Jon Margolis , former chief political reporter for the Chicago Tribune and the author of "The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964 ," lives in northeastern Vermont, where he writes and teaches.
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Anybody who’s been in this business for a week or more has heard the gripe of someone who lost all faith in news coverage the first time there was a story in the neighborhood—as serious as a murder, as frivolous as a cat stuck up a tree—and one glance at the evening news or the morning paper revealed that the folks covering it “got everything wrong.”
Needless to say, in some of those cases, the reporters and editors got it right and the grumbling civilian was making the mistakes. But lets face it--as often as not, those grumbling civilians have a point. Reporters do make mistakes. Even if they rarely “get everything wrong,” they often enough get enough wrong to justify the average person’s skepticism about the whole profession.
In the last several weeks, I’ve been doing some similar grumbling as The New York Times has come into my neighborhood and gotten too much of it wrong. The point of today’s exercise is not to pick on The Times, which is still the best paper in the country (if not as good as it used to be, but neither is anything else). It’s to examine two examples of getting it wrong, the better to understand them.
Not that I can pose as a civilian here. The last time I was a civilian, I was a soldier; I went from active duty at Fort Dix to the copy boy staff at the late, largely unlamented, New York Daily Mirror, and have been unable to escape the news racket ever since. As I’ve previously written here, some months ago I started my own one-man band news web site—vermontnewsguy.com. So I’m like the editor of any small-town paper; I’m always looking for the local angle.
Which The Times provided me on Sunday morning, September 13, with a front-page story headlined “Clean Water Laws Neglected, at a Cost .” An excellent story, carefully reported and clearly written by Charles Duhigg, revealing that in some places anti-pollution laws are so ill-enforced that people are actually getting sick from drinking water.
But this was more than just a story. Here in the new media age, The Times also provided more extensive information on its web site, compiling, it said, a ”national database of water pollution violations that is more comprehensive than those maintained by the states or the E.P.A.”
Wow! A local editor’s dream. Just a few clicks would take you to the info for your own state. Click. Click, and there was what seemed to be a reportorial bonanza.
Vermont’s water pollution enforcement system was somewhere between a mess and a scandal. Just the first on-line page listed 15 wastewater treatment plants, not one of which had been inspected since 1982, and eight of which had not been inspected since the 1970s. Those 15 plants had a total of 97 violations, but not one of them had been fined a single penny.
Hmmm. Violations found although no inspections performed? Seemed a little strange. For instance, the on-line information on that Sunday (and Monday and Tuesday as well) reported that the Burlington North End waste water treatment facility was last inspected on November 9, 1978, but that there was an enforcement action on August 5, 2005.
Whatever the enforcement action may have been, it seemed to have cost the plant no money. Under the column labeled “fines,” there were nothing but zeros for all of Vermont.
There’s an easy explanation for some of these inconsistencies: The on-line information was wrong. We know that because by Thursday morning….Presto! it had been changed. Now, as if by miracle, all the plants had been inspected in 2007 or 2008.
Still, why had there been no fines?
Well, there had been. Maybe they weren’t technically “fines,” because what Vermont does is siphon the money to local environmental improvement projects. But penalties were assessed against the cities operating the plants that were out of compliance.
My story, then, was not the Vermonters should be wary about drinking the water. It was that The New York Times had goofed, and so it was written in my web site on September 18 .
We all goof, and in fairness to the Times, it was using the Environmental Protection Association’s information, which may have been out of date. Still, it’s hard to believe that the EPA suddenly updated from 1978 to 2207 in September of 2009.
Either way, the Times referred readers to the site. The information on the site was wrong, and at some point somebody knew it or they would not have changed it. Somewhere in the newspaper there should have been a correction or clarification alerting readers that the on-line data had been wrong, not to mention some explanation about the financial penalties imposed on the plants.
Simply to change the data without acknowledging that the data had been changed seems surreptitious. Let’s assume no surreptitiousness was intended. It’s still not the way a newspaper ought to seem.
But then neither are superficial and supercilious.
Last month, the Times paid another visit to the neighborhood, this time my immediate neighborhood, Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. The dateline was Irasburg, the next town over.
The story was about a moose, the one some folks are calling Pete, who has become something of a celebrity, and is worth a story. The Times story by Katie Zezima was lively, engaging, simplistic, and misleading.
The moose, whose mother may (or then again, may not) have abandoned it, was taken as a baby by a couple from Bethel, down in the middle of the state. Zezima wrote that David Lawrence, a retired farmer from Albany (that’s right near Irasburg) “has raised (the moose) since June, when a local couple brought (it) to an elk farm Mr. Lawrence helps run.”
Small point, because Lawrence may have given different accounts to different reporters but what he told me when I interviewed him for the piece I wrote for my web site on August 28, was that he, not the Bethel couple, drove the moose from Bethel to Irasburg.
Or maybe not such a small point because what was absent from the Times story was any hint that Lawrence, the Bethel couple, and Doug Nelson, who owns the elk “captive hunt” enclosure in which the moose is confined, are all deliberately breaking the law.
That’s an observation, not a condemnation. Civil disobedience, which Lawrence acknowledged he was practicing, has a long and honored pedigree. But a news story about people who are intentionally breaking the law should mention that they are intentionally breaking the law. Zezima does note that “the state says it is still against the rules to have the deer and moose inside the private hunting facility,” but “against the rules” is inadequate. Had she reached Fish and Game Commissioner Wayne Laroche, he surely would have told her what he told me: “This moose was illegally taken, illegally transported and is now illegally being possessed inside an enclosure.”
Fish and Wildlife wants the moose moved or shot.
It isn’t that Zezima ignored all public policy implications of the moose controversy. She cites the concern by state officials that the hundreds of elk confined in a 600-acre enclosure pose the threat of spreading chronic wasting disease to any wild animals with which they come in contact.
But the basic theme of the story is the controversy itself, and how it has become “as much of a cause célèbre as is possible in this rural pocket of Vermont, with ‘Save Pete the Moose’ bumper stickers slapped on trucks .and a Facebook page with 1,646 members.”
Pifflesnorch. We have des causes plus plus célèbre around here (and far juicier; had I the talent and/or fearlessness of Grace Metalious I could write a best-seller just from the info garnered sitting at the café in town). As to the bumper stickers, I don’t doubt they exist, but I haven’t seen one though I drive around the Kingdom almost every day. Among the temptations big city reporters have to guard against when they head into the country (I’m sure I’ve been guilty here myself) is becoming enchanted about how the unsophisticated locals get riled up about seemingly inconsequential matters such as a confined moose.
In this case, no one involved is unsophisticated, most of the locals aren’t riled up, the matter is rather consequential.
OK, enough. As mentioned above, the Times remains indispensible. It is time for me to go to town, get the mail, have a cup of coffee (and get the salacious gossip) at the Step Back Café, and buy the Times.
Hoping, as ever, that next time it comes to the neighborhood, it gets things a little less wrong.
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