Jon Margolis, Thinking Clearly: Cases in Journalist Decision-Making, February 15, 2003
Synopsis
John McCain's speech was a big story for only a few days, but that was long enough to raise a host of questions. And while this speech was more dramatic than most, the problems it posed are by no means extraordinary, even at the non-presidential level.
Take away the cross-country travel and reduce the number of reporters and cameras covering the event, and something along these lines could confront a journalist covering a campaign for county commission, city hall or the state legislature-a major event that is a political turning point with ramifications surprising even to the candidate and his campaign staff.
The point of the case is whether there is a right way to cover this speech.
How would students in your class cover the speech? Would they follow one of styles discussed in the narrative?
How fair is it to characterize the meaning of McCain speech?
How much do you accept the words of the politician in terms of what he means?
How much should reporters just stick to the words in the text?
If time permits, additional questions could include:
Dealing with these questions in a classroom poses a challenge because much of the discussion has to focus on what was not in the newspapers or on the air. This is a discussion about politics, democracy, and some of the technological and social changes in American life as much as about the techniques of covering a story. Thus arises the inevitable temptation to wander too deeply into the cosmic, always difficult to distinguish from the fatuous. Teachers will have to make individual decisions on how and when to guide the class back to the specifics.
Teaching Plan
One way to teach this case is to give the students the speech itself first, before they read the text of the case, and ask them to write a news story based only on the text of the speech.
Then teachers could give them the narrative to read outside the classroom and rethink their first version. They could either rewrite the pieces or simply rethink them.
When they return to class, having absorbed their narrative and rethought their story, the teacher could open the discussion around the two versions.
Alternatively, a teacher could give students the narrative as is and then, as the opening to the class discussion, ask students how they would write the story.
Opening the Discussion
On its face, this would seem to be quite a simple story. It was a speech. The reporter's job is to tell the reader/listener/viewer what was in the speech, right?
Well, maybe not.
The first thing to be said about the coverage of this speech is that most of it was accurate in the strictest sense. Wherever the discussion comes out, any perceived flaws were largely a function of omission, the sort that most who have covered a presidential campaign would not judge harshly. The working reporter, unlike the journalism critic, writes for that evening or the next day.
Still, each of the approaches the different reporters took led to different outcomes. Even if almost all the stories contained essentially the same information, differences in tone and manner may have produced different responses among readers and viewers.
Question: Was there a right way to cover the speech? If so, was it one of the four approaches outlined in the narrative?
To give the discussion some structure, we suggest following the four categories of story in the narrative, beginning with the most literal: Avoiding Interpretation.
It might work best if the discussion goes through the advantages and risks of each approach. Thus, the teacher might suggest that:
Some reporters took the most literal approach to the story by simply quoting McCain's speech and avoiding interpretation. What do you think of that? What are the pros? What are the cons?
At first glance, this would seem to be the safest approach. Not that these reporters ignored political context-the Cox newspapers lead noted that the speech came on the eve of the Virginia Primary-but they avoided broader social-political interpretation of the attack on Robertson and Falwell.
This approach has one obvious advantage. It sidesteps the danger of saying more than the reporter knows, of reading more into the speech than the candidate intended.
But the disadvantages are equally obvious. McCain's attack on the two Christian conservative leaders summoned, whether or not he wished to, questions about the role of religion in politics and the power of the religious right in the Republican Party. In this case, sticking with "just the facts" poses the risk of insufficiently informing the people. The consumers of this news are also the voting public, who deserve to understand the nuances of political events, not just the facts.
Often, the candidate or the candidate's staff solves this problem for the reporter. In a press briefing, or at least in a "deep background" session on the bus, plane, or tarmac, the press secretary or the chief strategist, if not the contender himself, will reveal the strategic thinking behind a speech, announcement, or advertisement. Indeed, McCain staffers did some of this later in the day. But thanks to the hectic, cross-country schedule, by then it was already too late for some reporters, and this was one occasion when the usually voluble candidate provided no guidance. Each reporter, then, had to make a personal decision about how much interpretation was warranted.
The next approach is "A Tactical Frame." This approach was expressly political, concentrating on the campaign strategy motivations of the speech. Thus the lead of the Washington Post story stated that McCain "sought to tie rival George W. Bush as tightly as possible to the Christian conservative movement," and the second paragraph said McCain was trying "to portray himself as a mainstream conservative."
Question for class: What do you think of that?
One advantage here is that the reporters who took this approach knew what they were talking about. They had been covering the campaign. They had been listening to McCain's speeches and monitoring his television commercials, and in that context the conclusion that McCain was trying to associate Bush with the extremists was reasonable. Besides, in calling Bush "a Pat Robertson Republican," the speech did link Bush squarely with Robertson and Falwell. McCain, after all, was not running against Robertson or Falwell. He was running against Bush. All his attacks were really on Bush.
Another advantage is that in political coverage, context is vital. A campaign is a cumulative process, and campaign reporting has to keep that in mind. Campaign events do not occur in isolation; each one does not simply follow what occurred before; it is formed by what occurred before. If seeing patterns that do not really exist is one danger that awaits a political reporter, another is ignoring patterns that are real.
Many political journalists might argue that political coverage is, at least in part, about politics. Thus this is what the story should focus on. This may seem obvious, but in fact it is easy to forget in the tumult of the moment, and in the effort to dig behind the superficial meaning of an event. McCain was not delivering a sociological treatise about church-state relations. He was delivering a campaign speech in a tough battle against George W. Bush. Hence, focusing on the political tactics of a campaign speech, then, is usually one "right way" to cover it.
But there are also downsides to this. One is that reporters risk saying more than they know. McCain never said in so many words that his goal was to tarnish Bush by association with Robertson and Falwell, portraying himself as more mainstream in the process.
The second, perhaps even greater risk is that by focusing on the politics of McCain's speech reporters imply that the politics was the real point, that McCain didn't really mean what he said, he was only saying it for political advantage.
The fact is there are multiple levels of reality in most political events, and this one was no exception. First, there is McCain's message about Robertson, Falwell and how they have hijacked control of religious conservatives. Second, there is the fact that Robertson and Falwell are raising money to hurt McCain, and his favorite issue campaign finance reform. Third, there are the political advantages of linking Bush to Falwell and Robertson. All three co-exist, and it is difficult if not impossible for a reporter to know, unless McCain says so, which ones are most important to him. The difficulty a journalist faces is in deciding how much weight to place on each. Should a reporter assume a tactical purpose simply because there could be political gain?
The third approach to the story identified in the narrative, which the authors labeled "A Broadside Against the Christian Right," was to portray the speech as an attack on the Christian Conservative movement in general. In some ways, this was the riskiest method. It required not simply discerning what McCain did not explicitly say, but rejecting something he explicitly did say, that some "evangelical leaders are changing things for the better," and that his quarrel was not with the movement as a whole but with some of its leaders.
Question: What do you think of this approach?
It seems to the authors of this case that this approach could and did produce bad journalism. This was especially true for the New York Post story that began by saying, "John McCain yesterday delivered a blistering attack on the religious right," without mentioning McCain's praise for other Christian leaders. The brevity of the story (444 words, about a third of what most papers used) no doubt contributed to its failings.
