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Positively Negative
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Business New Haven
1/21/2002
By: BNH
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It is a pretty sad comment on the state of New Haven-area media when a relative pipsqueak such as Business New Haven gets accused - as we do almost daily - of being “too negative.”
Sometimes we wonder: What must we be doing wrong to make public officials whisper that we're too “critical,” or make paranoid executives roll out the PR platitudes once we turn the tape recorder on?
Is it our anti-perspirant? The soup stain on our necktie? Our shoeshine-challenged brogans?
The world wonders.
Or, at least, we do. In the spirit of sincere self-reflection, we must ask ourselves often why a few top city political officials (who shall remain unidentified for now, although you'd recognize their names in a heartbeat) tell their colleagues and one another to be careful in conversation with BNH's Lilliputian correspondents, lest their remarks be spun from gold into straw.
Over at Gateway Center, a really, really top public-education official (again, MYOB, although we will say that he's named after a popular condiment and insists on prefacing his name with “Dr.” even though he's quite clearly no brain surgeon) has refused interview requests for four years running.
Where some newsmakers look at us and see bloodthirsty, ink-stained wretches armed with pens of poison, we look in the mirror and see bright, fresh-scrubbed merchants of joy, spreading the gospel of a free-market paradise and cheering the successes of business people who dared to dream.
Too negative? It's all relative, we suppose. Maybe working in a tertiary market with few media outlets to begin with makes us stick out by comparison with the Babbitt-like boosterism of many others.
You know who gets a bad rap around here? The New Haven Register, that's who. (See how positive we are in defending our Sargent Drive playpals?) Readers who should know better criticize the daily for reporting crimes, for Pete's sake (actually, for Bob Jelenic's sake).
Where others see “negativity,” in the pages of the Reg, we see a paper whose cockeyed optimism borders on the slavish. A giant, unwanted mall for Long Wharf? Roll out the bulldozers! Leave no tern unstoned! Plan No. 1,432 for turning Tweed Airport into the O'Hare of the East? This one's gotta work, for sure!
You want negative? How about the weekly Advocate and its rabid-dog reporter, Paul Bass. Now we're talking negative - a reporter who assumes every City Hall deal will send widows and orphans to live in storm drains and that all business owners have cloven feet and forked tails. (Objectivity alert: We know Paul Bass, and as a private individual he wouldn't step on an ant.) But somehow the Advocate usually gets a free “Get Out of Jail” card from the negativity witch-hunters, perhaps because of its self-marginalizing ways. (That is, when people expect you to be negative, you don't seem so negative in reality.)
Jeepers - just can't figure this negativity thing out sometimes. We always thought journalists were supposed “to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” Doesn't that include fat cats in the public and private sectors? That's what we were taught, anyway.
In any event, just to prove our critics wrong (oops - that's kind of negative itself, isn't it?), we welcome readers to our eighth annual Business & Civic Awards issue, celebrating the very best southern Connecticut's business community has to offer. It's 44 pages filled with inspiration, dedication and perspiration on the part of the individuals and companies who set the standard for business excellence. We hope you enjoy and learn from their stories, much as we did in putting this special annual issue together.
And the skies are not cloudy all day.
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