citizens at the Post...

...An understandable, and frequently constructive, pressure pervades the newspaper to live up to that standard—to uncover official misconduct, to get the next "holy shit" story, as Bob Woodward himself puts it...

...Others are more direct...

...He wrote a widely heralded book on the drug manufacturing business which, along with Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed, helped ignite national interest in consumer issues...

...The paper also supplied useful guidance as to how readers should react to the confusing situation...

...Frank Swoboda isn't dismayed in the least...

...Take the Business section of May 31: you would have had to forge past the stories on tax reform and routine corporate jousting...