But there were more sophisticated treatments taking the same approach, such as the Los Angeles Times story which led with McCain attacking "leaders of the Christian conservative movement" as entrée into examining what it called "the religious tensions inside the GOP presidential race," as it fit the political context of the race.
Here again, there are rewards. These stories were based on more interpretation in the interest of providing more information, more context, more nuance.
While still essentially political, this approach steps cautiously into the broader sociological realm. Unlike the New York Post story, the Los Angeles Times mentioned all the relevant facts, including the presence of Gary Bauer in the gym with McCain. But it was bolder than the other approaches in dealing with the intra-party tensions between the Christian conservatives, especially powerful in the South, and the more pragmatic Republicans who win elections in the East and Midwest.
The risk is in asserting more than the journalist can confidently support, on making assertions based on the journalist's own opinion rather than supported analysis. How does this added interpretation serve the public? Could a journalist provide the added context and nuance without making such an assertion?
Question: What do you think of the fourth approach to the story, what the authors called "Focusing on Falwell and Robertson."
The final approach, "Focusing on Falwell and Robertson," not only laid more stress on distinguishing between the two leaders named in the attack and their broader movement, but also delved into deeper interpretation in making the point that McCain's real quarrel with them was over their opposition to his campaign finance proposals.
This interpretation was based firmly on something McCain said in the speech, that Robertson and Falwell "have turned good causes into businesses," but where McCain mentioned this only in passing, a few reporters highlighted it and examined its context.
Again, it was the reporter, not the candidate, who emphasized this aspect of the speech. The reporters who did so took a greater risk, but still dealt with something McCain had said. These reporters also availed themselves of the opportunity to give their readers information that was arguably more pertinent to their lives and to the current political reality than much of the rhetoric in the speech.
Only David Barstow of the New York Times and Bob Kemper of the Chicago Tribune took this course. They both used that quote in their leads. Barstow returned to the point several paragraphs later: "(A) subtext of the speech was Mr. McCain's campaign finance proposals, including limits on advertisement by advocacy groups. Mr. Robertson and anti-abortion advocates have said those restrictions would stifle their influence and were one reason they opposed Mr. McCain."
In the view of many political observers, McCain's campaign finance proposal would not simply stifle the influence of these groups; it would put them out of business. None of the stories elaborated on this point. But then neither did McCain.
Question: How far should reporters go in examining points that a candidate merely mentions, without elaboration? If the reporter thinks a brief allusion points to a matter of significance, should the reporter pursue this angle even if the candidate has de-emphasized it?
Reporters, of course, are safest when they only write what they know, not what they surmise. Usually this is not a problem because one antagonist says plainly what the other wants to avoid, in this case that Robertson and Falwell supported the existing campaign finance system because they and their friends were using it to make a tolerably good living.
But McCain didn't co-operate. Neither in his speech nor in later interviews did he discuss in detail the relationship between the campaign finance laws and the growth of politics as a profitable business. Instead of asserting, McCain hinted. And as it was placed in the speech, even the hint was almost a throw-away, as though McCain assumed that his listeners would get the point.
Most reporters didn't. They used another quote, in which McCain said that the Christian conservatives opposed him "because I don't pander to them, because I don't ascribe to their failed philosophy that money is our message."
That isn't really their philosophy; it's just their tactical situation. In fairness, for most of them it isn't just the money. Being a professional political agitator has become their personal raison d'être as well as their livelihood. Nor is the phenomenon confined to the political right. Similar situations and similar attitudes prevail at the offices of the Sierra Club and People for the American Way.
After this discussion, the teacher may want to take a class vote of the best method of coverage to see if views have changed.
The discussion by now should have demonstrated one of the truths about covering a political speech-that context is everything. To the beginner, covering a speech might seem simple. Armed with an advanced text, a reporter can't get the story "wrong," even when, as in this case, copies of the text were not distributed until a few minutes before the event. Assuming basic literacy, accuracy is not a problem. The challenge comes in understanding the political situation, paying attention to the mood, the tone of voice, even the body language of the candidate, remembering that what is not said can be as important as what is, and getting all these elements into the story in their proper place.
To a certain extent it is impossible to decide what is the best approach to the story and how interpretive should one be until the journalist grapples with a more fundamental reporting question: How much do I really know?
But even the experienced political reporters never dealt with another question raised by McCain's speech: Why has the Christian right become an arm of, rather than a goad to, the central Republican Establishment?
It isn't that political reporters were unaware of the phenomenon. On CNN the evening after McCain's speech, analyst Bill Schneider noted that while Robertson himself challenged the GOP establishment by running for President in 1988 against the elder George Bush, since then "something interesting has happened." Instead of supporting Pat Buchanan, leaders of the Christian conservatives "succeeded in holding religious right voters in line for President Bush in 1992 and Bob Dole in 1996. Now this year the religious right is again making common cause with the GOP establishment against John McCain."
This was a valuable insight. But neither Schneider nor anyone else seems to have wondered why religious conservatives and the Republican leadership are locked in mutual embrace. All of this would be but prelude to trying to determine how and why the Religious Right is now part of the Republican leadership. Have the religious conservatives effectively won control or enough influence? If the motivation is pragmatic ("We want to win") what does that say about a movement based on moral fervor?
Whatever the reason, the combination is unbeatable in a fight for the Republican nomination. But what else is new? Only once since 1944 has the Republican Party not nominated the choice of its elite. That once was 1964 when a new elite supplanted the old, and even then nominee Barry Goldwater was the early front-runner in the polls. For whatever reasons (and examining them would make a good story), most Republican voters tend to do as their leaders tell them. So McCain's real risk was not in taking on Falwell and Robertson, but in taking on the leadership.
Again, this aspect of the political situation was not exactly ignored. Reporters knew that McCain was taking a gamble. Many of them put it right up front. "Risking a religious brawl within Republican ranks," were the first words of Ron Hutcheson's story in the Fort worth Star-Telegram. "A daredevil maneuver," Yvonne Abraham and Jill Zuckman called it in their Boston Globe lead, and John Marelius called it a "high-stakes gamble" in the second paragraph of his San Diego Union-Tribune story.
But the gamble to which they referred had to do with McCain losing the votes of religious conservatives, and as one story pointed out, that may not have been much of a gamble. "Long before Monday's speech the religious right was fully mobilized against McCain," wrote Mark Sherman and Ken Herman in the Atlanta Journal and Constitution.
The Los Angeles Times story by T. Christian Miller and Ronald Brownstein made a similar point, citing a senior unnamed McCain advisor who said the campaign "was essentially writing off the remaining Southern primaries" where the religious right is strongest.
Few of the stories discussed why McCain felt he had to gamble, and why he may have been angry enough to lash out at Robertson and Falwell. In retrospect, his loss in South Carolina may have been pivotal. Later, Mark Sherman of Cox newspapers would remember that McCain's strategist had been aware for months that their only chance to beat Bush was to "knock him out early," and that they could do this by a four-state sweep, "winning New Hampshire, South Carolina, then Arizona and Michigan."
