Case Study: Minnesota's Basketball Cheating Scandal

The Case

In 1999, The St. Paul Pioneer Press uncovered a cheating scandal in the University of Minnesota's basketball program that turned out to be, in the university president's words, "one of the most serious cases of academic fraud ever reported to the NCAA." When the story broke on March 10—one day before the team was to play in the NCAA tournament—loyal Minnesotans widely condemned the paper for ill intentions and bad timing.

The case raises two questions we focus on here:

When does the public's right to know kick in?

Who should decide when this right is exercised?

Among other things, the right to know implies that journalists represent the public in much the same way that elected government officials do.

Journalists are privileged to go places and to learn things that the public simply can't. A further implication holds that the public should know those things journalists know, for freedom of the press is justified by the fact that the information is public, not private, property.

In this case, the St. Paul Pioneer Press knew that a scandal was brewing in the Minnesota basketball program, that the university had self-reported to the NCAA and was conducting an investigation and compliance review. Still, the paper withheld this information from the public for months. Only the reporter, sports editor and editor knew of the story. It was not even mentioned to other staffers on the paper or to the publisher. Was the paper justified in actively withholding information—public information? What does it mean, in reporting, to "have the whole story?"

The Story Begins
Reporter George Dohrmann got a tip.

Dohrmann, a genial 26-year-old, is an energetic fellow to whom "sports is everything," as one of his Notre Dame professors remembers. Dohrmann would normally have been covering the Minnesota's professional basketball team, the Timberwolves, once football season ended. But a long and dreary NBA lockout meant that the Twin Cities' Target Center was seeing no action in the final months of the year. He found himself with time to pursue something a source had told him. The source said a woman named Jan Gangelhoff might be able to tell Dohrmann a few things about "the climate of working" at the University of Minnesota's athletic department—a subject of interest to Dohrmann, who had been vaguely following several leads about the university's basketball team. Gangelhoff had left the university earlier in the year and was now working at a casino in the small town of Danbury, Wisconsin.

When Dohrmann contacted her, Gangelhoff told him she did have something interesting to share with him—she had recently received a letter from the director of men's athletics at the university, stating that an NCAA compliance review said it was necessary to "disassociate" Gangelhoff from the basketball program.

Dohrmann drove to Danbury, where Gangelhoff showed him the letter. It seemed an odd thing for the director to have sent. Gangelhoff had already left the university, and she wasn't sure what to make of the letter.

It was clear that the university had reported some violation to the NCAA. But Gangelhoff, who had tutored many basketball players over a long period of time, wasn't sure exactly what the violation was. And Dohrmann, of course, had no idea how serious it might be.

Back at the paper, Dohrmann took the matter up with Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, the paper's sports editor. Both of these men had come to St. Paul within the last couple of years—the reporter following the editor—from the Los Angeles Times. At the Times, they had worked together on a story about UCLA's basketball team that had taught them a number of lessons about pursuing an investigative college sports story. One of those lessons was that a university that sees trouble will quickly look for "a viable explanation they can basically sell" to the NCAA, as Garcia-Ruiz puts it.

The letter to Gangelhoff, the two thought, signified that the University of Minnesota had self-reported something. But what was it? And was there more going on than had been reported? Was it worth investigating even if whatever they found might turn out to be a non-story? The university might already have reported whatever the paper found. And, if it hadn't yet done so, once it got wind of the paper's nosing around, it might rush in a report—just as UCLA had done with Dohrmann's and Garcia-Ruiz's work in L.A.

They also had to consider the other local daily—the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Competition between the two papers is hot, and neither has much of a taste for getting beaten on a story.

Knowing all this, the two considered going with a story right then. There was some NCAA violation; that was clear from the letter. Perhaps there was enough here to report to their readers, and they should go to the university and ask what exactly had been reported.

The other alternative was to try to find out on their own exactly what was afoot. The UCLA experience had rankled these two. The team got off the hook because the university came up with documentation that satisfied NCAA investigators even though it seemed to the two journalists to be absurdly incredible. They felt it was essential to get into the paper what was actually going on—not simply that there was a violation—without alerting the university until it was absolutely essential that they do so.

