Ethics Corner: on watchdogs and the hand that feeds

By: Allan Wolper J. Robert Port has a box full of documents that remind him how five years ago, New York's Daily News emasculated his series on sweatshops to avoid embarrassing Macy's, one of its biggest retail advertisers. Port's pile of papers and photographs also proved that Bloomingdale's, Saks Fifth Avenue, Wal-Mart, Sears, and J.C. Penney all bought clothes from some of the worst sweatshops in New York City. But when the series ran, the stores in the series became generic brands, identified simply as major retailers, forcing the reader to guess who they might be.

"It was one of the most frustrating times of my career," Port, now investigative editor at the Times-Union in Albany, N.Y., said in a telephone interview from his newsroom. "I had to agree to censor myself. But I decided it was better to tell some of the story than kill all of it."

Port is haunted by what his 2001 series could have been. He put together a detailed chart with summaries of the fines the sweatshops paid to keep the feds from closing them down, with arrows and bullets naming the stores that sold the clothes.

"The list read like the best advertising clients of a major metropolitan newspaper," Port laughed, perhaps relieved that he could finally share his secret with someone. It was a confidence he would have kept if he were still at the Daily News or if I hadn't hounded him into talking about it.

"The point of the stories was to follow the clothes," he recalled. "I traced them from the sweatshops to the retailer. The stories were totally vetted. We took pictures of the clothes on the racks at Macy's that had been made at the sweatshops just across town from them."

But when the page proofs were ready, Daily News editors began dumbing down the expos?. They even deleted K-Mart's name from a sidebar detailing its association with a sweatshop that shortchanged its employees out of $400,00 in salaries. The K-Mart label was put back in the story only after Port threatened to take his name off the entire series. Still, Port understands why his bosses panicked.

"Ed Kosner [then-editor in chief] was honest with me," Port told me. "He said that if we published everything we had on Macy's, they might pull their ads and the Daily News would be out of business."

Port believes that Kosner wanted to publish the series as he wrote it, but censored it to keep Publisher Mortimer Zuckerman off his back.

"Ed was a great editor and a great journalist," Port said. "But he wasn't sure how much Mort would let him get away with. So we wound up running a series that let a lot of people walk away."

There was plenty of reason to fear Zuckerman's wrath. He had allowed Kosner to publish a series in May 2001 on dirty supermarkets titled " Dirty Rotten Shame" that resulted in an advertising boycott.

The supermarket investigation had some excellent reporting, but used some outdated inspection reports that gave the stores the right to question the entire series. The New York Times then embarrassed the News by disclosing that the paper paid for an advertising supplement that was a valentine to the supermarkets that pulled their ads.

Port's futile fight to run the entire investigation swept through the newsroom. Several Daily News sources worried that the paper would pull the sweatshop series because it feared another boycott. They urged me to write about it, hoping it would force the newspaper to publish the series. I did.

It was picked up by Page Six of the New York Post, and three weeks later, the Daily News sweatshop series, now a 12-page skeleton of itself, finally ran.

Afterward, Kosner wrote a full-page letter to Editor & Publisher complaining that I had used anonymous sources, and telephoned his advertisers for comment because I'd suggested the series had been "inappropriately" edited: "With the series in print, the writer, Bob Port, has told inquiring journalists that he is very happy with the series and very happy and comfortable with the editing process and very proud that the Daily News has given readers more information on sweatshops than anyone has published in a decade," Kosner wrote.

Port, who left the New York tabloid in March, 2005, told me, "I don't think you can say that."

Kosner, who has just written a book titled It's News To Me: The Making and Unmaking of An Editor, a detailed account of his editorial tenure at the Daily News, Esquire, Newsweek, and New York magazine, says he doesn't remember anything about the sweatshop series: "I have no recollection whatsoever of any of the circumstances of that series," Kosner said repeatedly from his home on Amelia Island, Fla. "Really, it's all a blank to me."