Winning South Carolina, then, was vital to McCain's strategy. And it seemed feasible; the state was home to thousands of military retirees, precisely the kind of voters who could be expected to respond to McCain. So his loss there was not merely damaging; it was fatal, and if the reporters covering him didn't know that, perhaps the candidate did.
"He seemed very angry about South Carolina," David Barstow said of his Feb. 29 "forces of evil" interview with McCain in California. Barstow said McCain "felt Pat Robertson screwed him in South Carolina," and that it was recalling this, ten days later, that drove McCain into a sour mood.
Mark Sherman agreed that the South Carolina loss may have marked the real end of McCain's campaign. After he lost there, Sherman said, "his only real hope was to excite the middle." But there may not be enough "middle" remaining in the Republican Party.
Sherman said he mentioned this political predicament of McCain's in some of his coverage, but never devoted an entire story to it. Neither did anyone else, though all the regulars on the "Straight Talk Express" knew about the candidate's early strategic thinking. The absence of this story might have been the result of that long plane ride west on Feb. 28. Or it may have been a reluctance on the part of reporters to acknowledge how much trouble the candidate was really in.
Additional Questions and Exercises (time permitting)
What do the students think about the increased professionalization of politics? Do they think anything can or should be done about it? If they are interested in political reporting, does the news that the beat might be "less enjoyable" than it used to be give them second thoughts?
It might be interesting to see how many students can name the Republican or Democratic chairmen of their own states or counties. Some students might be assigned to call the local county chairs and ask them just what they do, and whether they recognize a transformation of politics into a business. And whether they think it diminishes their offices.
During the last ten or fifteen years, politics has become much more of a business, a transformation the national political press has largely ignored. The primacy of television and the fading power of political parties have conspired to make money far more important than political organization, the support of prominent individuals, or even a office-seeker's positions on the issues. Candidates spend this money on an ever-increasing number of consultants, pollsters, and advertising firms. There is now for all practical purposes a politics industry, lucrative and growing.
Some political reporters may not recognize the extent to which their beat has become an industry. Some may not want to recognize it, or to call attention to it. Its practitioners are their sources. Political reporters rarely quote the Republican or Democratic state chairman these days; that role of observer has been usurped by the pollster, consultant, or occasional professor who in turn relies on polling for analysis. Twenty years ago, every political reporter worth his or her salt could identify the party chairman of, say, Cook County, Illinois, or New York County, New York (Manhattan; its chairman was the leader of the once-fabled Tammany Hall). Now few reporters know who those leaders are. They don't need to know who they are.
Perhaps reporters don't like to recognize this change because it has rendered their jobs less enjoyable. A political reporter now spends more time writing about fund-raising, television commercials, and the latest polls than going to bowling alleys or plant gates with the candidates, no doubt because the candidates spend less time at bowling alleys or plant gates than they do raising money and making commercials. Here, Barstow and Kemper may have had an advantage: they weren't full-time political reporters. Though they had both done their share of political stories, neither man was on the political beat full time, nor were they Washington-based. Kemper works out of Chicago. Barstow covers Brooklyn.
What is, and should be, the role of television news in political campaigns?
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One of the conclusions of an examination of the coverage of McCain's speech was the stark difference between the way print and broadcast handled the story. Though reporters took different approaches, most of the newspaper accounts were similar. So were the television reports. But the newspaper accounts were nothing like the television reports. It was as though the two media were covering the same event, but with different missions.
In general, the networks ignored the elements most major newspapers covered. To some extent, this is because the network correspondents simply don't have enough time. But even the shows that devote more time to the campaign-CNN's "inside Politics," or PBS's "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,"-made no attempt at what a newspaper would call comprehensive coverage. Instead, they have contentious debate. The modus operandi of political coverage by the commercial broadcast networks these days is a quick headline, lots of tape with thrust and parry, and then some musing by an expert on how it will play.
The programs that provide greater depth, or at least more time, do the same, then typically go to a debate between notable supporters of each candidate. Thus after a brief news account, "The NewsHour" on March 1 had Ari Fleisher of the Bush campaign head-to-head against McCain-backer Rep. J.D. Hayworth of Arizona. Two evenings earlier, CNN's "Inside Politics" pitted Gary Bauer against Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore, a Bush supporter.
This raises an interesting question: Is television still a medium where campaigns are reported, or is it where they actually occur? Other studies have documented the shrinkage of the "sound bite", as TV calls the taped words of candidates on the stump, and the total amount of time network news devotes to politics. There seems to have been a metamorphosis in the role of television in presidential politics; television does not provide news and analysis of campaigns as much as it provides a public forum where supporters of competing candidates or parties can debate, or at least contend.
It is no secret that a major goal of the political discussion programs on weekday evenings and Sunday mornings is to "make news," arguably a worthwhile goal but quite different from reporting and analyzing the news. The easiest way to "make news" is to provoke controversy, which could help explain why television news organizations seem comfortable devoting more time into providing a sounding board for antagonists, meaning less time for reporting.
Possible Exercise: Perhaps students could be assigned to monitor the television coverage of the next state or local election. Considering that they probably all have digital watches with stop-watch capability, they could calculate how much time local stations devote to coverage, how much to talking-heads confrontations between aides and supporters of competing candidates.
Do the students think switching reporters on and off candidates is necessary? Is a reporter becoming too friendly or too hostile to any particular candidate a problem that needs to be addressed?
In this case, it might be useful to get into personal proclivities. How important is peer approval to students who might want to cover national politics? Shouldn't they admit (I always did) that part of the appeal of the job is the fun of national political trips, fun which includes travel, good food, luxury hotels (along with bad food and decidedly non-luxury hotels), and the camaraderie of the campaign plane. If that's the case, what are the chances that they might be tempted, even subconsciously, to ignore a story that might make them less popular in that milieu?
McCain's popularity with the men and women covering him made life more pleasant for both him and them; conviviality is always more fun than antagonism. But it also created a quandary for the reporters, and, whether or not they knew it, for their bosses back home. Were some journalists becoming cheerleaders for the candidate they covered?
This became evident right after the speech, in the wake of David Barstow's New York Times story about McCain referring to Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell as "forces of evil." Even a few reporters (though none who would later admit to it) joined the McCain campaign grumbling about Barstow not understanding the bus protocols because he was "an outsider," not one of the regulars.
Later, at least some of the reporters would wonder whether they had given McCain too much of a pass. "Maybe a fresh pair of eyes and ears wasn't a bad idea," said Mark Sherman of Cox Newspapers. "I'm not sure I would have written it, but maybe I'd been on the (McCain) bus too long," said Bob Kemper of the Chicago Tribune. A few reporters, Kemper said, thought Barstow had been unfair, "but mostly it made us question ourselves."
The question news executives may have to ask themselves is whether it is a good idea to have one reporter cover the same candidate throughout a campaign. There is an obvious advantage to this practice; the regular reporter gets to know the candidate, develops sources in the campaign staff, and is well-placed to spot inconsistencies.
