MEDIA REPORTS

After A Lovely Stay, We Bid A Fond Farewell...

2010-02-12T07:03:00.006-06:00

"Since Freud, the center of man is not where we thought it was; one has to go on from there...." - Jacques Lacan

Well, we knew all along that the the end of the road was up ahead. Up ahead is now before us. It is with some strange smidgen of sadness that we today announce the completion of this Blog's journey.

This has been a bit more interesting than we envisioned back in November, when we began our drive across the Rio Grande Valley Journalism geography. It allowed us a bit of study time, of time we used to gauge the service RGV reporters are - and aren't - providing for the region's citizenry.

We leave knowing that there are a handful of Journalists doing the job, and the larger portion still struggling with the tenets of the craft. Maybe that's all we can expect down here. Who really knows? We must add that our opinion of The McAllen Monitor changed over the long weeks - for the better. Our experience with area television news was not as beneficial. With rare exception, the work of both Action 4 News and Channel 5 News fell below the bar. One (Action 4 News) wraps itself in something we can only call mediocrity, and the other (Channel 5 News) can never muster the will or effort to maintain altitude when it does get to the high reaches of reporting. Perhaps that will change somewhere down the road.

In any case, accept this as a 90-day (180-some postings!) assessment of what you have available as sources for news & information in the magical Rio Grande Valley. What you have in the way of Journalism is not the best in the country, although it is not the worst, either.

My chief writing project has been neglected for too long. Now, it's time to get back home...

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Return Of The Superstar: Brownsville Herald Investigative Reporter Emma Perez-Trevino Reclaims Her High Ground...

2010-02-11T10:44:00.003-06:00

Given time and resources, most Rio Grande Valley newspaper reporters would bring readers the occasional spectacular piece of Journalism. Case in point: Reporter Emma Perez-Trevino's superb contribution to today's edition of The Brownsville Herald.

Headline: BISD trustee, county candidate not certified doctor

Perez-Trevino's initial paragraphs: A longtime school board member and candidate for county commissioner who for years has listed his credentials as "Dr." and "M.D." is neither a medical doctor nor a Ph.D., The Brownsville Herald has found.

A trustee of the Brownsville Independent School District since 2003, Enrique Escobedo Jr., who is seeking the Democratic Party’s nomination for Cameron County Pct. 2 commissioner in March, has used the "Dr." and "M.D." designations with his name since at least 2002, the Herald investigation shows.

Escobedo maintains that he obtained his medical degree in 2000 from the Universidad del Noreste in Tampico, Mexico.

We believe that noise you hear rising from far-eastern Cameron County is the sound of hollow political walls crumbling. And what a wonderful, much-needed sound it is. Indeed, there should be more of of that uplifting, lying-heads-to-the-walls chin music. Perez- Trevino, an investigative reporter we recently criticized as being a bit slow to pull the trigger lately, has once again flexed her reporting muscles to serve her community. The story, found online at brownsvilleherald.com, is a literal trip through the world of posturing and fact-finding. The politician she subjected to the truth serum postured; Perez-Trevino nailed him with the facts. Her story looks sound and is well-written, questions posed and answered with every dramatic paragraph. It will be interesting to see what this Border Politician will do next.

May we suggest a round of applause for this worthy reporter? Absolutely! Two, even...

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Reporting Food: From Great Burgers To Missing Elvis To A Gorgeous, Quaint Mexican Eatery...

2010-02-11T09:01:00.004-06:00

A few days ago, McAllen Monitor reporter Jared Taylor ventured into Edinburg to write a piece on a neat eatery, King's Hamburgers. That was followed by a report in this morning's edition by reporter Jeremy Roebuck on Lone Star BBQ in Mission, where, it seems, someone snatched the cafe's talking Elvis statue. It's a gray, rainy Thursday, so indulge us.

Reading stories about out-of-the-way restaurants is always a treat. And we generally stick to the reliable cafes out of some sense of pushing civilization onward. But there are times when going back a bit is not so bad. In the Rio Grande Valley, where the Mexican culture eventually silences even the most popular of better-known chain restaurants, exploring the quaint is yet another unique joy in this part of the country.

Yesterday, we stumbled into a place called Zamora's Restaurant on N. 23rd Street in McAllen. This should be said: There is nothing glamorous in the smallish, block-constructed building, but it does throw the genuine language, music and food of the region at you - proudly and with unrestrained relish. We won't offer a breakfast-lunch-dinner rundown of the menu items. Suffice it to say that it is a traditional Mexican restaurant, all-ethnic and, yeah, so what? (We had the chicken tacos and they were delicious, as was the black coffee.)

What we read in reporter Taylor's story about the employees at King's Hamburgers, as well as from Roebuck on the crew at Lone Star BBQ, sat well with us. We are not among the mob that says wait service in the RGV is not up to standard. Sometimes (and we have seen this), the Valley customer demands bad service by way of abrasive, uncouth behavior no one would tolerate. Our server, a lovely lady named Nora, was the ultimate congenial Pro.

There are - and will be - more important stories in the newspapers and on TV news. But it's okay to get away from the hustle & flow of the beaten path, to hunger for that hidden corner in the Ol' RGV, to stop-in and chat with people who likely will never be the subject of a Front Page story.

It can't be all rockets and grenades, can it?...

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Streets of Silliness: Action 4 News Airs Unneeded, Cornpone Journalism...

2010-02-10T09:44:00.011-06:00

The weekly series Streets of Speed by Action 4 News reporter Ryan Wolf perhaps has an audience somewhere in the Rio Grande Valley. It is entertainment, for sure. The Harlingen television station without question is the more excitable of any area news organization, what with its other staples The Pothole Report and Food 4 Thought.

But at what price is Action 4 News flashing these comedic segments starring the huffing & puffing Wolf?

Invariably, Wolf and co-anchor Lacie Lowry introduce these offerings as if the best of public service. Well, maybe the premise is noble. The presentation, however, is Amateursville.

In its latest speedzapper segment last night, Wolf (he looks shorter in person) took to streets along Lyford Elementary School with his speedgun and his usual Barney Fife-like questioning. It was sad.

Wolf, to an old guy ferrying a car full of kids: "He's in the backseat not wearing a seatbelt. How come?"

Man: "He is wearing a seatbelt..."

The man then turns to look back at poor kid, yelling, "I told you to put it on!"

Great television; lousy news reporting. The poor kid on the receiving end of the screaming looked as bewildered as could be expected, completely stunned. This after a long day of school for the young boy. Geez, he might have said, when did I sign-up for Maquila Journalism?

But there was more. Wolf walks around with his speedgun and microphone, aiming both at parents asked to lower their vehicle's window. "He buckled up?" he asks a woman. And then, "She buckled up?"

To a young woman who tells him her mother lives around the corner and that that's where she's taking her kids, Wolf says, "You think people watching at home are going to believe that story?"

It is reporting at its worst. In the segment's end, a woman at the scene sympathetic to Wolf's histrionics smiles and says, "You've been zapped!" Again, okay television, but nowhere near Journalism.

Action 4 News needs to revisit this cornpone idea. What is the point? Every school in America has routine patrols by policemen in marked vehicles. What exactly is Action 4 News trying to accomplish here, besides bringing viewers a few laughs - laughter aimed at Action 4 News and at its unwilling victims.

It's not a laughing matter, however. Wolf comes across as a punk bullying young Hispanic mothers whose only thought is to get their children home. We say leave law enforcement to the professionals. What's next, Action 4 News noseying in on Valley barbers? We can already hear Ryan Wolf, standing in front of a battered barber chair with his microphone, asking: "So, you think that haircut is worth $6? Look at how uneven the sides are on this old man? You kiddin' me?!"

Advice for Action 4 News management: Fade this show to black...

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For Channel 5 News, Haiti Coverage Has Been Less-Than-Spectacular...

2010-02-10T07:02:00.000-06:00

It's tough to get worked-up about covering the aftermath of any major disaster, especially one that happened weeks ago. So we won't be too hard on Channel 5 News reporter Jordan Williams on this one. He's been in Haiti a few days, along with a group of Rio Grande Valley doctors. So far, his reports have been, well, does he know where he is?

Haiti was clobbered last January 12 by an earthquake that killed an untold number of residents and decimated its major city: Port-au-Prince. Stories keep surfacing. Good stories. Yesterday, according to network news, a man was rescued from under a collapsed building almost a month after the disaster struck.

Yet, why are we not moved by reporter Jordan's work?

We thought a bit about it and decided on this as the reason: He doesn't seem to get the magnitude of the mess. Williams, so far, has trudged along with his traveling companions and has, predictably, sent reports of the sort other reporters filed in the initial days of the tragedy. He needs to raise the bar a bit, to place his reports in the context of a lingering rescue & reconstruction effort. Life, he needs to bring more life to his reporting. It is canned sadness he has offered so far.

Example, from a story by Williams, as posted on krgv.com, website of Channel 5 News: Gerlene's death hurt the team's spirit, but they kept working because their were hundreds of other Haitians who desperately needed their help.

Oh, boy. So much for making his viewers feel any sort of sympathy toward the victims or the country. It left us with the impression that, dang, we wish a good storyteller had garnered this assignment - someone like Jared Taylor or Jeremy Roebuck of The McAllen Monitor, or Jazmine Ulloa or Laura B. Martinez of The Brownsville Herald. Great story; wrong guy. And that their should be there...

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Dangerous Sources: Twitter And News From the Bloody Mexican Drug War...

2010-02-09T14:41:00.009-06:00

We hadn't seen this in previous news reporting by Rio Grande Valley Journalists: A news story containing information gained by way of Twitter. But there was one in The McAllen Monitor this Ayem, by reporter Jared Taylor.

The headline was dramatic, from the latest hellish affair in Mexico: 6 dead after Reynosa shootout

And in his usual way, Taylor reports what he knows.

REYNOSA - At least six people were killed amid a barrage of grenade blasts and gunfire in a residential neighborhood on the city’s southwest fringe early Monday morning, officials said. The bloody confrontation between Mexican army soldiers and an unidentified criminal group broke out about midnight Sunday, local officials confirmed.

Three army soldiers and three civilians involved in the attack died during the shootout. Four soldiers suffered injuries, as well. Authorities detained about 10 people after the attack. A van loaded with marijuana was also reportedly seized by authorities. Officials said the attack involved a well-armed group that sprayed gunfire and detonated grenades along Avenida Pemex Oriente for about 40 minutes.

The first reports of the shootout came via Twitter, the micro-blogging Web site that allows users to post updates via computer and text message. Initial posts came shortly after midnight Sunday. “It won’t stop and there are lots of grenades,” one man wrote in Spanish about midnight Sunday. “God save us.”

Other (Twitter) posts suggest the death toll in Reynosa may have been much higher as a result of the gunfire, with one user posting that there were “bodies everywhere.”

Some users’ Twitter posts said that more than 25 grenades exploded during the confrontation.

We're all for use of modern technology, but we also wonder about the pitfalls for Journalists.

It would have been nice to see additional comments in Taylor's story from some other reliable (named) source at the shooting (about the 25 grenades and the number of "bodies everywhere," for example), but we're also aware of the fear running down every street in all Mexican bordertowns these days. Still, we would hope that reporters would double-check the Twittered info, as it is easy for someone to simply post rumors, jokes and exaggerations.

The risk is huge: Use of Twitter in the field to transfer info from reporter to editor is one thing. Taking that info from strangers is another. We'd say sourcing by way of Twitter postings is not the best kind of Journalism, although it has a place - just not the primary one...

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Brownsville Herald Reporter Ortiz Gets Worked-Over By McAllen Monitor Editors...

2010-02-09T09:01:00.006-06:00

We bring you another in our occasional series of observations to do with editing at The McAllen Monitor, editing in respect to stories written by reporters for The Brownsville Herald. Again, in this morning's Monitor edition, we see editors in the City of Palms daily have once again taken the blade to a story by a reporter for its sister newspaper downriver.

In The Herald, by reporter Ildefonso Ortiz (shown in photo):

Police: Mother forced crushed red pepper into daughter's mouth

A Brownsville mother remains in police custody after witnesses say she lost her temper and stuffed crushed pepper inside the mouth of her 3-year-old daughter before tying her arms with a jacket in response to the child’s temper tantrum, police officials said.

Gloria Martin, 38, was arrested Sunday afternoon at the 77 Flea Market and later charged with injury to a child, said police spokesman Sgt. Jimmy Manrrique.

Same story in The Monitor:

Police: Mother forced red pepper into daughter's mouth

BROWNSVILLE —A mother who tried to quell her daughter’s hot temper with crushed pepper remains in police custody.

Witnesses told police the woman lost her temper and stuffed crushed pepper inside the mouth of her 3-year-old daughter before tying her arms with a jacket in response to the child’s temper tantrum, police officials said.

We say short sentences absolutely are better, but wonder how often The Monitor does this to poor Herald reporters? Very often, would be our answer. It says much about editors at The Herald, and we cannot believe that they like it...

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The Taking of Reporter Jared Taylor's Story...

2010-02-09T07:02:00.000-06:00

It's not the first time they've done it. This is the television news organization not averse to taking another news organization's work and posting it on its website. ValleyCentral.Com, website of Action 4 News, has done it again.

Headline: Six killed in Reynosa shootout
Posted Tuesday, February 09, 2010 at 4:34 a.m.

A shootout between soldiers and marijuana smugglers has left six dead, four wounded and ten people behind bars. The McAllen Monitor reported on its website that the shootout took place early Monday morning.

The newspaper reported the confrontation took place along the Avenida Pemex Oriente in the Colonia Puerta del Sol in the city's southwest side.

The Monitor reported that grenades and gunfire were used during the battle. The newspaper reported that 10 people were arrested and a van filled with marijuana was seized.

The Monitor reported that three soldiers and three civilians were among the dead.

How do we know Acton 4 News lifted this story?

Well, The Monitor story, 6 dead after Reynosa shootout by reporter Jared Taylor, was posted on themonitor.com at 9:08 p.m. last night...

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For Reporter Sergio Chapa of Action 4 News, Week Gets Off To A Stumbling Start...

2010-02-08T17:25:00.003-06:00

From a story by reporter Sergio Chapa, as posted on ValleyCentral.com, website of Action 4 News:

Headline: Mexican fisherman jailed for pot off SPI

U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents charged Luis Evangelio Aguilar-Ramirez, Antonio Guerrero-Saldaña and Francisco Montes de Oca Pablo on federal drug charges on Sunday.

Try "arrested," rather than "charged," Sergio...plus, your story says there were three (3) fishermen, which is at odds with the headline...

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In Covering Political Gathering, Guardian Reporter Bill Rovira Finds, Loses Charles Dickens...

2010-02-08T09:11:00.011-06:00

Writers covering political campaigns often go to well-known quotations to set the tone of their stories. Peripatetic reporter Bill Rovira of RioGrandeGuardian.com is one of those who often scans the Internet for material he forever uses to pad his stories. For his latest contribution, he found the novelist Charles Dickens - and then...lost him.

Headline: Candidates commit to Valley Interfaith’s agenda

McALLEN, Feb. 7 - Sister Maria Sanchez of Valley Interfaith quoted Charles Dickens at the group’s Candidate Accountability Session on Sunday: “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.”

Rovira, a reporter who has a fine-tuned ear for jollities, staffed the afternoon gathering and heard candidate comments related to local poverty, immigration, and, from members of the audience, complaints of unfulfilled promises. What the reader never gets is anything more on his "best of times; worst of times" reference. Why did this woman use the quotation? There has to be a reason, Bill. Ask her.

Tell us, what exactly is - or has been - the best of times, and what is - or has been - the worst of times? Why include the well-known quotation in this story if you're not going to make the connection for the reader?

Well, we felt obliged to research the complete Dickens quote: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going directly to Heaven, we were all going the other way."

Somewhere in there is where the woman saw the connection. Too bad Rovira leaves it hanging...

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How Action 4 News Came To Define Poverty...

2010-02-08T07:01:00.000-06:00

From a Sunday story by reporter Erika Flores about Valley Intertfaith's candidate forum, as posted on ValleyCentral.com, website of Action 4 News:

The increasing poverty level in the valley, ealthcare reform and immigration policies are just a few of the topics valley residents discussed with local candidates vying for various political races.

Level of poverty? Poverty is poverty. And what is ealthcare?

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On Super Bowl Sunday, McAllen Monitor Stages Photo Of Ever-Hopeful Saints Fan...

2010-02-07T18:12:00.000-06:00

There is tried-and-true practice in American newspapering that says you do not stage photographs. That's for the magazines. And when such a thought crosses an editor's mind, that editor should be considering it for the Lifestyle Section, or Sports - never the Front or Metro Section.

In its Sunday Edition, The McAllen Monitor threw a staged color photograph on its Front Page. It is the only posed photo in its A-Section.

Headline: Longtime Saints fan cherishes only memorabilia left after Katrina

The story is by sportswriter Brian Sandalow.

