When my boy Rick Pfeiffer sets out to screw up a story he can do it with the best of them.
The ace Niagara Gazette newsman can often manage to get things so wrong that the end result bears no resemblance whatsoever to any objective reality.
A case in point is the article he did last week on the six African-American Department of Public Works employees who have filed a multi-million dollar discrimination lawsuit against the city, a story you first read about in the Niagara Falls Reporter last year.
Let's start with Pfeiffer's breathless one-sentence lead paragraph. He's a master of the breathless one-sentence lead paragraph.
"Emmitt Cox couldn't believe what was happening."
That would be good, except for the fact that my friend Emmett spells his name with two "e's" and no "i."
A minor point, perhaps, but a portent of things to come.
Pfeiffer goes on to say that the lawsuit was filed last November.
Actually, it was filed last June, but I'll give the hapless scribe the benefit of the doubt on that one. November was the month we broke the story and, since he was cribbing his background notes from the Reporter archives rather than official court documents, it's quite understandable how he became confused.
Then there was a real howler.
Pfeiffer referred to one of the black workers, Bruce Palmer, as a "seasonal employee." Back in 1978 and 1979, when Pfeiffer was getting his hair blow-dried for his job as a television personality, Palmer was indeed a seasonal employee.
But for the past 24 years, Palmer has been a full-time employee for the city, often earning overtime by driving snowplows and taking on other harsh assignments that sources say some of his lighter-skinned co-workers refuse to perform.
But the most egregious error in the story was Pfeiffer's repeated references to Cox, Palmer and the four other black DPW workers involved in the lawsuit as "defendants" in the case. In reality, Cox and his colleagues are the plaintiffs. The defendants are former DPW Director Paul Colangelo and the City of Niagara Falls.
Again, perhaps it's understandable.
Pfeiffer initiated the Gazette's odious "Niagara's Most Wanted" series, in which photographs of black men and women being sought for unpaid parking tickets, spitting on the sidewalk, jaywalking and other high crimes are regularly featured. About the only time you ever read about an unelected black person in the Gazette, the word "defendant" is indeed applicable.
Unlike some, I'm not going to characterize Pfeiffer's mischaracterization of the plaintiffs in the DPW case as racist, because he regularly screws up stories about white people as well. Last summer's "They're gonna bulldoze the Wintergarden" fantasy was a Pfeiffer classic.
What's unfathomable is how this stuff gets past his editors.
Even worse, despite being informed that Pfeiffer's DPW and Wintergarden stories were both riddled with errors, his editors ran no corrections of his many mistakes in subsequent editions. Believe me when I tell you that the discrimination case is going to cost the taxpayers of Niagara Falls millions of dollars.
Stevie Wonder or Ray Charles could see that the DPW, the Police Department, the Fire Department and every other branch of city government have engaged, and continue to engage, in a pattern of institutionalized racial discrimination in their hiring practices.
They might put up with that stuff over at the Gazette.
They might even tacitly condone it.
Here at the Reporter, we don't play that.
The city's African-American population stands at around 30 percent, and the fact that fewer than 10 percent of its workers are black is a disgrace.
A worse disgrace is that those workers are subjected to racial epithets, harassment and worse while on the job.
In a television interview on the subject last month, Mayor Vince Anello seemed to dismiss the issue by saying that a lot of people in Niagara Falls were brought up to be prejudiced against blacks.
He couldn't blame the problem on a past administration since he chose to keep the accused -- Paul Colangelo -- on in his own administration, albeit in a different role.
He'll have to do better than that.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | March 16 2004 |