The equally obvious disadvantage is that some reporters can get so attached to a candidate that they fail to see his or her faults, and so comfortable with a campaign that they begin to feel more loyalty to it than to their news organization and its audience.
Though this did not come up during McCain's candidacy, the opposite problem-dislike of a candidate-can also distort a reporter's work. Later in the 2000 campaign, some observers speculated that the personal distaste some reporters had for Vice President Al Gore was having an impact on their stories. In his dealings with the press, Gore was in many ways McCain's opposite. He was rarely available, and when he was it would be at a formal press conference or a photo opportunity where reporters might get in a quick question or two. No wonder that he also acquired the opposite of McCain's reputation for candor.
There is nothing new about the flying fraternity house aspect of a presidential campaign. Away from home, hard at work, and on unlimited expense accounts, even nominal grown-ups tend toward post-adolescent behavior, and that includes developing a "we band of brothers' attitude for the duration of the campaign.
The qualitative--and dangerous-mutation occurs when the "we" includes the candidate and his staff, not just fellow-reporters. A bit of that mutation may have taken place on the McCain campaign among the reporters who considered Barstow "an outsider," as opposed to a reporter accurately quoting an on-the-record, news-worthy statement by a candidate for President of the United States. Yes, he might have provided the setting, and had he been one of the "Straight Talk Express" regulars he might have explained that McCain was often flippant while schmoozing on the bus.
But welcome to the NFL. The regulars go off the bus sometimes and get replaced.
But then there are advantages to being a full-time political reporter. For instance, only about half the newspaper accounts compared McCain's speech strategy to Bill Clinton's "Sister Soljah" speech in 1992. Like McCain, Clinton was demonstrating his independence from an important constituency in his own party when he attacked the African-American singer's endorsement of violence, and did it right from the podium of Jesse Jackson's political organization. The fact that Jackson expressed his irritation no doubt only helped Clinton get across the message that he was not beholden to him or any other black leader.
It was an interesting, and relevant, piece of political history, but a reporter-or an editor-had to know that history and remember it to get it into the story. Only a few did, and only the Los Angeles Times, and Curtis Wilkie in the Boston Globe, pointed out how much more dangerous McCain's situation was, and how much better Clinton pulled off his political maneuver. Clinton had already wrapped up the Democratic nomination when he criticized Sister Soljah. By then, Clinton had a rapport with black voters unlikely to be shaken by criticism of an entertainer. As seasoned political reporters, Wilkie and Ron Brownstein of the Los Angeles Times were aware of these distinctions, which enhanced the scope of their stories.
Possible exercise: A potentially interesting exercise would be to have some of the students cover a local campaign, assigning them to write stories but also to remain aware of their own reactions. Do they want the other reporters (older, and real professionals) to include them in lunch and cocktail plans? Is it pleasing to have the governor, mayor or city councilman call you by your first name? Those who do not deny the ego gratification that comes with the job are less likely to allow it to distort their work.
Do reporters need special expertise in covering a religion-based political movement? Assuming that most journalists, even those who attend church or synagogue, have basically secular outlooks, should they make a special effort to understand voters whose political motivation is faith based? Have today's reporters studied enough history to know that earlier, not-so-conservative, political movements-civil rights, peace, temperance--were also based at least in part on a religious foundation.
Some students might want to visit one of the local fundamentalist churches, or to attend a Conservative Christian political event, just to look and listen, in an effort to find out what motivates the rank-and-file of the movement.
All of this would be but prelude to trying to determine how and why the Religious Right is now part of the Republican leadership. Have the religious conservatives effectively won control or enough influence? If the motivation is pragmatic ("We want to win") what does that say about a movement based on moral fervor?In other words, failure to pursue these stories may lie with the Pack and The Narrative. Reporters didn't want the McCain campaign to be over because they liked him, and because his success had been predicted by The Narrative they had created.
There is no point getting huffy or moralistic about this. People who work together all day every day are going to associate with each other and influence one another. If their job is to chronicle and explain events-to provide a narrative-one of the things that will come out of their conversation will be…a Narrative. The temptation to conceptualize is irresistible.
In fact, The Narrative can exert a positive influence. The campaign 2000 version was nicely summed up in Newsweek by Jonathan Alter, who explained McCain's success by noting an indisputable, if little-discussed, political phenomenon.
The secret of McCain's appeal, Alter wrote, was the widespread "dissatisfaction with both parties that is becoming a permanent condition of the American electorate." Calling it "the biggest and most elusive political story around," Alter wrote that "The underground reservoir known as the independent vote is huge, nearly 40 percent of voters. Ross Perot and Bill Clinton tapped it; Bill Bradley tried. John McCain has had the most success of late."
But like so many explanations, this one raises its own question: is the political press partly responsible for the dissatisfaction Alter mentioned? Another interesting explanation of McCain's appeal in a Sunday analysis in the Chicago Tribune by Lisa Anderson:
"John Wayne couldn't do it any better," Anderson wrote. "He comes out of the West, packing honesty and heroism like a pair of righteous six-shooters. He blasts Republican politics-as-usual. He fires up new voters of every stripe."
So McCain is appealing because he's against "politics-as-usual." Among those to whom he appeals are political reporters. Does this mean political reporters don't like politics as usual? Is there something about covering politics that tends to make one dislike politics and politicians? If so, what are the implications?
One implication might be that, having found their anti-political politician, journalists have trouble seeing his defects. Because the other untold story of this story was how John McCain's bold gamble laid bare John McCain's political weakness, which was not being a maverick but being a self-absorbed maverick.
One thing reporters barely had time to do on February 28 and 29 was to read McCain's speech-really read it, not just scan it for the good quotes. Because to read it is to be struck by how flimsy it is. Oh, it was newsworthy enough, hard-hitting and full of punchy quotes. But it never makes a substantive case against Robertson and Falwell. It's not really about them. It's about McCain, who calls the religious conservatives into the political dock for the offense of...not supporting him.
Some reporters nibbled around the edges here. In the Philadelphia Inquirer on March 2, Larry Eichel noted that McCain himself said that his speech was in part "a reaction to the personal attacks directed at him by Robertson and others...that contributed to his loss in South Carolina."
As Jill Lawrence pointed out in USA Today on February 29, McCain's entire candidacy was based less on policy or social vision than on "biography," what his aides called "the story," the compelling account of how he endured years in a North Vietnamese prison camp with both his honor and his sense of humor intact.
It wasn't that McCain ignored issues. On most of them he was, as he said in his speech, "a proud conservative," with a position on taxes, spending and Social Security slightly to Bush's left. This did win him some support from the remnants of the Republican moderate wing, but most of his support was non-ideological. It was a response to the appeal of his story.
That's what made it part of The Narrative. If McCain wasn't really John Wayne he was close enough for government work. And such was the power of The Narrative that very few political journalists dared to question whether this was really good politics, much less good government.
National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" came closest on the evening of February 28 with University of Maryland Professor Eric Uslander, who noted that McCain is "not on very good terms with any of the Republican leadership in the Senate...he's one of the least liked people in the Senate and can never really be an insider or a power broker."
