Winning the Battle Against Mission Creep

We all have our career visions. If things turned out the way we planned, what a grand world this would be.

Young lawyers set out to right wrongs, only to find themselves bogged down in plea bargains they don’t believe in.

Cops start off wanting to put bad guys in jail, only to spend their days shuffling papers.

Teachers and social workers want to change lives but get mired in a bureaucracy that both saps them and burns them out.

For newspaper people of a certain age (maybe “era” is the better word), the vision was to improve the world in all kinds of ways. The “mission,” as we liked to call it, was to expose the polluter, keep City Hall clean, explain the Legislature, slay the dragons.

The mission never was to make a celebrity out of Dennis Rodman or to cover Clinton-Lewinsky for a year.

File under: the best-laid plans. . . .

Our business has always had its sideshows, but we comforted ourselves in keeping our eyes on the main event. Nowadays, opinion polls suggest the public isn’t so trusting of us to do that.

And to tell you a dirty little secret, journalists are not even all that confident.

There’s such an array of media, with everyone claiming to be a journalist, that it’s difficult to claim a pure, unifying agenda for our industry.

And so, just as you criticize us, we criticize ourselves.

But amid our miscues and shortcomings, two recent Orange County stories have brought us back to our roots.

In the first case, we pursued the story of the Christmas Eve accident at Disneyland that resulted in a man’s death.

No one disputed it was an accident, but we kept poking around and asking a few more questions and raising a few more issues.

Eventually, Disneyland--the King Kong of Orange County institutions--announced that it would change the way it deals with local authorities in the aftermath of park incidents.

It also said, for the first time, it might be amenable to some form of state inspection of its rides.

The other story involved St. Joseph Hospital, another of the county’s most respected institutions.

When the hospital was forced to concede 10 days ago that it discharged a newborn baby to the wrong parents, it suggested such mix-ups occurred with the regularity of a Halley’s comet sighting.

Subsequent news stories, however, revealed that the hospital’s system of matching parents and newborns wasn’t foolproof, after all.

The hospital president announced this week that it’s maternity-ward problems were more widespread than previously revealed and that the hospital will spend up to $500,000 for a new electronic security system.

I’m not suggesting that either story will change the world. Or that we didn’t have in-house disputes on how to cover them.

I am suggesting, however, that both efforts, in the end, helped make things better for our community.

For us around the newspaper, at least for a while, there’s a scent of idealism back in the air. We haven’t atoned for all our sins, but we regained a little vision, an idealism that, unfortunately, all too often goes by the boards.

Enough of this self-flattery, which really wasn’t the point, anyway.

Rest assured, the back-patting won’t last. None of us has any illusions that we’ve cured ourselves of some of our worst faults.

After all, there was Dennis Rodman on Page 1 of Tuesday’s paper.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821, by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail at dana.parsons@latimes.com.