Imperfect sources, yet real news
By REX SMITH EDITOR
First published in print: Saturday, September 19, 2009
When we were kids, Tommy Allen wasn't the most dependable font of knowledge, though he pretended to be. For years, I called every craft on water a "boat" because Tommy insisted the word "ship" was naughty. He said he could pin me wrestling in the yard because he ate liver and onions every day and once drank a quart of blood.
Now, I'm told, Tommy is a respected lawyer in our hometown. People who know him might even consider him trustworthy, based on the experiences they have had with him. I remain dubious. Considering that "ship" thing alone, it would take a while before I could accept Tommy as a reliable source.
Maybe that dynamic explains why those of us in the mainstream media were a bit slow responding to the explosive allegations arising this week
about ACORN, the anti-poverty group. Not that the stories were made up, like Tommy's tale of liver eating. But many of us in the news business get a quick take on a tale by checking its teller. That may explain why the story was largely overlooked at first and why we may learn from it something about the changing nature of information transmittal.
In case you missed it: A couple of young conservative activists pretending to be a prostitute and her pimp secretly videotaped ACORN workers in several offices coaching the duo on how to evade taxes and avoid scrutiny. One ACORN worker talked about killing her abusive husband. It was startling, to say the least.
The tapes prompted both houses of Congress to pass differing bills that bar the group from receiving federal funds. That was a sweet victory for the several conservative groups that have long viewed ACORN, a coalition of neighborhood groups with a national umbrella lobbying arm, as a haven of voter registration fraud and unethical political activity.
Most of us in the so-called legacy media came late to the story. ABC anchor Charles Gibson, for one, seemed in the dark when asked about the tapes Tuesday. This paper published articles on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, but that was after the first vote in Congress Monday evening. We missed the initial allegations.
To suggest, as some callers have, that our handling of the story stems from a bias against conservative views is to miss a more complex and interesting point.
Foremost is that our newspaper focuses primarily on local news and secondarily on what's going on in this state. Nobody else gives you that content as reliably, while you can find national and world news in many venues.
But there's this, too: The ACORN video was first revealed on a blog run by Andrew Breitbart, a former associate of Matt Drudge. You remember Drudge: It was from The Drudge Report, a groundbreaking blog during the Clinton presidency, that we first heard that Monica Lewinsky had a blue dress harboring presidential DNA.
Many people didn't believe that at first not just because it was mind-boggling; it was also because Drudge had little credibility. Although a lot of his reports on Clinton proved correct, he has been wrong so often since that nobody should take a Drudge claim at face value.
Breitbart's video got picked up by Fox News -- notably, by talk show host Glenn Beck, who urged viewers to call local newspapers and excoriate us for not reporting the story. Journalists tend to be dispassionate about stories, and we value independence; the involvement of Beck, whose stock in trade is histrionics, lent little credence to the account.
Talk shows, right or left, aren't where reporters look for stories. Beck and most other hosts start from an admittedly biased perspective, with the goal of selling that view to their audience. That makes their work suspect from the get-go.
Nor did those pushing the story perform wholly admirably. For example, the ACORN worker who discussed her husband's murder was pulling the filmmakers' legs: He's alive and well. No beginning reporter here would file a story without such basic fact-checking. Journalism demands a discipline of verification.
That said, the tapes yielded a real story. Lesson learned: In an era when many outlets can pass information instantly to millions, the traditional media need to pay attention to non-traditional sources, even those with axes to grind.
Still, we're not yielding our news judgment to some talk show host, any more than I would to my old pal Tommy.
Rex Smith is editor of the Times Union. Share your thoughts at
http://blogs.timesunion.com/editors.
Logged