A President of the United States who can't be a power broker would be in quite a pickle, and perhaps so would the country. But aside from these few seconds on NPR, the political press seems to have ignored-avoided?- any discussion of how McCain's words might just be as much a sign of petulance as of courage, of prickliness as of conviction. It was as though many reporters, having helped create The Narrative, had trouble seeing beyond it.
At the very least, someone might have looked into recent history to note how the anti-politician who is revered largely for being blunt and "taking on the Establishment"-Ross Perot being the most clear and recent example-often does well several months before the election. It's in the fall, when folks begin to realize that they are electing a president, not venting their spleen or making a statement, that they turn to someone who can be...a power broker. Politics as usual is usually politic, and someone should have noted that John Wayne would probably never have been elected.
i Full disclosure. Ms Anderson was once a colleague and is still a friend. Others mentioned herein with whom I have been and remain on friendly terms are Curtis Wilkie, Tom Oliphant, Jonathan Alter, John Marelius, Larry Eichel.
Geneva Overholser, Thinking Clearly: Cases in Journalist Decision-Making, February 15, 2003
The Case
In 1999, The St. Paul Pioneer Press uncovered a cheating scandal in the University of Minnesota's basketball program that turned out to be, in the university president's words, "one of the most serious cases of academic fraud ever reported to the NCAA." When the story broke on March 10—one day before the team was to play in the NCAA tournament—loyal Minnesotans widely condemned the paper for ill intentions and bad timing.
The case raises two questions we focus on here:
When does the public's right to know kick in?
Who should decide when this right is exercised?
Among other things, the right to know implies that journalists represent the public in much the same way that elected government officials do.
Journalists are privileged to go places and to learn things that the public simply can't. A further implication holds that the public should know those things journalists know, for freedom of the press is justified by the fact that the information is public, not private, property.
In this case, the St. Paul Pioneer Press knew that a scandal was brewing in the Minnesota basketball program, that the university had self-reported to the NCAA and was conducting an investigation and compliance review. Still, the paper withheld this information from the public for months. Only the reporter, sports editor and editor knew of the story. It was not even mentioned to other staffers on the paper or to the publisher. Was the paper justified in actively withholding information—public information? What does it mean, in reporting, to "have the whole story?"
The Story Begins
Reporter George Dohrmann got a tip.
Dohrmann, a genial 26-year-old, is an energetic fellow to whom "sports is everything," as one of his Notre Dame professors remembers. Dohrmann would normally have been covering the Minnesota's professional basketball team, the Timberwolves, once football season ended. But a long and dreary NBA lockout meant that the Twin Cities' Target Center was seeing no action in the final months of the year. He found himself with time to pursue something a source had told him. The source said a woman named Jan Gangelhoff might be able to tell Dohrmann a few things about "the climate of working" at the University of Minnesota's athletic department—a subject of interest to Dohrmann, who had been vaguely following several leads about the university's basketball team. Gangelhoff had left the university earlier in the year and was now working at a casino in the small town of Danbury, Wisconsin.
When Dohrmann contacted her, Gangelhoff told him she did have something interesting to share with him—she had recently received a letter from the director of men's athletics at the university, stating that an NCAA compliance review said it was necessary to "disassociate" Gangelhoff from the basketball program.
Dohrmann drove to Danbury, where Gangelhoff showed him the letter. It seemed an odd thing for the director to have sent. Gangelhoff had already left the university, and she wasn't sure what to make of the letter.
It was clear that the university had reported some violation to the NCAA. But Gangelhoff, who had tutored many basketball players over a long period of time, wasn't sure exactly what the violation was. And Dohrmann, of course, had no idea how serious it might be.
Back at the paper, Dohrmann took the matter up with Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, the paper's sports editor. Both of these men had come to St. Paul within the last couple of years—the reporter following the editor—from the Los Angeles Times. At the Times, they had worked together on a story about UCLA's basketball team that had taught them a number of lessons about pursuing an investigative college sports story. One of those lessons was that a university that sees trouble will quickly look for "a viable explanation they can basically sell" to the NCAA, as Garcia-Ruiz puts it.
The letter to Gangelhoff, the two thought, signified that the University of Minnesota had self-reported something. But what was it? And was there more going on than had been reported? Was it worth investigating even if whatever they found might turn out to be a non-story? The university might already have reported whatever the paper found. And, if it hadn't yet done so, once it got wind of the paper's nosing around, it might rush in a report—just as UCLA had done with Dohrmann's and Garcia-Ruiz's work in L.A.
They also had to consider the other local daily—the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Competition between the two papers is hot, and neither has much of a taste for getting beaten on a story.
Knowing all this, the two considered going with a story right then. There was some NCAA violation; that was clear from the letter. Perhaps there was enough here to report to their readers, and they should go to the university and ask what exactly had been reported.
The other alternative was to try to find out on their own exactly what was afoot. The UCLA experience had rankled these two. The team got off the hook because the university came up with documentation that satisfied NCAA investigators even though it seemed to the two journalists to be absurdly incredible. They felt it was essential to get into the paper what was actually going on—not simply that there was a violation—without alerting the university until it was absolutely essential that they do so.
George's view, he said, was, "If it is not in the newspaper, then the NCAA will not recognize it. We have to get it in the paper." They decided to try to get to the bottom of this for themselves.
So far they didn't have much to go on. There was the letter, yes. Beyond that, there was only Gangelhoff—a 50-ish, disgruntled, former employer working for a casino, as Garcia-Ruiz puts it.
There was a lot of work to be done.
The Reporter and Editor and their Environment
Along with their UCLA experience, the relatively recent arrival in St. Paul of the two principals at work on this story affected their decisions about how to handle it. Indeed, Garcia-Ruiz wonders if the Gophers' scandal would ever have broken, if the only sports staffers around had been the long-timers that dominated both papers' sports staffs.
These veterans worked in a larger cultural atmosphere unusually unsuspecting about any kind of wrongdoing. There are a lot of very settled, comfortable Midwesterners in these cities—people with deep roots and a powerful pride of place. "Minnesota nice" is the prevailing tone, and not just in radio host Garrison Keillor's mind. Minnesotans toe the line and behave decently—at least that's the behavior they presume will prevail, among themselves and others.
The dynamic and bustling Twin Cities—Minneapolis and St. Paul—dominate Minnesota economically, politically, culturally and intellectually. Minneapolis is the state's largest city by far, St. Paul its capital. In the heart of the Twin Cities area, astride both banks of the Mississippi River, which winds between the two cities, sits the huge University of Minnesota. The university plays a powerful role in the life of the state. Minnesotans in overwhelming numbers send their children to be educated there and their sick to be tended in its hospitals. In a far-flung and otherwise largely rural state, the University of Minnesota is a great unifier. Loyalties to it are fierce and strong. In no arena is this more true than in athletics. The university has the state's only big-time college teams, and Minnesotans are proud and fanatic supporters of them.