George's view, he said, was, "If it is not in the newspaper, then the NCAA will not recognize it. We have to get it in the paper." They decided to try to get to the bottom of this for themselves.

So far they didn't have much to go on. There was the letter, yes. Beyond that, there was only Gangelhoff—a 50-ish, disgruntled, former employer working for a casino, as Garcia-Ruiz puts it.

There was a lot of work to be done.

The Reporter and Editor and their Environment
Along with their UCLA experience, the relatively recent arrival in St. Paul of the two principals at work on this story affected their decisions about how to handle it. Indeed, Garcia-Ruiz wonders if the Gophers' scandal would ever have broken, if the only sports staffers around had been the long-timers that dominated both papers' sports staffs.

These veterans worked in a larger cultural atmosphere unusually unsuspecting about any kind of wrongdoing. There are a lot of very settled, comfortable Midwesterners in these cities—people with deep roots and a powerful pride of place. "Minnesota nice" is the prevailing tone, and not just in radio host Garrison Keillor's mind. Minnesotans toe the line and behave decently—at least that's the behavior they presume will prevail, among themselves and others.

The dynamic and bustling Twin Cities—Minneapolis and St. Paul—dominate Minnesota economically, politically, culturally and intellectually. Minneapolis is the state's largest city by far, St. Paul its capital. In the heart of the Twin Cities area, astride both banks of the Mississippi River, which winds between the two cities, sits the huge University of Minnesota. The university plays a powerful role in the life of the state. Minnesotans in overwhelming numbers send their children to be educated there and their sick to be tended in its hospitals. In a far-flung and otherwise largely rural state, the University of Minnesota is a great unifier. Loyalties to it are fierce and strong. In no arena is this more true than in athletics. The university has the state's only big-time college teams, and Minnesotans are proud and fanatic supporters of them.

You could say that, in such a setting, a sports story is never "just a sports story." The price of error in reporting on the object of fierce loyalty is high—from public anger to professional ostracism; maybe even to the loss of a job. And in such an environment, the competition thinks nothing of jumping on an error even before the offended source does. This is especially true because, in college towns like this one, sports reporters tend to grow unusually close to the athletic departments and teams they cover, traveling together with the players and coaches. If they are not always "hometowners," they at least desperately want the teams to succeed.

The last thing most of these sports journalists want to do is to hurt the team.

The Twin Cities' sports journalism community was particularly close to Clem Haskins, the beloved coach of the Gophers. When the Pioneer Press did in the end go to Haskins for a comment, this was his response:

"I've been here 13 years. Don't you know me, what I stand for as a man, as a person? I haven't changed. All I'm trying to do is win a game. All I'm worrying about is beating Gonzaga. It's all I'm concentrating on. All I'll say is, 'I will talk when the tournament is over'."

But Dohrmann and Garcia-Ruiz had never gotten close to Haskins. And neither was hampered by the locally prevailing notion that "It couldn't be happening here." Even after they uncovered a level of fraud that no one would have imagined, Garcia-Ruiz said, "I don't think George and I have been surprised by any of it. The thing is, we never had that doubt about the institution—that it just couldn't be corrupt."

Still, the closeness of the sports writing community, Dohrmann and his editor knew, meant that others would be quite ready to turn on them if their work fingered some of the Twin Cities' most beloved figures. There would be an unusually high level of scrutiny. They'd have to pass a test that they came to refer to, between the two of them, as "making the story Sid-proof"—after a columnist in the Star Tribune named Sid Hartman.

Accordingly, whenever Dohrmann would come back from talking with Gangelhoff, Garcia-Ruiz would press him about how much he knew, how much he could prove, and how. They decided certain things were needed to verify the story: They'd report only things the NCAA could prove. They wanted everything on the record. And they were always working with the notion that it could be nothing. "I told (Executive Editor) Walker (Lundy) the Friday before the story ran that it could be nothing," says Garcia-Ruiz. "They could have self-reported it all."

But for now, so determined were they to get more, to keep the bar of proof high before they counted on anything, that they didn't even raise the issue with Lundy, or with Managing Editor Vicki Gowler. It was too early.

Cultivating the Source
After that first visit, when Dohrmann had driven over to meet her and to see the letter, Jan Gangelhoff was uncertain what might come of the contact with the press. She was struggling with how much she ought to reveal. At one point, she tried to contact someone at the university to let them know what was going on. But no one called back.