He writes: John Felker’s New Orleans Saints hat looks like it’s been through a lot. Bought more than 20 years ago, it bears nicks and cuts that make it look every month of its age. The hat, however, is the only piece of team memorabilia the lifelong Saints fan has. Undoubtedly, he’ll be wearing it when the NFC champions face the Indianapolis Colts tonight in Super Bowl XLIV in Miami.

Felker, who lives in McAllen but has divided his time between the Valley and Bayou Country, was here taking care of his grandmother when Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast on Aug. 29, 2005.

Maybe it’s appropriate that the hat, albeit nothing more than a small of symbol of the Saints and the Gulf Coast, will be worn today during the franchise’s finest hour. Just five years ago, it looked unlikely the Saints could ever reach the Super Bowl, not to mention return to New Orleans and the battered Superdome.

It's a timely story. Today is Super Sunday for the National Football League.

But a photo of this Felker fella holding that weathered Saints gimme cap over his heart, his face angled upward and eyes looking as if in church...is sad. We say sad, but we do not mean it in respect to this guy's great hopes for his beloved football team. We use the word to characterize The Monitor decision to resort to staging the photograph. It's a good job by Monitor Photographer Gabe Hernandez.

It's just not cool for a newspaper to be asking its subjects to pose. That's a huge no-no. Oddly, the photo we refer to was not used alongside the online version of this story on themonitor.com...

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In McAllen, A Visiting UFOlogist Vanishes...

2010-02-07T09:11:00.004-06:00

Three days ago, The McAllen Monitor published a story about a Mexican journalist coming to the City of Palms to speak on the subject of UFOs. His background seemed, well, grounded. The Monitor described him as a reporter for the Mexican version of 60 Minutes.

Headline: Mexican journalist to present evidence of UFO sightings

The story by reporter Martha L. Hernandez began in this manner:

McALLEN - Mexican UFOlogist Jaime Maussan is convinced mankind will see a marked change in the year 2012. “It could be a change in the climate or in the human being itself,” Maussan said.

Maussan, who has collected, documented and researched videos, pictures and sightings of UFOs and extraterrestrials for the past 26 years, considers the possibility of a 2012 mass destruction “a stupidity.”
“The Mayans believed that every 5,125 years there would be a change, and that period is due on Dec. 21, 2012,” said Maussan, a former anchor and reporter for the Mexican edition of 60 Minutes.

There was a quote from Maussan about being a "journalist" and not a scientist. Okay.

Wrote Hernandez, "Maussan said he has evidence of UFO sightings in Mexico, Norway, Russia and South America and will present his most recent material Saturday at the McAllen Civic Center."

So, how'd it go? You'll likely never know. The Monitor did not cover Maussan's appearance. With occasional glances at the high, blue sky while leafing through every page of its Sunday edition, we found nothing confirming Maussan's presence at the McAllen Civic Center...

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HO-HUM: No Fire In Herald Reporter Perez-Trevino's Political Coverage...

2010-02-07T07:22:00.004-06:00

We used to be fans of Brownsville Herald reporter Emma Perez-Trevino. That was sometime back. Her recent reports have been anything but insightful. Indeed, they absolutely approach the unforgivable Journalism ledge known as...boring. Her story in Sunday's Herald is a prime example. It lacks spark and, well, life.

Headline: Contributions slow in Cameron County judge race

Her lede: Statements of campaign contributions and expenditures filed 30 days before the March 2 Democratic and Republican Party primaries by candidates for Cameron County judge, for activity covering Jan. 1 through Jan. 21:

As if a bureaucrat toiling on a late Thursday afternoon ahead of a four-day weekend, she then fashions a list of the candidates, amount of contributions received, and, finally, the names of contributors. It is underwhelming.

What follows that seems to be the buried lede of this story:

A lull in fundraising activity has enveloped the most recent statements of campaign contributions and expenditures that candidates for Cameron County judge in the March 2 Democratic and Republican Party primaries filed for the public record.

In a typical Rio Grande Valley campaign season, political stories often write themselves. If it isn't reporting on some scandal, it's reporting on declarations of wild promise, or, at times, at the very least reporting on the ebb and flow of the races. Perez-Trevino seems to be interested in simply "mailing it in," as they say in the world of lackluster government employment. Que lastima...

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Monitor Reporter Covers Toilet Paper Caper...

2010-02-06T11:47:00.006-06:00

It was understandably placed on Page 8B in the Valley & State section of The McAllen Monitor, there above the weather graphics. But at least it made it into the newspaper's Saturday edition. The headline was succinct:

Sheriff's deputies arrest suspected toilet paper thief

Reported by Ana Ley, it began in this manner:

McALLEN - Hidalgo County sheriff’s deputies arrested a suspected toilet paper thief last week. Rogelio Cervantes, 48, allegedly stole hundreds of tissue rolls and other bathroom supplies from his employer.

He was arrested on one charge of theft by a public servant on Jan. 29, according to a statement from the Hidalgo County Sheriff’s Office. Cervantes allegedly made off with 400 rolls of toilet paper, 160 bundles of paper towels and 12 soap dispensers totaling more than $500 worth of supplies from the Hidalgo County Head Start Program, 1901 W. Highway 107.

If convicted of theft by a public servant, a state jail felony, Cervantes could be incarcerated for up to two years and face a fine of up to $10,000.

The story could have been ignored. Theft of toilet paper in these bad economic times happens. There was that story last year where a woman was caught stealing toilet paper from the Ladies Room of a local restaurant. But ever-scrambling reporter Ley went for it. There was a heist and the fuzz did arrest someone. That's a story...

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In The Air-Conditioned Newsroom Of Action 4 News, It's Time To Doubt H1N1...

2010-02-06T10:54:00.009-06:00

It's been a serious story for months, and Action 4 News certainly has been covering the dangers of the H1N1 problem. But it's always a hoot to see television news stations make that all-too-quick turnaround when reporters think a story has petered out.

Action 4 News is now doubting H1N1 ever was a problem.

It's evening anchor - the excitable Ryan Wolf - burst forth with a report last night that asked the question: H1N1: Health risk or hype? Well, we still think it's more than hype, although Action 4 News is quite free to keep changing its mind on any story. We're just wondering why they don't pay more attention to the writing on their website, ValleyCentral.com?

In his story, Wolf apparently wrote this: So is H1N1 more hype than a continued health risk? Parents at Stuart Place Elementary School in Harlingen for had varying opinions on the debate.

That tells us Wolf wasn't even sure of this sentence, nevermind H1N1...

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In Mercedes, Burglars Leave Fresh Footprints...

2010-02-06T07:07:00.000-06:00

From a story titled Burglars Hit Mercedes Apartments, as posted last night on krgv.com, website of Channel 5 News:

There is a footprint still fresh that is still fresh. It's proof of the burglar’s path.

Cops'll solve this one. Plenty of fresh evidence here...

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Monitor Reporter Pipitone Tackles Issue of Undocumented Immigrants and Higher Education...

2010-02-05T11:57:00.001-06:00

We've always said the Rio Grande Valley affords journalists a very unique professional playground. Here, from Rio Grande City to the west and Brownsville to the east, a reporter can work multi-national stories you don't get to work in, say, Peoria, Illinois or Omaha, Nebraska.

Reporter Nick Pipitone of The McAllen Monitor offers readers one such story in today's edition. He writes about non-citizens attending Texas colleges.

Headline: Suit challenges law allowing college aid to undocumented students

EDINBURG - For Carmen, as for many people, a college degree represents an opportunity for a better future. But her future is far more difficult to ascertain than it is for most U.S. college students. She is one of several thousand undocumented immigrants attending Texas universities and colleges, according to the Immigration Reform Coalition of Texas (IRCOT).

Carmen - who declined to give her last name for fear that her current employer could face repercussions - came to the U.S. from Chiapas in 1992 at age 14, unsure of what was happening or what her future held. Now, at 32, she is pursuing a master’s degree at the University of Texas-Pan American with the peace of mind that even if she is forced to leave the U.S., the federal government cannot take away her college education and the hope of better employment in Mexico.

“If I stayed in Mexico, I don’t think I’d have a degree,” said Carmen, who lives in Edinburg. “That’s the difference. If you go ask a few hundred people (on campus), a number of them will have a similar experience.”

Apparently there is opposition from some Texans about this.

Writes Pipitone: Texas is one of 11 states that allow undocumented immigrants to pay in-state tuition rates and receive state grants. IRCOT challenged that law in December, arguing that the state overstepped its authority and violated federal law. President Bill Clinton signed into law two immigration omnibus bills in 1996 that, among other things, disqualified undocumented immigrants from receiving many health, welfare and higher education benefits, such as federal student aid.

But five years later, Texas became the first state to enact a law that allowed undocumented immigrants to receive in-state benefits, such as a lower tuition rate than out-of-state students and eligibility for financial assistance like grants from the Texas Educational Opportunity Grant Program.

Pipitone quotes Steven W. Smith, a former Texas Supreme Court justice who is representing IRCOT, as saying his group opposes giving "cheaper, in-state tuition rates and grants to undocumented students," although the group notes it is "not seeking to bar them from attending colleges or universities."

“They can pay their own way just like somebody from Kansas or North Dakota,” Smith said. “It’s not preventing them from attending college. It’s a matter of them getting a tax break.”

Elsewhere, this story likely would not have been of much interest. In South Texas, it goes to the many layers of local culture. Pipitone does an excellent job of covering his angle bases with this effort. The story is about the symbiotic relationship between the Valley and Mexico, once more unfurling the constant clash between the legalities of Life and the humanitarian...and that makes it valuable for Monitor readers.

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In Brownsville, Tumbling Lions, Tigers & Bears Save Lagging Local Economy...

2010-02-05T09:41:00.007-06:00

The headline ranks as the worst headline of the year, but more troubling is the story's content. In today's Brownsville Herald, reporter Steve Clark coldcocked his city's readers with this beauty.

Headline: Strangely dressed people and wild animals to invade Brownsville

It’s amazing that in this age of movies on demand, Xbox and virtual everything people still go to the circus — a non-virtual form of entertainment with its origins in ancient Rome. But people still do, apparently. As such, the empty field between Walgreens and the Bank of America on Ruben Torres Boulevard soon will be transformed into the temporary home of the Kelly Miller Circus, which begins this year’s touring season in Brownsville with a string of performances running Feb. 11-14.

Okay. Writing about a circus coming to town is a bit better than covering some chuckwagon rolling into town to sell Dallas Cowboys gear, as happened last month in Brownsville.

But Clark writes this inanity:

Not only is the circus important for the chamber, she says, it’s a "small economic burst" for Brownsville, since the traveling show’s 50-plus employees will spend a lot of money here, stocking up on food, computers, satellite dishes and the like. From Brownsville, Kelly Miller will travel to San Benito and other points around the Valley for a few weeks before meandering farther north with its fleet of 25 vehicles and imported Italian big top.

Unbelievable! Circus people are going to spend a lot of money in town? Stock up on computers? Satellite Dishes! Wild, and incredibly naive for a news reporter to ever believe, much less write. A looksee at the world of circus and carnival workers tells you these wandering folks are world-class scrimps, forever saving for, yes, a rainy day...

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Good Ol' State Farm Lands In Hidalgo...

2010-02-05T09:11:00.003-06:00

This morning, McAllen Monitor reporter Sean Gaffney splashed forth a story about the re-naming of Dodge Arena in dusty Hidalgo. It is now State Farm Arena. The news is good for the popular venue and for the Valley, but State Farm?

Isn't this the same company that is being roasted for cancelling policies in Florida?

Well, here's what a spokesman for State Farm said in response to criticism that the insurance company is abandoning Sunshine State policyholders.

State Farm is cancelling 125,000 policies in 2010. Those affected will receive 6 months notice, and the last cancellation won’t occur until August 2011 - a year and a half from now. Our agents will help any customers affected by our regulatory agreement find replacement coverage. We apologize for any inconvenience or anxiety this process might cause our customers, but State Farm Florida was losing $20 million a month in the homeowners business. These are not easy times for the Florida property insurance market, and this difficult, but necessary decision will help us better protect our remaining 675,000+ policyholders.The Office of Insurance Regulation has noted publicly that 102 of the 210 private property insurers operating in the state are losing money; 3 have gone out of business in the last year. To that end, it is essential for the state to continue working to develop constructive and sustainable insurance reforms that better serve the long-term interests of all Floridians. - Chris Neal, Public Affairs, State Farm Florida

Alrightee. Well, sports and concert fans, think a bit about that the next time you're scurrying over to catch some has-been comedian from Los Angeles, pitiful semi-pro sports, or yet another Nostalgia rock 'n roll act at the nice & comfy venue we've known for all these years...

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From The Dept. Of Stories We'd Like To See...

2010-02-04T19:27:00.000-06:00

Back when I wrote for The Boston Globe, our newsroom was so big (in excess of 250 reporters, in Boston and elsewhere in the world) that writing for every issue was not a requirement. On slow days, my superb editor, John Burke, would walk over to my desk and hand me a note before saying, "This could be a good Centerpiece."

Centerpiece was a feature in The Globe with a loose-ended news peg. It always appeared on Page A2 and was said to be popular with the newspaper's readership. Some staffer would write about the old forts in Boston Harbor. Someone else would write about the fall foliage on the road to Maine. Someone else would write a mini-profile on someone perhaps not all that famous. I remember writing a Centerpiece about a woman from New York named Barbara Mincy. My contribution was about her last day at a drug rehabilitation center. I recall a woman named Portis was director of the center, and I remember asking her how she knew this particular woman would stay clean.

"I never really know for sure," she told me. "But I will know about her come Christmastime. The ones finding the strength to stay off drugs usually send me a Christmas card."

These Centerpiece stories were rarely about the Kennedys, or about any other superstar celebrity in Massachusetts. They were roughly 600-word vignettes that held an interesting angle or allowed for flexing the writer chops. Another time, I rode with the city police department, on a night patrol of rough and tough Roxbury. There was nothing urgent about these stories; they just spoke to life in the city.

Sometimes, those stories say a lot about a community. You can spin yourself silly in the Rio Grande Valley writing about drunks, wife-beaters, children abusers, drug pushers and corrupt politicians. And you should. But there are several other layers of life & culture in every one of these Valley towns. In most newspapers, columnists are the ones who find this path. Columnist we have seen here rarely venture out into the streets. Something is lost when the columns are the work of half-hearted thought born inside an air-conditioned office or den. Perhaps that will change. A few Journalism dreamers would help...

- 30 -

Action At Action 4 News: The Great Bad Taco Hunt...

2010-02-04T10:44:00.011-06:00

News organizations generally will not cover even the best of hoaxes, perhaps because there is something inherently dangerous about publishing the make-belief or even the flimsiest lie. Action 4 News of Harlingen apparently is not one of those organizations. It has taken an exposed hoax about bad tacos and flashed it on its website, ValleyCentral.com:

Headline: 'Dog Tacos' email hoax circulates in Valley

The writer is identified as Sergio Chapa, a lad we're told once worked as a reporter for The Brownsville Herald.

Here's his story: A email hoax saying that a Matamoros man was arrested for killing dogs and selling the meat to a popular taqueria chain is circulating on both sides of the border. Action 4 News received a copy of the fraudulent email on Wednesday afternoon.

The email includes graphic pictures and is purported to be an article written by a reporter named “Yolanda Ordaz” from the El Bravo de Matamoros newspaper. The article states that local police arrested a man named “Ruben Moreno” for killing dogs and selling the meat to the popular restaurant Tacos El Campeon.

Action 4 News spoke to editors at the El Bravo and they said the email is a hoax. The editors added that nobody by the name of “Yolanda Ordaz” works there.

Further investigation revealed that the email hoax is circulating across Mexico but varies for each city. The reporter’s name “Yolanda Ordaz” is always the same but newspaper or media outlet’s name is changed. The suspect’s name is always “Ruben Moreno” or “Ruben Cuellar” while the name of the restaurant changes to one popular in that city.

The El Mañana de Nuevo Laredo reported the email hoax is circulating there using their newspaper’s name. El Mañana reported that the hoax has been documented in Guadalajara, Mexico City, Cuernavaca, Ciudad Juarez and other parts of Mexico dating as far back as April 2008. Concerned viewers from Brownsville contacted Action 4 News about the email.

We posted it in its entirety because it gives us a look into the mindset of a reporter willing to go public with such silliness. But then came a reply, also posted on ValleyCentral.com, from the owner of the taco eatery in question.

It went this way: I personally analyzed the email and anyone who has seen it, can notice that obviously the pictures were not taken where they say they were. You can tell the pictures don't coincide with one another. We pride ourselves in the quality and health standards we have set within our establishments. We have served our community for over 20 years, and recently opened our doors to business in Brownsville, where he had no trouble meeting the standards set by the city health department. Our product is of great acceptance and would be disappointed if that would change thanks to a "bad joke". If you have any questions or concerns please do not hesitate to contact me.

It should be noted that, as yet, no other Rio Grande Valley news organization has touched this dog taco rumor. Our question for Action 4 News is this: If you know the story is a hoax, why offer it? Better still, why not sic Food Patrol Hero Ryan Wolf on the sordid tale and have him deliver the goods? Video of Wolf storming that taqueria in his usual huff would be...priceless.

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Action 4 News and Its Phantom Reporting Corps...

2010-02-04T07:00:00.000-06:00

Action 4 News must be a small outfit. The excitable Harlingen station keeps claiming CBS network reporters as its own.

On last night's evening newscast, there was Action 4 News Anchor Ryan Wolf leading into a segment about backpacks and how they may be injuring schoolkids by saying, "Here's Action 4's Janet Choi..."

Choi does not work for Action 4 News. In fact, at the tail end of her report, she says, "This is Janet Choi, CBS News."

We've said it before, it is dishonest for Action 4 News to keep claiming reporters not its own. Be honest. Nothing wrong with saying, "Here's a report from CBS News."

Wolf - and station executives - should worry about being accused of playing silly games...

- 30 -

In McAllen, The Mayor's Vanishing Act Is Puzzling...

2010-02-03T13:54:00.009-06:00

We've been wondering a bit about the disappearance of McAllen Mayor Richard Cortez from the pages of The McAllen Monitor. From what we could find, Cortez has barely been in the paper - several times in early January and in the January 21 edition, when Monitor reporter Nick Pipitone covered the mayor's State of The City address. Compared to this, 2009 was a Rockstar Year for the mayor.

A recent Headline: McAllen mayor touts city's sound financial footing in address

McALLEN - Mayor Richard Cortez said the city is well-positioned to rebound from the recession and touted several completed and future city projects during the annual State of the City address at the McAllen Convention Center Thursday.

As readers of newspapers across this great land, we have grown accustomed to seeing coverage of local politicians and other community public servants. In The Monitor, bureaucrats doing their jobs over on Houston Street - at City Hall - don't get much publicity. Perhaps these city employees are doing the people's business absolutely right, or maybe they are doing absolutely nothing. Who knows? You'd never be able to say one way or the other from reading the hometown newspaper. What's that all about? Is there a feud involved here?

On occasion, the good mayor (shown in photo) should be rousted for comment. We have not made a master list of such Cortez Moments, but one story comes to mind: the recent excusing from prosecution of a McAllen Police Department officer whose DWI case was thrown out by a judge when the arresting officer failed to appear. It would have been interesting to see what Mayor Cortez might have said about that, and about Police Chief Victor Rodriguez's handling of the matter. There has been nothing...

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Writing, Managing The New Bishop's Story...

2010-02-03T09:50:00.009-06:00

Comparing stories on a news event by competing newspapers is easier when both papers are not owned by the same publishing company. It would be easy to say The Brownsville Herald beat The McAllen Monitor in covering the installation of a new Bishop for the Diocese of Brownsville on Tuesday. It's not. What makes any assessment quirky is that editors at both newspapers are able to see exactly what the other is offering its readers. Yes, that should be a positive - for the newspapers...and for their readers.

Here's what we say: The Herald went serious with the coverage. The Monitor, meanwhile, opted for soft.

Is one story better than the other? No. They're just different, although as Journalism and taking the subject matter into account, we say reporter Martinez's story was the one we would have published as the "main" story and Ley's as the sidebar.

* In today's McAllen Monitor, from reporter Ana Ley:

Headline: New Shepherd: Bishop Flores takes reins of Diocese of Brownsville

SAN JUAN — Clad in jeans and baggy T-shirts, the teenagers giggled as they strolled the long, dark path around the Basilica of Our Lady of San Juan del Valle. The Brownsville teens visited the shrine Tuesday evening to watch the installment Mass for Bishop Daniel Flores, who was appointed in December as the sixth bishop to lead the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brownsville. He replaces Bishop Raymundo Peña, who was required to submit his resignation when he turned 75 last year, in keeping with canon law.

“We’re really excited,” said Danny Lucio, the teens’ youth minister. “We’ve been talking about it for weeks.” Inside the shrine, 2,000 people gathered to witness the elaborate, solemn ceremony. Several minutes into the Mass, the crowd rose from the seats and clapped vigorously as the Rev. Jorge A. Gomez notarized the letter in which Pope Benedict XVI appointed Flores. As Gomez embraced Flores to congratulate him, some churchgoers glanced at one another and smiled warmly.

* In The Brownsville Herald, by reporter Laura B. Martinez.

Headline: Faithful gather for installation of Bishop Flores

SAN JUAN – With the choir singing loudly at the Basilica of Our Lady of San Juan del Valle National Shrine, the Catholic Diocese of Brownsville officially welcomed its sixth bishop — Bishop Daniel E. Flores. A long procession of seminarians, deacons, priests, monsignors and more than two dozen bishops entered into the basilica with Flores entering nearly last. Many of the priests took a moment to shake the hands of Flores’ family members who were sitting in the front row.

Cameras could be heard clicking throughout the basilica as the faithful photographed the procession and Flores, the man Pope Benedict XVI picked last month to lead the Brownsville diocese. Flores’ installation was attended by Cardinal Adam Joseph Maida, of Detroit’s archdiocese, and Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, of the Galveston-Houston archdiocese, who presided during the Mass.

Papal Nuncio Archbishop Pietro Sambi, the Vatican representative to the United States, read the pope’s official decree announcing Flores’ appointment. DiNardo then told Flores,"You have heard the letter of his holiness Pope Benedict XVI. You are called by the Holy Spirit to serve Almighty God and the people of the Diocese of Brownsville in faith and in love as their shepherd."

"Having already accepted the appointment of the Holy Father, are you willing to serve the people of this diocese in the tradition of the Apostolic Faith of the Church?" DiNardo asked.

Flores replied, "With faith in our Lord Jesus Christ and with the love of God in my heart, I accept the pastoral care of the people of God in the Diocese of Brownsville. I resolve to serve faithfully the spiritual needs of this local Church."

Both newspapers are owned by Freedom Newspapers, Inc., and it's been its practice in the Rio Grande Valley to let one paper cover any one regional story. The Monitor led the way last year when a shooting in Nuevo Progreso drew the entire RGV news media to the scene. Its reporters from The Valley Morning Star and The Herald did not rush in to have their say.

Perhaps Freedom should have done the same with this Bishop installation coverage. That, or maybe let the editors of both newspapers join forces ahead of the coverage, so that decisions could be made on who'd write the main story and who'd write the sidebars. As it is, readers in McAllen did not get the superb story readers in Brownsville got from reporter Martinez. And maybe the Brownsville Herald readership would have enjoyed the additional coverage by Monitor reporter Ley...

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Hitchcock's Birds: Scary Report on Channel 5 News...

2010-02-02T07:04:00.001-06:00

Usually reserved Channel 5 News called it a "bizarre" find. A McAllen animal control officer called it no such thing. Here's the story, as reported on the evening news yesterday and as it was posted on the station's website, krgv.com.

McALLEN - A bizarre find inside a McAllen park leads a viewer to call CHANNEL 5 NEWS after her morning walk took a dark turn. Shocked by what she saw, she stopped long enough to take pictures. They are graphic.

Children play at the park, and families walk near a pond to feed the ducks. Ana Cantu lives nearby and says, "It's nice and everything to go out and run in the afternoons."

Police dispatched Robert Mata, an animal control officer, to look into it. He says this was, "Probably just an accident." Mata tells us the fowl got caught in a fishing line. "It got hooked. You can see the hooks," he says.

Video showed a black bird hanging off the branches of a small tree in a pond. Animal control officer arrives. Makes the deduction the reporter never seeks. Bird caught in fishing line. End of bizarre story. Someone should donate a dictionary to the journalists at Channel 5 News. This was not bizarre...

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The Flippant Professor And RioGrandeGuardian.com

2010-02-01T15:51:00.019-06:00

It is in all-inclusive publications - print and online - that people who want to write find a sympathetic venue. Often, they are unpaid contributors. RioGrandeGuardian.com is one such venue. On any given day, you can find a string of "columns" written by advocates of veterans affairs, partisan politics, labor, the Texas-Mexico border, Latin America, etc., etc. Rarely is this work thoughtful or engaging. The writing is banal and it always seems to stay on the beaten, non-offending path.

Then there is columnist Samuel Freeman, a political science professor at UT-Pan American. He likes to stretch his over-simplified thoughts, adorning them with childish humor and solemn pronouncements of the sort that do not make one think, but make one wonder about this writer's brain.

Here, we offer a few excerpts from his latest column, one assessing President Barack Obama's recent State of The Union Speech. Early-on, Freeman wonders about this claim by the administration that Obama took office in the worst of economic times. He is of the opinion that the years of the American Civil War were worse. You decide whether there is any lingering connection between the 1860s and the Year 2010. And, venturing onto a sidebar, hot-button topic, he questions the entire debate about who knew what ahead of the attack on New York in 2001.

Most people at that time did not know Bush and Kindasleezzy Rice, as well as most of the rest of those around them, had ignored repeated warnings of the probability of a major terrorist attack against the U.S.

His take on the news media: Of course, the Wrong-Wing Republican Propaganda Ministry - i.e., FOX SPEWS - has worked mightily to contribute to Obama’s falling approval ratings. From the perspective of FOX SPEWS and wrong-wing Republicans, everything Obama does is wrong. Even when he does something they advocate - such as increasing U.S. troops in Afghanistan and refusing to end the war in Iraq - they hammer him. He has been called a “communist” (whatever that is), a fascist, Stalin, Hitler - just about every name in the book except “nigger.” ...In the (not so) “good ole days” when racists could vent their bigotry openly, Obama would have been called “uppity,” and accused of “not knowing his place.” Today, such blatant racism is out of vogue, and has been replaced with more subtle code words; specifically, “arrogant.” An “uppity nigger”, by definition, is an “arrogant nigger who does not know his place,” and, consequently, needs to be taught a lesson.

.
There's more: Since the “night riders” - Ku Klux Klan, White Citizens Council crowd - cannot take him out behind the barn and give a good lashing with a bull whip, they settle for T-baggers showing up at rallies brandishing firearms, and engaging in verbal lynchings. They tell every lie they can conjure up. They scream he is not really an American citizen. They see a giant conspiracy since the instant of his birth to hide this. He is a Muslim. His years in a Baptist church only prove his is a “Manchurian Candidate” sent by Muslim fanatics, an emissary of Satan himself to destroy America. And that surely is what he has set out to do - which is why he is condemned and damned for every breath he takes. When he inhales, dammit, he should be exhaling! ARROGANT! UPPITY!

Freeman then makes a U-turn, but it's too late to save him: The magnitude of our current crisis, coupled with wrong-wingers unremitting lies and attacks that have been given wide voice by the wrong-wing press, coupled with Obama’s own mistakes and misguided approaches to the problems confronting the nation, and coupled with unrealistic expectations, have placed Obama in a near impossible situation.

We ask: Why is RioGrandeGuardian.com publishing this low-flying drivel? What is his point in offering a convoluted, misguided column? Yes, we absolutely expect a college professor to write with academic authority about his specialty. Freeman, a political scientist, writes about politics as if a clumsy fool. To use words like Kindasleezzy to introduce former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice is pathetic. To allude to anyone calling the president of the United States a"nigger" is disgraceful. This is higher education at UT-PA?

If he wants to be taken seriously, Prof. Freeman needs to bring deeper thought to his columns. He needs an editor. RioGrandeGuardian.com does not identify him as a professor at UT-PA, but perhaps it should - out of fairness to its readers and to its Journalism. We graded Freeman low, as could be expected, and then we decided against publishing our letter grade. Our advice for the professor: Dare to be heroic.

If you're going to be eccentric, at least write something that provokes the mind. Example: When they asked the writer Gore Vidal about America, he placed it in the context of an "experiment," and said it was a dismal failure. And then, to cement his point, Vidal said America would eventually "take its place between Brazil and Argentina, where it belongs."

That makes the reader smile, yes. But it also sparks a bit of intellectual wonderment, which is the task of a column...

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For UT-PA Athletics, A Rare, Biting News Report...

2010-02-01T12:55:00.001-06:00

We have been critical of The McAllen Monitor's coverage of athletics at UT-Pan American, to the point that it has been our contention that the Edinburg school largely counts on favorable publicity at every turn. In Sunday's edition, sportswriter Peter Rasmussen began walking toward fair & honest reporting.

Rasmussen's story, titled "UTPA chooses to keep quiet," laid bare a bit of what's been going on behind closed doors at the state-funded school. Something happened a bit over a year ago with the men's basketball team that led to elimination of one assistant coach slot and one student/athlete scholarship as form of self-imposed punishment. But what are the violations? No one knows, and UT-PA is not saying. This comes ahead of a similar probe said to be in the works from the governing NCAA. UT-PA concluded its in-house investigation last May, and, as yet, no word from school officials, writes Rasmussen.

We've always said that covering any bureaucracy is best when the reporter is both hard and easy, the range coming only to the extent of a particular story's value. Rasmussen has been writing about the UT-PA men's basketball team all season. It's been a chore, to be sure - since the lowly Broncs are 3-20 this year. What happens when a reporter is "too nice" to his or her sources is that those sources grow to expect the friendship to mean eternal positive coverage.

Rasmussen notes in his story that UT-PA officials have been - and continue to be - mum on the investigation. The school invested $25,000 in the probe, he writes. Rasmussen goes on to note that a similar investigation at Texas A & M - Corpus Christi was not as secretive.

The story is a fine, fine beginning for reporter Rasmussen. He should stay on the story. He should keep asking questions, of athletics officials and of the school's administration. He's stoked the coals. And perhaps it's time he placed their feet in the fire. UT-PA officials may not be talking because they think The Monitor will not go after "news," but it also could be that they're just not used to a full-court press from the newspaper...

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Matamoros In The Time of Cholera: On The Road With Brownsville Herald Reporters Ortiz & Ulloa...

2010-02-01T07:05:00.000-06:00

There is a however-numbing, beautiful story in the doings along the Mexican bordertowns, perhaps nowhere better than in Matamoros across the Rio Grande from Brownsville. In Sunday's edition, The Brownsville Herald took a baby step toward that story. In a two-prong effort, the newspaper dispatched reporters Ildefonso Ortiz and Jazmine Ulloa to the streets of Matamoros. The assignment, we surmise, was to deliver a mood story, of sorts - one that would speak to exactly how the often-electric town is dealing with its crime and the resulting effect on its citizens.

Ortiz and Ulloa, however, filed individual stories that play as if contributions from two reporters declining to work as one. Their stories contain similar info and only the barest of facts differentiate them. One comprehensive story given the same space would have been better for Herald readers.

Here's what reporter Ortiz brought back:

Headline: Colorful fiction harming Garcia business, owner says

MATAMOROS -- García’s restaurant has been serving U.S. and Mexican customers for 65 years. These days, though, the owners say they have an image problem. For more than 18 months, rumors have circulated of Americans being kidnapped, tortured or raped while visiting the restaurant, said restaurant owner Emigdio Manuel García. "None of those rumors are true," he said. "However, they have been told so often that people believe them as fact."

The Garcías, both Manuel and his son Raul, believe those rumors have chased away regular tourists, who now are afraid to go to the restaurant. Business is down more than 80 percent over past years at this time. And while the owners admit that a combination of factors is at play here - specifically, the economic downturn in both Matamoros and Brownsville, along with recent drug and political violence in Mexico and along the border - they believe lingering rumors about the restaurant’s safety have had the most direct impact on their customers.

And from Herald reporter Jazmine Ulloa:

Headline: Unmeasurable fear and violence in Matamoros

MATAMOROS - Violence in this border city, residents say, is often left unreported by authorities yet exaggerated when caught on tape by the media, making it difficult to measure. But if there is some certainty in the muddle of misinformation, many say it is this: Fear is ravaging the public perception of Matamoros. People no longer cross as frequently into the Mexican border city as they did in the past, and its retail businesses and restaurants are hurting.

And:

One business struggling in the wake of such unsubstantiated reports is García’s restaurant and tourist shop, which sits at the edge of the Texas-Mexico border near the Gateway International Bridge. Nearly everyone knows the long-standing establishment and its charismatic, self-made owner, Emigdio Manuel García. In its heyday, the place was one of the most popular venues in the city for natives and tourists alike.

But the Matamoros businessman and his son, Raul García, recently described for The Brownsville Herald what they called an "avalanche of rumors" within the past year. False stories abound, Manuel García says, from cartel members taking a cut of his profits, to the raping of a young woman in the parking lot, to the abduction of a prominent Rio Grande Valley businessman from the restaurant grounds.

The premise for the reporting is okay. Too much is happening in Matamoros and other area Mexican bordertowns, so such a story is needed. But this is a weak effort, as if written after a day and a meal in Matamoros. These stories work, but only when editors give reporters time to do the job. We say a pair of weeks would be the minimum. Then and only then would the reader get a worthwhile, accurate account of what may be - or not be - going on in Matamoros.

