DART to TheHartford Courant,
for throwing out the journalistic baby with the press-release bathwater. Deluged for years with material pointing to
corruption on the part of Governor John G. Rowland — who happens to be a
Republican — Courant reporters sent it swiftly down the drain, unmoved
by its less-than-disinterested source, a lawyer named Edward L. Marcus — who
happened at the time to be head of the Democratic Party in Connecticut. So
annoyed was the paper by the “diatribes” of the “pugnacious and irascible”
tipster that in 1997 it published an editorial addressed directly to him.
Citing, among other things, “135 press releases excoriating Mr. Rowland,
ranging from the governor’s purchase of a vacation cottage in Litchfield to his
acceptance of surplus military equipment,” the editorial concluded with a
reprise of its headline: “Put a sock in it, Ed.” Six years later, it was an
entirely different story. Following probes by the Courant and other
news organizations — probes that validated many of Marcus’s “diatribes” and
then some — Rowland, facing impeachment and federal prosecution, resigned in
disgrace in July.
“If it weren’t for the news media,
notably, the Courant,” wrote Paul Janensch,
the paper’s “Professor News,” in a column that gave a passing nod to the “sock”
editorial, “he still would be governor today. I think the beginning of the end
came last November, when the Courant disclosed that more work was performed
on the Rowlands’ BantamLake
vacation cottage than he had paid for.”