Arcata Eye - Sources and six-packs - August 4, 2003

The Arcata Eye
Opinions: August 4, 2003

Sources and six-packs
By Kevin L. Hoover

Two words sum up Roger Rodoni's reaction to his financial arrangements with Pacific Lumber being outed:

Caught.

Flailing.

Voters may rightly be concerned that their representative apparently suffers from reading and comprehension problems, since he claims the Fair Political Practices Commission has cleared him of inappropriate conduct. Let's hope he pays better attention to county business than he has the FPPC correspondence.

But if Rog needs help with the first two of the "three Rs," he's sure doing all right with the third, given his highly favorable financial relationship with a major corporation whose local issues he votes on.

With regard to former Eye reporter Daniel Mintz's much-publicized ethical objections, a few observations:

News tips fly in from all over, their origins sometimes unknown and usually unimportant as long as any resulting news story is independently verified and presented with full context. There is an obvious problem with disclosing confidential sources, as Daniel purports to have done.

In fact, I first heard of Daniel's ethical crusade on receiving calls from another local newspaper and radio station about the matter. He went to them, naming an individual as our confidential source, before raising any objections with his editor.

When he did, the next day, he told me that reporting on the unsolicited check and our news tipsters should be "a group decision" by himself, me and other local editors, and suggested that I hire his roommate to write the story. Presumably, I would be paying the roommate to betray our sources. I declined.

There are people in our office and on the phone virtually every week speaking off the record and confidentially about stuff, and that's the way it's going to be. The public is entitled to have a comfort level when communicating privately with us, and now, once again, they may be secure in the knowledge that no one here is going to phone another newspaper and rat them out.

What if Mayor Bob Ornelas was a source for the Rodoni story? I wonder what Daniel would have done if Deep Throat had approached him with Watergate tips. Written a story naming the turncoat in the Nixon administration? Woodward and Bernstein favored a different approach.

If Rodoni discovers evidence that Ornelas rents 9,000 acres for $350 a month from a corporation who's issues he votes on in Arcata, I hope he forwards the info to us so we can verify it and do a story on it. Whether or not something as scandalous as a conflict of interest on that scale proved true - as it did with Roger - we'd never divulge any source's identity, as it would be irrelevant.

Anyone who does this job for more than two days swiftly realizes that legions of politicians, employees, businesspeople and others are ready, willing and sometimes even able to point out alleged misfeasances by their rivals. Our job is to check this stuff out, and, if there's anything to it and it matters, tell the readers. That's what we did.

Daniel has gotten a lot of mileage from saying he resigned from the Eye over principle, but the fact is, the day after I found out he'd gone telling tales of what he thought happened here in the newsroom, his key no longer fit the door. No news organization can function with people around who think it's OK to shop its sources around to other news outlets.

Here's a twist: Being the careful journalist that he is, Hank Sims ran the draft Rodoni story by Daniel for pre-publication feedback as to whether it was, to use a recently discredited phrase, fair and balanced. Daniel voiced no concerns to anyone at the time over sources or torn-up checks - other than to say Hank did the right thing - and Hank later thanked him for the consultation with a six-pack of microbrew, which Daniel accepted.

Anyway, I think Jeff Knapp's suggestion that we write about it when people send in provocative items is a worthy one, except that we get all kinds of things in the mail, from taunts to threats to food to checks, and I reserve the right not to glorify unwanted submissions with a news story.

So, long story short, the Eye didn't take any outside money, we didn't disclose any confidential sources, we offered our readers a first-class investigative piece about an elected official and the only person who took any foamy gratuity from the whole deal is Roger Rodoni's favorite reporter.

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Follow up - it is important to note that after all the attacks, after the filing of FPPC complaints, Roger Rodoni was cleared by the FPPC. Hank Sims became the editor of the North Coast Journal. Mintz's stories once again appear in the EYE, as well as the McKinleyville Press and Garberville's Independent.
2/17/05 Northcoast Journal RODONI CLEARED: