A reader whom I have known for years as an astute long-time baseball fan approached me the other day with a question. “Why is the Times going after the Mets?” Ron Dworkis asked, meaning The New York Times. “They hammer and hammer and hammer them. They have a story one day and another the next day and another the next day, and they all say the same thing.”
I told him there was a simple answer to his question but he would have to wait to read it in this column. I can’t say his question prompted me to write this column, but it reinforced the idea that I should write it. I was already thinking about it because I had my own questions about the different ways the New York newspapers were covering the legal/financial confrontation between the Mets and the trustee for the victims of Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.
What struck me from the start was the difference in emphasis between the Times and the Daily News after Irving Picard, the trustee, sued Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz, the Mets’ owners, and assorted other individuals and components of their company, Sterling Equities. The trial in the lawsuit was scheduled to begin March 19 in United States District Court in New York.
The Times kicked off the coverage with a series of articles that quoted anonymous sources. The judge handling the lawsuit had placed it under seal so it seemed obvious that the Times’ sources were lawyers linked to the Madoff trustee.
Wanting to get into the game, the News recruited its own sources, once quoting the Mets’ lead lawyer and otherwise quoting anonymous sources, presumably a lawyer or lawyers for the Mets.
It was only natural. If the trustee was getting his case against the Mets out to the public through his lawyers, give the Mets and their lawyers equal time and space. It was an opportunity the defendants couldn’t ignore.
For the most part, the News’ coverage has seemed even-handed. The same can’t be said for the Times. As my inquirer, Ron, has seen it, the Times has followed a course of heavy-handed pursuit. They’ve acted like the dogs at a greyhound race track chasing the mechanical rabbit.
That the Times has taken a different approach from the other papers can best be seen from their reports of March 6 on Judge Jed Rakoff’s rulings on motions both sides had filed. The Mets basically were trying to get the case dismissed while Picard wanted it to go forward, as scheduled, March 19.
The judge indeed let the case go forward, but he also had some noteworthy comments about the trustee’s case. These were the headlines in the three New York newspapers:
Post: Judge throws heat at Picard’s claim vs. Mets
News: NY Mets case goes to trial even as judge slams Bernard Madoff trustee’s evidence against team’s owners
Times: Judge Deals Financial Blow to Mets’ Owners
If you saw these three headlines adjoining each other, you’d have to wonder if the Times was covering the same story as the others. Read the stories, and you still wouldn’t be sure.
The Post told how the judge gave the trial a green light but expressed doubt that Picard could prove his case to force the Mets to pay $303 million to be distributed among Madoff victims.
“The court remains skeptical,” Rakoff wrote in his four-page ruling, “that the trustee can ultimately rebut the defendants’ showing of good faith, let alone impute bad faith to all the defendants.” The News also used that remark.
One-hundred-eighty degrees from the Times’ perspective, the Post wrote, Rakoff’s ruling “is a blow to Picard.” The Post quoted Rakoff’s skepticism about the trustee’s case in the third paragraph of its article. The News did the same.
Times readers had to go to the 13th paragraph of a 21-paragraph article to read the judge’s unusual comment. In newspaper terminology that’s called burying the news. In addition, the Times did not quote Rakoff as expressing skepticism; the report just noted it.
The Times totally ignored another of Rakoff’s remarks that I believe were newsworthy. He criticized the evidence presented by both sides, saying they promised bombshells but produced only bombast. The evidence, he said, probably won’t even be admissible.
Obviously, if significant segments of Picard’s evidence are not permitted, his case could suffer serious damage.
I wasn’t in the courtroom, but I didn’t have to be to know how significant and unusual Rakoff’s comments were. They cried out for inclusion and inclusion high in the story, certainly the third paragraph, not the 13th.
Of course, positively treating comments that benefit the Mets might not be part of the Times’ game plan. Does the Times have a game plan in this legal and financial fight? It must; otherwise the Times would be treating the Mets and the story more fairly. If there is something that passes for a game plan, I would suspect it was designed by the sports editor, Joe Sexton.
