Francine Sustaita Keeping open the doors of commerce: The Star-Telegram never saw a Dillard's ad it didn't like.

Attention Dillard's shoppers: Pride and ethics are for sale, courtesy of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. The newspaper recently killed a critical story about the nation's third-largest department store rather than risk losing advertisement dollars.

"The dirty little secret is we are beholden to advertising," a Star-Telegram reporter said. "It's sad because we get in the public and say we are the bastions of journalism. And we are, as long as it is government officials doing something wrong, but if it's an advertiser, the story is going to be so watered down it won't even matter."

The Star-Telegram vowed to do more investigative pieces a few years ago. Subsequent reports have been informative and mostly well done, but the topics have also been safe. The Star-T crumbled like a dry cookie in May when a reporter wrote a story that raised questions about a big-bucks advertiser.

Staff writers described how Arlington Star-Telegram reporter Tanya Eiserer, who declined to comment for this story, spent weeks researching and writing an article about Dillard's, which has been socked by lawsuits amid accusations of security guards using racial profiling and excessive force against shoplifters. A Dillard's security guard shot and killed a man at an Arlington mall in June 1999. Other deaths have occurred in San Antonio, Houston, and Memphis.

Dillard's is also quick on the trigger when it comes to yanking advertisements. Star-Telegram executives practically soiled themselves at the thought of losing a multi-million-dollar account during an economic slowdown and at a time when head honcho Tony Ridder is demanding higher profit margins.

Reporters who read Eiserer's story, and who requested anonymity for this one, deemed it comprehensive and fair. They accused Senior Vice President and Executive Editor Jim Witt of castrating the article during editing. Editor's notes -- unsigned but attributed to Witt -- forbade Eiserer from focusing on Dillard's and limited the article to "an overall story about shoplifting." Star-Telegram reporters can easily access their co-workers' computer directories, and the notes were widely read and discussed in the newsroom. The notes ended with, "I want to get this information into the paper and at the same time try to walk a fine line so as not to incite them to do something in retaliation."

That's editor lingo for "please allow this story to die quietly, and get back to work writing about bank robberies and car wrecks." The Dillard's story was never published. "It was right there in black and white: 'inciting retaliation,' " one reporter said. "He [Witt] wasn't worried about Dillard's managers coming over and shooting up the newsroom. It was the pulling of ads that he was worried about. Since when is it our job to protect advertisers? When you have to start worrying if your stories are conflicting with the ad department, you're fucked."

Dillard's pulled advertising from CBS and some of its affiliate stations after a 60 Minutes exposé in March. Star-Telegram executives feared similar treatment. Fort Worth Weekly had no Dillard's ad to lose when it wrote about the firm's security practices in June 2000.

A financial pinch at newspapers nationwide has made advertising dollars crucial. It works like this: The economy slows; retailers feel the pinch; they cut back on help-wanted ads and retail ads; newspapers earn less money. Meanwhile, an onslaught of 24-hour television and internet news programs has increased competition and cut into newspaper subscriptions, and the cost of newsprint jumped about 20 percent in 2000. The last thing money crunchers want to do is anger a big-bucks advertiser.

The Star-Telegram's investigative articles in recent years have focused on health care at the county hospital, legal representation for indigent defendants, children with mental health problems, heroin use among young people, questionable school construction projects, and the demise of the county's largest health-maintenance organization. Executives offer full support on these stories, but a reporter pursuing a story that besmirches an advertiser suddenly must endure excessive rewrites, edits, and clashes with newspaper officials.

Knight Ridder is the nation's second-largest newspaper publishing company with 32 daily newspapers, including the Star-Telegram. Chairman and Chief Executive Tony Ridder said in April that staff reductions would occur at most of the chain's newspapers, with a total work force reduction of about 1,700 positions from its staff of 22,000. Add that to the 400 staff cuts announced last year, and Knight Ridder is cutting almost 10 percent of its staff. Most cuts so far have involved buyouts or attrition, but managers have said layoffs could be the next step.

This isn't the first or last story to be killed locally or nationwide. The barrier between editorial and advertising staffs, referred to among journalists as "the wall," has been weakened through the years as newspaper owners place more emphasis on profit. "These days, the wall more often resembles a screen door with double hinges and no latch," Don Campbell wrote last year in American Journalism Review.

Aly Colon, who teaches ethics at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, said news departments have become more aware of their financial standing. They must not, however, be driven by money or allow advertisers to sway their news judgment, or their credibility will vanish, he said. "Newspapers draw much of their revenue from advertising but they have to remember that it is not the advertisers that they are serving with respect to the news they provide," he said. "The advertiser benefits from being associated with and being a part of a news product that people trust."

CEO Mark Willes led the Los Angeles Times in 1999 when the newspaper published a Sunday magazine that celebrated the newly constructed Staples Center. The Times later admitted it had shared ad revenue with the arena, a grievous breach of ethics. Willes, whose background was in business rather than journalism, had earlier raised eyebrows by vowing to "blow up" the wall between news and advertising, a remark roundly criticized by media insiders. "The experiment backfired greatly at the L.A. Times when the public became aware just how far this new trend had gone," Colon said. "Readers began to have questions about the credibility of the L.A. Times in regard to how it covered a lot of major corporations."

The trade journal Editor and Publisher criticized the Staples arrangement and acknowledged that it "confirms journalists' suspicions that breaking the editorial/advertising 'wall' really means breaching a dam that will flood the newsroom with dubious projects and sweep away editorial integrity."

The wall is cracking at the Star-Telegram. Besides killing the Dillard's story, the newspaper wrote eight puff pieces in seven days about the Fort Worth Zoo's much-criticized Texas Wild! exhibit -- financed by one of Fort Worth's richest couples, Lee and Ramona Bass, and supported by the Star-Telegram.

The Star-Telegram hasn't killed many stories, but that's hardly a compliment. "We haven't done any hard-hitting stories that would cause managers to pull them," a reporter said. "It's just, 'Who won the game?' and 'What's the latest nonprofit?' "