You could say that, in such a setting, a sports story is never "just a sports story." The price of error in reporting on the object of fierce loyalty is high—from public anger to professional ostracism; maybe even to the loss of a job. And in such an environment, the competition thinks nothing of jumping on an error even before the offended source does. This is especially true because, in college towns like this one, sports reporters tend to grow unusually close to the athletic departments and teams they cover, traveling together with the players and coaches. If they are not always "hometowners," they at least desperately want the teams to succeed.
The last thing most of these sports journalists want to do is to hurt the team.
The Twin Cities' sports journalism community was particularly close to Clem Haskins, the beloved coach of the Gophers. When the Pioneer Press did in the end go to Haskins for a comment, this was his response:
"I've been here 13 years. Don't you know me, what I stand for as a man, as a person? I haven't changed. All I'm trying to do is win a game. All I'm worrying about is beating Gonzaga. It's all I'm concentrating on. All I'll say is, 'I will talk when the tournament is over'."
But Dohrmann and Garcia-Ruiz had never gotten close to Haskins. And neither was hampered by the locally prevailing notion that "It couldn't be happening here." Even after they uncovered a level of fraud that no one would have imagined, Garcia-Ruiz said, "I don't think George and I have been surprised by any of it. The thing is, we never had that doubt about the institution—that it just couldn't be corrupt."
Still, the closeness of the sports writing community, Dohrmann and his editor knew, meant that others would be quite ready to turn on them if their work fingered some of the Twin Cities' most beloved figures. There would be an unusually high level of scrutiny. They'd have to pass a test that they came to refer to, between the two of them, as "making the story Sid-proof"—after a columnist in the Star Tribune named Sid Hartman.
Accordingly, whenever Dohrmann would come back from talking with Gangelhoff, Garcia-Ruiz would press him about how much he knew, how much he could prove, and how. They decided certain things were needed to verify the story: They'd report only things the NCAA could prove. They wanted everything on the record. And they were always working with the notion that it could be nothing. "I told (Executive Editor) Walker (Lundy) the Friday before the story ran that it could be nothing," says Garcia-Ruiz. "They could have self-reported it all."
But for now, so determined were they to get more, to keep the bar of proof high before they counted on anything, that they didn't even raise the issue with Lundy, or with Managing Editor Vicki Gowler. It was too early.
Cultivating the Source
After that first visit, when Dohrmann had driven over to meet her and to see the letter, Jan Gangelhoff was uncertain what might come of the contact with the press. She was struggling with how much she ought to reveal. At one point, she tried to contact someone at the university to let them know what was going on. But no one called back.
George, meanwhile, had decided that, since Gangelhoff had been close to the basketball program, "she would at least be an amazing source of background information. I needed to get her to trust me." He placed regular phone calls, took her to lunch when she came to Minneapolis, drove to Danbury now and then to see her.
Meanwhile, Garcia-Ruiz was telling him that he needed someone else—in addition to the source who originally put him onto Jan—to bounce information off of. Dohrmann thought Elayne Donahue, the retired head of the university's academic counseling unit, might fill that role. He contacted her. Donahue said that she wouldn't offer up anything but, yes, she'd be willing to respond if George asked her about what he was finding out elsewhere.
Now, as Dohrmann describes it, "I would have a triangle of people I could confirm things with. And then I could sit down with Emilio and ask, 'What does this mean?' He was doing a lot of that—sitting down with Emilio—and the copy desk was noticing the conversations. "They started asking what we were doing," the sports editor says.
But still the two weren't talking.
Gradually, Gangelhoff began to reveal a few things. "She said she went on trips with the team," he said. "I figured she was doing more than tutoring." When she said she had accompanied the team to Hawaii, he was more confident than ever that Gangelhoff was playing a pivotal role in the players' lives.
"But I had to convince her to have enough trust in me so she'd talk," he said.
"...and so she'd talk on the record," added his editor.
Garcia-Ruiz was not interested in anonymous sources. Beyond that, he felt that on-the-record comments from Gangelhoff would not even be enough. He would need collaboration. "We weren't going to allow it to be a 'he said, she said' story."
The reporter would come back and tell what Gangelhoff said she'd done, says Garcia-Ruiz, "And I'd say, 'That's nice, but you don't have the story'." He could just imagine the critics poking fun at the Pioneer Press, resting their big expose on the claims of an embittered, former university staffer. He wanted the story Sid-proof.
And Dohrmann was game to keep trying. When he works with a source long-term, he says, "I don't just want to convince them I care about their lives. I want them to care about my life." In addition to keeping up with the latest in Gangelhoff's life, he would tell her what was going on in his. He'd keep her posted on his reporting on other stories, on what he and his fiancée were doing.
And, one day in January, the time and effort began to pay off.
"I called her, and she said, 'I was just thinking about you. I kind of have decided that you can ask me things, and I'll tell you the truth'."
Dohrmann lost no time in taking Gangelhoff up on her offer. "Did you do papers for the players?" he asked her. "Yes," she replied. He told her he'd be coming over tomorrow to talk.
Dohrmann drove to Danbury and sat down with his source and a tape recorder. Gangelhoff, he says, "is a reporter's dream. She writes stuff down. She has a great memory."
The story poured out. The size and shape of the NCAA infractions began to grow clearer to Dohrmann.
The Question of Timing
Back in St. Paul, despite Gangelhoff's forthrightness, Garcia-Ruiz remained dissatisfied. "I didn't think we'd get proof," he says. "What was she gonna have to show us?" Something concrete—a paper Gangelhoff had written for a player, a taped phone conversation—is what Garcia-Ruiz felt was needed, and it didn't seem to be forthcoming. Meanwhile, the strike was over, and the NBA season had started. Dohrmann was needed to cover the games. "We didn't have anybody else," says his editor.
During the days to follow, as their story was held, Garcia-Ruiz and Dohrmann would check the Star Tribune every day to see if the competition had the story. After all, the letter that the university had sent Gangelhoff was out there. "We always had to think about it."
Still, the time lag made sense to Dohrmann, "I really felt I needed to give Gangelhoff room to breathe." Though she had professed her willingness to talk, she was clearly worried about what the effect would be. She talked to her sister about it, she told Dohrmann. She was really struggling with it.
Besides, Elayne Donahue, the former academic counselor for the university who was his confirming source, was out of the country until March 1.
Finally, at the beginning of March, he called Gangelhoff. "Let me come up," he asked. She agreed. They met at the Chippewa Corners Cafe in Danbury. He sat down at the table, he said, and she told him, right off the bat: "I can give you proof."
Gangelhoff had kept innumerable computer files of the work she had done. Unfortunately, she told Dohrmann, she wasn't sure exactly what she had, and it was all mixed in with everything else she'd done on her computer for years. The two went back to her apartment, and started going through her hard drive. They came up with 450 files—papers she said she'd done for players, intermingled with personal letters and other work. And all of it was riddled with viruses.
Dohrmann took the stuff, on discs, back to his office, and printed it out. Then he put everything into two huge legal boxes, and carted them over to Garcia-Ruiz's house.
By now, Garcia-Ruiz had let the paper's editor, Walker Lundy, know how hot the story was getting, although, "even then, I told him that I thought it was going to be hard to prove," the sports editor says. Still, Lundy had begun to expect something big. He definitely wanted to go with the story, as soon as they could nail it down. But he understood that the timing was going to be controversial.