This particular example of toe-in-the-water reporting unquestionably must be blamed on The Herald's editors. They assign the story, and they see the reporter's work when submitted. If these two stories please Herald Editor Marcia Caltabiano-Ponce and Metro Editor Jerry Urban, well, it is our belief that both need to defend the work to senior management. We say they cannot characterize the work as the best from reporters Ortiz and Ulloa. We say Ortiz and Ulloa, given the time, would come through with better Journalism...

- 30 -

Watching Action 4 News, Viewer Admittedly Barfed...

2010-01-31T07:45:00.000-06:00

Television reporters can never help themselves when pushing their stories. Often, they practice what is called "overkill," insisting on hyperbole to make their point. We notice this more in reports by Action 4 News of Harlingen. If it isn't excitable segments on tainted restaurant food, it's potholes. Every eatery logging city health department demerits gets the weighted-sock treatment; all potholes are mysterious craters.

We're of the opinion that clear, crisp vocabulary works best for the viewer/reader. So then came this on ValleyCentral.com, website of Action 4 News, in a story reported by Erika Flores.

Headline: 38-year-old man admits having sex with young teenager

Harlingen Police said that a Harlingen man admittedly confessed to having sex with a minor.

Admittedly confessed? What English is that? Confessed is enough, Kiddoe. Also, all teenagers are young. We've never heard of an old teenager, not even on Action 4 News. Stunning...

- 30 -

In Passive, Rural Harlingen, Valley Morning Star Dumbs Down 100-Year Celebration Copy...

2010-01-30T18:15:00.012-06:00

Today's Valley Morning Star includes a Front Page story in which Harlingen Mayor Chris Boswell speaks well of the Mid-Valley city. In covering the mayor's State of The City address, Morning Star reporter Gabriel Saldana writes that Boswell lauds the city's burgeoning hospital and medical services, rising opportunities in education, and unemployment showing lower numbers than any other community in the county.

In the end, the mayor promises an optimistic 2010 for Harlingen, as it celebrates its 100th Anniversary. Well, okay. Perhaps things are chipper in Cardinal Country.

But then, there alongside the mayor's story is a Morning Star-inspired logo - Harlingen, Texas 100 Years - carrying this text: Harlingen enjoyed a huge boom due to cotton growing and ginning during the 1920s. By 1930 its population had grown to almost seven times larger when the 20s began.

That second sentence is a mess. We dare to wonder: Does it make sense to the Morning Star writer/editor who wrote it? It's a bit rural in Harlingen, so we're left to imagine the worst...

- 30 -

The Toyota Story: For McAllen Monitor, A Lesson In Sourcing, In Confirming...

2010-01-30T16:04:00.004-06:00

On Friday, we took McAllen Monitor reporter Ana Ley to task for failing to deliver information in her story backing the contention that a Rio Grande Valley woman's crash had been the result of a faulty accelerator in her 2007 Toyota Camry. The automaker is wrestling with the major problem, and we are aware that the news media sees this as the sort of story that will generate sympathy for the consumer. It happens.

It should be said that we were not questioning the possibility that this lady's Camry may be among the troubled cars. Our point was that reporter Ley had not offered corroborative information supporting her lede, in which she wrote that the woman was blaming the Toyota accelerator for her accident. Nowhere in her story did anyone - the driver or the investigating authorities - address the issue of blame.

Here's an example of what we mean by corroborating information.

Headline: Elderly driver crashes Camry into laundromat, blames unintended acceleration

In writing his story, AutoBlog.com reporter Chris Shunk covered his bases nicely.

Story: We knew this would happen, and it didn't take long at all. A Pennsylvania woman has crashed her 2007 Toyota Camry into a Montgomery County laundromat on Wednesday, and she's blaming the ordeal on unintended acceleration.

The 68-year-old woman was attempting to park her Camry when the sedan allegedly took off all by itself. The vehicle crashed through a window into a bank of washing machines and thankfully no one was injured. The 2007 Camry is among the vehicles affected by Toyota's recall of millions of vehicles for unintended acceleration claims.

A laundromat employee told the local CBS affiliate that the woman said she "pushed on the gas and then she tried to stop and she just went forward. She couldn't stop." Lt. John Weed of the Cheltenham Township Police Department told CBS 3 that the woman reported she "was shifting the car into Park, she was parking the vehicle, that's when it suddenly accelerated."

We have placed the needed corroborative info in bold italics. Indeed, we'd still like to see a quote from the driver saying it, saying, "It was the accelerator, that's what it was." Then you could write it in the lede. Readers need info that speaks to specifics, and to the possibilities. It may turn out that, yes, the Valley woman was driving a Toyota car with a faulty accelerator, but to blame it before a mechanical check is a bit premature. In this case, the reporter needed to place the proper source on record regarding the accelerator. Monitor reporter Ley never did that. It'll be interesting to see what the authorities ultimately tell her about the accelerator in question. We trust the story is in the pipeline...

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Blast From The Past: The Life & Times of Former Brownsvillle Herald Editor Teclo Garcia...

2010-01-30T09:50:00.003-06:00

It's always good to see a former newspaperman get back in the game, especially when it is someone you know. This particular former Journalist isn't pushing the young whippersnappers out of the way to monopolize the Front Page. No, Teclo Garcia gets back in the hunt by way of The McAllen Monitor's sports section. From time-to-time, he goes the freelancer route, covering local high school athletic events. Last night, Teclo staffed the basketball showdown between McAllen High School and Sharyland High, a game Sharyland won in overtime.

Background: From time to time, Teclo joins us for coffee at our favorite Starbucks on N. 10th Street, sometimes with Monitor Managing Editor Henry Miller in tow. Garcia is a former editor of The Brownsville Herald and the Arizona Republic in Phoenix. At present, he works for the City of McAllen as a governmental lobbyist.

In any case, here's a bit of Teclo's banner story in today's edition of The Monitor.

Headline: Sharyland comes up with clutch District 30-5A win over McHi

McHi’s strengths are fluid team offense and the sharp shooting of Joanna Reyes. Sharyland put a lid on that from the onset of the game by hassling Reyes most of the night with tough defense and not allowing her to get to her spots around the 3-point arch.

Teclo, Old Sport, this Reyes kid scored forty-some points in a recent game. You could have at least told readers how many she scored against the Rattlers. Coffee on you next time, son...

- 30 -

Ahead Of Confirmation, McAllen Monitor Reporter And Editors Fall For Toyota Stretch...

2010-01-29T10:31:00.003-06:00

Reporters we have known always wrote two-three-four ledes before settling on the one that did the job, the one that was interesting, yet accurate. It takes some experience to master the craft, is what we were told back when we started in the newspaper business. So, yes, we wrote our fair share of ridiculous ledes and learned from our mistakes. The beginning of a news story needs to stand on facts; that was uppermost at all times.

This brings us to a story by reporter Ana Ley of The McAllen Monitor. It's a minor story in today's edition, but it affords a chance to say this about it: That lede promises more than it delivers.

Story: Days after Toyota recall, woman who crashed into house blames faulty pedal

MERCEDES — A woman who crashed into a house after losing control of her 2007 Toyota Camry blamed her vehicle’s faulty accelerator pedal, a week after Toyota added the vehicle to the company’s expanding recall.

The problem is Ley never gets a quote from the woman blaming anything, and neither does she get a quote - or information - from the investigating police department. So, here you have a car model in the national news and a car accident. Does the reporter make the quick connection? Wouldn't you wait a few days to see if perhaps an auto mechanic confirmed a problem with the accelerator? To merely swallow A plus B equal C is a bit much. In this case, the rest of the story never supported the lede...

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Cold and Mineral: How To Land On The Moon...

2010-01-29T07:04:00.000-06:00

We didn't think we'd have to explain ourselves beyond flashing the name of this Blog and augmenting that with its sub-heading (critiques), but here's a bit more info for the uninitiated. That dude in photo at right is yours truly chomping on a salsa snack well-known to most of you. Anyway, your numerous questioning Emails - presumably from Rio Grande Valley reporters we write about, although the creativity of those missives is perplexing because we'd sure love to see that vigor in your work - force us to offer this explainer, as we used to say about stories that bring readers "inside" info:

1.) We do not personally know any RGV reporter, print or broadcast, so charges of "favoritism" don't register. Same for photographers, anchors, web writers, etc., etc. But we do know the editor and managing editor of The McAllen Monitor, and we've met the editor of The Brownsville Herald.

2.) We do not read every story in the papers. Same for the television station web sites.

3.) We generally select a story of interest for posting, one we believe is meaningful and likely well-read. There are days when we select more than one, however.

4.) From time-to-time, we offer a feature we call "Page Review," in which we review every story in a newspaper's Front Page and Metro Page. On that day, we delve a bit deeper into the journalism delivered by that particular edition. Our comments come from the perspective of the reader. We know a bit about Journalism, so that is where our criticism comes from, although we're quick to praise when we think praise is deserved. You should know that the Journalism we have found in the Rio Grande Valley, with few exceptions, is definitely a low-energy lightbulb. To that we add: Effort seems to be made, but the end product (stories) is rarely spectacular - especially from the broadcast journalists. Bland appears to be the preferred style of writing, and vocabulary is largely elementary and utilitarian. But we will point to The McAllen Monitor as the news outlet capable of treating readers to worthy journalism, thanks in large part to the reporting of Sean Gaffney, Jared Taylor and Jeremy Roebuck. The other two RGV dailies - The Valley Morning Star and The Brownsville Herald - do not have the talent this trio brings to the fight. The Herald's Laura Martinez and Jazmine Ulloa could hang with Taylor & Co., but that would be it from that newspaper. Reporters at The Valley Morning Star do not seem to be challenged by their editors. It seems to exist exclusively for Winter Texans, availing the daily bowl of soft oatmeal and accompanying swig of Maalox in "Happy Bingo" features. The Morning Star willingly fell into the role of Quiet Beatle a long, long time ago, so...

Add: As we noted earlier, we have no need for comments (available at the bottom of all postings on this site) that are personal attacks, profane, idiotic, clueless, insipid, Spanglish, grammatical madness, etc., etc. It takes us seconds to delete them, but perhaps if we say it enough...perhaps you'll get it and devote the time to something better.

In any case, that's a bit more about us. We shall strive to update you as needed. And, absolutely, thanks to our visitors: foreign and domestic...

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McAllen Monitor's Monstrous Task: How To Cover The Region's Beer Here-There-Everywhere Culture...

2010-01-28T09:11:00.004-06:00

Yes, they say it's the culture of the region. Drinking beer and breathing: All it takes to live in the Rio Grande Valley. That's how the line goes. Shame lives elsewhere. There, that's our editorial comment for the day. But we're taken there by a story in today's McAllen Monitor by crime reporter Jared Taylor.

Story: Cop catches break in DWI case when arresting officer is no-show for court

McALLEN — An Hidalgo County judge killed a McAllen policeman’s criminal case after one of the defendant’s fellow officers failed to appear in court and testify against him, court records state. Judge Jay Palacios of Hidalgo County Court-at-law No. 2 dealt a “fatal” blow to the prosecution’s case, Hidalgo County District Attorney Rene Guerra said, when he granted a motion to suppress evidence in Officer Alex Alvarez’s pending case on a charge of driving while intoxicated.
McAllen police arrested Alvarez on July 5, 2009, after they found him in his red Ford pickup truck at Chili’s, 521 E. Nolana. An anti-theft locking device was still attached to the steering wheel as he allegedly attempted to leave the restaurant while drunk. In the process, his truck collided with a parked car.

We grabbed the essence of the story, but were left with a few questions. These: 1.) Does the judge have any sort of leeway in re-scheduling the case? A quote from Judge Palacios might have helped. 2.) Does not McAllen Police Chief Victor Rodriguez make it a requirement that his arresting officers appear in court? Ask him. What's the point of law enforcement then?

The judge may have been hamstrung by legalities, but Chief Rodriguez cannot simply let things stand. This officer was arrested for a serious crime. The story will no doubt generate many comments aimed at the judge and Rodriguez. Perhaps reporter Taylor can follow-up and get them on the record...

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Page Review: Today's McAllen Monitor...

2010-01-27T14:15:00.013-06:00

In our day-to-day adventure with The McAllen Monitor, it has been our custom to read it early in the morning, to leaf through its pages in hopes of finding something interesting, to scan it with an eye toward gauging its Journalism, and to wonder about a few things to do with its presentation.

Here, then, is a looksee at today's edition:

FRONT PAGE

1.) RESIDENT'S LIFE: UT-PA President Settles In - To Dorm

We're not Big Fans of feature stories with weak news pegs (Editors Ask: Why are we doing this story, and why are we doing it now?) Such a story is reporter Jennifer L Berghom's piece about UT-Pan American's new president. The story is too shallow to be perceived as even the barest of profiles. It is closer to being a vignette, a chatty story based on a single sit-down interview, one dressed-up by a few quotes from a student and a university administrator. Berghom writes it listlessly, in sing-song fashion, and as if for a nursing home weekly. UT-PA is a university with a variety of troubling issues: enrollment, athletics, competition from South Texas College, etc., etc. Berghom does not venture there. Instead, she visits the campus, gives it the once-over and apparently splits back to the newsroom. For The Monitor, perhaps the color photo of new Pres. Robert Nelsen ambling into his dorm room was enough to place this story on the Front Page. The photo was cute; the story was lacking.

2.) FAMILY FIGHT TURNS FATAL

This story, by reporter Jared Taylor, carried the weight of the front page's news expectations. Taylor is fast becoming The Monitor's most inventive writer, inventive in that he seeks to make his stories stories and not merely reports. His storyteller style, on even the thinnest crime story, does the newspaper proud. In this piece, he writes about the bizarre shooting of a young man at the hands of his brother at their home near Alton. The news is this: two young men in their early 20s argue over use of the home's bathroom. One eventually shoots the other in the neck, resulting in death. Taylor could have done what the television stations did and merely given the basics as offered by law enforcement. But his story is a story, written to give the readers more than the basic info. His lede is ceative: "A childish argument between two brothers ended with adult consequences Tuesday morning." Clear, crisp. Succinct (with a glass of Shiraz) has no better friend at The Monitor than reporter Jared Taylor. The accompanying color photograph is fuzzy. This novel story deserved better play and better photography.

3.) Deputy Constable Thwarts 3 Efforts To Draw Blood

Again, by reporter Jared Tayor. It's well-known that Rio Grande Valley elected officials and bureaucrats are quick to make monkeys of themselves. Here, Taylor writes about Hidalgo County senior deputy constable Javier Hinojosa. It is a second-day story that comes on the heels of Hinojosa's arrest on a charge of DWI following a crash in which three people went to the hospital, one being his 11-year-old son. Taylor has fished info at area hospitals to note that all three declined to obtain blood samplings from Hinojosa, as required by state law. It is a single factoid in the overall story, yet it speaks to not only the Hinojosa case, but to lax enforcement of these cases when they deal with local bureaucrats and elected officials. Taylor's story was informative and written with the authority of a reporter who knows his facts. This reporter works shoe leather for details that make his reporting superior. But, once more, the police mug shot of constable Hinojosa was weak, almost pitifully lame.

VALLEY AND STATE PAGE

1.) The "feature" story on this page is a report by reporter Martha L. Hernandez on the opening of a new library in the city of Penitas. Titled New Chapter, it underwhelms the reader from the outset. Hernandez writes about how the new library will help Penitas residents avoid making a drive to better - and bigger - libraries in nearby Mission and McAllen. The story arrives with no bells or whistles. It is stodgy and somewhat boring from beginning to end. Two color photos - of bookshelves! - accompany the section front, neither anywhere near creative. Hernandez has shown flashes of brilliance (her story on the opening of the Anzalduas Bridge earlier his month comes to mind) in recent weeks, but, really, most of her stories from Western Hidalgo County lack, well, passion. Perhaps her next story will floor us.

2.) Monitor reporter Ana Ley contributes a story titled Police Detain Vandal Suspects and is at once boring and, very late in the story, semi-interesting. Her lede is utilitarian; that is, it is nothing spectacular. But the second-half of the story draws attention, especially when Ley writes a snippet about approaching the mother of the Chief Vandal and getting this: "(Andy) Solorio's mother, who declined an interview request with The Monitor, cried as her son was escorted before a judge during Tuesday's arraignment." It's not earth-shaking info, but it gave her story some life. We do not know Ana Ley, but we have known many young reporters with her style - a style that screams some sort of wish for a longer journalism leash. Editor Steve Fagan should grant it. He may be surprised by this young talent. Now, if only she would accept a bit of constructive criticism.

