Fishwrapper - The news that’s not news
The AJC didn’t think allegations of Vernon Jones’ threatening gunplay was a story
Recent press coverage of DeKalb County politics raises a disturbing question: Are some local journalists stooges of DeKalb CEO Vernon Jones, or are they victims of their own bosses?
If you care about Jones, you probably know about problems with his lavish expenditures on security guards. What you haven’t read is how a critical part of the story came to light — and was deftly managed by damage-control agents of the volatile DeKalb CEO.
Some of the most incisive reporting on Jones has been by WSB/Channel 2 reporter Dale Cardwell. Intriguingly, his best reports haven’t exactly been welcomed by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Cardwell says he wonders what’s going on at the newspaper, but he doesn’t want to get sideways with the AJC.
WSB and the newspaper, you see, are both tentacles of the ubiquitous (and occasionally iniquitous) Coxtopus. (CL, too, is 25 percent owned by the monopolists at Cox, a circumstance we hope to change. See the disclosure at the end of this column.)
You’d think a revelation that a high-ranking public official allegedly threatened a woman with a gun would be “news,” even if it occurred more than a decade ago. You might also consider it “news” that, according to police reports, the same public official in 1998 twice became involved in verbal altercations with cops at Georgia World Congress Center.
And, you could make a good argument that those episodes would have heightened importance as “news” once the official, Jones, had been accused in recent months of standing in the front yard of a Lithonia woman and screaming at her. Or that the episodes became “news” in January, when Jones allegedly bumped County Commissioner Elaine Boyer, which she contends was a physical assault.
Seems to be a pattern. But at the AJC, “news” isn’t always “news.”
The newspaper knew about the gun-pointing incident for many months and failed to act. Two newsroom staffers say stories were proposed — and shot down by editors — to lay it all out about Jones. “Not newsworthy, kind of old,” AJC Metro editor Bert Roughton said of the 1989 gun complaint.
Then Cardwell, the WSB journalist, uncovered the incidents. Earlier this month, he had solid back-to-back reports, the first about the gun waving, and the second on the Congress Center confrontations.
After Cardwell aired his findings, the newspaper finally reported the “news,” a whopping 158 words buried on page 6 of the local section about the gun incident. AJC readers (as I write this) still know nothing about the Congress Center events involving Jones.
I submitted a list of questions about the coverage of Jones to the AJC’s two top editors, Julia Wallace and Hank Klibanoff. They, in turn, offered up a subaltern, Metro editor Roughton. The irony is that Roughton conceded that his bosses didn’t clue him in on their discussions with Jones.
Roughton, regarded as having restored some oomph to the AJC’s long-flaccid local coverage, told me the newspaper hadn’t found the right “context” to print the full story about Jones. Even with Jones’ recent questionable behavior, Roughton said the older incidents “don’t strike me as news.”
Jones began finding himself in a pit of doo-doo last June when AJC reporters Ben Smith and Maurice Tamman discovered that the DeKalb CEO had spent $630,000 in tax dollars on his personal security detail since taking office in 2001.
The $630,000 figure is infrequently repeated in subsequent news articles. The newspaper began substituting the more benign (to Jones) wording of “$250,000 a year” in most stories. Readers without a calculator or knowledge of Jones’ tenure are less likely to be agitated by $250,000 for security than by $630,000.
The Smith-Tamman story on Jones’ security prompted a grand jury investigation of the CEO’s expenses. The grand jury finished its report, which stated security expenses were actually $830,000, or about $200,000 more than what Smith and Tamman had reported. Jones objected to findings that questioned his stewardship. He requested, as was his right, that certain portions of the report be edited out. Many passages were.
At about this time, three things happened. First, Jones huddled with the AJC’s top newsroom potentates. Roughton wouldn’t say with whom Jones met, but he confirmed the meeting took place.
Second, the unexpurgated version of the grand jury report was leaked to the AJC. The leak, according to Roughton, was made to one of the daily’s top editors. The AJC won’t say which one. Roughton and Smith say they weren’t told who leaked the report, and didn’t know until I told them. AJC sources told me that notations on one page, which would have revealed the document came from Jones’ camp, were removed. Why? So the newspaper’s own reporters wouldn’t see them.
