Thar She Blows

(Note:  the original davenporttoday.com post did not include the handy link to the 1/23/15 Times article)

Tom Saul had it right.  Back when newspapers had beat reporters that would spend their day plying the city for THE story, it would be customary for him to spend fifteen minutes or so in my office several times a week on his rotation through City Hall.  He’d talk to sources face to face, piece together stories and report the news without fear or favor.  He was well respected, and taught me more than a few things about journalism, and life.  One of the things he taught me was the definition of news.

Tom said news was the difference between yesterday and today, or today and tomorrow.  While I didn’t appreciate everything he wrote, he was fair and diligent.  He was old school, telling me he was inspired to join the journalism trade by classic reporting; Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, etc..  I reminded him a few times I wasn’t Richard Nixon.

Reporters sift through BS, wear out shoe leather, page through e-mails and dispense FOIAs like candy at Halloween.  They’re not paid enough and I don’t begrudge their at times heroic journeys through the dark alleys of life to shine the light of truth on what needs to be seen.  But Moby Dick is not just a long story about fishing.  Hoisting a public official on his own petard is classic journalism, but sharpening a spear for months on end can be a pointless voyage.

I wake up this morning and see three quarters of the Times front page is about Illinois so I turn the page and look for Wundram’s column.  It’s a repeat from December 2012 (a good one, Bill).  Turn a few pages and I get to revisit an e-mail exchange from August 19.  Barb’s parsing a sentence and I’m the target.

Here’s the thing.  The first lie I tell in my job is the end of my career.  It is that simple.  So I avoid telling lies like kids avoid broccoli.  I’ll feed it to the dog.  I’ll wipe my mouth and deftly spit it out into my napkin.  I’ll stuff it in my pants pocket when mom’s not looking.  No broccoli.  No lies.  If you’d like to read the original exchanges from August, here’s the original sentence and the e-mail exchange Barb is frustrated with.  Here’s a more recent e-mail seemingly related to the topic that ended better.

It’s near the end of January, 2015.  The Times today is recycling a column from 2012 and publishing a column that had its origins on August 19, 2014.  That would stretch Tom’s definition of news.  But what I’m most confused about this morning is something else.  Last Friday’s QCT headline was “Davenport to Finance Elmore Avenue extension”.  Set aside for the moment that the front page headline on January 23, 2015 describes the outcome of a City Council vote from June 25, 2014.  The first sentence of the Times’ story from last Friday (here), in reference to the extension of Elmore Drive, reads “The city is paying for it, but not really”.

I didn’t write that sentence about how the city is “not really” paying for a public improvement spurred by private investment.  Times reporter Brian Wellner authored that sentence.  The Times reports something as first sentence, front page, headline truth and six days later chastises me for “semantics” ... regarding a story they first got wrong in August of last year.    

I get the public paycheck comes with a target.  I’m not perfect by far, but I am ok with living a life on the record.  More a fan of Twain than Melville, I like his approach; “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything”.

1/28/15