A No-Newspaper Town
(2009-03-10)
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(Note - This is part 2 of the series, "A No Newspaper Town?")
In 1988, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer published a story revealing that for years a well-regarded Superior Court judge had been sexually preying on minors. The piece had an explosive impact: it set off a re-examination of the state's system of judicial discipline, resulted in voters changing the state constitution -- and triggered the judge's suicide. Now the imminent extinction of the P-I raises the question: If newspapers disappear, who will fill that watchdog role?
On Friday morning, August 19, 1988, Seattleites woke to a stunning front-page headline. The night before, King County Superior Court Judge Gary Little had gone into the courthouse after hours and shot himself in the head.
"It was unfortunate that the judge decided to take his own life rather than to face up to the reality of the hurt he had caused with these young men," says Dick Clever, an editor at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer at the time.
Clever, now an editor at the Skagit Valley Herald, and P-I investigative reporter Duff Wilson worked for months on a story showing that the popular and well-respected judge had used positions of power to groom young men for sex. Little committed suicide hours after Wilson told him the story would break the next day, and the public reaction was swift and intense.
"We took a lot of heat the first couple of days after Mr. Little killed himself," Clever says.
Little's many friends in the legal community - as well as members of the public -- condemned the P-I, claiming the judge had been hounded to death by sensationalistic media. But rumors of Little's activities with young boys had dogged him for years, and after the story broke, people who knew about or had suspected Little of misconduct came forward. Then the mood shifted.
"Over a period of a couple of days, people started actually reading the stories and the whole tenor of public reaction changed," Clever says. "It was almost 180 degrees."
The P-I investigation also raised questions about the often-secretive workings of the state commission in charge of judicial discipline.
The commission had failed to act forcefully on evidence that Little was having improper out-of-court contact with juvenile defendants, some of whom had weekend sleep-overs with him at his vacation home. At least two men reported to the commission that Little had sexually abused them as teenagers years before. Still, no action was taken.
Public pressure -- fuelled by the P-I stories -- soon led to reforms in judicial oversight. Wilson says he's proud that voters changed the state constitution to make processes more transparent.
"Instead of being a super-secret discipline system for judges who are accused of misconduct, it's one of the most open ones in the country," he says. "And other states have followed suit."
Over the years, investigations by both of Seattle's daily newspapers have alerted the public to logging practices that contributed to floods, Seattle hospitals failing to come to grips with a deadly epidemic of drug-resistant infections and more. But if the dailies aren't around to do that work, who will be?
According to Scott St.Clair at the Evergreen Freedom Foundation - a free market-oriented think-thank in Olympia, Wash. -- we'll soon find it in the blogosphere. Despite a lack of training or experience prior to his current job, St. Clair calls himself an investigative journalist.
"The information has become more accessible," he says. "Everybody -- from the average citizen on up -- now has the tools to get it."
He points to his own news stories -- published online by Evergreen - as examples. St. Clair has dug into the shortcomings of the state ferry system by using open records laws and asking hard questions of ferry management, lawmakers, unions and the governor. Although he's a self-described newspaper fan, he says ferreting out official shenanigans doesn't require professional journalists anymore.
So, are we entering the age of the citizen journalist, a democratized media-sphere where the next Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein are bloggers?
Clever says that while bloggers are a legitimate part of the information mix, there's more to investigative journalism than simply having an online forum. After all, he was reared in newspapers - he started working at one in the 1960s for 80 dollars a week.
"It may not be brain surgery, but it is a skill and an art," he says.
And he recalls the eight solid months he and Duff Wilson worked on the Judge Little story - months of editing, rewriting, fact-checking.
"It was no light duty, I can tell you," he says. "It was a process of building, brick by brick, something that would stand really harsh scrutiny."
Clever says most people don't realize how much work and care goes into a story like that, and he has a hard time seeing how something like it would have come out had it been left to the blogosphere. For one thing, he says, an experienced editor is a crucial part of investigative reporting.
"The editor is constantly interviewing the reporter," he says. "'Have we asked this, have we asked that, how do we know this?'"
Without a news organization, he says, those checks and balances - and, ultimately, credible investigative journalism - are lost.
Like most bloggers and citizen journalists, St. Clair works without an editor. He says if he's writing something that alleges wrongdoing, he runs it by his boss at the Evergreen Freedom Foundation to make sure he's covered his bases. But as someone who came to journalism from the outside, St.Clair doesn't have much patience for talking about professional journalistic standards.
"I don't have to follow your rules because I don't know them," he says. "Basically, my responsibility is to tell the truth, and to be able to support what I write about, and things like that. And that's just flat-ass common courtesy."
Beneath the decline of mainstream newspapers, St. Clair says, lies a sort of paternalistic hubris that says we need pros to sort it all out for us.
"The print media seems to subliminally send the message out that if we don't survive, who's going to be there to protect you?" he says. "Well, I do a pretty good job of protecting myself. You know, I'm reasonably intelligent, I've got enough life experience that I can discern things."
To be fair, investigative reporting has been declining for years, even at most daily newspapers. It's expensive, risky, and has few upsides for publishers watching the bottom line. With newspapers folding, maybe future Watergates - or future exposers of judicial misconduct - will have to come from an emerging breed of freewheeling citizen journalists with lots of attitude and little to lose.
For more information:
Skagit Valley Herald
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Evergreen Freedom Foundation
Scott St.Clair's investigation of Washington State Ferries
© Copyright 2012, KPLU