George, meanwhile, had decided that, since Gangelhoff had been close to the basketball program, "she would at least be an amazing source of background information. I needed to get her to trust me." He placed regular phone calls, took her to lunch when she came to Minneapolis, drove to Danbury now and then to see her.

Meanwhile, Garcia-Ruiz was telling him that he needed someone else—in addition to the source who originally put him onto Jan—to bounce information off of. Dohrmann thought Elayne Donahue, the retired head of the university's academic counseling unit, might fill that role. He contacted her. Donahue said that she wouldn't offer up anything but, yes, she'd be willing to respond if George asked her about what he was finding out elsewhere.

Now, as Dohrmann describes it, "I would have a triangle of people I could confirm things with. And then I could sit down with Emilio and ask, 'What does this mean?' He was doing a lot of that—sitting down with Emilio—and the copy desk was noticing the conversations. "They started asking what we were doing," the sports editor says.

But still the two weren't talking.

Gradually, Gangelhoff began to reveal a few things. "She said she went on trips with the team," he said. "I figured she was doing more than tutoring." When she said she had accompanied the team to Hawaii, he was more confident than ever that Gangelhoff was playing a pivotal role in the players' lives.

"But I had to convince her to have enough trust in me so she'd talk," he said.

"...and so she'd talk on the record," added his editor.

Garcia-Ruiz was not interested in anonymous sources. Beyond that, he felt that on-the-record comments from Gangelhoff would not even be enough. He would need collaboration. "We weren't going to allow it to be a 'he said, she said' story."

The reporter would come back and tell what Gangelhoff said she'd done, says Garcia-Ruiz, "And I'd say, 'That's nice, but you don't have the story'." He could just imagine the critics poking fun at the Pioneer Press, resting their big expose on the claims of an embittered, former university staffer. He wanted the story Sid-proof.

And Dohrmann was game to keep trying. When he works with a source long-term, he says, "I don't just want to convince them I care about their lives. I want them to care about my life." In addition to keeping up with the latest in Gangelhoff's life, he would tell her what was going on in his. He'd keep her posted on his reporting on other stories, on what he and his fiancée were doing.

And, one day in January, the time and effort began to pay off.

"I called her, and she said, 'I was just thinking about you. I kind of have decided that you can ask me things, and I'll tell you the truth'."

Dohrmann lost no time in taking Gangelhoff up on her offer. "Did you do papers for the players?" he asked her. "Yes," she replied. He told her he'd be coming over tomorrow to talk.

Dohrmann drove to Danbury and sat down with his source and a tape recorder. Gangelhoff, he says, "is a reporter's dream. She writes stuff down. She has a great memory."

The story poured out. The size and shape of the NCAA infractions began to grow clearer to Dohrmann.

The Question of Timing
Back in St. Paul, despite Gangelhoff's forthrightness, Garcia-Ruiz remained dissatisfied. "I didn't think we'd get proof," he says. "What was she gonna have to show us?" Something concrete—a paper Gangelhoff had written for a player, a taped phone conversation—is what Garcia-Ruiz felt was needed, and it didn't seem to be forthcoming. Meanwhile, the strike was over, and the NBA season had started. Dohrmann was needed to cover the games. "We didn't have anybody else," says his editor.

During the days to follow, as their story was held, Garcia-Ruiz and Dohrmann would check the Star Tribune every day to see if the competition had the story. After all, the letter that the university had sent Gangelhoff was out there. "We always had to think about it."

Still, the time lag made sense to Dohrmann, "I really felt I needed to give Gangelhoff room to breathe." Though she had professed her willingness to talk, she was clearly worried about what the effect would be. She talked to her sister about it, she told Dohrmann. She was really struggling with it.

Besides, Elayne Donahue, the former academic counselor for the university who was his confirming source, was out of the country until March 1.

Finally, at the beginning of March, he called Gangelhoff. "Let me come up," he asked. She agreed. They met at the Chippewa Corners Cafe in Danbury. He sat down at the table, he said, and she told him, right off the bat: "I can give you proof."

