WCNC reporter Nicole Allshouse isn’t one of those journalists who lets mere facts, or the necessity of confirming them, stand in the way of a good story. And like Allshouse, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Detective Ginger Lowe isn’t the kind of person to let inconvenient facts hamper her latest criminal crusade. Put the two together and you’ve got a hatchet job waiting to happen.
That’s what occurred last Tuesday, March 16, during an NBC6 newscast. The staff at Creative Loafing is still trying to figure out if the story that resulted from a team effort by the talented pair was a poorly thought-out hit piece, or an example of what can result when really sloppy reporting and really bad detective work collide.
Either way, the result was a televised news story that claimed Creative Loafing contributed to prostitution problems in South End because CL had run ads for massage spas, including two, Bahama Spa and Belle Spa, at which prostitution arrests have been made over the last two weeks.
Over the course of the NBC6 story, Allshouse prominently displayed CL’s logo and the logos of various spas from ads in the back of the paper, claiming that the vice unit had contacted CL in the past and asked us to stop running the ads. Other than the fact that the first we heard of the problem was from NBC6 on the day of the newscast (Lowe didn’t actually call anyone at CL until two hours before the broadcast), there are other problems.
What WCNC and Lowe didn’t mention in any of the three versions of the story that ran, although both were aware of it, was that the Charlotte Observer — with four times the circulation of CL — runs the same ads on its sports pages.
As a matter of fact, in the two weeks before Lowe and Allshouse trashed CL on the news, CL ran a total of 17 spa ads in the back half of the paper. During that same period, the Observer ran 43 massage spa ads in its sports pages, including 10 ads for Belle Spa. In fact, the Belle ad ran in the daily paper on the day of the WCNC story. Yet the Observer ads didn’t merit a single mention by Allshouse or Lowe in the station’s stories.
In an interview with CL three days after the WCNC story ran, Detective Lowe claimed that she would “call any other publication that’s advertising for these people” and ask them to stop. When asked why she hadn’t called the Observer to ask the paper to stop running ads for Belle, Lowe claimed that she couldn’t find any ads for Belle or any of the other spas at which the department had made arrests in the Observer.
“I just checked the Observer yesterday and they only had two and we haven’t made cases on those two,” Lowe said.
She’s right. The Observer didn’t run an ad for Belle Spa on Thursday, the day Lowe checked the paper. But the Observer did run Belle Spa ads, as well as 14 others, for three days in a row before that, as well as on most weekdays during the past couple of months.
When we pointed this out to the ace detective, not once but twice, she finally became exasperated and asked, “What are you wantin’?” before hanging up on us.
As of Friday, neither Lowe nor her boss, Captain Tim Jayne, had bothered to call the Observer about the ads, despite the fact that both had been made aware of them, which leads us to wonder what the vice unit is more interested in combating — Creative Loafing or prostitution.
“My people do monitor and do look at the (Observer) and try to track who is advertising what and where, but if we were to call the Observer and say look, we made an arrest at Belle and they don’t immediately yank the advertising, it is not for us to say good or bad,” Jayne said. “I know how hard especially that one detective works and she has a huge responsibility with the number of sexually oriented businesses that are operating in this city and I’m asking one person to do a whole lot of work, so if she missed a couple of days where one paper ran it and the other one didn’t or whatever, I really can’t fault her for that.”
When contacted on Monday, six days after the WCNC story ran, the Observer sales manager we spoke to was still unaware of the Belle Spa arrests. Unless vice officers contact their paper, an Observer sales manager told CL, sales representatives wouldn’t know that the police have made arrests at these spas unless they happened to hear about it. The same applies at Creative Loafing.
Yet Lowe waited until two hours before the WCNC story ran — after WCNC reporters had already called the Loaf for comment — to call and request that we consider not running the ads for Bahama and Belle Spas because prostitution arrests had been made there. During that phone call, CL’s advertising director, Eric Hancock, told Lowe that we would pull the ads — and any others at which arrests had been made — if police informed the paper about it. This is the informal agreement CL has had with the vice unit for nearly two years. Yet two hours later, Lowe appeared on WCNC berating CL for continuing to run the ads.