He had a chat with his managing editor, Vicki Gowler. "This story is gonna hit somewhere as the team is going into this tournament." Lundy said. He added later," I thought some would say, 'Hey, wait a minute—did you time this?' "
Gowler, as it turns out, had been thinking quite a bit about timing, thanks to a prior experience in which timing had made a big difference. When Gowler was executive editor at a paper in Duluth, Minnesota, she had presided over a package of interviews with candidates emphasizing their comments on education funding issues. The package came out in September, just as school started, and the teachers felt it was exceedingly prejudicial. They felt its tone was anti-teacher, and the paper caught hell for the decision to run the package when it did.
"Since then, I've tried to think about timing," says Gowler. "Not just, 'Is the story fair?' but 'Is the timing fair?' We could do everything right, [yet still] feel that the story coming out now could mean something would happen that wasn't right."
Nonetheless, after raising this fear—and talking with Lundy about the story and their options—Gowler concluded that the piece should run whenever it was completed. "We knew the timing would be unpopular, but we knew it would be worse to wait. It came down to a rock and a hard place. It seemed like the right thing to do was to run the story when it was ready."
For his part, Lundy says he never doubted that having the story's readiness determine the timing was the thing to do. "You have to have a reason to hold it. Is there a reason to hold it? I couldn't think of one that didn't have something to do with rooting for the home team."
Putting the Story Together
Garcia-Ruiz and Dohrmann spent hours in the sports editor's basement sifting through Gangelhoff's papers, reading them, comparing them. Soon they began to make telling discoveries: the same paper, turned in by two different players, years apart. Papers with exactly the same mistakes in them, turned in by one player and then another. It was clear that Gangelhoff's claims were solid. And they had the proof.
"That night, about 1 a.m., we knew we were good to go," said Garcia-Ruiz.
The paper hurriedly relieved Dohrmann of coverage of the basketball games, replacing him with a preps writer hired from the St. Petersburg Times a few days before.
"We told her, you're on basketball," says Lundy with evident pride. "Now she's our NBA writer."
Dohrmann hopped on a flight to Grand Rapids to talk to the first of the players implicated by the papers. Then he flew to Indianapolis to talk to a second player. Both confirmed Gangelhoff's description of the work she had done for them and others.
They confirmed, too, that the coaches knew about it.
At the beginning of the next week, Garcia-Ruiz put other staffers onto the job of calling the 19 other players. "We decided first thing Monday morning that we had to try to talk to all of them," he said. Meanwhile, Dohrmann had written a rough draft of the story, without university or player comment, and Garcia-Ruiz gave it to Lundy to read. But he was still downplaying it to his boss: "We knew we had what Gangelhoff had done. But we didn't know what Minnesota had told the NCAA." The nagging thought that perhaps they had already reported all this persisted.
But it was soon to be banished. The Monday phone calls to players had alerted Haskins and other university officials, one of whom angrily called Gangelhoff to ask her what in the world she had done. Clearly, they did not have the ease of conscience, the sense of security, they would have had if all had been reported.
Garcia-Ruiz now shed his doubts. They had a big one. And it was Sid-proof.
Still, there was still a lot of last-minute work to do. Emilio called the sports information office (SIO) at the university and said he needed to talk to the athletic director and to the basketball coach. The SIO promised that the officials would get back. Meanwhile, said the editor, "George was going nuts. They could fire up a quick letter and do all the reporting now, we figured." Still, there would be no story until they had the university's comments.
When the next morning passed without the promised phone calls, Garcia-Ruiz called the SIO again, pressing to talk to the coach. The team was already in the air, came the answer. They were headed for Seattle, the site of the Gophers' game with Gonzaga.
The Pioneer Press reporter went up the ladder of the university. An education reporter called the university president, who was out of town. Yes, the president agreed, he would definitely make sure that the athletic department got back to Garcia-Ruiz. The call to the president worked. Finally, at six in the evening the vice president for student development and athletics, McKinley Boston, called. Boston questioned the credibility of Gangelhoff's allegations, saying they were inconsistent with statements she'd made in the past. Shortly afterward, a Pioneer Press columnist in Seattle to cover the tournament knocked on Clem Haskins' door. Haskins delivered his speech about how they knew who he was—that he wouldn't do something like that. He was just concentrating on beating Gonzaga. He'd talk to them after the tournament.
Okay, said Walker, we're going with the story tomorrow.
But they still had to reach the four players on the team who were implicated in the scandal, the editor thought. "If we're gonna name 'em, we gotta talk to 'em. If we couldn't find a player, we couldn't say he was a cheater."
"I was real concerned that we be fair to the people this was landing on," he says. "Frankly, I didn't feel responsible for the reputation of the university. I figured others were responsible for that."
Pioneer Press staffers at the tournament drummed up players there for interviews, but university officials had already gotten to them. They refused to comment.
Back at the paper, editors decided they'd done all they could. They were ready to go. "At least 20 men's basketball players at the University of Minnesota had research papers, take-home exams or other course work done for them during a five-year period, according to a former office manager in the academic counseling unit who said she did the work," said the lead of the story on the March 10 front page. The Gophers' first tournament game was set for March 11.
That evening was a great time for Lundy. "The 10 o'clock news had no record of [the story]. The Star Tribune's website, www.startribune.com, had nothing on it. The presses were running. I thought, 'Now I know what the Japanese forces felt like when they came over the mountains, and there were the battleships waiting in the harbor'."
Published
Nancy Conner's phone was ringing off the hook, along with the phones at the main switchboard, the editorial page and many throughout the newsroom. Conner, the Pioneer Press's reader advocate, had heard of the story for the first time when Lundy read the lead at the 4:30 meeting the afternoon before. "I didn't know how concerned people would be about the timing," she said. "I just thought it was a damned good story."
Now she saw that there was a lot more to it than that. Readers were furious—in droves. "People were telling us we weren't public-minded, that we were ruining lives. We had destroyed something that the players had fairly earned—an opportunity to play this game." The e-mail messages were even worse than the phone calls—unsigned screeds, laced with vitriol, bristling with obscenity.
Then Gov. Jesse Ventura entered the fray. At a press conference he said what the Pioneer Press had done was "despicable." He accused the paper of rigging the timing so the story would come out right before the game, all for the sake of "sensationalism journalism."
Lundy says, "I just wish he'd found time to say that academic cheating is not a very good thing either."
The governor's tirade triggered even more calls and letters. The tone was consistent: The paper's timing showed malice aforethought, and its action was inexcusable. "Cheating happens throughout college, and not just with athletes," wrote Jon Schmoll of St. Paul. "The fact that you used these students, at this exact time, one day before the tournament started, is totally inexcusable."
Brian Deal of Lake Crystal wrote: "You should be more than ashamed of yourself. It's time the media stopped being the self-appointed watchdog of society. We are all tired of it. Thanks for crushing the hopes of a state that has endured the Vikings' loss, the Twins' debacle and the NBA strike. I hope the editor feels he has served some grand purpose, whatever that may be."
