Like any soured relationship, the one between the Telegram & Gazette in Worcester, Mass., and the local police department is taking time to heal.
Tensions arose after the paper made public records requests and ran stories questioning expenses such as overtime paid to the police department’s mechanic, who is the chief’s brother, editor Leah Lamson said. Over the summer, the agency’s spokesman refused to speak to a particular reporter on the newspaper’s watchdog team.
Last month, after another story questioned the educational value of the master’s degrees that made some officers eligible for annual bonuses, the agency refused to release information about crimes heard over the scanner to the newspaper until days later, Lamson said. Meanwhile, the details appeared on local television and radio stations.
About a week after that snub, the police department officially announced in a news release that it would focus more on radio and television for disseminating information because the Telegram & Gazette “now places a premium on hyperbole over reality, fiction over fact, and innuendo over truth.”
The release accused the New York Times Company-owned newspaper, which has a readership of roughly 238,000, of resorting to questionable reporting tactics to survive the journalism industry’s layoffs and declining circulation. “Unfortunately, the dark, dirty and poorly lit newsroom is affecting their neutrality, professionalism and integrity,” the release said.
Lamson said she is accustomed to sources pointing out what they consider inaccuracies, but this venom caught her and her staff by surprise.
“It was a personal attack on us. It wasn’t professional. That’s what really startled us,” she said. “It was hard to read that as anything but retaliatory.”
Media outlets often run afoul of public officials because of the dichotomy of our profession. We’re asked to build rapport with sources and act as conduits of information agencies want to communicate; yet we also have a responsibility to hold officials accountable and be willing to burn bridges.
“It’s a tough job,” said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press in Arlington, Va. “You have to report on the news as it turns up and deal with the consequences from people who don’t like what you’ve reported.”
Reporters everywhere have anecdotes of such rancor. The Minneapolis Star Tribune in 2001 noted how then-Governor Jesse Ventura stipulated that reporters covering him wear a special badge with the designation “Official Jackal” and called for Minnesotans to stop reading the Tribune and the St. Paul Pioneer Press.
More recently, the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office in Tampa announced a media ban in September against CBS affiliate WTSP-TV, blasting a particular reporter, Mike Deeson, in a news release for being rude, unethical and dishonest. The sheriff’s office claimed Deeson had embarked on a “personal campaign” against the agency because it had rejected his application for a job, which Deeson denied.
Media outlets can fight for access to information under open-records and public-records laws, as the West Valley View in Avondale, Ariz., did. The newspaper in 2008 reported it won a longstanding suit against the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office after the agency, unhappy with the newspaper’s coverage, removed it from its press release e-mail list.
However, “there is no law requiring that any public agency has to talk to you,” Dalglish said. “There is no law requiring them to behave like grown-ups.”
An agency’s attempt to embarrass or shame a media outlet by announcing a blackout typically raises the suspicions of other reporters — and the pride of those singled out, she said.
“What this reflects, really, is sour grapes and juvenile tactics,” Dalglish said. “In the end, it’s not the reporter who suffers. It’s the public.”
Dalglish said the only way to combat a blackout is “to fully and fairly report on the controversy.” Public officials and the press need each other, and the public ultimately makes it clear it wants to know what its officials are doing, she said.
In addition to reporting, media outlets have used a variety of means to mend these relationships. Newsday reporter Andrew Smith recalled that when the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office years ago wouldn’t alert the paper to news conferences, colleagues at other New York-area newspapers and television stations did. A beat reporter also visited every courtroom he could, which improved communication with prosecutors, Smith said.
This fall, The Washington Post noted a meeting between its new education editor and Washington, D.C., Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee had helped thaw a once-icy relationship between Rhee and the paper’s education reporter. In Tampa, WTSP-TV credited a meeting between its executives and officials at the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office with dissolving that media ban after about a day.
Lamson said the relationship between the Telegram & Gazette and Worcester Police Department has improved somewhat since the newspaper’s city editor met with the police chief. Reporters must glean information only from the department’s spokesman, which is problematic late at night or on weekends, “but we’re not blacked out,” she said.
Lamson and the paper’s publisher have scheduled another meeting later this month with the police chief and the city manager to help both sides better understand each other.
“They have to respect us, I think, for just doing our jobs,” Lamson said. “I also think they need to understand that we aren’t going to stop asking the tough questions.”