Because CL is a weekly paper, common sense dictates that the soonest the Belle ad could have been removed was a week after WCNC’s story ran — which also would have been a week after the prostitution busts at Belle and a week after Lowe requested we pull the ads. Yet none of this made the cut in Allshouse’s story.
“Officers have arrested the owners of both spas on prostitution charges,” Allshouse droned. “But the ads are still running in this paper.”
“Their advertisements are still appearing in these papers,” Lowe whined. (What “other papers” Lowe was referring to is uncertain, since no other papers were mentioned.)
Though prostitution arrests had been made at Bahama Spa 11 days before the story ran, giving vice over a week before WCNC’s story to contact CL and ask that we pull the ads, this wasn’t done.
When CL interviewed Lowe’s boss, Capt. Tim Jayne, two days after the story ran, he wasn’t sure if his department had contacted CL about the ads or not before WCNC’s story ran.
“Didn’t we ask you to stop running them before?” he asked.
We explained to Jayne that the last time CL discussed its ads with vice was in 2002 during an informal conversation between then-Captain Eddie Levins and a reporter in which Levins mentioned that national hotline ads for two companies appeared to be fronts for prostitution. CL pulled the ads. Again, until two hours before WCNC’s story ran, no one from vice had ever said anything about the spa ads to CL.
Yet in WCNC’s story, Allshouse also claimed that vice told her that “Creative Loafing goes against the police department’s efforts” and that “the vice unit has contacted CL in the past, asking them to stop running suspicious ads.”
Jayne says WCNC’s story may not have included everything Lowe told Allshouse, which could have caused some confusion.
“I don’t want to get in the middle of the detective said this and NBC said that,” said Jayne. “I’m looking at the bigger picture and that’s quality of life for the citizens of Charlotte and being a media outlet, if Creative Loafing chooses to partner with us like I think you have, I don’t want to damage that relationship. Whatever was said on NBC6, just like any news story, just like speaking with you now, if you publish any part of what I say, it wouldn’t include the entire conversation and what NBC6 had was not the entire conversation.”
Allshouse’s boss, WCNC Executive News Director Keith Connors, initially seemed as confused as we were when we called him two days after the story ran. Connors claimed he was unaware that the Observer runs the same ads the station had faulted CL for running. We also explained to Connors that Allshouse inaccurately reported that CL “was going to change its policy and drop the ads for any spa that gets busted.” What Allshouse was actually told was that CL is willing to pull ads if the police made us aware that an advertiser had been arrested for illegal activity. That is, in fact, this paper’s informal policy, not a change of policy.
Despite the glaring omissions and inaccuracies in Allshouse’s story, Connors refused to commit to doing a follow-up story, but said he “might” do one if vice views the Observer ads to be a “problem.”
“They haven’t told us that or mentioned that as an issue,” said Connors. “Why do you think the vice cops would be complaining about you guys and not the Charlotte Observer?
“It sounds like your problem is with the vice department, not with WCNC television,” Connors said before he cut the conversation off by hanging up. “I’m going to run my newsroom and you run yours.”
CL Editor John Grooms also spoke to Connors, asserting that the station had made a number of mistakes in the story, but with no results. “I’m frankly dumbfounded by this kind of reporting,” said Grooms, “and even more so by the news director’s apparent nonchalance about our complaint. This is a news report that was riddled with inaccuracies and omissions and is as sloppy a job of news reporting as I’ve seen in some time. I understand that in the heat of producing a news show, mistakes like this will occasionally be made. My problem is that when the station’s news director was informed of the serious problems with this story — which, don’t forget, made CL look like brokers for criminal activity, no small matter — he not only didn’t bother to look into it, he made it plain that he couldn’t have cared less, and boasted about having been in the news business for 20 years. You expect a little more professionalism and a journalist’s concern for accuracy from a news director. Frankly, you almost expect the police to make dumb mistakes like this now and then, and there are always overzealous reporters who are under pressure to gather attention-grabbing stories, but somebody needs to be watching the hen house.”
Calls to WCNC General Manager Stuart Powell were unreturned by press time.
Contact Tara Servatius at tara.servatius@cln.com
This article appears in Mar 24-30, 2004.