3.) Reporter Jared Taylor adds to the page by contributing a folo-up piece on a Weslaco story that is still alive after five days. Seems there was a shooting at a gas station in Panther City. Well, the shooter has been arrested. What Taylor writes in Owner Searches For Dog Shot in Dispute is the search for Buster, the attack victim's dog. Buster, Taylor has told readers, was shot during the altercation between his owner and a ruffian. As Taylor tells it in this story, Buster ( a Boxer) fled the scene. Its owner tells Taylor he has looked for him in the area of the incident and in town. Endquote: "If he's dead, I wish I could find him," the man said, "just so I don't have to be wondering anymore." Excellent reporting. In the hands of another local reporter, this one would not have been as good as Taylor's.

4.) Column by Maria Luisa Salcines with this headline: Fufilling dreams requires courage. We have criticized this columnist in the past for having a flair for the obvious. Here, once more, she confirms our belief that road-tired angles and cliches have a home in her weekly column. Pity...

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For RGV Dailies, Moving The News Is Routine...

2010-01-27T09:11:00.002-06:00

Something important is lost when residents of a region can read a good story in the hometown paper and then, simply by traveling a few miles, see it again weeks later. It happens in the Rio Grande Valley, thanks to Freedom Newspapers, Inc. As owner of the Valley's dailies in McAllen, Harlingen and Brownsville, it routinely publishes stories from each paper more than once. If it's in the Valley Morning Star on Friday, it'll eventually surface in the Brownsville Herald and The McAllen Monitor. Here's the latest example:

Last December 6th, in The Brownsville Herald:

Cosmopolitan Intent: Monterrey restaurateur launches upscale family venture on Central Boulevard

By STEVE CLARK

Stepping through the front door of Amazonia, it’s easy to forget you’re still in Brownsville.
The restaurant’s interior, designed by owner Delia Lazo with a strong bent toward original Mexican artwork, would look right at home in any cosmopolitan city — exactly what Lazo, a native of Monterrey, had in mind.

This morning, in The McAllen Monitor:

Cosmopolitan Intent: Monterrey Native Seasons Her New, Upscale Brownsville Restaurant With Big City Ambiance

Same story. Yeah, it's just a piece about a new restaurant. But surely there is "new" info. To merely throw it in the paper as it was written two months ago leaves much Journalism to be desired. It's an easy-reach story for editors who should be thinking "news," not simply looking to fill a newshole on the page...

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In A First, We Praise An Entire Story...

2010-01-26T09:47:00.002-06:00

To newcomers, they say it takes a year to feel comfortable with the Rio Grande Valley. It is a shank of land so unlike the rest of the country, so willing to please and so quick to disappoint. Life comes at you daily, from under every windblown scheme and aboard every faded dream. Eventually, goes the line, you get used to the silliness of life along the Mexican border. Yet, it is those schemes and those dreams that make for great news copy. And when you have a writer with some ability, you actually get to enjoy the stories.

Here's one, by Brownsville Herald reporter Jazmine Ulloa.

Headline: Municipal judge released from psychiatric facility

A Brownsville municipal judge was ordered released Monday afternoon from a mandatory stay at a psychiatric facility, where he had been held since his arrest earlier in January.

In a two-day hearing, Municipal Judge Phil Bellamy was found to be mentally unstable, but a Cameron County judge said there was not enough evidence to suggest he would be a danger to himself or others if he were released.

"Mr. Bellamy, I am concerned about you...Whether you agree or not, it does not matter, but I do think you need some serious help on this. I hope that you, for the sake of your family and yourself, get these things straightened out," Cameron County Judge Menton Murray said at Monday’s hearing.

Bellamy, 44, had been at Valley Baptist Medical Center East Campus since Jan. 11, when Brownsville police officers arrested him after a customer service dispute at Sam’s Club, according to court testimony. Police said he was taken into custody on charges of disorderly conduct and terrorist threats for arguing with two Sam’s employees and a manager and yelling expletives before leaving the store.

At the hearing, psychiatrists testified that Bellamy had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and described his refusal to take medications, "flight of ideas" and manic episodes of "grandiosity," in which Bellamy likened himself to fictional characters Spock and Spongebob.

Daniel Villarreal, the lead psychiatrist at the medical center, testified that Bellamy had tried to escape from the facility last week and had made several threats to sue hospital staff. Francisco Torres, another psychiatrist at the medical center, said Bellamy had been aggressive and irritable, describing one instance in which Bellamy tried to prevent staff from treating another patient.

But in an impassioned response, Bellamy defended his behavior, claiming the medical facility maltreated patients and forced them to take psychoactive drugs they had a right not to accept.

"I was acting like a caged animal, which is exactly what I was, held against my will, brought in unconstitutionally and illegally," Bellamy said, when asked about the day he was first transported to the medical center.

And although Bellamy had expressed outrage, not once had he tried to cause another person bodily injury, said Noe Garza, Bellamy’s attorney. Threats against hospital staff, for example, had been legal not physical, Garza said.

Bellamy said in court he would set up appointments with two of his own doctors upon his release. It is still unclear whether he will return to his position as a municipal judge. But City Manager Charlie Cabler said part-time judges are handling his cases to allow the city to make a decision.

"We are going to have to evaluate the situation," Cabler said. "We are giving him time to handle his personal situation right now and any concerns he may have. We need to make sure he can handle the operation of a municipal court."

Paraphrasing to perfection. Appropriate, meaningful, no-bullshit quotes. Neat ending - a treat of a story for the reader. In two words: Excellent Journalism. Yes, with a capital J...

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The Ol' Double Lede Surfaces In McAllen Monitor...

2010-01-26T09:11:00.001-06:00

Reporter Jared Taylor of The McAllen Monitor is usually a capable writer, at least he has been in everything we've seen since this venture began last Fall. So, we were taken aback by seeing what is called a "double lede" in his story in this morning's edition. It arrives with this headline: BETA buses damaged, submerged in pond during vandalism spree.

EDINBURG — Vandals damaged as many as two dozen school buses as part of an apparent demolition derby Sunday evening. As many as two dozen buses were vandalized at the South Texas Independent School District's Business, Education and Technology Academy campus Sunday evening.

For some reason, we suspect it was an editor's doing..

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Word Handcuffs ValleyCentral.com...

2010-01-25T17:40:00.004-06:00

From a story posted today on ValleyCentral.com, website of Action 4 News, about a McAllen man who fell from a hotel in Monterrey, Mexico:

El Milenio reproted that authorities are investigating whether the fall was accident or if Iruegas was pushed.

There's that word again: reproted. Reproted, they wrote...

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The Convoluted English of Channel 5 News....

2010-01-25T08:45:00.000-06:00

From a story titled "Man Held at Gunpoint at Gas Station," as posted on krgv.com - website of Channel 5 News:

Escalon knows Buster may have not survived the gunshot, but he wants to find him either way so he can bury him.

He's going to bury him either way...

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Away With Words...

2010-01-24T07:47:00.002-06:00

From a story titled "Tough times hurt campaigns" by reporter Emma Perez-Trevino in today's edition of The Brownsville Herald:

On the other hand, Incumbent County Judge Carlos Cascos, the lone candidate for the post in the Republican Party Primary, has amassed more money in his war chest dating back to late 2008 than the three Democratic Party candidates combined have.

Perez-Trevino, shown in company photo, uses one little, little word that is not needed. See it?

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In Today's Monitor, Tuesday's News....

2010-01-23T09:11:00.000-06:00

Okay, how far is too far? In Rio Grande Valley Journalism, it could be a few miles.

This morning, TheMonitor.com, website of The McAllen Monitor, offered this story by reporter Matt Lynch of The Mid-Valley Town Crier:

Weslaco hunting for new city manager again

Wrote Lynch: WESLACO — City Manager Richard Cannone offered his resignation to city commissioners Monday afternoon, less than a month after he took the position, city officials confirmed Tuesday morning.

Weslaco is - what? - 15/20 miles to the east of McAllen. Perhaps no biggie there, but the story in the Town Crier was written earlier in the week. This is Saturday...

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The Trouble With Writing Absolutes...

2010-01-22T17:15:00.006-06:00

We were intrigued by a statement in Brownsville Herald reporter Jazmine Ulloa's story in today's edition. She wrote, in her lede: Mexico trades more with the United States in one day than France does in one year. Ulloa was at the local college, staffing a conference focusing on U.S.-Mexico trade.

We kinda checked things out a little bit. Here are our findings:

FRANCE:

Trade with France 2009 NOTE: All figures are in millions of U.S. dollars, and not seasonally adjusted unless otherwise specified.

Exports...24,270.1
Imports...31,097.8
Balance...-6,827.7

CONTACT: Data Dissemination Branch, U.S. Census Bureau, (301) 763-2311
SOURCE: U.S. Census Bureau, Foreign Trade Division, Data Dissemination Branch, Washington, D.C. 20233

MEXICO:

Trade with Mexico: 2009 NOTE: All figures are in millions of U.S. dollars, and not seasonally adjusted unless otherwise specified.

Exports...117,200.7
Imports...159,510.9
Balance...-42,310.2

CONTACT: Data Dissemination Branch, U.S. Census Bureau, (301) 763-2311
SOURCE: U.S. Census Bureau, Foreign Trade Division, Data Dissemination Branch, Washington, D.C. 20233

Editors should have sought attribution for such a blanket statement, and they should have required corroborative statistical data from a reliable source. So, is reporter Ulloa's more-in-one-day statement true? ...Uh, no.

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McAllen Monitor Protects Mysterious Doctors...

2010-01-22T09:11:00.005-06:00

Everybody knows newspapers are about names and faces. Stories are largely the same from town to town, but it is the names and faces of locals that sell the hometown newspaper.

So, we were wondering why The McAllen Monitor would staff a Thursday night concert at the fabled Cine El Rey and not name the bandmembers or show their faces.

Here's a bit of the story, as written by reporter Ana Ley:

Hundreds packed into the historic building for a benefit concert hosted by Doctors Hospital at Renaissance in Edinburg. The evening event, dubbed the “Haitian Relief Jam,” offered entertainment by a band composed of doctors from the hospital.

Clad in a cowboy hat, jeans and sunglasses, the Renaissance Rockers’ lead singer crooned Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman” on stage while a group of women swayed to the beat below.

Explanation? An agreement with the doctors involved? If so, that is sad. What, was this going to ruin their medical reputations? Open them to malpractice lawsuits because some patient noted these doctors had been working on their guitar riffs when they should have been boning up on the latest heart surgery technique. That's their problem.

The Monitor has a duty to provide readers with certain info: Names, yes...

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At Channel 5 News, A Different Kind of English...

2010-01-22T07:11:00.000-06:00

From a story about a fire in McAllen posted on krgv.com, website of Channel 5 News:

Witnesses told fire investigators the girl ran down after a shower. She may have ran back up to put on her clothes or to get her baby brother.

Can you spot the mistake? Clue: second sentence...

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Stories We'd Like To See, Part One...

2010-01-22T07:07:00.000-06:00

In 1989, the Mitsubishi Group of Japan shocked America when it purchased Rockefeller Center in the heart of New York. The landmark building later reverted to Americans, but it was a jolt. We wonder about the Mexicanization of McAllen. According to talk in the streets (read: my coffee club friends at Starbucks), Mexican nationals own a handful of the bars and night clubs along booming 17th Street - the heart of the city's so-called Entertainment District.

It also is said that some of the better restaurants and bars in the City of Palms also enjoy major investment from Mexico. Is it so? Such foreign investment is not necessarily a bad thing. All we are saying is that it may just make for an eye-opening story; that's all.

We simply think it would be a worthwhile project for some enterprising reporter to check tax records and business filings for such a report. What's visible - and out in the open - is that the crowded streets of McAllen are busy with vehicles bearing Mexican license plates, and that some Mexican bigwigs have purchased million-dollar homes in town. What isn't known is the extent of the Peso invasion...

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Action 4 News Reports NewsChannel 5's News...

2010-01-21T13:57:00.002-06:00

Geez. So much for competition. This from ValleyCentral.com, website of Action 4 News, as posted this morning:

Authorities are searching for the driver of a car who led police on a three-city chase. KRGV reported that the chase started around 3:30 a.m. Thursday in San Juan. It's not clear why the chase started but KRGV reported that the driver led police up to speeds of 70 mph.

The Valley TV station reported that police chased the car to Alamo and then back to San Juan.

KRGV reported that the two people bailed out of the car in Pharr. Police told KRGV that they were able to catch the passenger but the driver got away.

Lately, if Action 4 News is not quoting stories from the McAllen Monitor and Mexican news organizations, its chasing their lead. Here, Action 4 News acknowledges chasing its main television news competitor, KRGV-TV, NewsChannel 5. Groan...and double-groan.

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McAllen Monitor Copy Editor/Columnist Goofs...

2010-01-21T09:01:00.003-06:00

In his latest column, titled "Help Haiti - trade your beer for water," The McAllen Monitor's Andy Comer writes this:

You have the chance to do something heroic by simply drinking one less beer, margarita or glass of wine. Save that $4 you might spend on an oat soda, skip the $10 martini or simply drink the cheap stuff and use your extra cash to buy water instead. There’s some folks who could really use it right now.

Well, lookee here: "there's" is a contraction for "there is"...Doesn't quite work, Andy. Nope...

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Spelling on Holiday At Action 4 News...

2010-01-20T13:49:00.005-06:00

Well, the headline for the story on ValleyCentral.com, web site of Action 4 News, was this: "Witness: Kidnanping Victim 'Cooked' in Mexico."

What should we have expected of the story?

Well, this: A kidnapping ring is accused of taking its Rio Grande Valley victims to Mexico where they were tortured, held for ransmon and in one case -- killed.

Ransmon, they wrote. Ransmon...

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[Editor's Note: 3:21 p.m. - These two mistakes have now been corrected by our fellow scholars at ValleyCentral.com...]

On Five: The One & Only Joe Hernandez!

2010-01-20T13:42:00.003-06:00

From a post on krgv.com, website of NewsChannel 5 in Weslaco:

SAN BENITO - It's unclear if the Joe Hernandez could regain his post as San Benito mayor.

The Joe Hernandez? That guy?

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How To Get Your Comments Published Here...

2010-01-20T08:51:00.003-06:00

We receive a fair amount of comments from our readers. Some of them we use, most we do not. In our desire to help you join the rolling commentary, we offer these suggestions and no-nos:

SUGGESTIONS:

1.) Be thoughtful: If commenting for or against a posting, state your case and leave it it that.
2.) Be civil: Use the vocabulary of intelligence.

NO-NOs:

1.) Profanity
2.) Bad grammar
3.) Strange spelling
4.) Inanities

Keep the above in mind and you may see your comment posted on this site. You also should know that we publish, at best, 5 % of the comments we receive...

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Herald Reporter Feeds Off Internet...Not Good.

2010-01-20T07:07:00.000-06:00

Beat reporting once required reporters to know sources and bureaucracies they cover like the back of their hands. Most veteran reporters, or, really, anyone with more than a year's experience in newspapering, should know this. Indeed, some of the better reporters can rattle-off names and offices of the people they cover with ease. Stuff about the Beat? No problem. You don't need the Internet if you know your Beat.

Yet, here comes Gary Long of The Brownsville Herald.

Long, shown in photo, has been around. He covers education in Brownsville. He should know a few things about his Beat, especially something as basic as the following.

In a Tuesday story titled "Vendor Fair connects BISD to its Suppliers," he gives his readers this: BISD is one of the 100 largest school districts in the United States and the 17th largest district in Texas. Its operating budget for the 2009-2010 school year totals $493.1 million, according to the BISD Web site.

According to the BISD web site? Is that what Long wrote? Yes, he did. One wonders why Long had to source the web. He's been covering the school district for a good spell. We'd have taken the story, read that last sentence, and handed it back to Long. "Call someone at BISD and source it there," would have been our exact wording, perhaps thrown at reporter Long a bit tersely...

- 30 -

Action 4 News Bids Adieu to Channel 23...

2010-01-19T11:21:00.002-06:00

It isn't the Top Dog in Rio Grande Valley TV news, but Action 4 News knows a good industry story when it sees one, especially if it concerns the troubles of a competitor.

This morning, Action 4 News, by way of its website, ValleyCentral.com, posted a report telling its readers that things have changed at KVEO-TV, Channel 23 in Brownsville. Headline: Valley TV Station Taping Newscast in El Paso. The news is not news, as it was initially reported by The Brownsville Herald. But it allows Harlingen-based Action 4 News to now say it clearly is second only to KRGV-TV, NewsChannel 5 in Weslaco.

This is what was posted on ValleyCentral.com: The El Paso Times’ Mediz Buzz blog reported last week that KVEO-TV’s parent company ComCorp was letting go of several from Brownsville station’s staff.

Well, it's really Media Buzz...

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At NewsChannel 5, Time Is An Ocean...

2010-01-19T09:27:00.000-06:00

It's Tuesday, do you know where your "Breaking News" is? Don't go to krgv.com. They're still on Monday time.

