Explain Yourself ...

Dog bites

We'll report this more fully in the morning, but the state's Attorney General says he's filed charges  against Mannatech, owner Samuel Caster, and other related entities. In fact, what Greg Abbott says might sound familiar. Almost like he was reading _ not a script but our clips. Maybe this will jar your memory: The Texas attorney general's office isn't talking about why it has taken no action against Mannatech Inc., a North Texas dietary supplement marketer deemed nine months ago to be a threat to public health and safety by the Department of State Health Services. That's the start of our story published June 25. About a month earlier, we had this story where some of the company's claims were loudly disputed. Today Abbott said, in this release, that Mannatech is accused of operating an illegal marketing scheme in violation of state law. We may be barking up the wrong tree, but didn't see any mention of the Star-Telegram's watchdog journalism work. Here are links (1) (2) (3) to other past stories. __Larry Lutz

Controlling the news

     The 2006 annual report of the Project for Excellence in Journalism idenfied several emerging trends. Leading the list was a capsule report on the effects of revenue stresses that have been forcing reductions in newsgathering resources. Here's the item:

     "The new paradox of journalism is more outlets covering fewer stories. As the number of places delivering news proliferates, the audience for each tends to shrink and the number of journalists in each organization is reduced. At the national level, those organizations still have to cover the big events. Thus we tend to see more accounts of the same handful of stories each day. And when big stories break, they are often covered in a similar fashion by general-assignment reporters working with a limited list of sources and a tight time-frame. Such concentration of personnel around a few stories, in turn, has aided the efforts of newsmakers to control what the public knows. One of the first things to happen is that the authorities quickly corral the growing throng of correspondents, crews and paparazzi into press areas away from the news. One of the reasons coverage of Katrina stood out to Americans in 2005 was officials were unable to do that, though some efforts, including one incident of holding journalists at gunpoint, were reported. For the most part, the public — and the government — were learning from journalists who were discovering things for themselves."

-- David House