Having been named sports editor after five years as metropolitan editor, Sexton arrived on the scene just as the Madoff-Mets mess was heating up. That was the Mets’ bad fortune. Had Sexton’s predecessor, Tom Jolly, still been sports editor, the Times’ coverage would have been vastly different from what it has been.
Jolly couldn’t direct coverage of a major news story if he tried. Actually, he did try once, but the Times’ coverage of the Duke lacrosse story in 2006 under his direction was the worst and most embarrassing the Times has experienced.
(Having worked under Jolly for five years, I have to admit that I was not a fan of his direction of the sports department, and I think his banishment to the night news desk, supposedly because of his failed Duke coverage, was appropriate.)
I came to know Sexton a little more than 10 years earlier when I was the paper’s national baseball writer and he was the Mets’ beat writer. I thought his coverage of the Mets was as bad as Jolly’s direction of the sports department.
It’s not that Sexton didn’t do a creditable job, but he did it unfairly. He let his personal feelings dictate his coverage. The prime example of that was probably the comment he made and position he took when the Mets named Jeff Torborg manager for the 1992 season.
Torborg was different from most managers. Besides talking baseball, he often talked about family and personal values and admittedly came across as old-fashioned and corny. “I don’t give a hoot if I sound corny,” he once said.
But some writers, including Sexton, did care. “This guy’s boring,” another writer heard Sexton say to a couple of other like-minded writers. “Let’s get him.”
Sexton did his best to achieve his goal. He would write articles critical of aspects of Torborg’s managing but not give him a chance, which is only fair and proper, to explain his thinking or respond to the criticism.
“I don’t remember a whole lot,” Torborg said when asked about certain incidents, “but I remember how unfair he was to Mel Stottlemyre. He was calling for his job. I didn’t understand why he was doing that. That was part of the confrontation Joe and I had in Cincinnati. I asked him why are you attacking him like you are.
“I said you have a good job working for a good newspaper. If you don’t enjoy it, why don’t you get a job you enjoy? He was critical all the way around. I remember him being so negative and so critical. He was like a shark in the water looking for blood. Joe was one of the ringleaders. He was just nasty.”
Sexton’s treatment of Torborg and Stottlemyre, his pitching coach, wasn’t his only fault as a beat writer. At times he used quotes from players or others and applied them to situations they were not spoken about.
There was a game in Los Angeles that the Mets blew in the eighth inning after Ron Darling had pitched 6 1/3 scoreless innings. With a runner at first base and no one out in the eighth and the Mets ahead 2-0, Manager Bud Harrelson brought in John Franco to pitch and in a double switch replaced the good-fielding Tom Herr at second with Keith Miller.
The first batter hit a grounder to Miller, who booted it instead of starting a double play, and the Dodgers went on to score four runs and win, 4-3.
After the game, Darling was livid with Harrelson’s double switch and said sharply to reporters, “I’m a pitcher, and I’m greedy. I want Tom Herr out there all nine innings.”
Sexton didn’t use that quote that night but did use it a couple of days later in an article about Gregg Jefferies, linking Darling’s comment to a pair of errors Jefferies made at third after Miller’s miscue. The comment was clearly directed at Harrelson, but Sexton made it seem as if it was about Jefferies.
In a similar misapplication of a quote, on the day the Mets lost Howard Johnson as a free agent between the 1993 and ’94 seasons, Fred Wilpon met with the beat writers and talked about the meetings they would have that off-season.
“I want to look ahead,” Wilpon said at one point. “If you guys want to look behind, ok.” He did not mention Johnson, but in the Times story the next day Sexton used the quote to disparage Johnson.
The Mets are too focused “on the future” Sexton wrote, “for the club to pretend to be distraught over the third baseman’s departure.” Then he wrote:
“I don’t want to dwell on what was,” Fred Wilpon, an owner of the Mets, said at a briefing for reporters at Shea yesterday. “I want to dwell on what is.”
Sexton had markedly different assessments of Torborg when he was hired and after he managed for a season.
In December 1991 he lauded “the addition of Manager Jeff Torborg for the overmatched Bud Harrelson – the mathematics all work out for a more professional, provocative and engaged atmosphere in the clubhouse.”