Atop NewsChannel 5's Homepage, visitors this morning got this: BREAKING NEWS: Warehouse Goes Up in Flames

Well, yes, but first word on that fire in Mercedes came yesterday, at 7 p.m. - some 12 hours earlier by the station's own reporter, Lisa Cortez. So much for NewsChannel 5 laying claim to being the Rio Grande Valley's Number 1 television station. News junkies would have been better-off visiting websites of the local newspapers...

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[Editor's Note: NewsChannel 5 has now removed the day-old Breaking News headline. It has replaced the headline of the story with this: Wharehouse wall demolished after fire. Groan...]

Tortilla Flat: Channel 4 Leans on Mexican Press

2010-01-18T17:22:00.012-06:00

We file this posting under the category of: Dispatches From a Strange Land, or How We learned to Love the Mexican News Media.
.
Action 4 News today posted a story on its website - ValleyCentral.com - worked by the Mexican staff of Metro Noticias de Tamaulipas.

The story: Tamaulipas officials are cracking down on dirty and illegal tortillerías. The Metro Noticias de Tamaulipas newspaper reported on its website Monday that the statewide campaign has already been launched in Tampico and Ciudad Victoria.

We merely wonder why Action 4 News reporters cannot drive across the Rio Grande and bring Channel 4 viewers the station's own tortilla story. It's - what? - 10/15/20 miles to the border, depending on where you may be in the Rio Grande Valley. What exactly does action mean to Action 4 News?

Those miles are somewhat scenic, if we know the roads to the international bridges...

- 30 -

To Guardian: Where In The World Is Bill Rovira?

2010-01-18T08:33:00.007-06:00

A few weeks back, we chided The McAllen Monitor for using the byline of a reporter no longer at the newspaper. Little things like that go to credibility and to being honest with readers. Such thoughtfulness ought to be uppermost on the minds of writers and editors.

The latest weirdness comes from RioGrandeGuardian.com.

Headline: Census will not skip us this time, say colonia groups

Readers are told the story was written by Gabriela Reyna, Bill Rovira and Steve Taylor

Here's the beginning: PHARR, Jan. 17 - Non-profit groups that work in Rio Grande Valley colonias say they are determined that their communities will be counted in full under Census 2010.

The heart of the matter? Well, we were surprised several days ago when RioGrandeGuardian.com described Rovira as its "Latin America Correspondent" yet here he is in Pharr. What gives? Strange, but so was the Central America assignation. We're told Rovira resides in the Rio Grande Valley and only happened to be in Central America visiting his wife's family when he submitted a "profile" of Haiti after the recent earthquake in the Caribbean country...

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[Editor's Note: We forwarded a note about this to Guardian Editor Steve Taylor, but it was Bill Rovira who replied, telling us he resides in McAllen. It's a stretch to characterize him as a Latin America correspondent. RioGrandeGuardian.com should be honest about its personnel. We did notice that Rovira's "profile" of Haiti contained plenty of material taken from sources on the Internet. When we asked him whose idea it was to label him a Latin America correspondent, Rovira wrote: "Not mine. I'm not an editor." Guardian Editor Steve Taylor did not respond...]

In Brownsville, The Benching of a Star Reporter...

2010-01-18T07:00:00.000-06:00

Spend any amount of time in any given town and it's not long before you winnow out the amateurish news outlets from the reliable ones. And, in that vein, you also get to know a bit about the reporters and their work. That brings us to this: Whatever became of Emma Perez-Trevino?

The Brownsville Herald reporter used to offer readers the toughest, harshest, bone-digging stories in rough-and-tumble Cameron County. These days, she's as visible as Dan Quayle, writing about fire station mascots, housing permits, the honoring of local citizens by the City Commission, and, lately, plastic bags.

In Sunday's Herald, her story's headline is: Local company may benefit from plastic bag ban

The lightweight story begins with these words: Amid a changing economy within the past four decades, employees of a company that manufactures paper bags have been quietly toiling in Brownsville — riding out the waves of good and bad economic times.

Not exactly the stuff to be worked by a Star Reporter, which was Perez-Trevino's badge for many years in Brownsville. Plastic bags may be an environmental issue, but, in the tree of Border Journalism, that is a budding branch that perhaps should be tended to by a cub reporter. The idea is noble. Plastic bags are a problem. It just seems to us that there is a mountain of other, more-meaningful stories Perez-Trevino should be writing to better serve the community. Some blame The Herald's management for the reining of Perez-Trevino's leash. Others say the silencing of The Herald is a corporate decision made in McAllen, where, it is said, the newspaper's future is being decided and, well, it may just be that The Herald is publishing on borrowed time.

No one is talking. Emma Perez-Trevino is not writing. And Brownsville is enduring an Era of No Journalism...

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Monitor Sportswriter Rasmussen Puts Up Airball...

2010-01-17T18:36:00.000-06:00

After the game, the combined records of both schools was eight wins and 30 losses. One, the local team, left the court with the win, its third in 19 tries. That was UT-Pan American. The other squad didn't put up much of a fight. Final score: UT-PA 63 Chicago State 42.

McAllen Monitor sportswriter Peter Rasmussen, shown in photo, dutifully staffed the game in Edinburg, and this is how his story began in the Sunday edition of The Monitor:

EDINBURG – Two days ago, the University of Texas-Pan American men’s basketball team was introduced to the word victory. On Saturday, the word of the day was momentum.

Momentum? What the giddy Rasmussen never acknowledges in his report is that the two consecutive wins came against teams that largely get that designation simply because they field five players. Chicago State left the UT-PA Field House with a record of 5-14, its five wins against forgettable squads. Rasmussen's story said nothing about the losing team's record.

Beating up on cupcakes is part of collegiate athletics. We know that. The Texas Longhorns whipped UT-PA by more than 60 points a few weeks back, as did the University of Missouri. Reporter Rasmussen should at the very least note that the two recent Broncs victories came against teams with awful records. Writing it won't be news to the under-achieving Broncs, but not doing it makes Rasmussen's reporting suspect...

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Worshipping at The McAllen Monitor...

2010-01-17T07:47:00.001-06:00

Well, maybe The McAllen Monitor went with it because it's Sunday.

But this in a headline: One of world's most worshipped DJs will perform at SPI in April

The writer is reporter Zack Quaintance. He named the DJ, but we've never heard of the fellow. Worshipped, he wrote. Worshipped!

We doubt it. Bad choice of words. And, should we be worried because this DJ is only "one" of the world's most worshipped? One? How many are there? Okay, okay, enough silliness, which is exactly what the editor of this story should have said about this particular headline...

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Store Rolls In, Brownsville Herald Goes Ga-Ga...

2010-01-16T07:23:00.010-06:00

We're a bit iffy on this, but here goes. Something hits us wrong when we see some out-of-town enterprise pop into the Rio Grande Valley playing on local sports fandom while looking to make a few bucks. Journalists have a sixth sense about such things. Often, they either ship the info over to the Advertising Department, or they write a two-paragraph blurb and leave it at that.

Brownsville Herald reporter Ildefonso Ortiz, shown in photo, has his own outlook on this. Well, perhaps it was a Herald editor who assigned the story, so we'll say that, as well.

In today's Herald, readers will see an Ortiz story about a truck that came to town yesterday, set up shop, and then began selling Dallas Cowboys gear - jerseys and other trinkets emblazoned with the North Texas football team's logo. Ortiz went to the location and began interviewing shoppers/buyers. He focused on a little kid getting his first - Tony Romo - Cowboys jersey. Stirring stuff.

The best part of the story?

This sentence: In the evening, the Cowboys on Tour truck rolled away from the Texas Roadhouse and Brownsville headed for McAllen, where it will be on Saturday.

We know. Not much of a story here...

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[Editor's Note: We say we're "iffy" on this critique because The Brownsville Herald largely practices smalltown journalism. And in that setting, stories such as this one are a staple. Being "iffy" here allows us to give them a teeny-tiny break. You could say we're grading them on the Bell Curve...]

NewsChannel 5 Covers Wondering Immigrant

2010-01-16T07:00:00.001-06:00

Perhaps a mandatory class on vocabulary for the entire newsroom is in order. Who knows? It could help. We note another malapropism, but it's not the first time KRGV-TV, NewsChannel 5 has confused a word.

Here's the latest: Border Patrol agents took the man into custody. They suspect he wondered away from a group of illegal immigrants.

Isn't it written in the Book of Immigrants that they shall not "wonder" about anything at all while moving north? Just keep walking, head down, one step at a time. Wondering can get you killed...or captured.

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[Editor's Note: NewsChannel 5 has corrected the above mistake. In its amended story, it included this: Police say he was part of a bigger group of illegals moving through a wooded area near the neighborhood.]

Action 4 News Becomes Fan of McAllen Monitor

2010-01-15T10:00:00.009-06:00

This is what ValleyCentral.com, web site of Action 4 News in Harlingen, posted this morning for a story titled, Palmview boy shot in home invasion:

The McAllen Monitor reported on its on-line edition that the incident happened on Minnesota Road near 8 Mile Line around 12:30 a.m. Friday. Hidalgo County Sheriff’s Office deputies told the newspaper that two armed men burst into the home.

The Monitor reported that the homeowner shot at the attackers and one of the suspects returned fire. Deputies told the newspaper that a stray bullet hit the 11-year-old boy in the groin. The Monitor reported that the boy and one of the home invasion suspects were hospitalized but their condition was not immediately available.

Channel 4 did not "work" the story. It credited the people who did, and that's something...

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[Afternoon Update: Action 4 News has now removed its ValleyCentral.com posting crediting The McAllen Monitor for this story and is offering readers its own version. This from its new post: "Hidalgo County Sheriff’s Office deputies told Action 4 News that it happened off Minnesota Road and 8 Mile Line between Palmview and Mission around 12:30 a.m. Friday."...]

News From The Book of Brownsville...

2010-01-15T08:50:00.005-06:00

Lord knows we have enough material daily to bestow an award for Worst Lede of The Day, but we hold hard to the belief that we cannot possibly criticize every little thing. Still, the one offered this morning by Brownsville Herald reporter Steve Clark wins the day.

The headline seems innocent enough: Entrepreneur finds Valley perfect for algae-to-biodiesel development

Then Steve goes elegiac, writing in his opening sentence: And God said, "Let there be light: and there was light," according to the Book of Genesis, although He might have added, "especially in South Texas."

We're not against reporters using the Big Book, but on a story about algae? Eh. We'd be more open to such a thing in stories by reporters covering the wildly creative crime in the ungovernable Rio Grande Valley. Now, that world could use some quotes out of the foreboding Book of Revelations...

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JARED TAYLOR: The Reporter In Me...

2010-01-14T09:31:00.001-06:00

As we have said before, localizing disasters elsewhere always makes for either superb reporting or wimpy stabs at it. Usually, small newspapers fall victim to the latter. The killer earthquake in Haiti brought another opportunity for Rio Grande Valley reporters. Jared Taylor of The McAllen Monitor delivered his readers a winning piece of journalism.

His story, titled Haitian immigrants in valley unable to contact family, brought a nice article full of meaningful information and quotes. Taylor knows the newspaper is a product to be read, so he places a premium on approach and style. It worked for us. Near the end of his front-page story, he wrote this:

Those feelings of helplessness translated into a simple decision for (Esther) Etienne, who said she would donate all the profits from her restaurant in the next three months to the relief efforts. “I have to do that,” she said. “I feel like it’s my calling to do that.”

Excellent reportage...

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Bad Chili: When News Comes Free...

2010-01-14T09:00:00.000-06:00

The crazy part is that Action 4 News offers the reporting as if it is its own. The premise may be, but the legwork belongs to others. Again last night, Anchor Ryan Wolf took to the RGV airwaves to front his Food 4 Thought segment. This time, he targeted a chicken wings eatery in Weslaco.

Here's what was posted about the piece on ValleyCentral.com, web site of Action 4 News: The food patrol dug up the dirt which includes a whopping 39 demerits for violations like off-temperature and expired foods.

This would be fine, except that...Action 4 News uses city health inspection reports to feed the segments. Its "dangerous foods" reports are not the result of independent work. It would be more honest if Action 4 News at the very least followed a health inspector and reported on his findings. Taking the work and presenting it as if yours is not cool...

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The Fog of Winter At NewsChannel 5...

2010-01-14T08:31:00.001-06:00

From an otherwise utilitarian story reported by Polo Sandoval of KRGV-TV, NewsChannel 5 about the earthquake that struck Haiti, as posted on the Weslaco station's web site this afternoon:

Their parents, 74-year-old Abner Etienne and his wife Jennie, arrived in Haiti less than a week ago. We're told that's where they spend their summers.

Okay, how many seasons between now and summer? Is this a meaningful bit of information, or is it filler that doesn't quite make linear sense? It's winter, so this couple must spend more than their summers in Haiti...

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[Editor's Note: After our post, someone at Channel 5 amended the above sentence to read, "We're told that's where they spend their winters." Perhaps our post had something to do with NewsChannel 5 posting a needed correction...]

Gobbledygook On Action 4 News...

2010-01-13T20:30:00.002-06:00

From a story about an alleged rape, as posted this afternoon on ValleyCentral.com - web site of Action 4 News:

The girl told investigators that Ramirez had sex with her again on New Year’s Eve where he threatened that he was not going to leave her alone.

Something is lost when a journalist cannot convey information in a clear, crisp manner...

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RGV Press Goes Easy On Mexican President...

2010-01-13T07:20:00.000-06:00

We were happy to see all relevant Rio Grande Valley news media at Monday's inauguration of the Anzalduas Bridge linking a spot south of Mission with the western reaches of Reynosa in Mexico. The McAllen Monitor was present, as were Action 4 News (Channel 4) and KRGV-TV, NewsChannel 5. So were a few staffers from the RioGrandeGuardian.com.

And there before them was Mexican President Felipe Calderon - the man responsible for militarizing the southern banks of the Rio Grande. It was a golden opportunity to ask Calderon about the ongoing drug-related killings in the northern Mexican bordertowns, but apparently no RGV reporter did it. Not one even shouted a question at Calderon, to ask what comes next in the cruel and bloody chess game between his army and the thugs working for the cartels. Not one Valley reporter chanced the idea that, perhaps, just perhaps, Calderon would stop for a few minutes and provide an answer.

But no one posed such a question. Yes, the Mexican president was here for another reason, but we assume there were no ground rules for the press - at least not any that the above news organizations would agree to honor. We believe the questions should have been asked, at the very least by the print reporters for a sidebar story. And even if Calderon ignored it all, well, that would have been written.

To not ask pertinent questions of politicians at every opportunity is an utter resignation. As one of our editors with The Associated Press once put it when assigning coverage of a recalcitrant politician: "You ask the Goddamned question. If the sonofabitch doesn't answer it, we'll write that."

Calderon should have been pressed...

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Action 4 News Good At Guarding Identities...

2010-01-12T08:50:00.000-06:00

From a story titled Border Patrol agent arrested for disorderly conduct, as posted on ValleyCentral.com, web site of Action 4 News:

Around 2:30 Monday morning, an Edinburg resident, who doesn’t want to be identified, was alerted by barking dogs of a commotion outside his home. The owner, who doesn’t want his identity revealed, said his dogs first alerted him something was wrong.

The property owner just didn't want to be identified and, to please him or her, Action 4 News made sure there would be no question about the identity. They noted it twice in the story, in consecutive sentences...in consecutive sentences...

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Hollow Tank Bewilders KRGV-TV, Channel 5

2010-01-11T18:16:00.000-06:00

From a story titled "Postal worker indicted on federal charges," as reported by Cristina Rendon of NewsChannel 5 and posted Monday on the station's web site, krgv.com:

Prosecutors accused the group of transporting cocaine in hollow oxygen tanks and conspiring to ship the cocaine in packages through UPS.

Note: All oxygen tanks are "hollow," never solid. What you can write is that tanks can be filled or empty, and at times partially-full or partially-empty. But always hollow, always. Otherwise, how could you put anything in a tank...

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Guardian Columnist Clarifies "A-Rab" Wording...

2010-01-11T10:30:00.002-06:00

An interesting sentence in RioGrandeGuardian.com columnist Samuel Freeman's latest offering caught our attention this morning. In it, the UT-PA political science professor writes this:

We like to think we are so superior to all of those un-Christian A-Rab nations, yet four provide better health care to their citizens than is provided in the U.S.

We wondered what exactly Freeman meant to accomplish by using the pejorative spelling of the word Arab, so we Emailed him a note asking for an explanation. The professor responds:

You need to read the passage in context. I was being critical of the anti-Arab sentiments within the U.S. Sadly, many Americans -- largely because they are fed a steady diet of "American superiority" by all of the major institutions of our society (schools, press, government, corporations) -- see us as superior to other peoples, ethnic groups, cultures. It is not unlike Hitler's propaganda about the inherent racial superiority of the "Aryan race." Yet, here are these supposedly "backward" people who have health care systems that provide better health care to their people than we provide to our own. Part of the implied message is we should get over our arrogance. Another part was we can and should do better providing health care to our own people. If nations considered to be "developing nations" are providing better health care than the "most developed nation in the world", that should tell us there is something terribly wrong with how we provide health care. I hope this answers your questions. Salaam, Samuel

We believe the UT-PA professor could have made his point without using a term favored and revered by political extremists. As for the Guardian, well, everything it publishes reflects on its effort...and its staff.