Gangelhoff had kept innumerable computer files of the work she had done. Unfortunately, she told Dohrmann, she wasn't sure exactly what she had, and it was all mixed in with everything else she'd done on her computer for years. The two went back to her apartment, and started going through her hard drive. They came up with 450 files—papers she said she'd done for players, intermingled with personal letters and other work. And all of it was riddled with viruses.

Dohrmann took the stuff, on discs, back to his office, and printed it out. Then he put everything into two huge legal boxes, and carted them over to Garcia-Ruiz's house.

By now, Garcia-Ruiz had let the paper's editor, Walker Lundy, know how hot the story was getting, although, "even then, I told him that I thought it was going to be hard to prove," the sports editor says. Still, Lundy had begun to expect something big. He definitely wanted to go with the story, as soon as they could nail it down. But he understood that the timing was going to be controversial.

He had a chat with his managing editor, Vicki Gowler. "This story is gonna hit somewhere as the team is going into this tournament." Lundy said. He added later," I thought some would say, 'Hey, wait a minute—did you time this?' "

Gowler, as it turns out, had been thinking quite a bit about timing, thanks to a prior experience in which timing had made a big difference. When Gowler was executive editor at a paper in Duluth, Minnesota, she had presided over a package of interviews with candidates emphasizing their comments on education funding issues. The package came out in September, just as school started, and the teachers felt it was exceedingly prejudicial. They felt its tone was anti-teacher, and the paper caught hell for the decision to run the package when it did.

"Since then, I've tried to think about timing," says Gowler. "Not just, 'Is the story fair?' but 'Is the timing fair?' We could do everything right, [yet still] feel that the story coming out now could mean something would happen that wasn't right."

Nonetheless, after raising this fear—and talking with Lundy about the story and their options—Gowler concluded that the piece should run whenever it was completed. "We knew the timing would be unpopular, but we knew it would be worse to wait. It came down to a rock and a hard place. It seemed like the right thing to do was to run the story when it was ready."

For his part, Lundy says he never doubted that having the story's readiness determine the timing was the thing to do. "You have to have a reason to hold it. Is there a reason to hold it? I couldn't think of one that didn't have something to do with rooting for the home team."

Putting the Story Together
Garcia-Ruiz and Dohrmann spent hours in the sports editor's basement sifting through Gangelhoff's papers, reading them, comparing them. Soon they began to make telling discoveries: the same paper, turned in by two different players, years apart. Papers with exactly the same mistakes in them, turned in by one player and then another. It was clear that Gangelhoff's claims were solid. And they had the proof.

"That night, about 1 a.m., we knew we were good to go," said Garcia-Ruiz.

The paper hurriedly relieved Dohrmann of coverage of the basketball games, replacing him with a preps writer hired from the St. Petersburg Times a few days before.

"We told her, you're on basketball," says Lundy with evident pride. "Now she's our NBA writer."

Dohrmann hopped on a flight to Grand Rapids to talk to the first of the players implicated by the papers. Then he flew to Indianapolis to talk to a second player. Both confirmed Gangelhoff's description of the work she had done for them and others.

They confirmed, too, that the coaches knew about it.

At the beginning of the next week, Garcia-Ruiz put other staffers onto the job of calling the 19 other players. "We decided first thing Monday morning that we had to try to talk to all of them," he said. Meanwhile, Dohrmann had written a rough draft of the story, without university or player comment, and Garcia-Ruiz gave it to Lundy to read. But he was still downplaying it to his boss: "We knew we had what Gangelhoff had done. But we didn't know what Minnesota had told the NCAA." The nagging thought that perhaps they had already reported all this persisted.

But it was soon to be banished. The Monday phone calls to players had alerted Haskins and other university officials, one of whom angrily called Gangelhoff to ask her what in the world she had done. Clearly, they did not have the ease of conscience, the sense of security, they would have had if all had been reported.

Garcia-Ruiz now shed his doubts. They had a big one. And it was Sid-proof.

Still, there was still a lot of last-minute work to do. Emilio called the sports information office (SIO) at the university and said he needed to talk to the athletic director and to the basketball coach. The SIO promised that the officials would get back. Meanwhile, said the editor, "George was going nuts. They could fire up a quick letter and do all the reporting now, we figured." Still, there would be no story until they had the university's comments.

