Is political correctness coloring the news? - Burlington Free Press reporter fired for reporting woman's comments at Burlington, Vermont City Hall meeting, March 1993

Insight on the News, June 27, 1994 by Sally Johnson

A reporter fired after writing about reverse discrimination alleges that his editors were cowed by corporate efforts to push racial awareness.

The white woman was determined to be heard. She had waited in a long line of people for her turn at the microphone with a restless infant strapped to her chest in a baby carrier. What she wanted to tell her minority neighbors in the predominantly white community of Burlington, Vt., was at not all white people are racists--that racial misunderstanding sometimes can be a function of ignorance rather than malice.

"My name is Ellen Norton, and I am a fifth-generation Vermonter," she began, addressing the crowd of about 250 people seated in the elementary-school gym. "There are more black people in this room tonight than I knew my entire life growing up... Sometimes, some of the things that you experience are not necessarily racism but a lot of ignorance."

About half a minute short of her three-minute time limit, Norton was interrupted by Rodney Patterson, an assistant to the mayor of Burlington and the moderator of the session.

Patterson, who is black, told Norton that the March 1993 forum had been called to allow minorities to talk about racism in Burlington. Norton, he said, was welcome to express her views to two members of his staff in the lobby.

When Norton objected, he interrupted her once, twice, three times. Visibly upset, she left the room in the company of Patterson's two staffers.

At that point, Paul Teetor, the city hall reporter for the Burlington Free Press, decided to follow Norton from the room. She told him she had been the victim of "reverse racism." Back at the office, he consulted with the editor in charge about whether to include the incident, which had taken up only about five minutes of the two-hour forum, in his story. Together, Teetor says, they agreed that he should. Halfway through his relatively brief account of the meeting, Teetor described in eight paragraphs the encounter between Patterson and Norton.

The next day, all hell broke loose. Patterson and other members of the minority community bitterly attacked the Free Press, the state's largest newspaper, and demanded a front-page apology for Teetor's coverage. Patterson, who now works at Michigan State University, said he had been misquoted and his actions misrepresented. The story, he said, was "ugly." Without an apology, he said, he would demonstrate or possibly sue.

That very night, Editor Ron Thornburg, who admitted in sworn testimony that he conducted virtually no personal investigation, fired Teetor for what Thornburg called "distorted" and "inaccurate" journalism -- even though he refused Teetor's request to watch a videotape of the entire forum. Thornburg since has resigned his Free Press position to teach part time at a local college.

Teetor responded by accusing his editors of knuckling under to pressure from minority groups at the expense of the truth. He sued the Free Press; the newspaper's owner, Gannett Co. Inc.; and several senior editors, claiming wrongful termination and defamation -- the latter because of the damage to his professional reputation that occurred, Teetor believes, when the editors printed a revised version of his story the next day.

The case, now in Vermont Superior Court in Burlington, is scheduled for trial next May.

What has emerged from that forum -- and that firing -- a year ago is a kafkaesque tale of political correctness and revisionist journalism in which a reporter has sued a newspaper for libel and a newspaper has gone to court seeking a gag order to keep reporters from making public material covered in the personnel files. That request was denied by Judge Matthew Katz, who ruled, "This court is being, in effect, requested to prevent newspaper coverage." The paper also is fighting to withhold records of the financial ties between the Burlington Free Press and Gannett -- an issue that has yet to be resolved.

At the same time, the public has been offered an unusual look at the inner workings of Gannett, the nation's largest media chain, with newspaper, radio and television holdings. A centerpiece of its campaign to attract minority readers nationally is a program called the "All-American Contest," in which individual newspapers are scored for their racial awareness on and off the news pages.

"Gannett has decided that minorities are the great untapped readership and it has decided to go after that readership," says Teetor, who joined the Free Press in 1990 and has been unemployed since he was fired. "As far back as 1991, I noticed the paper was doing a lot of ethnic cheerleading, but it seemed relatively harmless. It's when it moves beyond ethnic cheerleading to distorting the news that it gets dangerous."

Through it all, Gannett and the Burlington Free Press have refused to comment on the matter, even as they have taken hits from media heavyweights such as columnist David Nyhan of the Boston Globe and media critic Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post, both of whom reviewed a videotape of the forum and found that it largely supported Teetor's version.