At the end of the 1992 season, though, Sexton had a different view of the job Torborg had done in the previous three years with the Chicago White Sox. He wrote:
“It has to be noted, though, that achieving a dramatic but limited reversal of fortunes for a young club is arguably one of the more easily accomplished feats for a manager or coach. And in the one season in which expectations were high and the adequate talent was there, 1991, the White Sox finished second but 8 games out of first in the American League West.”
Sexton is directing, not writing, the Times coverage of the Mets and Madoff so there’s no indication that the Times is distorting quotes or facts. However, as the reader who raised the questions at the start of the column noted, the Times has basically done the same story more than once.
The most recent example of that practice was the story about Noreen Harrington, who left her job as chief investment officer for a hedge fund owned in part by the Mets’ owners when, she said, they ignored her warnings about Madoff.
The Times told the tale last month, then again last week, this time with the embellishment of comments from New York State authorities lauding her credibility. She is expected to testify for Picard at the trial.
An objective observer of the Times coverage might call that piling on. It might also be possible to imagine that, as he did about 20 years ago with Torborg, Sexton saying to his reporters about the Mets, “Let’s get them.”
I made an e-mail request to Sexton to discuss his coverage and was specific with my thinking on the matter.
“I would like to get your comment for a weekend column I am doing on news media coverage of the Mets-Madoff-Picard story,” I wrote. “A reader/friend asked me ‘Why is the Times going after the Mets?’ I have had a similar feeling about the coverage, and it frankly has reminded me of your coverage of the Mets in the early ’90s when you set out to “get” Jeff Torborg with two or three of the other beat writers.”
Sexton did not respond. Another Times employee, who shall remain nameless because he or she might be fired or otherwise maltreated for talking to me, noted that the Times coverage placed among the top five in the Associated Press Sports Editors contest in the categories of investigative and beat writing.
That questionable achievement doesn’t impress me. I have no regard for those politically driven contests, which are judged by a bunch of sports editors sitting in a room and divvying up the awards. In my view, putting a bunch of sports editors in a room together only makes them that many times worse than they are individually.
As he was as a reporter, Sexton is an aggressive editor. There’s nothing wrong with being aggressive unless the sports editor has an agenda. To help initiate what has seemed like his agenda, Sexton recruited a Pulitzer-Prize winning reporter, Serge Kovaleski, from the Times’ news side. Kovaleski produced more than half a dozen stories before moving on to another assignment.
The Times, however, hasn’t covered all of the developments, especially when they have put the trustee in a negative light. Last June, for example, the News had an article with this headline: Investors victimized by Bernie Madoff scheme slam trustee Irving Picard for redefining net equity.
The Times did not have that story. However, earlier last year, the paper ran a story with this headline: Madoff Had Wide Role in Mets’ Finances.
In a two week span this month (March 5-18), these headlines appeared in the Times:
Mets Await a Key Ruling Amid More Negative News
For Mets Owners, Wealth May Pose Trial Risk
Mets Face Burden of Proof
Unhappy With the Owners, Some Fans Root for a Mets Loss in Court
And that doesn’t include the March 6 headline noted earlier: Judge Deals Financial Blow to Mets’ Owners
I suppose story selection depends on one’s point of view, and the Times doesn’t seem to have hidden its point of view.
Are the Mets’ owners guilty of willful blindness, as Picard has charged, by deliberately ignoring an obviously fraudulent scheme? Madoff has said they didn’t know he was operating a Ponzi scheme, but how can anyone believe someone who has admitted operating a Ponzi scheme?
I don’t know if Wilpon et al are guilty, but I can make arguments either way.
Wilpon and brother-in-law Katz have long been bright businessmen. How could they not have questioned the unusually high and consistent rate of return they were getting on their investments with Madoff?
On the other hand, if they knew or even suspected that Madoff was a fraud, would they have encouraged family and friends, such as Sandy Koufax, to invest with Madoff? If they suspected a crooked scheme, they had to know it would come crashing down one day, and their relatives and friends would suffer.
There is no way to predict the outcome of the trial, but should Wilpon and the Mets prevail, the Times coverage will earn a place of ignominy just behind its Duke lacrosse abomination.