When the next morning passed without the promised phone calls, Garcia-Ruiz called the SIO again, pressing to talk to the coach. The team was already in the air, came the answer. They were headed for Seattle, the site of the Gophers' game with Gonzaga.

The Pioneer Press reporter went up the ladder of the university. An education reporter called the university president, who was out of town. Yes, the president agreed, he would definitely make sure that the athletic department got back to Garcia-Ruiz. The call to the president worked. Finally, at six in the evening the vice president for student development and athletics, McKinley Boston, called. Boston questioned the credibility of Gangelhoff's allegations, saying they were inconsistent with statements she'd made in the past. Shortly afterward, a Pioneer Press columnist in Seattle to cover the tournament knocked on Clem Haskins' door. Haskins delivered his speech about how they knew who he was—that he wouldn't do something like that. He was just concentrating on beating Gonzaga. He'd talk to them after the tournament.

Okay, said Walker, we're going with the story tomorrow.

But they still had to reach the four players on the team who were implicated in the scandal, the editor thought. "If we're gonna name 'em, we gotta talk to 'em. If we couldn't find a player, we couldn't say he was a cheater."

"I was real concerned that we be fair to the people this was landing on," he says. "Frankly, I didn't feel responsible for the reputation of the university. I figured others were responsible for that."

Pioneer Press staffers at the tournament drummed up players there for interviews, but university officials had already gotten to them. They refused to comment.

Back at the paper, editors decided they'd done all they could. They were ready to go. "At least 20 men's basketball players at the University of Minnesota had research papers, take-home exams or other course work done for them during a five-year period, according to a former office manager in the academic counseling unit who said she did the work," said the lead of the story on the March 10 front page. The Gophers' first tournament game was set for March 11.

That evening was a great time for Lundy. "The 10 o'clock news had no record of [the story]. The Star Tribune's website, www.startribune.com, had nothing on it. The presses were running. I thought, 'Now I know what the Japanese forces felt like when they came over the mountains, and there were the battleships waiting in the harbor'."

Published
Nancy Conner's phone was ringing off the hook, along with the phones at the main switchboard, the editorial page and many throughout the newsroom. Conner, the Pioneer Press's reader advocate, had heard of the story for the first time when Lundy read the lead at the 4:30 meeting the afternoon before. "I didn't know how concerned people would be about the timing," she said. "I just thought it was a damned good story."

Now she saw that there was a lot more to it than that. Readers were furious—in droves. "People were telling us we weren't public-minded, that we were ruining lives. We had destroyed something that the players had fairly earned—an opportunity to play this game." The e-mail messages were even worse than the phone calls—unsigned screeds, laced with vitriol, bristling with obscenity.

Then Gov. Jesse Ventura entered the fray. At a press conference he said what the Pioneer Press had done was "despicable." He accused the paper of rigging the timing so the story would come out right before the game, all for the sake of "sensationalism journalism."

Lundy says, "I just wish he'd found time to say that academic cheating is not a very good thing either."

The governor's tirade triggered even more calls and letters. The tone was consistent: The paper's timing showed malice aforethought, and its action was inexcusable. "Cheating happens throughout college, and not just with athletes," wrote Jon Schmoll of St. Paul. "The fact that you used these students, at this exact time, one day before the tournament started, is totally inexcusable."

Brian Deal of Lake Crystal wrote: "You should be more than ashamed of yourself. It's time the media stopped being the self-appointed watchdog of society. We are all tired of it. Thanks for crushing the hopes of a state that has endured the Vikings' loss, the Twins' debacle and the NBA strike. I hope the editor feels he has served some grand purpose, whatever that may be."

"We are one of society's ... watchdogs," said Walker Lundy later. "In fact, that's our job," a role that is set forth and protected in the Constitution. "We had very solid evidence that the University of Minnesota was fielding an unacceptable basketball team. They had corrupted the basic reason a university exists, which is to educate people."

The university's response, meanwhile, was swift and powerful. It suspended the four players named among the cheaters. Two of them were starters.

Sure enough, Gonzaga beat the Gophers.

