Readers Were Well-Served, So You, Sir, Are Misinformed

You may find this hard to believe, but nobody knocks the press more than the press itself. We second-guess ourselves daily, colleagues privately snipe at other colleagues’ work (note to mine: I know what you’re saying about me) and reporters and editors often disagree about how to cover the news.

We know this is an imperfect business. During the 20-some years and three newspapers that constitute my journalism career, grousing about what goes in and what stays out of the daily product has filled many a lunch hour. When it comes to news coverage, we ask the same questions you do: Are we doing too much? Are we doing too little? Were we fair? Was it understandable? Does anyone give a hoot?

While I could fill this column and many more with things that bug me about the business, my protective instincts flare when we’re bashed unfairly.

For that reason, I’m stewing over an essay The Times published a week ago from Orange County School Supt. John F. Dean. In an otherwise sensible argument that the schools should receive all their principal from the investment fund, Dean offered this observation: “The media feeding frenzy since the Dec. 6 Board of Supervisors’ bankruptcy pronouncement has often produced more heat than light, more rhetoric than logic, more fault-seeking than solution-gathering.”

I most vehemently beg to differ, sir!

Given that it was his only reference to media coverage in the essay, I wonder why Dean bothered to mention it at all. It didn’t seem connected to his central argument; instead, it sounded like a gratuitous slap--the kind that Rush Limbaugh feels compelled to serve up as garnish with every meal.

Dean is entitled to his opinion and, had he chosen any of a number of topics other than Orange County’s bankruptcy, I might have agreed with him. But to suggest that media coverage of the bankruptcy has been sub-par strikes me as one of the superintendent’s less scholarly remarks.

Since Dean confined his dart to media coverage after the bankruptcy declaration, that’s the time frame I’ll address. What the media did in advance of the fund’s collapse would require an essay all to itself (and there’s been lots of in-house conversation of that too).

But from Dec. 6 to the present, I would argue that the media has more than honored its compact with Orange County readers. I don’t want to get overly schmaltzy, but I think it’s been one of our shining moments.

Please elaborate, you say? OK, I will.

The bankruptcy story was a newspaper’s nightmare and, therefore, greatest challenge.

It was full of complicated, unfamiliar terminology.

It involved bureaucrats who were faceless to many readers. It didn’t lend itself to pictures.

It didn’t have an immediate resolution, like a crime scene or a natural-disaster site.

It had the potential to produce a range of emotions, from anger to concern to panic.

And on top of all that, for some, it came out of nowhere.

In the weeks since, I think the media has performed its classic function of informing people about a complicated, worrisome subject. What Dean would call a “media frenzy,” I would call a thorough explanation of the various nuances of the issue. The story unfolded irregularly--in quantum leaps and short bursts--making the coverage difficult.

Volume of coverage doesn’t necessarily equate with quality, but for you figure filberts out there, The Times has published more than 500 articles or editorials since the crisis began. Some may have involved more heat than light, to use Dean’s phrase, but to suggest that as a characterization for the coverage seems to me to be far off the mark.

The acid test is that I have the sense that Orange County readers are very much up to speed on the situation.

They don’t have all the answers, because we don’t have all the answers, because the county doesn’t have all the answers.

If it looks to Dean as if there’s been too much “rhetoric” or “fault-finding,” he should take a reality check. What he would call fault-finding, much of the public would call “assigning accountability.”

If the superintendent doesn’t think the public has wanted that, he can have my phone calls.

This wasn’t a put-up job. The editors didn’t ask me to write this or suggest it or hypnotically induce it.

I decided to do it because, for those of us inside the business who recognize all too quickly when we do something wrong, it’s hard to take the shots when we know we’ve done something right.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday.

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