ustxtxb_obs_1978_02_17_50_00016-00000_000.pdf

Page 8

by

Reca p turin g a Victorian tradition Box 2085 Austin 78768 Sty oC Vl ” f93 04CCC -41 th e va s ‘ et fr Austin 1 6 0 7 Son crcinIto Fine Food Draught beer Outdoor Patio Good books in every field JENKINS PUBLISHING CO. The Pemberton Press John H. Jenkins, Publisher ANDERSON & COMPANY corrign TEA SPICES TWO JEFJ?ERSON SWAMI AUSTIN, TEXAS 78731 512 453-15’33 Send me your list. Name Street City Zip Fine foods purchased daily and prepared to order. Cocktails, domestic and imported wine served. Luncheon 11:30-2:00 except Saturday Dinner 6:30-10:30 except Monday Dinner reservations preferred. The lineage gap is worse than the figures suggest. For example, Olson got his name in 13 headlines, five of them making page 1; Burgess’s name was headlined eight times, three times on page 1; but Denton and Leath found their names in only five headlines each, none of them on the front page. In fact, during the 16 weeks monitored, the Tribune-Herald managed to keep Denton and Leath off its front page altogether. Tricks of the trade Little things kept happening to these two. For example, all three of the Democratic contenders sent protests to HEW Secretary Joe Cal ifano over a set of health planning guidelines issued by his agency, but only Olson’s statement made it into print. And when Denton appeared before the Public Utilities Commission armed with a petition signed by nearly The Tribune-Herald, a Cox paper, remains a bulwark of the Waco establishment and is not above playing favorites in its news columns. The two outsiders in the congressional race, Denton and Leath, did not make the paper’s front page even once in 16 weeks. The Tribune-Herald has a history of such partiality. A 1972 Ralph Nader report on Bob Poage cited the Waco paper’s extraordinary support of the incumbent over any challenger and noted that even Poage’s regular Washington newsletters were given headlines, lead sentences, and verbatim reproduction in the Tribune-Herald as straight news stories. When Murray Watson announced in 1970 that he would run against Poage, the Waco paper totally ignored his candidacy. His campaign manager told a Nader interviewer that except for paid ads, Watson’s name never once appeared in the paper during the campaign. Watson’s man added that “The local paper makes it a crime to run against [Poage].” If the partisanship is not quite so out of hand these days, neither has it been mitigated as much as many expected it would be when Cox Enterprises bought the Tribune-Herald two years ago. The paper remains a bulwark of the local establishment, which happens to be backing two candidates in this year’s congressional race: Olson, a moderate Democrat from a longand well-established Waco family \(Obs., Burgess, a conservative Republican businessman running with the support of John Connally, a favorite of Waco’s economic elite. Standing well outside of this circle are Denton, a former state representative and populist Democrat from Belimead, and Leath, a conservative Democrat and banker from Marlin. An Olson-Burgess contest in November’s general election would please the Waco powers no end, since they could feel victorious no matter the outcome. The Tribune-Herald has been doing what it can to insure that an Olson-Burgess match-up is exactly what general election voters get in the fall by keeping Denton’s and Leath’s profiles as low as possible. 15,000 11th district residents demanding an audit of Texas Power & Light Company, the story ran in the paper’s second section, made minimal mention of Denton, and did not identify him as a congressional candidate. The paper was at its worst, however, in its coverage of the four formal announcements of candidacy. Three weeks before his declaration, Olson got frontpage play under the headline, “Olson prepares to announce candidacy for Poage’s seat.” When he made it official, the editors put him out front again \(“Lyndon Olson puts hat in ring for treated to yet another friendly story, this one on page 1B: “Olson formally declares entry in House race.” The Tribune-Herald beat the drum similarly for Burgess two days before his announcement, gave him page 1 treatment on the day he became a candidate, then printed a follow-up article the next day. There was no build-up for Denton and Leath, however. Indeed, the paper printed not one word about Denton over the four-day period preceding his announcement, then buried its story on his entry into the race on page 12B under the headline, “Denton candidate for House.” But the editors were not satisfied just to ignore Dentonduring the silence leading up to his Sept. 14 announcement, they ran three stories each on Burgess and Olson. As for Leath, the Tribune-Herald was generous enough to run a piece on his Sept. 30 announcement with a picture, but they placed the story in Section D, opposite the funnies. Harris Worcester is a graduate student in Latin American studies at Princeton University and a sometime bartender in Austin and Houston. 16 FEBRUARY 17, 1978