"We expected them to suspend the players, but then appeal. People had told me that it was likely they could get a waiver, so that the players could play," said Lundy. "When we put the stories in the paper, I didn't know the university would be obligated to suspend them."

The fans were heartsick. "We don't have a long and storied athletic history here," Lundy points out. "And Clem Haskins had taken a pretty average team and gotten them to play better than anyone would have thought, and gotten them into the tournament: a bunch of underachievers who really played well together. The community had rallied around them. It was great. Clem Haskins was the man."

To make matters even more dramatic, the behavior the Pioneer Press was setting forth was not the kind of thing Minnesotans thought went on in their midst. "Minnesotans are proud of the fact that we don't have that kind of stuff," acknowledges Lundy. "So, in the middle of this celebration, comes the Pioneer Press to piss all over everything, presenting this revered coach as a cheater and the players they loved as cheaters."

Worse yet, he said, "We really have only this one university, and the Pioneer Press was saying its academic mission is corrupt. It's a terribly rude thing to say."

For her part, Nancy Conner decided that the readers were asking a good question when they wondered whether the paper couldn't have done the story sooner. "I decided to interview people here to find out if I was comfortable with what we had done."

She satisfied herself ultimately. "I ended up being an advocate for the paper," she said. "I told people that I understood why they were upset, but that I thought we did the right thing. I asked readers, 'Should a paper hide information? You wouldn't want us to do this about anything else [other than sports]. What if we had found this out about Gonzaga?' Would they have wanted us to hide it then?"

Column Fails to Satisfy
With so many readers so unhappy, Lundy decided he should write something for the next day's paper about the timing question. "Because we hadn't answered the question the first day, lots of people thought we had timed it. It's hard, in 750 words, to explain the process." But he thought he'd better try to explain what he saw as the value of the work, and what he felt was the inevitability of its timing.

The column didn't have exactly the effect he had hoped. "Silly me. I thought once I wrote the column... people would say, 'Oh, okay, I get this.' Instead people wrote and said, 'I don't believe you'."

By a week after the story ran, Conner—collecting a count of phone calls from around the building and adding them to e-mail and letters—had tallied about 1,000 responses.

A lot of the calls were going to Lundy, and a lot of them were calling him a liar. The number of people who compared him to President Clinton, then in the midst of his nationwide deception act regarding Monica Lewinsky, he noticed, was particularly striking.

What might have happened if the paper had run a note of explanation on the day the story ran? "I dunno," says Lundy. "I don't think it would've made any difference. You look like you're feeling like you have to defend something."

But some of the others involved think that being more forthcoming with readers on the day the story ran could have made a difference.

Managing Editor Vicki Gowler is among them: "I think that's the one thing I would have done differently—trying to explain to readers" what the editors' thinking was.

Garcia-Ruiz, too, says that "had we been able to anticipate" the response, an editor's note might have been in order. "But it just floored me completely" how big the response was. "We never even dreamed that [the story] would be 45 minutes of the 1-hour news report the next day."

Another vote for a same-day explanation comes from Conner: "I wish that we had gone ahead for once and written an editor's note that explained some of the background, showed the fairness and the depth of the reporting that went into it—and done it on the first day."

She's glad Walker did write such a piece the second day, she added, but doing it afterward "was in more of a defense mode."

Still, Conner notes that after the column—and following the initial deluge of complaints—"the supporters came out of the woodwork."

"The thing is, people didn't see immediately how this could serve students better in the future." It's her hope that it will help force universities to "come to grips with playing college athletics and being a scholar" and how the two can be balanced. "This hurt some players but, in the end, future athletes are going to have a better situation."

As for Jan Gangelhoff, Dohrmann says that she "has heard enough people say she did the right thing to now really, really believe that she did. She realizes that what she did was wrong. So now she's really happy she did this thing to correct it—so it doesn't happen to kids in the future."

And how did Lundy end up feeling about it all? "I'm sorry anybody lost a job," he says

"But when I get my gold watch, I'm going to talk about this as one of the best things I've ever seen happen."

Impact of Competition
Star Tribune editor Tim McGuire agreed that the Pioneer Press had done a fine piece of work. As he told the American Journalism Review, which ran a piece on the Gopher stories, "I wasn't thrilled. I was disappointed" to see the competition break this big story. But McGuire didn't seek to undercut the work in any way.

