You might wonder why Mark DeMarino gives a damn about Fox News’s WJW-TV, Channel 8, his former employer. But he does. He can’t shake the idea that journalism is supposed to be about something meaningful.
In this day of cost cutbacks – some possibly necessary, many seemingly simply to cut costs – newspaper and broadcast outlets would be the target of a typical I-Team investigation. About not delivering what is promised. Bait and switch.
That’s what prompted DeMarino to fire off a blistering e-mail to news director Sonya Thompson and other station managers.
It’s a message that shouts, “I’m through with journalism because that’s not what it is anymore.”
DeMarino – an award winning reporter/researcher who left Ch. 8 about this time last year – charged the station management with deception by tagging ordinary stories with the I-Team brand. It’s a brand he helped make valuable.
DeMarino said in an e-mail to me that he was upset because the station “was pulling a fast one with its viewers. It has never told viewers that it’s eliminated its investigative unit, yet, station management wants to benefit from the I-Team brand by calling these general assignment type stories ‘I-Team” stories when, in fact, they are not.”
He cited in conversation one recent example of misuse of an I-Team report. The report last week had Lorrie Taylor trying to make an investigative piece about Yazeed Essa’s empty jail cell. (He was convicted last week of murdering his wife Rosemarie.) The item is entitled “I-Team exclusive – Inside Essa’s Jail Cell.” It’s hard to make a relevant investigation of showing a cushioned jail cell bed though Taylor made the best of the assignment.
DeMarino told Thompson, “Any news operation must be an honest broker of information, sad to say your continued labeling of general assignment stories, by either Bill Sheil or Lorrie Taylor, as I-Team is deceptive, misleading and a disservice to your views and sponsors.”
He notes in an e-mail to me that money wouldn’t be a problem if management would “take a critical look at some of the huge salaries paid their anchors and the number of newsroom managers.” If television stations did examine these high salaries, “there is money to fund a legitimate I-Team unit,” wrote DeMarino.
DeMarino was a newsman for some 33 years in radio and television, most of it in Cleveland. In disgust, he took a buyout at Ch. 8 last year after working at the station for 16 years. He has served as investigative reporter for Carl Monday and Tom Merriman in addition to Sheil and Taylor.
“The city’s news business lost another dedicated newsman whose long and distinguished service – back to the 1970s – went more or less generally unobserved,” I wrote a year ago when he departed Ch. 8.
DeMarino was researcher and behind-the-scenes reporter for the I-Team, putting together the investigative guts of reports that were hosted by a team of on-air persons.
DeMarino’s passion for his job still comes through in his message to the station management.
“It’s bait and switch,” he writes of the use of the I-Team brand on regular stories. The regular news pieces are given the I-Team branding to suggest that the reports are the result of investigative reporting.
The former I-Team researcher finds this reprehensible.
“It’s a knockoff Coach purse,” DeMarino writes, borrowing the term from an investigation the team did on scam artists selling knockoffs of the brand named pocketbooks.
“The stories are threadbare, faded, and thrown together in a rush. Either invest in people and resources to resurrect the I-Team, or leave it alone,” he wrote to Thompson.
“What you are doing is cheap, lazy and cowardly,” wrote DeMarino, leaving nothing of his feelings to the imagination.
Thompson did not respond to an e-mail request for her comment. Oddly, Ch. 8’s web site doesn’t have a telephone number and in the yellow pages under television stations, Fox 8 isn’t listed, though other TV stations are.
One has to note with a bit of irony, however, that if you call the I-Team’s telephone number (432-4228) who answers? Mark DeMarino’s voice still responds, “This is the Fox 8 I-Team. Leave your name and your number… we’ll try to get right back to you.”
DeMarino shared in numerous awards, including the coveted Alfred I. DuPont/Columbia Journalism Award for broadcast excellence in 2006. It is comparable to the Pulitzer Awards in print journalism.
The DuPont award resulted from an investigation and expose of the Cleveland school system. DeMarino, in an undercover role, filmed school bus drivers sitting idly, using school buses to pick up girl friends and on personal shopping tours. It was estimated the probe resulted in some $4 million in savings for the schools.
The school bus expose also won a prestigious Investigative Reporters & Editors (IRE) national award “for exposing millions of dollars in waste, gross mismanagement and cover-up in the Cleveland Municipal School District.” It was a multi-part investigation that had undercover film of some 200 bus drivers at the bus station that did little more than play pool while on the payroll. At the same time, teachers were laid off by the school system.
A competitor, Tom Beres of WKYC-TV, Channel 3, said of DeMarino upon his leaving Ch. 8, “His connections, insight and institutional memory and historical background will be missed.” Beres said DeMarino was “grossly underappreciated,” a statement I couldn’t agree with more.
Too bad. But what can you expect these days from local news.
Roldo Bartimole celebrates 50 years of news reporting this year. He published and wrote Point of View, a newsletter about Cleveland, for 32 years. He worked for the Plain Dealer and Wall Street Journal in the 1960s.
He was a 2004 Cleveland Journalism Hall of Fame recipient and won the national Joe Callaway Award for Civic Courage in 1991.