Pica Pole : Facts, not gossip
Posted on Wednesday, May 24, 2006
It amazes me how many people want to change our politicians but don’t want to get their hands dirty doing it: They want the newspaper to do the work.
Just about every political season we can count on a stream of great story possibilities — in the last week before the election. We believe that most of these anonymous tipsters — they are almost always anonymous — think the newspaper is going to simply run their information, lock, stock and barrel.
That’s not the way it works.
The newspaper is in the business of checking out information, verifying it or discrediting it, then deciding if it’s worth publishing. That takes time — often, lots of time.
One thing that makes it easier is if we can write the name of someone involved. If we say that Joe Average said that the candidate did this, then the information has more credibility, but when we give anonymity to someone, that person is free to say anything he wants without any worry about it coming back to him.
In a couple of recent conversations, tipsters told me they couldn’t talk because they have a lot to lose. Sure they do.
So did our nation’s Founding Fathers. They faced the noose, yet they still signed that sheet of parchment, the Declaration of Independence. They weren’t doing something as mundane as trying to get their candidate elected — they were overthrowing an entire governmental system. They were, in effect, signing their own death warrants.
While this newspaper is not afraid to publish stories the politicians don’t like, we’re not going to trot off on the basis of a last-minute tip and write a blockbuster story. First, it takes time to develop stories, and if we’re not going to have someone with firsthand knowledge talking on the record, our reporters are going to have to do a lot of digging to confirm the story. That work takes time — more time than is available in the last few days before an election.
And don’t start bringing up old stories, either. This election season saw many people talking about Andy Lee, bringing up all the old accusations — which now take on the aura of urban legend — which I won’t cover here. A few of the tipsters spoke in quiet tones, as if what they had to tell me was a deep secret.
OK, so I’m going to share one story. Andy Lee — by the time you read this he may be soon-to-be-Sheriff Lee — as the story goes, pushed a nurse out of the way so he could perform CPR on the victim of a traffic accident and had a photographer take a picture and put it in the paper. Someone with enough time on their hands could indeed go back through archives and — lo and behold! — find a photo of Sheriff Lee performing CPR on a traffic victim. Proves the story, right? Wrong.
How do I know? Because the person who finds the photo could also discover, by looking in the lower right corner below the photo, that someone named Kent Marts took the photo in question. Lee did not have me take his photograph, not did he push a nurse out of the way. The sheriff performing CPR was a good photo, so we ran it.
Regarding all the other stories about Andy, or any other longtime politician for that matter, if you were there then you’re a viable source; if you were not there, you must question your source on how they "know"the information. Do they really "know"the information, or just "know"that someone told them it’s the truth In our case, we’re not going to print up more than 20,000 copies on the word of someone who "knows"what someone told them.
We’re going to have to verify it.
That’s called reporting. If we didn’t do that, it would be called gossiping. When someone tells me something, I’ll gladly listen. The closer it is to an election, the less likely we are to do a story. It’s not because we’re in the politician’s back pocket; it’s because we’re not going to participate in gossip. We’re reporters — we want to get to the truth, but we want to be fair to all involved.
• • • Kent Marts is editor/general manager of The Benton County Daily Record. His column appears on Wednesdays. He can be reached at kentm@nwanews. com.
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