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Now It Can Be Told Dept.

2010-01-11T08:55:00.001-06:00

Any sort of White Paper on how the Rio Grande Valley news media fared in covering the weekend cold front must include the ridiculous angle meanderings of Action 4 News. Its wall-to-wall reporting spanned all possible angles, from pets-in-danger to the semi-hilarious stab at how the sales of caldo went nuts in the dining-out hours of what the Harlingen-based station labeled a Winter Blast.

Well, it's television, so we'll focus on what print reporting brought us.

In today's McAllen Monitor, reporter Jennifer L. Berghom, shown in photo, sets one thing straight: RGV shelters did not draw crowds. Residents watching both Action 4 News and KRGV-TV, NewsChannel 5 got plenty of field and newsroom reports to do with the needs of the poor and of the shelters. To be fair, The Monitor's own Ana Ley wrote in one of her stories that hundreds of people had sought shelter in these humanitarian venues.

Berghom wrote this in her story, "We Dodged A Serious Bullet":

The Salvation Army in McAllen estimated it hosted about 30 people since the temperature began to drop Thursday. Though the men’s shelter at Loaves and Fishes in Harlingen received more guests than usual, the number of people staying at the women’s shelter that charity was not as high as anticipated, managers of the shelters said. “We were expecting a lot more,” said Letty Barron, manager of Loaves and Fishes’ women’s shelter. About 11 women and 16 children stayed there during the cold spell. Overall, the shelters can house about 100 people.

There, now you can stash your wallet back inside your pants or purses. Not much happened at the shelters. We're all for helping, but not when our help is not needed. Outside, it is nice and sunny and bright. Cold? Cold was Barrow, Alaska, not the RGV. The Salvation Army in McAllen estimated it hosted about 30 people, wrote Berghom. Thirty people. As they say on Sportscenter: ..."C'mon, Man!"

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RGVSports.com Columnist Whines, Then Chokes...

2010-01-11T07:15:00.000-06:00

We'll say it here: Sportswriting in the Rio Grande Valley is an exercise in whole-hog rallying behind the local teams. You'll have to dig deep to find a smidgen of criticism aimed at the high school squads, the local colleges, or the semi-pro teams. Elsewhere, these reporters are known as "homers," because they do nothing to annoy the teams they cover. Indeed, they do their - ahem - damndest to shamelessly ingratiate themselves.

Really, the only peep coming out of this daycare playground is that of RGVSports.com writer Dave Favila, who on occasion will launch a dart at the Valley athletics world. We only wish he - and his colleagues - would be a bit more critical and earn that so-called "objective" assignation. As it is, RGV sportswriters are nothing more than waterboys for the area's high schools, UT-Pan American, and minor league clubs like the basketball Vipers.

We almost enjoyed Favila's column in the Sunday edition of The McAllen Monitor, in which he bodyslams University of Texas fans unhappy at losing the national football championship to Alabama last Thursday night. For the most part, his points found their mark. Longhorn fans can be weepy.

Still, these next few sentences in Favila's column ruined it.

What if McCoy hadn’t gotten injured? Would Texas been able to win or was Alabama’s defense too tough? What if McCoy’s replacement - freshman Garrett Gilbert - hadn’t had thrown that shuffle pass toward the end of the second quarter that was intercepted and returned for a touchdown by Alabama’s Marcell Dareus?

Can you spot the mistakes? Clue: He abuses the grammatical use of: had & have. Now, find the sentences and the places in those sentences where Favila, as he would say, chokes...

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Action 4 News Throws Caldo Into Weather Mix...

2010-01-10T06:57:00.000-06:00

Well, give Action 4 News the Anything Is News Award. It wins hands down.

While the nation froze and the Rio Grande Valley got a dose of cold, northern air, Action 4 News reporter Miriam Marentes got a taste of...caldo.

As things are going for the most passionate television news crew south of Falfurrias, we should soon expect yet another novel angle to this Winter Blast - like perhaps a story about how frigid air blows the entire concept of hairspray. Hey, we thought they were done when reporter Rafael Carranza stammered his way through yet another story on homeless shelters.

But, nooooooooOOOOH.

Here came reporter Marentes strolling into a Harlingen restaurant and telling us nothing assuages worries like...caldo. Caldo!

"There are many different ways people keep warm here in the Valley," she told viewers, "...but this is the most common." There followed, your honor, a string of interviews with restaurant management and employees - all telling the world caldo is the answer.

Indeed, reporter Marentes ended her piece with this beauty: "Seems to be working for me." A bowl of caldo rested on the table in front of her, looking like a Number 9 Galvanized tub and, presumably, ready to deliver spiritual shelter from the wicked storm.

Stories such as this manufactured caldo one keep area television news at the bottom of the ladder. It has to be one heckuva (George W. Bush lingo) resignation to mediocrity. Caldo! Caldo, she said...

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At Guardian, Commas Need Not Apply...

2010-01-08T16:20:00.003-06:00

Prior to posting a story today on the current cold weather, RioGrandeGuardian.com had left much of the meteorological Devo-dancing to the rest of the area's news media. It had published only one other piece, about vans being available in the Upper Valley for ferrying of homeless and other needy souls to shelters.

In today's posting, it offered this in a non-bylined story with a Brownsville dateline and a color photograph of Brownsville Mayor Pat Ahumada:

Freezing cold weather came to the Rio Grande Valley on Thursday with dropping temperatures into the 30s with northerly winds of 20 to 30 mph. Showers accompanied the passage of the front with windblown light rain.

A bit of a mess, eh? Mangled wording and missing commas...

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Monitor Reporter Gaffney: Sink The Bismark!

2010-01-08T13:43:00.006-06:00

This from the latest weather story posted on The McAllen Monitor's web site, www.themonitor.com, and credited to reporter Sean Gaffney:

McALLEN --Yeah, it's cold, but honestly, this is pretty mild. By Rio Grande Valley standards, high temparatures in the upper 30s are frigid, but tell that to people in Bismark, N.D. and they'll probably just laugh.

Well, for one, it's temperatures.

And folks in the North Dakota community spell it BISMARCK.

We're familiar with Gaffney's work and this is out of character for him. But it's been a fast year aleady and, yeah, who knows what may have happened here. Perhaps someone in The Monitor's newsroom will shoot us an Email. Confidentially, of course...

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At McAllen Monitor, Calling All Shelters Not Option

2010-01-08T09:01:00.004-06:00

There cannot be that many homeless shelters in the lovely, tropical Rio Grande Valley, can there? You'd think even a cub reporter would be able to call each and every one of them and get a good head count. So this next sentence in a story titled Valley braces for colder temperatures by McAllen Monitor reporter Ana Ley troubled us:

Shelters across the Valley welcomed hundreds of residents, offering them a warm place to stay for the night.

Hundreds could be any of a hundred hundreds. Why not make the telephone calls and at the very least get a ballpark figure? It's not as if this is Chicago or Philadelphia, and it could be the maker-breaker in a reader's decision to make a monetary contribution. Hundreds, she wrote...

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For Action 4 News, It's Pretty Much...A Winter Blast

2010-01-08T07:35:00.000-06:00

We have grown used to Action 4 News being a bit....well, passionate. It's excitable television news, even if the Rio Grande Valley is the somewhat unimpressive 87th Market in the country. So we weren't surprised this morning to hear the Harlingen station's Sunrise anchor Lacie Lowry blame a brief power outage on...you guessed it: the Winter Blast.

The outage lasted, at best, 10 seconds.

We saw it as an obvious easy-reach for Lowry. But, who knows? Right? Who really knows what actually happened? The show continued for another 15 minutes before the screen again went red-orange and a few commercials fell-in as if automatically. "Good morning, everyone. We took another power hit, but thanks for bearing with us," a thin weathergal wearing a fluffy shirt under a black blazer told viewers. Ah, television! Yep, there's something halting, yet wildly corny in a weathergal who uses the phrase "pretty much" over and over and over. And then the Channel 4 screen went lime-green and, well, we'd had enough...

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Worst Headline of Weather Frenzy Blows In...

2010-01-08T07:17:00.000-06:00

In the news business, seasons for certain vocabulary come around with all the reliability of a Swiss watch. And no season has it over others like Winter. Reporters and editors break out the tried-and-true lingo as if wishing to re-live every previous winter since the advent of the trade. This year, the Cliche Headline winner goes to The Valley Morning Star.

Readers of the stodgy Harlingen daily awoke to find sub-freezing temperatures its newspaper predicted had not arrived, but they were still going to get this headline: THE BIG CHILL

HARLINGEN — As temperatures plummeted Thursday, Alma Reyna and her family were just one of many in Cameron County looking for a warm place to stay.

For those of us living the single life, that's every night of the year. Still, The Big Chill was a superb movie. We should rejoice in The Valley Morning Star's restraint, however. Those sheltered editors could easily have gone with: THE ICE AGE...

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Fear & Clothing: Winter Scares Area News Outlets

2010-01-07T11:49:00.008-06:00

Into the meteorological hysteria engulfing Rio Grande Valley news organizations comes this border brain-twister from ValleyCentral.com, web site of Action 4 News:

The group is also taking donations for those who have coats they no longer need.

Read it three times and destroy a jillion brain cells...

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At The Brownsville Herald, It's Still 1972...

2010-01-07T10:41:00.002-06:00

There is real time. And then there is the clock followed by our friends in the press. Why else would The Brownsville Herald, fully knowing that it is the Year 2010, staff a press conference scheduled by management of a grocery store? A grocery store! Shades of some deprived West Texas burb, some dusty and sleepy San Angelo-like town where Western Auto and Woolworth's still live.

There...there was Herald reporter Steve Clark waltzing into the gathering called by people running the H-E-B stores, there to take note of the words being issued by someone named Robert Palomine, H-E-B director of retail operations. It seems Palomine was announcing "at an in-store press conference at the grocery chain’s Paredes Line Road location that the company has plans to remodel 60 stores across the state of Texas, including the Rio Grande Valley and possibly Brownsville and Harlingen."

Oh, and, yeah, H-E-B plans to open a store in the metropolis of San Benito.

This is press release material. We cannot imagine any self-respecting reporter in Houston, Dallas, Austin, or any major city driving to a grocery store for a news conference. It is the mark of a weekly news operation, some low-tier outfit dependent on neighborhood news for copy. For a part of the state eagerly wishing to be taken seriously elsewhere, this is the sort of minor league Journalism that keeps it where it is - forever defined as a Land of Rubes. A news conference in a grocery store, Clark wrote. In a grocery store...

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In Monitor, Columnists Bore An Entire Town...

2010-01-07T09:50:00.004-06:00

It is the rain of words that annoys more than pleases. Every week, in The McAllen Monitor, four columnists sit down to scribble their Pablum. And, invariably, the readers who know there is much, much more to life in McAllen, pull their hair and gnash their teeth. How, they ask, can such bland pap be published for a community in the middle of great social drama?

The answer: Blame it on Editor Steve Fagan and Publisher M. Olaf Frandsen. They oversee the news content at The Monitor. Either of the two could say, "Hey, Garza, you're not column material." Or, "Hey, Salcines, that one just didn't cut it. Adios, Kiddoe...Try the newspaper in Reynosa."

In recent days, columnists Andy Comer (shown in photo), Nora Garza, Rod Santa Ana and Maria Luisa Salcines have written about, respectively, airline magazines, familial clutter, Internet mold classes and swinging the bat - as in taking chances when unfolding a life.

The reaction in town: Yawns. Or, more correctly, huge, county-sized yawns.

Comer is really a copy editor at The Monitor. About him, one wonders why he writes a column when the newspaper has such glaring editing problems. Garza is a county extension agent with the Texas AgriLife Extension Service in Hidalgo County. Santa Ana is a communications specialist with the same entity. Salcines is a parenting counselor. If these four "safe" writers had opted to become a musical band, they would likely be The Monkees. We need not say more.

Again, we would urge The Monitor to use others in the community. Take a few weeks to interview butchers, barbers, cabbies, waitresses, hairstylists, poets, bank clerks, secretaries, jailers, etc., etc. Their contributions would add to the local spice. It's a new year. Change the enchilada plate side orders, in other words...

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In Brownsville, Ignoring The Year Of The Dog...

2010-01-06T12:20:00.000-06:00

It's been a very good year for pets, stray dogs, cats and pretty much every needy, heart-tugging organism in Brownsville. The mayor has made time to come out for dogs. Publicity-hungry animal advocacy groups have seen their cause embraced by the newspaper.

So why, then, is Brownsville Herald reporter Jazmine Ulloa, shown in photo, writing the following silliness?

In her story titled: Experts say pets need care when weather plummets: Brownsville animal advocates for years have battled what they call a culture of apathy toward the city’s estimated 80,000 pets, and pet problems are exacerbated during extreme weather.

Apathy? Where? All Ulloa has to do is check her own newspaper's 2009 archives to see the endless scribbling that came whenever a local pet was either stolen, smuggled, traded, kicked, maimed, starved, abandoned, or gutted. Apathy? Apathy, she wrote...a-pa-thy.

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Herald Reporter Goes Chronically...

2010-01-06T07:01:00.000-06:00

Well, at least no local news reporter has ventured forth with the road-weary "Old Man Winter" when crafting their weather story. But...but there's the annoying, easy-reach bureaucratese that makes it sooner or later. Here's one from reporter Laura Tillman of The Brownsville Herald:

* Victor Maldonado, the director of the Ozanam Center, knows that it can be hard to help the city’s chronically homeless.

Chronically homeless? Okay. We can picture that. But, really, what does "homeless" mean, Laura? Does Brownsville have Monday-Friday homeless people? Morning to sundown? Doubt it. Homeless is homeless.

Using the lingo of the social service bureaucrats is okay at times, but not three paragraphs in a row. In a row!

* Unlike many families who come to the center as a temporary shelter, with intentions to transition back into their own housing, chronically homeless people may prefer to sleep outside rather than dealing with officials like Maldonado.

* But when a cold front comes in, like the one expected for Thursday and Friday, Maldonado says that it presents a unique opportunity to help these residents. The chronically homeless come to the shelter when the temperatures drop.

Does The Brownsville Herald have at least one competent copy editor?

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Action 4 News & The Bonds Thing...

2010-01-05T20:10:00.005-06:00

From a non-bylined story posted today on ValleyCentral.com, web site of Action 4 News: The San Benito woman appeared before Cameron County Magistrate Judge Luis Saenz on Tuesday morning where she received $20,000 dollars in bonds.

One more time for our friends at Channel 4: Bonds are not given...or received. They are set (or assessed) by a judge, in court...

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Odd Decision At KRGV-TV, NewsChannel 5...

2010-01-05T06:40:00.001-06:00

Someone called KRGV-TV, NewsChannel 5 to say they'd found medical records belonging to a Weslaco health care agency. Channel 5 took the paperwork, looked it over, and then reported a story that said the documents found along some street contained delicate information. No problem there; it happens. You report the story.

But when the agency, identified as Milagros II Home Health, asked that Channel 5 return the documents, the station declined.

Its web site - krgv.com - carried the story with the headline Medical Records Found.

Its report includes an explanation from Milagros II Home Health Manager Edward Rippistine. According to Channel 5, "He said, 'We had a staff member actually who ended up losing a bag. She recovered it, but wasn't able to get all of the paperwork. It was an accident, yes, because this is something that we generally safeguard as much as we possibly can.' "

Then comes the weird part

Says Channel 5: The company asked us to give the papers back. For now, we're holding on to them while we wait for advice from the Attorney General. It's unclear whether the home health company could face punishment since this appears to be an accident.

Big Clue: The documents are the property of the home health agency. They should be returned. The story has been reported. If the state Attorney General's office has a problem with the agency's handling of personal medical records, it will investigate. Channel 5's decision is an odd one for a news organization. Its decision smacks of law enforcement, and KRGV-TV is not a law enforcement entity. Give the documents to the police. They'll know what to do.

They'll drive the documents to the agency's office and hand them to their rightful owner. Someone else will decide whether a penalty will be assessed to Milagros II Home Health. Simple stuff, isn't it?

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The Somewhat Funny Scribbling of Channel 4...

2010-01-04T17:05:00.007-06:00

From a non-bylined story titled Weslaco shoplifting ring busted posted on ValleyCentral.com, web site of Action 4 News:

The group would steal the clothes and resell them throughout the Rio Grande Valley for profit.

Resell? They were stolen! And why else would they sell them, if not for profit?

.
All six suspects are from Brownsville. They all appeared before a Weslaco Municipal Court judge on Saturday where they each received $50,000 dollar bonds.

