Let’s get ready to rumble
Happy 2009. May this year be fruitful and prosperous — or to be more realistic, may it be less unprosperous than 2008. May fine things abound, may be your cheeks be ruddy with good health, and may your every day begin with a visit to Words Assembled Well.
Aw, enough of the goodwill. Let’s move on to the topic du jour: The trading of bitch slaps between North Carolina governor Mike Easley and News & Observer editor John Drescher.
It unfolded over the holidays, beginning with Easley’s complaint that newspapers weren’t doing their job (which he described as “to be nice to me” — suggesting our chief executive isn’t clear on that whole watchdog thing). Easley then went on to say that the N&O’s series of stories on the state’s profoundly dysfunctional probation system was a “hatchet job.” Finally, Easley had his henchmen … uh, I mean, spokesmen produce statistics showing that, in fact, the average annual number of murders committed by criminals on probation had dropped during Easley’s two terms, when compared to the six years preceding his ascension to the governor’s office in 2001.
That last charge was the one which drew blood. Drescher responded in print Saturday, but in doing so unwittingly acknowledged the Achilles heel in the N&O’s fine reporting. The N&O left Easley an opening, and the governor rammed his way through it. Consider this from Drescher’s column:
The number of probationers convicted of intentional killing generally fell in the late 1990s. In 2000, it was 64. Easley took office in January 2001. Since then, the number has gone up and down, averaging 66 a year.
There are two ways to look at these numbers. You could say those killings, on average, have risen slightly since Gov. Jim Hunt’s last year. Or you could say those killings have declined under Easley to 66 a year (from 77 a year during Hunt’s last six years).
Easley told the Greensboro News & Record: “The genesis of the story was: Huge explosion in probationers’ killings.” But we didn’t say those killings had risen.
It’s true, in a narrow, technical sense, that the series didn’t explicitly say murders by probationers had risen. But any reader of the N&O’s stories was left with the clear impression that the system’s woes were mounting, and the first story in the series focused on that specific issue. More to the point, the N&O didn’t take the trouble to make clear that the number of such murders had been significantly lower in the years after Easley took office. And that’s a problem.
To understand why, think of journalism as something like lawyering. The N&O, with its series, was pleading a case before a jury of its readers, seeking to persuade them of the significance of the problem it had uncovered. But any first-year law student understands that a lawyer should never let a troublesome fact be first introduced by the opponent. If a witness has a shady past, the lawyer who called him to the stand addresses it first, thereby denying the other attorney the chance to later cast doubt on the testimony.
Either the N&O didn’t know murders by probationers have trended downward in the past decade or so, or knew that and decided simply to step around that inconvenient fact. Drescher, for all his column’s fulminating against Easley, doesn’t say which is the case. No surprise there. Whether it’s the first or the second, a little shine has been taken off an otherwise fine performance.