"The Star Tribune people were very professional in their response," says Lundy. "They gave us full credit for the story, and threw nine people at it the next day. But when you're that far behind and you didn't have Jan Gangelhoff, it was very hard to catch up."

McGuire sees this differently. "I think this newsroom reacted very well," he says, in following up with reporting that broke other parts of the story.

Minnesota's former governor, Arne Carlson, thinks the competition that fuels such remarks played a role in the reporting and play of this story. In the wake of the cheating scandal, Carlson pronounced the university a victim of the newspaper war.

Garcia-Ruiz understands the analogy. "The war between the Dallas Morning News and the Dallas Times Herald killed the Southwest Conference," in his view. "That could've happened here, but I don't think it did."

Indeed, Garcia-Ruiz argues the competition made the paper more responsible, not less: "I'll tell you what it did to us. It actually made us more cautious. We dotted our i's and crossed our t's more carefully" because we figured that the other paper would be watching.

Lundy acknowledges the situation is "hotly competitive." Not for nothing is "hell-raising" one of the goals on the flip chart when his staff sits down at 9 a.m. to assess how that morning's paper looks in retrospect. And not for nothing is the Trib's front page pasted up there right alongside the hometown sheet.

Still, Lundy maintains, "On this one, [the competition] played no role."

Epilogue

In all, 548 Pioneer Press readers canceled their subscriptions over the Gophers story. (The paper sold an extra 8,000 copies the day the story ran.)

Editors usually expect that most of those subscribers who cancel in anger will return to the fold before long. As Lundy says, "If you're the only game in town, they have to." But not in this case. "Here they have an alternative." And in fact, most of the cancellations have stuck. Six months after the story broke, the circulation director calculated the net loss at 433.

Another financial hit came in advertising. The university's athletic department had its advertising reps call to explain that, thanks to the story, "the mood was so bad" that they could no longer advertise with the paper. They canceled their contracts, which had been worth about $30,000 a year.

A piece of journalistic fallout was the football team's initial reluctance to speak to Pioneer Press reporters, demanding that the paper issue a formal apology for the effects of its work on the Gophers scandal.

As for what the newspaper's publisher thought of his staff's work, and all the developments that followed, Lundy notes, "I had put him in the loop toward the end. You know, publishers aren't too keen on surprises. He was thrilled with the story."

Eight months after the story, the university released a report, prepared for it by a law firm, concluding that Clem Haskins had lied to investigators about "widespread academic misconduct" and had also told his players to lie. It criticized the athletic department, academic counseling supervisors and faculty members for allowing the cheating to occur. Hours before the release of the report, two other top athletic officials—McKinley Boston, the vice president for student development and athletics, along with the men's athletic director—resigned. Haskins, who had resigned under pressure in June and taken a $1.5 million buyout, denied any knowledge of Gangelhoff's activities, and said he had told no one to lie.

Said the university's president. Mark Yudof: "I am angry. I felt I was lied to my face... the problem was much deeper, and... this program was corrupt in almost any way one can think about it."

The report was forwarded to the NCAA, which will either have its own investigation and report, or rubber-stamp the university's investigation.

Shortly over a year after the story broke, it brought George Dohrmann the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for beat reporting. Several weeks later, Dohrmann announced he was leaving the staff to take an investigative reporting position with Sports Illustrated.

Discussion questions

1. Was the Pioneer Press's decision to run the story when it did the best decision? How well did it serve the public interest? Did the public have a right to this information earlier? If so, did the paper serve a higher purpose by withholding it? Should it have withheld it until after the tournament?
   
   
2. Who made the decisions about the handling of the story, and what principles guided them? Were the decisions professionally and ethically sound?
   
   
3. The two journalists went deep into a secret, investigative mode because they didn't want the competition to get wind of the story and also because they distrusted the university and the NCAA, based partly on previous experience. Shouldn't journalists champion openness? Was it right to keep the story so closely held?
   
   
4. If these two journalists had been not newcomers, but longtime residents, would they have pursued the story differently?
   
   
5. Should the paper have anticipated the public response? Would fuller explanations from the paper have made a difference in the response? Does the public unhappiness mean that the paper did the wrong thing?