When good is bad

Perhaps the late US Supreme Court Associate Justice Potter Stewart said it best:

“Newspapers, television networks and magazines have sometimes been outrageously abusive, untruthful, arrogant and hypocritical,” Stewart once wrote. “But it hardly follows that elimination of a strong and independent press is the way to eliminate abusiveness.”

That’s probably the best way to describe my feelings last Wednesday heading into a historic community forum at Cleveland Elementary School involving residents, community leaders, reporters and editors from the Los Angeles Sentinel, the Pasadena Journal, Pasadena Now, the Pasadena Star-News and the Pasadena Weekly.

As far as I know, we haven’t been abusive or untruthful or arrogant or hypocritical. Then why did people attending this meeting — called by newly elected City Councilwoman Jacque Robinson — seem to want to tear down the independent press now operating in Pasadena?

As far as I know, this was the first time that representatives from every local Pasadena media outlet were on the same stage discussing how we do our jobs. Making the event particularly noteworthy was the fact that three of those reporters were African Americans.

We’ve come a long way, baby, since my days as the only African-American reporter in town, when I covered sports at the Star-News almost 20 years ago.

Needless to say, the potential for fireworks last Wednesday was great, and just not between longtime political enemies Larry Wilson, public editor of the Star-News, and Joe Hopkins, publisher of black-owned Pasadena Journal, but also between other scribes and some people in the audience who stood to speak that night.

For about a month, there had been rumors that the forum was really just a thinly disguised excuse to rake Wilson and the Star-News over the coals for some of that paper’s recent coverage of gang-related troubles around John Muir High School at the start of the school year a few weeks back. Others, including me, also suspected the meeting was really an attempt to control the way all of us cover the news.

I may not agree with every story choice that any of these newspapers make, including some decisions made here at the PW. But if the story is true, and that truth is written without malice, then the newspaper has done its job.

I was reminded of that at the beginning of the forum when I stated that I considered a story’s newsworthiness with the public’s need to know in mind. Beyond need, however, PW editor Kevin Uhrich pointed out that the public always has a right to know what is going on in the community, and that it’s not up to us to sift through the news and decide if it’s good or bad.

Yes, sometimes we write about tragedies and people are quick to point out that we only write about bad news. It is true that this past year we have written about every one of the eight homicides in Pasadena, many of them gang-related. We’ve also covered the troubles at John Muir, which we know hasn’t made some people happy with us.

But at the same time, we have also written about the arrests of each suspect in those homicides and the community’s efforts, in concert with the Pasadena Police Department, to curb the violence. We’ve also covered some of the community’s efforts to save John Muir from being closed by creating separate autonomous schools in buildings on campus.

Good news, indeed.

But would you rather have us not write about the tragedies? Is just the “good” news all you really want?

Just because a teacher fails to tell a parent that her son is tanking in math doesn’t make the problem go away. The kid still needs help, and mom needs the information to decide what should be done.

I say that to point out the simple fact that journalism is one of the few professions where you get flack — from all directions — for simply being the messenger.

Maybe that’s because we all know how to write to some degree. It’s easy to think that this job is easy. But let me be the first to tell you that there is nothing easy about it. Sometimes it’s a damn near impossible job. And for those like Wilson, who works at a daily paper and sometimes has to make decisions about stories in an hour’s time, the pressure is tremendous.

Keep in mind: The same free press that we sometimes wish would not report bad news has freed people, ended wars, restored rights and even brought down a president. The fact of the matter is there would be no democracy or freedom without a free press — because there would be no informed public — and it is good to see that notion was still flourishing in Pasadena two Wednesdays ago.

Instead of a hostile audience, we were all — including Wilson — met by mostly curious people who truly wanted to know what we did and how we did it.

Some wanted to know why we didn’t tell more stories about the Latino community since that population continues to grow. Of course, we’ve been telling those stories all along.

In fairness, the Star-News’ city editor is veteran LA newsman Hector Gonzalez and its City Hall reporter is Kenneth Todd Ruiz.

But as to why we don’t have more Latino reporters, as some people asked, judging by my own paycheck, hell, I still wonder why I do this.

All non-kidding aside, journalism is a two-way proposition. We need you to help us get the ball rolling with press releases and phone calls on events and issues in order to get that information into print.

There were more questions, such as why we don’t work harder at bringing the community together. That’s a complicated query. But one simple answer is that it’s not really our job to do that. Our job is to get the facts out there.

Once we do that, it’s up to the community to take that information and do something with it, whether that takes the form of outrage over a bad superintendent (not the new one), negative reaction to a Rose Parade float honoring the Beijing Olympics, or community impatience with nuisance liquor stores in minority communities that bring down the quality of life of everyone by allowing thugs and gang members to hang out and harass area residents.

The truth is we only report the news, and hopefully we do it minus the abuse, lies, arrogance and hypocrisy that Stewart spoke of.

The rest is up to you.