Desperately Seeking Muckrakers
Journalism’s help-wanteds are usually phrased more delicately than that. Thumbing through recent issues of Editor & Publisher, I find papers looking for someone “hard-hitting,” someone who “cuts through hooey,” someone who wants to head to an “intensely competitive” market or to “one of the most storied areas in the nation” (the Mississippi delta, if you’re wondering) and “make an impact.” But nobody’s being invited to–in so many words–bring a bucket and drain a swamp.
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’67 was promptly called out by an east coast publicist. “If there’s a widespread thinking that a part of the govt is corrupt, why wouldn’t an editor have his or her beat reporter look into it and see why people feel that way?” ’67 snapped back, “Perhaps you misunderstood my point. All too often, I see editors decide what kind of story will be written and published BEFORE the reporters gather the facts, and IN SPITE OF the facts they gather. That guy has already made up his mind, and he’s going to hire accordingly. It’s unethical. There’s nothing wrong with investigating corruption, but making up your mind that it exists–damn the facts, full speed ahead–before you gather the facts, is wrong. (Maybe that’s why the position is open?)”
A Florida reporter was then heard from. “He said ‘considered,’ which is likely true. Many people do consider government corrupt and inefficient and there’s no question that most of it IS politically motivated. If that’s the local perception of the county government, there’s nothing wrong with saying so in a job advertisement. Maybe the new reporter will find otherwise. We often do find that what the public ‘considers’ the truth isn’t.”
Rudy Bartolomei, sheriff until 1984, when he was convicted on federal weapons and extortion charges, disappeared into a federal witness-protection program. But that’s local color so old it’s folklore. When I asked Chapin for a recent scandal, he told me about the series that just earned reporter William Lazarus a Lisagor. Lazarus’s articles last year examined the fate of convicted drug dealers in Lake County. When they’re convicted in state courts that fate is generally pretty kind: thanks to the plea bargaining of the Lake County prosecutor’s office, “most defendants charged with Class A felonies for drug dealing get no prison time.”
The Times’s innovation raises an intriguing possibility. Because most of us shape our opinions by excluding all facts to the contrary, a shrewd newspaper could stake out both sides of some big issues by doing likewise. While its thumbnail opinion panders to the mob, the editorial can follow the high, hard road of principled logic to a contrary conclusion.