"We are one of society's ... watchdogs," said Walker Lundy later. "In fact, that's our job," a role that is set forth and protected in the Constitution. "We had very solid evidence that the University of Minnesota was fielding an unacceptable basketball team. They had corrupted the basic reason a university exists, which is to educate people."
The university's response, meanwhile, was swift and powerful. It suspended the four players named among the cheaters. Two of them were starters.
Sure enough, Gonzaga beat the Gophers.
"We expected them to suspend the players, but then appeal. People had told me that it was likely they could get a waiver, so that the players could play," said Lundy. "When we put the stories in the paper, I didn't know the university would be obligated to suspend them."
The fans were heartsick. "We don't have a long and storied athletic history here," Lundy points out. "And Clem Haskins had taken a pretty average team and gotten them to play better than anyone would have thought, and gotten them into the tournament: a bunch of underachievers who really played well together. The community had rallied around them. It was great. Clem Haskins was the man."
To make matters even more dramatic, the behavior the Pioneer Press was setting forth was not the kind of thing Minnesotans thought went on in their midst. "Minnesotans are proud of the fact that we don't have that kind of stuff," acknowledges Lundy. "So, in the middle of this celebration, comes the Pioneer Press to piss all over everything, presenting this revered coach as a cheater and the players they loved as cheaters."
Worse yet, he said, "We really have only this one university, and the Pioneer Press was saying its academic mission is corrupt. It's a terribly rude thing to say."
For her part, Nancy Conner decided that the readers were asking a good question when they wondered whether the paper couldn't have done the story sooner. "I decided to interview people here to find out if I was comfortable with what we had done."
She satisfied herself ultimately. "I ended up being an advocate for the paper," she said. "I told people that I understood why they were upset, but that I thought we did the right thing. I asked readers, 'Should a paper hide information? You wouldn't want us to do this about anything else [other than sports]. What if we had found this out about Gonzaga?' Would they have wanted us to hide it then?"
Column Fails to Satisfy
With so many readers so unhappy, Lundy decided he should write something for the next day's paper about the timing question. "Because we hadn't answered the question the first day, lots of people thought we had timed it. It's hard, in 750 words, to explain the process." But he thought he'd better try to explain what he saw as the value of the work, and what he felt was the inevitability of its timing.
The column didn't have exactly the effect he had hoped. "Silly me. I thought once I wrote the column... people would say, 'Oh, okay, I get this.' Instead people wrote and said, 'I don't believe you'."
By a week after the story ran, Conner—collecting a count of phone calls from around the building and adding them to e-mail and letters—had tallied about 1,000 responses.
A lot of the calls were going to Lundy, and a lot of them were calling him a liar. The number of people who compared him to President Clinton, then in the midst of his nationwide deception act regarding Monica Lewinsky, he noticed, was particularly striking.
What might have happened if the paper had run a note of explanation on the day the story ran? "I dunno," says Lundy. "I don't think it would've made any difference. You look like you're feeling like you have to defend something."
But some of the others involved think that being more forthcoming with readers on the day the story ran could have made a difference.
Managing Editor Vicki Gowler is among them: "I think that's the one thing I would have done differently—trying to explain to readers" what the editors' thinking was.
Garcia-Ruiz, too, says that "had we been able to anticipate" the response, an editor's note might have been in order. "But it just floored me completely" how big the response was. "We never even dreamed that [the story] would be 45 minutes of the 1-hour news report the next day."
Another vote for a same-day explanation comes from Conner: "I wish that we had gone ahead for once and written an editor's note that explained some of the background, showed the fairness and the depth of the reporting that went into it—and done it on the first day."
She's glad Walker did write such a piece the second day, she added, but doing it afterward "was in more of a defense mode."
Still, Conner notes that after the column—and following the initial deluge of complaints—"the supporters came out of the woodwork."
"The thing is, people didn't see immediately how this could serve students better in the future." It's her hope that it will help force universities to "come to grips with playing college athletics and being a scholar" and how the two can be balanced. "This hurt some players but, in the end, future athletes are going to have a better situation."
As for Jan Gangelhoff, Dohrmann says that she "has heard enough people say she did the right thing to now really, really believe that she did. She realizes that what she did was wrong. So now she's really happy she did this thing to correct it—so it doesn't happen to kids in the future."
And how did Lundy end up feeling about it all? "I'm sorry anybody lost a job," he says
"But when I get my gold watch, I'm going to talk about this as one of the best things I've ever seen happen."
Impact of Competition
Star Tribune editor Tim McGuire agreed that the Pioneer Press had done a fine piece of work. As he told the American Journalism Review, which ran a piece on the Gopher stories, "I wasn't thrilled. I was disappointed" to see the competition break this big story. But McGuire didn't seek to undercut the work in any way.
"The Star Tribune people were very professional in their response," says Lundy. "They gave us full credit for the story, and threw nine people at it the next day. But when you're that far behind and you didn't have Jan Gangelhoff, it was very hard to catch up."
McGuire sees this differently. "I think this newsroom reacted very well," he says, in following up with reporting that broke other parts of the story.
Minnesota's former governor, Arne Carlson, thinks the competition that fuels such remarks played a role in the reporting and play of this story. In the wake of the cheating scandal, Carlson pronounced the university a victim of the newspaper war.
Garcia-Ruiz understands the analogy. "The war between the Dallas Morning News and the Dallas Times Herald killed the Southwest Conference," in his view. "That could've happened here, but I don't think it did."
Indeed, Garcia-Ruiz argues the competition made the paper more responsible, not less: "I'll tell you what it did to us. It actually made us more cautious. We dotted our i's and crossed our t's more carefully" because we figured that the other paper would be watching.
Lundy acknowledges the situation is "hotly competitive." Not for nothing is "hell-raising" one of the goals on the flip chart when his staff sits down at 9 a.m. to assess how that morning's paper looks in retrospect. And not for nothing is the Trib's front page pasted up there right alongside the hometown sheet.
Still, Lundy maintains, "On this one, [the competition] played no role."
Epilogue
In all, 548 Pioneer Press readers canceled their subscriptions over the Gophers story. (The paper sold an extra 8,000 copies the day the story ran.)
Editors usually expect that most of those subscribers who cancel in anger will return to the fold before long. As Lundy says, "If you're the only game in town, they have to." But not in this case. "Here they have an alternative." And in fact, most of the cancellations have stuck. Six months after the story broke, the circulation director calculated the net loss at 433.
Another financial hit came in advertising. The university's athletic department had its advertising reps call to explain that, thanks to the story, "the mood was so bad" that they could no longer advertise with the paper. They canceled their contracts, which had been worth about $30,000 a year.
A piece of journalistic fallout was the football team's initial reluctance to speak to Pioneer Press reporters, demanding that the paper issue a formal apology for the effects of its work on the Gophers scandal.
As for what the newspaper's publisher thought of his staff's work, and all the developments that followed, Lundy notes, "I had put him in the loop toward the end. You know, publishers aren't too keen on surprises. He was thrilled with the story."
Eight months after the story, the university released a report, prepared for it by a law firm, concluding that Clem Haskins had l
