By the end of August, the scene had become all too familiar: A “tea party,” with people waving upside-down American flags, with signs and chants insulting the president, a fellow in 18th century garb; lots of yelling, an occasional supportive honk from a passing car.
By coincidence, it was outside an Indianapolis hotel where a national journalism convention was going on.
The demonstrators apparently weren’t aware, when they had scheduled their event, that there would be hundreds of journalists just across the street. Had they known, they might have included the journalists in their wrath.
But when you think about it, journalists share a lot of the responsibility for that wrath. In some ways, they’re just as anti-government as the “tea party” crowd.
While the demonstrators were demonstrating, the journalists were in sessions offering examples of how reporters uncovered potential fraud “that could let millions of people vote more than once”; how they caught “the Chicago City Council repeatedly breaking the law”; how “relentless” reporting “put the mayor of Detroit behind bars”; and how the Chicago Tribune worked with federal prosecutors to nail former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich.
No wonder people are convinced government can’t do anything right. And these were not right-wing, anti-government journalists talking about getting the goods on elected officials; they were the mainstream media.
At one of these sessions, Chicago Tribune editors explained why they agreed to sit on what they believed was exclusive information about a federal investigation. Premature reporting, one said, “would have very plausibly ended the investigation or severely damaged it.”
A former prosecutor on the panel, no surprise, said he thought the Trib made the right call. “In some ways journalists and feds are on the same side,” he added — going after state government corruption. And, the Trib editors added, their cooperation — up to a point; they insisted on controlling when to publish — allows them to maintain good relations with a source that can alert them to future scandals.
They went on in this watchdog mode for some time until one naïve member of the audience (me) was moved to ask if there weren’t any good-government examples to give readers. Ha, said a friend of mine who worked at the Trib for decades; remember, this is Chicago.
And, in Chicago and everywhere else, bad-government stories get much more attention, and win more awards, than good-government stories. They’re like the piece a Denver television station did recently on the state’s buying premium gasoline for some of its vehicles. It cost an extra $135,000 a year until the state ended the practice last January. But considering that the state’s 2008-09 budget was $18.4 billion, that would be like a family with a $40,000 annual budget frittering away 29 cents of it. And the practice had ended months before the report.
On my route into downtown Denver, there is an intersection at Parker Road and East Mississippi Avenue that recently underwent a widening and rebuilding. The project was supposed to be done by Halloween — this coming Halloween. It was finished before the end of July, thanks to the Denver Department of Public Works and the contractor, Technology Constructors.
It’s the sort of good news that doesn’t get much, if any, media notice. Well, of course not, the crusty old journalist will say. Do we report every time a plane lands safely? No. We tell people about the unusual and unexpected.
But we have accustomed people to think that the government can’t do anything right. And if that’s really the case, if it’s really true that government is thoroughly inept, then it’s real news when the government does get it right — and somebody ought to say something.
Fred Brown (punditfwb@) is a retired Capitol Bureau chief for The Denver Post.
