The world would be a better place if everyone whose job has an impact on the public could know what it feels like to be on the receiving end.
Might not a doctor’s bedside manner improve after a medical scare of his or her own? And shouldn’t lawyers know what it feels like to be sued before they’re awarded a license to go out and start suing others?
Same goes for us.
I think every reporter should experience being written about before embarking on a career of writing about others.
That doesn’t usually happen, of course. So people who HAVE been the subject of stories might see a rich irony when newspaper folks start squawking because another publication produced an inaccurate, incomplete or selectively reported story about them or their city.
The Plain Dealer had that experience a couple of times recently.
The most recent was last week, after a reporter from Agence France-Presse, which bills itself as the oldest established news service in the world, parachuted into Cleveland to do a story on the large number of local home foreclosures as part of a series on the subprime loan crisis.
He didn’t literally “parachute” in, of course. That’s an industry clich that describes reporters who race to an unfamiliar area that’s in the news, quickly gather some facts, interview a few of the locals, write a story as if they’ve lived there all their lives, and then vanish just as quickly.
It’s a difficult assignment, and reporters who can do it well are rare. They must assess and assimilate quickly, make sure they talk to the right people, strive for perspective and – above all – check the facts with the locals to make sure they didn’t make some boneheaded mistake.
It was that pesky fact-checking part that tripped up AFP reporter Luc Olinga in his story about foreclosures. As Mike McIntyre chronicled in a Page One story Wednesday, Olinga waxed eloquent about the empty, trash-filled streets and boarded-up, abandoned houses of Shaker Heights. Trouble is, he got the city wrong. The place he was describing is one of the most destitute areas in Cleveland’s hard-hit Mount Pleasant neighborhood. He also missed on the name of a grocery store, a couple of street names, a key fact about the number of police in the area, and a quote from Cuyahoga County Treasurer Jim Rokakis.
Consternation ensued, particularly on the part of Olinga’s editor, who eventually corrected and reissued the story, and Shaker Heights Mayor Earl Leiken, who spent part of his week trying to get the Internet genie back into the bottle.
There was also some subdued hilarity in this newsroom – “subdued” because all of us have made boneheaded errors of our own, and we’re a bit reluctant to start cackling about somebody else’s. But checking one’s facts is the foundation of any story, and therein lay the cautionary tale: The proof was there in hideous detail on Page One.
The other story was a Jan. 17 New York Times piece about the aftermath of the attack by six black teenagers on Shaker Heights lawyer Kevin McDermott. Under the heading of “Shaker Heights Journal,” Times stringer Christopher Maag described the general dismay in the Ludlow neighborhood where the beating occurred, and the efforts of many residents to help the area recover.
He also wrote that there’s a general puzzlement among Cleveland suburbanites as to why the people who live in Shaker Heights are still there, and there’s even some satisfaction that the holier-than-thou Shakerites were getting their comeuppance.
To back that up, he quoted the most incendiary line of columnist Dick Feagler’s controversial post-attack column: “So move.” Also from an unnamed blogger on our Web site who smugly wondered how tolerant the “limousine liberals” of Shaker Heights would be now that the thugs had arrived in their city.
Maag is no parachutist from New York. He lives here, thus can write with some authority about what he knows of the region. His facts were solid. And I suppose labeling his piece a “journal” gives him some more latitude than might be acceptable in a straight news story.
But I thought the piece was peppered with generalizations, and the Plain Dealer quotes he selected – a line out of a nuanced column and a quote from a blogger – were not at all representative of our coverage.
Metro columnist Phillip Morris wrote a passionate rebuttal to Feagler’s argument. Our news coverage hit all sides of the issue. Dozens of our bloggers took issue with the curmudgeon Maag quoted. And . . . and . . .
Wait a minute. I’m starting to sound like one of my callers, to whom I explain that we can’t quote everything a source says, and that at times we use just one comment from a wide-ranging interview to illustrate a point.
“I didn’t think of it as a comment on the PD,” said Maag. “I used the Feagler quote because I thought Dick put a polite face on a pretty broadly held sentiment in the region. I didn’t quote Phil because I thought the people right on the ground, from Ludlow and Shaker Heights, expressed that point quite eloquently.”
That’s reasonable, but it doesn’t get him completely off the hook. Generalizations abounded, distilling the ideas of “Ludlow residents” and “many outsiders” into selective quotes that he didn’t prove were representative. And I still think he should have put the Plain Dealer coverage into context.
But that’s for somebody else to worry about. For my part, the story simply reaffirms what most reporters already know: The subjects we write about are people, not just parts of a story. The way they are portrayed is important to them, and we should be careful with that.
