The Scoop: We chase it, at times just luck into it

MELONE E-mail: Click here Archive

By MARY JO MELONE

© St. Petersburg Times, published July 18, 2000

So patients sue their doctors, employees sue their employers, Little League parents sue their kids' coaches, and fast food junkies sue fast food restaurants.

But reporters suing their editors?

Anybody in journalism will tell you that the news business is not a democracy, no matter how much editorial writers editorialize in democracy's defense. In virtually every row between reporter and editor -- I have some experience -- the editor wins. Speaking as a non-editor, this absolutely stinks. But it is absolutely necessary.

The newspaper has to be on your lawn the same time every morning. The evening news cannot begin one minute after 6 p.m.

This fundamental fact about journalism somehow escaped the notice of Steve Wilson and Jane Akre. They were once big players in the TV business, but now they're crusading against their ex-bosses at WTVT-Ch. 13. The trial of their suit, which charges that the station kept them from broadcasting a story about how the hormones fed to cows to get them to make more milk is making us sick, began Monday.

I have no clue if the suit has merit, to use some of that insufferable lawyer-speak.

Whatever the result, the suit will give aid and comfort to the grassy knoll crowd, which believes some stories are told, or not told, because a wicked conspiracy is afoot among the powerful.

Pinellas Republicans think this of the Times.

Hillsborough Democrats think this of the Tribune.

And it's a crock. Much subtler forces are at work, like those cited in a cover story earlier this summer by Columbia Journalism Review -- on reporters censoring themselves.

Based on the results of a poll taken by CJR and a journalism think tank, the magazine concluded:

"Journalists are more likely to confirm that self censorship exists than to personally admit to avoiding newsworthy stories ... . There is a generational divide on this question, with younger journalists more likely than older colleagues to say they have avoided or toned down stories."

What the magazine calls "market pressures" -- bigfooting by companies like Monsanto, which supposedly brought Rupert Murdoch's empire, in the Channel 13 case, to its designer-suited knees -- is cited. Some cows that take the shape of ball teams and stadiums become sacred indeed.

But the harder-to-get-at influences were things we reporters don't even like to talk about. Because they involve us.

Like failing to push to do a story because a reporter thinks doing so would hurt his career or hurt his relationship to his source. Or an editor failing to encourage a story because he knows that if something goes wrong along the way, it's his hide on the hook. "Few editors get fired for stories they don't publish," CJR said.

The flip side is a story that gets done because everybody is doing it: There was a period when I swear every big paper in the country sent somebody to sneer at the country pop culture that took over Branson, Mo.

What yuppie, loafered reporter would admit to liking Branson? (Not me.) This is newsroom groupthink. The $20 phrase is office culture. Every business has its own. It's just that other businesses don't claim to be truth seekers. They don't pledge to be free of hypocrisy.

Add these to the usual suspects: lack of time, of information, decisions that have to be made in haste, on the wing, over the phone. This is why the puffed-up chests of my business are wrong about calling journalism art. Like most jobs, it is just honorable work.

Now and then you might tell a story that somebody thanks you for, that comforts the afflicted. This can be the result of your effort, when you ferret out the facts, or of dumb luck, when the tip of the decade comes over a phone you just happen to answer.

Forget Oliver Stone. Think Oliver Hardy.

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