In legal settings, bonds are not something you give or receive. They are assessed...

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At Monitor, Sidebar As Lead Story...

2010-01-04T12:12:00.007-06:00

It's something you don't often see: a newspaper acknowledging use of Associated Press reporting when the same AP story is published as a sidebar. It happened in Monday's edition of The McAllen Monitor.

The Monitor's story on border strife by reporter Ana Ley played on the Front Page. The Associated Press story accompanied the jump portion of Ley's story on Page A4. Headline for Ley's story: Ready For the Worst. Headline for the AP Story: Mexico nabs third brother in reputed drug family

It all concerns the ongoing violence in Mexico. Ley gives readers an overview of the problem's recent history and ties it to the AP story. Indeed, she even takes a portion of a quote in the wire story to strengthen her own reporting.

In the Associated Press story: In a possible sign of that fight, the bound, beaten bodies of two men were found Wednesday hanging by their necks from a highway overpass in the Sinaloa town of Los Mochis. Nearby, a message was written on a piece of cardboard: "This territory already has an owner."

In Ley's story: As recently as Dec. 30, the bound, beaten bodies of two men were found hanging by their necks from a highway overpass in the northern state of Sinaloa, home to some of the most powerful crime lords in Mexico. Nearby, a message written on a piece of cardboard apparently written by members of the Beltran Leyva cartel warned rivals that "the territory already has an owner."

Too close for plagiarism comfort, is what we'd say.

We'll let The Monitor editors wonder about that one. Another question: Why localize the AP story to the extent of placing the obvious sidebar (Ley's story) on the Front Page and burying the wire story (arrest of yet another Beltran brother)?

The AP story was the reason for Ley's effort. That is clear. We say: At the very least, publish the stories side-by-side. One more: Eyeball material taken from any wire story and used by staff reporters. Simply adding a tagline that says the AP contributed to the staffer's report is not enough. The local story should stand on its own reporting.

This was Ley's intro (lede) to her piece: As Mexico’s bloody drug war rages on at the Rio Grande Valley’s doorstep, law enforcement officials north of the border say they are prepared for the worst. Still, they don’t expect it will come to that in 2010.

She should have stuck to that as the dominant angle in her reporting...

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Sloppy Editing Ruins Brownsville Herald Story...

2010-01-04T07:11:00.000-06:00

We want to believe that it's just editing errors, that a reporter would never write such a goofy news story. But there it is in all its muddled weirdness. The reporter? Travis M. Whitehead (shown at right) of The Brownsville Herald. The story: Need For Knowledge, published in Sunday's McAllen Monitor Valley Life section.

The problem: "When a mother said she had make her son put the dictionary away and go to bed, Bill Foster knew he was making a difference."

And: "The mother who said she had to send make her son put the dictionary away and go to bed said he and his father were up until 10:30 studying the periodic table of elements in the book."

Both sentences above were taken verbatim from today's Monitor. We think some editor meddled with this story. Now, was it ruined at The Monitor...or at The Herald?

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Going After Gangs In Harlingen. Sort Of...

2010-01-03T11:07:00.006-06:00

The article appears to be a good stab at a story not often found in the pages of The Valley Morning Star. Reporter Corey Ryan takes to the streets and fishes for color from the neighborhoods, nuance from statistics, and operational info from the Harlingen cops. Titled "Harlingen police unit targets gangs," the report is laudable for its ambition. We were just stopped cold by Ryan's intro, the so-called lede in a journalism story, and his extensive use of law enforcement lingo.

The Lede: Armed street thugs were trying to take over the streets in sweeping numbers.

It's not a full image. Ryan needed to round out the portrait. He forces the reader to wonder what the second-half of that sentence ought to be. Just give readers the full picture as soon as possible.

Instead, Ryan follows his lede with this: “We were all about gang banging,” said a member of the West Side Aquas, the city’s most violent gang in recent memory. “And we had guns, lots of guns.” Going into their neighborhoods would be like shaking a hornet’s nest. Agitation would undoubtedly be the response by local gang members to a police unit designed to stop them.

Reporters who work stories over a long period of time often find themselves with more information than they'll be able to use in the final version. This is where writing with authority comes in. Ryan is new to Journalism and, as such, falls victim to taking the story only halfway across the street. A savvy editor would have asked for a rewrite, to help both the writer and the reader.

We've seen - and noted - good work from Ryan. This story, however, falls short. In the end, it is filled with copspeak: "This job could get you killed, the newly formed Gang Eradication Unit's leader warned his handpicked team during a meeting about a week after gang violence came to a head."

And: Mayer's message was simple. If someone contributed to gang life, they would face consequences.

Cliches and road-tired crime vocabulary derail a rolling story. Just write it, is what we would have said to Ryan. Write it the way you want to write it. Why shackle yourself - and the reader - with bureacratic mumbo-jumbo? And we would have said this to Ryan ahead of the project: Spend time on the streets, in the affected neighborhoods, and with the cops. Take a month. Two months. Insist on the spectacular. Tell the editor it'll be ready when it's ready. On those terms, the story would have been much, much better. We hate to get South American here, but we'd advice young reporters to dream the impossible dream. There, that's our one and only cliche for 2010...

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Correction At Channel 4: It's Nuevo Progreso!

2010-01-03T07:44:00.002-06:00

This morning, we noticed ValleyCentral.com (Action 4 News) has corrected an earlier error. In an initial posting listing its Top 10 Stories of 2009, the station's Sergio Chapa had assigned a shooting to the South Texas community of Progreso. His correction reads:

The Number 5 story was a breaking news report about a shootout in the Mexican border town of Nuevo Progreso.

Readers and viewers need to know that journalists are willing to make corrections. We haven't seen many from Rio Grande Valley journalists during our brief existence...

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McAllen Monitor Plays With Front Page...

2010-01-02T17:30:00.000-06:00

It is the sort of editing decision that makes even the newsroom staffers shake their heads. We speak of the feature story as Front Page material. On occasion, the idea works. Most of the time, it does not. In today's edition of The McAllen Monitor, readers were treated to one such bad decision. The large headline - 'They're Pretty' - left us feeling someone had not tried hard enough to come up with something better. Thankfully, that was removed from the online version, where viewers found: Palm trees an essential part of the Valley's identity.

This must be said: We do not quarrel with reporter Ana Ley's work.

What did bother us was that there was not one frond of "news" in the story. What it offered was the hardly-sentient observation that palm trees abound in the - ahem - City of Palms.

Wrote reporter Ley: Their beautifully slender, swaying bodies seem to welcome travelers into the Rio Grande Valley. Palm trees, which flourish in abundance in South Texas, are easily one of the region’s most noticeable plants. Many visitors are surprised to find such a tropical tree in an area distinguished by flat land and an arid climate - and in a state known rather for its bluebonnet fields and prickly pear cacti.

And from there began a quickie lesson on the various kinds of palm trees anyone sees when moving up and down the area's roads and highways. Fair enough. But what's the news peg? Why is the newspaper doing this story now? And why not place it on the Valley & State page, or in the lighter Valley Life section?

A historical review of palms trees, with no urgent reason to do it, is not a Front Page story. A better story for that prominent space would have been a deeper look at the apparent clash between the city and owners of 17th Street bars. According to reporter Nick Pipitone's Page B-1 story, these bar owners have a post-New Year's Eve beef with city administrators. The Beef: Seems city officials set up the bandstand on a neighboring street and located the crowd-drawing, celebratory ball drop two blocks away - on Beaumont Street. "We were expecting a lot more street traffic," one bar owner told Pepitone. "I would say double than what it was." Hmmmmm?

Such undercurrent squabbles between private enterprise and municipal bureaucracies always make for good, community Journalism. They tend to make readers feel as if public servants are being selfish (which is true), and private business is being, well, childish (which is expected). Coming two editions after the successful New Year's Eve downtown bash, such a story would have played well on The Monitor's Front Page...

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Monitor Sportswriter Goes Soft on UT-PA Broncs

2010-01-02T10:21:00.004-06:00

In even the best newsrooms across this great land, Sports is casually characterized as the Toy Department. It is the section in the newspaper where every excitable adjective known to English is fair game, where hyperbole is a requirement, and where writers are given a long, long leash. In the Rio Grande Valley, the sportswriting corps could be a bit more dramatic, but that's just our opinion. Still, we smile away when reading what the local newspapers have to offer from the world of sports.

Peter Rasmussen, a sportswriter for The McAllen Monitor, writes about the UT-Pan American Broncs. We would wish to use the word "covers," but he really doesn't cover them. Part of the coverage equation is being critical - reporting a team's ups...and a team's downs. In the case of the lowly Broncs, Rasmussen doesn't do it. Here's the most recent example of why we say that:

The Broncs are at odds with basketball success this season, yet Rasmussen types away as if hopscotching across recess activities in the playground of a daycare. In today's Monitor, he offers the following ahead of tonight's game between the Broncs and the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, CO.: "The University of Texas-Pan American men's basketball tream's last two games revealed a disturbing trend. During games against Northern Arizona on Monday and Louisiana Tech on Dec. 22, the Broncs failed to put together a complete 40 minutes of basketball."

Last two games, Peter?

The pitiful UT-Pan Am Broncs are 1-13 this season!

To Rasmussen and his colleagues, we offer the words of one Howard Cosell: "Tell it like it is..."

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Geography Baffles Action 4 News...

2010-01-02T07:42:00.000-06:00

From a story by Sergio Chapa titled Top 10 Action 4 News Stories for 2009, as seen on ValleyCentral.com, website of Action 4 News:

The Number 5 story was a breaking news report about a shootout in the Mexican border town of Progreso.

Too bad the shooting happened in Nuevo Progreso...

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Dept. of Great Moments In Valley Sports

2010-01-01T11:41:00.010-06:00

From a story by Lori Vermaas for RGVSports.com, as published in today's McAllen Monitor: With 3:46 to go, she drove in a layup after picking the pocket of a McHi player and added another two minutes later by curling around the Lady Bulldogs’ defense to work free for a deftly thrown pass.

Headline? Harlingen South routs McHi...The basketball game apparently was exciting, what with all that picking of pockets and curling and passes being thrown deftly. Whew!

She had us at "picking the pocket..."

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Strange Sentence Appears on Channel 5 Web Site

2010-01-01T10:01:00.003-06:00

This from KRGV-TV, NewsChannel 5's web site:

MISSION - The Castellano family they paid $2,000 to George Castillo House Movers to bring their home from San Benito to Mission.

According to krgv.com, the story was reported by Cristina Rendon. Maria Elena Hernandez, web content coordinator for Channel 5, reminds us that reporters do not always write the web site stories (news producers sometimes do it), so we are obliged to note that here. Still, it is bad grammar...and it reflects badly on the Weslaco station...

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At The Herald, An Inferior Story Greets 2010

2010-01-01T07:05:00.001-06:00

The Brownsville Herald today offers readers its annual Year in Review report. High drama to do with crime, harsh politics and the occasional goof coming from City Hall again interrupted the city's inherent boredom in 2009. It must, however, be noted that Charro Days remains on the city's social calendar. Here, then, we focus on a few writing/editing problems with the newspaper's story. We begin:

* The federal response to the recession in the form of stimulus dollars, proved to be a win for Brownsville.

No comma is needed in this sentence. If you must keep it, add another one after the word...recession.

* The new passport requirements are part of a travel initiative to secure the nation's border.

There continues to be more than one border. Plural.

* Brownsville residents were on edge as violence in northern Mexico continued to rise in 2009, as the Mexican government and military took on the drug cartels.

In the case of "took on," a better word would be...engaged.

* The truck driver, who Mexican authorities said was drunk, apparently lost control and swerved into the bus' lane.

What is that apostrophe doing there? Unnecessary.

* Then the Board of Trustees began proceedings against former superintendent Hector Gonzales, on Jan. 16 naming Brett Springston, the assistant superintendent for operations, as interim superintendent.

Awkward, wordy sentence.

* Mayor Pat M. Ahumada ended 2009 as he did 2008 — with a cloud over him and his integrity questioned.

What kind of cloud? Cloud of suspicion perhaps? There are nice clouds that bring needed shade and cool rains.

* How did the check get from the city finance department to Ahumada’s hands? That question again rears its head at the start of the new year. The mayor’s second trial on felony charges of theft, abuse of official capacity, and misapplication of fiduciary property is slated for Jan. 19. The first trial ended in a deadlocked jury and a mistrial in October 2009.

This begs the question: Where is The Herald's reporting? Seems the newspaper's City Hall reporter would be able to get this info. How about asking municipal personnel?

* ...Parks Director Chris Patterson and developer Richard Hope were duped at the hands of promoter Hiro Jamal Hariram of Houston.

At the hands? Using the word "by" is better. No murder or torture was involved, so leave those words for writers of True Crime books.

* Police said Horn was killed in a crime of passion.

Has that been confirmed in a trial? The word "believe" would be our word.

[Ultimately, we found this to be an inferior effort in great need of a re-write. It reads as if a first draft - a gathering of interesting notes that, if better organized, would make for a Journalism story. We doubt any editor at The Herald wants to claim this story. Perhaps that is why no Herald reporter or editor affixed his/her name to it. Done with professional pride and a stab at the spectacular, these reflective stories can be a pleasure to write...and a treat to read. This is not a good beginning to the New Year for troops at The Herald...]

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[Editor's Note: This story can be found on The Brownsville Herald's web site, brownsvilleherald.com...]

The Reporters...

2009-12-31T08:45:00.002-06:00

On this the last day of 2009, we're taking a few minutes to praise the good work offered by some of the Rio Grande Valley's better reporters. There are a handful. Here's the Readers's Digest version of local Journalists who impressed us this year.

* Jeremy Roebuck: This McAllen Monitor reporter always gets the story and always tells it in an exemplary way. His work is comprehensive and easy to read. We could pick one of his stories and tell you it stands as an example of his work, but, really, all of Roebuck's stories meet our standards. And it too was clear to us that The Monitor recognizes his talent. At times when a good report was needed, as with the late-year shooting in Nuevo Progreso, the newspaper editors looked to Roebuck (shown in green shirt above). His work - with reporter Jared Janes - on the Hidalgo County public defender program was a winner. We just do not see this sort of skillful reporting in any of the other RGV dailies.

*Jared Taylor: We thought hard about differentiating Taylor's work from Roebuck's, but we saw little drop-off in the content of their work. Taylor's contributions to The Monitor news pages also brought readers a collection of quality stories. As we were often told during our days in newspapering, a story is a story is a story. Well, that is true. But it's always good to see a reporter exhibit his interest in good writing. That comes with each opportunity to craft a story and to craft it in such a way that the reader decides he's just read something beyond the ordinary. Effort shows. The newspaper page is unforgiving. Print reporters are known to grab the morning paper on their way into the newsroom and sit down for a bit of profesional reflection, eyes glued on their stories, looking for ways it could have been better. Taylor, like Roebuck, strikes us the kind of reporter who can't wait to get going on the next edition. (Photo of Taylor, in blue shirt, is shown above)

*Sean Gaffney: We didn't see as much from Gaffney in The Monitor as we did from Roebuck and Taylor, but perhaps we will in 2010. We would draw your attention to the work he offered in his story - with reporter Nick Pipitone - on the death of former McAllen Mayor Othal Brand. In many ways, the City of Palms is a small, insular community with enough Old School blowhards that writing about the powers-that-be tends to be a high-wire act. Gaffney's contributions on the Brand story stormed the barns of controversy. Along with young Pipitone, he brought the good and questionable side of the former mayor to Monitor readers. That's all the reader wants and expects.

Television Journalists:

*Will Ripley: It would take a shovel to dig through the layers of local geography before we would find broadcast reporters in the league of the above print reporters. But Ripley, a reporter for KRGV-TV, NewsChannel 5, was close. His reporting from the Mexican side of the Rio Grande on the seemingly daily battles between the Mexican army and elements of the drug trade was laudable. We don't know much about Ripley, but tend to believe that he's been around long enough to be able to report with the authority of, as they say in golf, local knowledge. It is obvious he researches his stories and delivers them with skill. We cannot say that about too many of the Valley's television journalists, and especially not about the whiners who cannot stand to be criticized. It is visual news that Ripley brings, and he does it well. Now, if only local television news departments could look at innovation. Reporters such as Ripley ought to be given a long leash. We suspect the stories he would deliver would be somewhere between great and spectacular.

And so, that is our short list of reporters we believe offered superior journalism. There is, however, a huge drop-off from there. For print reporters, a bit more enterprise reporting would go a long way to seeing the product grow and plunge into the 1990s. For broadcast journalists, we suggest a quick return to the definition of the profession. A Journalist's only loyalty is to the truth and to the story. Around here, much of the broadcast reporting tends to give sway to the mundane and the back-slapping of smalltown culture. The RGV is home to a large population that, like other urban areas in the country, needs fair and honest news reporting. We continue to think that the Rio Grande Valley deserves better Journalism...

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