The gang of reporters marched into the fancy-shmancy law offices of Brownstein, Hyatt, Farber and Schreck and headed to a conference room where they began the long, laborious work, lasting deep into the night, of discovering nothing.
That’s how reporting works. You get leads. You check them out. Often you get nothing.
This was a little different, though, because it was the mayor-elect of Denver offering up cellphone records that he was not legally obligated to disclose — and what the reporters were looking for was potential phone calls to hookers.
And it was different, too, because it would be the lead story in the newspaper the next day — that nothing was found.
Usually, when nothing is found, there’s no story because, well, nothing was found. But when a story begins on the Internet and advances to talk radio and becomes a story before it can be fully reported, it’s a new world. It’s a more exciting world, certainly, but there are a few kinks in the project.
Let’s just say if you knew the alleged stories about past politicians’ lives — stories that were worked on but never reached the level of making it to print — you might be shocked. Actually, given the latest string of political/ sexual revelations, maybe we’re past being shocked.
But we don’t know what Hancock may or may not have done, which is the point.
And so, our heroes/reporters were sitting at two tables in the law office conference room Tuesday night, facing large binders and bringing with them more than 100 phone numbers to see if there were any matches. The Hancock people and their lawyers sat at another table. It was described to me as your basic exam-proctor situation, in what was a really, really long exam.
The reporters had to stash their cellphones and laptops at a fourth table, which they could use, but not at the binder tables. Occasionally, I was told, the proctors would walk by and look over a reporter’s shoulder to see what was being written. In other words, it was very, very weird.
Here’s how weird: If a reporter needed to use the, uh, facilities, he/she was escorted. The escort ended thankfully at the restroom door. As one participant said to me, “I think it was because I asked for reading material.”
The fact that nothing was found proves nothing. If Hancock had, in fact, used his cellphone to set up an account with a prostitution business, he could have done it before the dates that were checked.
Of course, he might well have never done it at all. It’s not a matter, in the journalistic world, of someone being innocent until proven guilty, which is a legal construct.
But it is a matter, journalistically speaking, that you don’t go with a story until you have the story.
The Post didn’t run the story until the Hancock team reneged on a promise to release an unedited phone list that they said would show Hancock was not involved. The funny thing about this story now — the way things stand — is that if Hancock’s people had provided these records prior to last week’s election, The Post might never have run a story.
The new information — that there isn’t any new information — makes the story less credible. There are still bank records that the Hancock team has promised to show reporters, but it seems unlikely to me that the lawyers would hand over records to the media if they were in any way incriminating.
The phone record story shows only that the pimp, Scottie Ewing, stands ever more alone. It becomes harder, looking at the phone records and Hancock’s calendar, to find three possible dates in one year — the logbook, remember, had dates and times, but no years — that would work.
I don’t pretend to have any answers. I don’t know how the story got from Ewing to the website, Complete Colorado, that broke the story. I keep wondering about Ewing’s motives, about why he worked so hard to get this story out. I have trouble imagining that he was moved by what he has called Hancock’s hypocrisy, but what do I know about Ewing’s moral code?
I wonder, too, about the story of the alleged burglary at Ewing’s house, which now, the police say, he doesn’t want to pursue. But the logbooks that he showed me and other reporters are now apparently gone.
And the story itself?
Something else has to happen — something with the the bank records or something entirely unexpected — or the story goes away, too.
Contact Mike Littwin at mlittwin@.
