Once I covered a speech by Virginia's secretary of transportation - not the current one; one who came before. He was trying to convince a collection of city, county and town officials to support an intermodal rail yard the commonwealth and Norfolk Southern plan to build west of Roanoke. It's an opportunity, he said, a chance to position the community for economic growth. And he offered this story to show how devastating it can be for a community to pass up such an opportunity.
In the late 19th century, Galveston, Texas, had a big and busy port. Then, about 1909, citizens around Buffalo Bayou voted to build a canal from the Galveston Bay to their community about fifty miles inland. That grew into the port of Houston, one of the busiest in world. Meanwhile, Galveston didn't improve its port and was eclipsed by its inland neighbor.
When I wrote my story about that speech, I pointed out that one of the main reasons for building the inland port was that Galveston was virtually washed away by a hurricane in 1900. Although the city built a seawall and dredged enough sand to raise the city by a few feet, some people thought it would be a good idea to move the area's main shipping terminal to someplace less likely to be destroyed by hurricanes. The Houston ship channel was completed in 1914. The next year, another hurricane sent waves and at least one ocean going vessel over Galveston's seawall and turned the city's beach into an offshore sand bar.
You see, just because someone has a fancy title, it doesn't mean he knows what he's talking about. And even if he does, the fact that he's talking doesn't mean he's telling the whole story, or even the truth. What distinguishes a reporter from a stenographer is that a reporter does more than take down what is said. A reporter tries to verify, to add context - tries to make sense of statements and events.
Consider Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele's recent visit with some College Republicans ("Steele pushes for student turnout," Sept. 16).
"Tuesday night," The Cavalier Daily's report said, "two mainstream Republican candidates fell to Tea Party opposition in primaries in New York and Delaware. When asked by a student in the audience about the defeats, Steele denied that they indicated a division in the party between mainstream candidates and Tea Party activists, attributing talk of such a split to media speculation."
Ideally, the reporter would have asked Steele to clarify that, since the Delaware GOP funded advertisements and robo-calls that accused Tea Party candidate Christine O'Donnell - now the Republican nominee - of all manner of misbehavior, including using campaign funds for personal expenses while staffers went unpaid.
According to The Wall Street Journal, "The state party chairman, Tom Ross, spent weeks laying into O'Donnell in interview after interview. His message: She was a delusional liar who wasn't fit to be dog catcher, much less senator."
GOP icon Karl Rove called O'Donnell "nutty," among other unflattering things.
That's not "media speculation."
Even if The Cavalier Daily reporter couldn't get to Steele to ask follow-up questions, readers would been better served if the story included some factual information about the GOP-Tea Party fight. Steele's title doesn't give him the right to make up stuff.
There was a similar problem with a story about allegedly illegal meetings of Charlottesville City Council members and Albemarle County supervisors ("Group claims lack of transparency," Sept. 10, 2010). According to that story, the officials met to discuss combining services to save money. The Rutherford Institute sent council and the supervisors a letter claiming that those meetings violated Virginia's Freedom of Information Act. The act requires, among other things, that most public bodies do most of the public's business where the public can see and hear what's being done in the public's name.
According to the story, Supervisor Dennis Rooker said the complicated nature of the discussions required the closed meetings.
There are many exemptions in Virginia's Freedom of Information Act that allow closed meetings, but "complicated" is not one of them.
Rooker was quoted as saying, the Freedom of Information Act "simply did not apply to that meeting [because] the members of the Board of Supervisors who participated in the meeting were not selected by the Board."
There's no exemption for that either. If three members of a public body get together to discuss public business, it's a public meeting, whether or not they're meeting with the blessing of their colleagues.
Ideally, the reporter would have known that. But even without that knowledge, the reporter should have called someone who knows the law to see if what Rooker said made sense.
That's the kind of thing that distinguishes a reporter from a stenographer
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