Rubbing salt in his wounds

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A great newspaper acknowledges its mistakes. But at The Record of Woodland Park, editors do everything possible to hide their boneheaded decisions from readers. A perfect example is the brief story on Page A-4 today reporting that readers of the New York Post voted a Record staffer's 9/11 photo as the tabloid's cover of the decade.

Of course, The Record story carefully omits any mention of  how Editor Frank Scandale -- handling the biggest story of his life -- shamefully put money over journalism on Sept. 11, 2001, keeping Record photographer Thomas E. Franklin's unique flag-raising photo off of the front page and shoving it so far back in the paper, it ran on Page A-32 on Sept. 12, 2001. Although the photo was available in plenty of time for The Record's first edition, Scandale was told it would "cost too much" to remake Page 1.


The Post ran the photo on its front page the next day, Sept. 13, without giving credit to Franklin or The Record. The photo was used later on a U.S. postage stamp, but failed to win the Pulitzer Prize -- maybe because The Record and Scandale treated it so shabbily. It shows three firefighters raising the American flag over the ruins of the World Trade Center -- an image that has become one of the most famous in the history of photojournalism and recalls the iconic photo taken during World War II on Iwo Jima (photo below shows monument.)

Image by dbking via Flickr

This may be why Scandale talks incessantly about what he did at the Denver Post more than a decade ago or at Reuters wire service before that, but never boasts of what he has done since he came to The Record.