January 24–31, 2002

slant

Ted Said...

RealPhilly publisher responds to City Paper article.

by Theodore Beitchman

As far as the public’s trust is concerned, in most public-opinion polls journalists rank somewhere down there with elected officials and attorneys. Which is too bad, because many journalists have contributed to making this the great country that it is: polemicists Jack Reed and Gloria Steinem; investigative journalists I.F. Stone and Bob Woodward; essayists Nora Ephron and Tom Wolfe; sportswriters Stan Hochman and Dick Schaap; columnists Jimmy Breslin, Sandy Grady and Murray Kempton.

And now we have garbage collector/terrorist Howard Altman, whose piece in the City Paper about RealPhilly is a classic example of why journalism as a profession has lost the public’s trust.

Garbage collection is an honorable profession, and it does, strangely enough, have antecedents related to what passes for journalism. To wit, in the 1970s a journalist sifted through Henry Kissinger’s garbage and wrote a story about its contents; in the 1980s, Robert Bork’s nomination to the United States Supreme Court inspired someone with a press badge to rifle through his garbage to find — are you sitting down? — that he rented movies! At least those two "investigations" produced real documents.

I have spent the last two years constructing a business model and raising investment capital from more than 30 sources in the teeth of the fiercest bear market in 20 years. The inaugural Winter 2001/2002 issue of RealPhilly has been out for a month and the reaction has been nearly unanimously positive.

I say nearly because two former employees who resigned by e-mail on Dec. 3 (they correctly gathered that they would be terminated for incompetence) took with them dozens of computer files representing privileged information relating to my business. It subsequently came to my attention that they also hacked into my home computer and misappropriated e-mails that go back as far as 1998. Two weeks after their departure, I began getting calls from vendors of beauty products and leather goods in this region and New York, looking for these former employees and the product that they called and asked for under the pretense that we were doing stories about these products. These vendors sent the product with the caveat that they be returned in a timely manner. These former employees now have more the $3,500 of product that they have stolen. Naturally, I will make the vendors whole. It was at this point that I engaged an attorney to start legal action against these two former employees.

Many of the documents stolen from my company were evidently altered by the thieves and disseminated to various members of the media. Most of the other media understood that the nature of the documents they had received was tainted by the fact that these former employees have an ax to grind and that they are hardly stable, let alone reputable, sources.

Which brings me to Mr. Altman (Is it possible that he is City Paper’s top editor?), with whom I have had six telephone conversations and responded to 41 questions almost always with the answer, "No comment." It is not Mr. Altman’s business who the investors in my company are, and it is not his business who our strategic partners are, any more than it is my business who the City Paper’s accountants or lawyers are. We are a privately held company, not a public company nor a public entity, and Mr. Altman’s methods produced a piece of garbage the contents of which are totally fatuous.

I refused to play his game and give in to his terroristic methods — most of his questions were along the lines of "When did you stop beating your wife?" — which he pursued as if what he had was the Pentagon Papers and he was Neil Sheehan. He had questionable garbage disseminated to him by thieves, and I refused to cooperate. The result is a hit-and-run piece that any real reporter would not have written and any reputable publication would not run.

With respect — and I use the term advisedly — to Mr. Altman and the City Paper, the question must be asked, "When your journalistic ethics and judgment are alone in the room, is anything there?"

Theodore N. Beitchman is the editor and publisher of RealPhilly. If you would like to respond to this Slant or have one of your own (850 words), contact Howard Altman, City Paper interim editor, 123 Chestnut St., Phila., PA 19106 or e-mail altman@citypaper.net.