The third thing that happened was that Smith and reporter Eric Stirgus, who had reported on some embarrassing real estate deals involving Jones, were assigned other beats. Roughton said the moves weren’t punitive. But the bottom line is that two reporters who irritated Jones are no longer covering him.
Roughton said it wasn’t his job to ask from where the grand jury report emanated. But he’s misstating common newsroom protocol. Good reporters have confidential sources. Journalists often are reluctant to tell anyone, even their editors, who their sources are. Editors generally want to vet the sources’ credibility and motives, and depending on a reporter’s reliability, editors may or may not demand a name.
But the grand jury document wasn’t acquired by a grunt reporter. Rather, it came from the newsroom’s executive offices following discussions to which reporters and even Roughton weren’t privy.
The leak turned out to be weighted down with political baggage. The grand jury report was delivered to the AJC by Jones’ political strategist, Angelo Fuster. It took me about 10 minutes to shake Fuster’s name from, um, sources. Then, Fuster himself confirmed to me that he was the man.
Whoa. Let’s think about that. Jones’ political adviser decided that releasing the report — against a judge’s order — was more advantageous than letting speculation fester over its contents. Maybe Jones should be commended for wanting to hang it all out.
Or maybe he had other motives. Maybe there was a deal — as in, why did the AJC sit on the gun and Congress Center stories? Or, as in, why were the reporters reassigned to other beats?
I hope the AJC wouldn’t be so craven. But the press has a credibility problem when it demands openness of everyone and every institution, but then insists that its own inner workings remain cloaked.
Even more intriguing questions: Why was Jones publicly demanding that parts of the grand jury report be squelched when his guy was delivering the unabridged version to the AJC? Why did the daily start obsessively citing the $250,000-a-year number instead of the more clear $630,000? And why did the AJC not report the $830,000 instead of obliquely referencing it as $200,000 more than the paper initially reported?
After the AJC ran its story on the unedited report, CL reporter Mara Shalhoup used her own sources — again, someone close to Jones — to get a peek at it. Shalhoup was interested in the coverage of the “secret” portions of the report.
I edited that story and advised Shalhoup on it, but I have doubts now about our approach. While we and the AJC were engaged in the fairly standard journalistic practice of obtaining leaked information from confidential sources, both of us ended up being used to soften the criticism on Jones.
The difference was that AJC brass were feeding reporters some pieces of information, withholding others, and suppressing news on sensational incidents.
Was the AJC pulling its punches on Jones? Roughton responds, “Anyone who suggests we’re soft-pedaling [coverage of] Jones isn’t telling the truth.”
To be sure, the newspaper has energetically covered the fracas with Boyer, as well as Jones’ real estate dealings. But those stories were inescapable. They either occurred in the public eye or were well known. The groundbreaking work on the security detail by Smith and Tamman also deserves kudos, but raises questions about the AJC’s subsequent coverage.
On other stories — the gun and the Congress Center episodes — the paper seemed happy to be a stooge. The stories were likely to stay buried unless the AJC decided to report them. But even more disturbing was the top editors’ willingness to be a conduit for a politically opportunistic leak.
Folks at the AJC and other Cox operations have a theory: The newspaper doesn’t want to be perceived as ferociously attacking one black leader after another. The AJC had been aggressive in pursuing former Atlanta Mayor Bill Campbell. I raised the possibility with the AJC’s top two editors in an email; they declined to comment.
Beyond the journalism questions, there’s a much more serious one for DeKalb County: What else does the AJC know about Jones that it isn’t telling you?
Disclosure time: Cox owns 25 percent of Creative Loafing’s parent company. CL’s board recently determined that two senior Cox officials used their relationship with us to learn the alternative newspaper business, and then put that knowledge to work by launching a product designed to cripple or kill CL. That’s another story you won’t read in the AJC.
Senior Editor John Sugg, who is a shareholder in CL, can be reached at 404-614-1241 or at john.sugg@creativeloafing.com.
If you care about Jones, you probably know about problems with his lavish expenditures on security guards. What you haven’t read is how a critical part of the story came to light — and was deftly managed by damage-control agents of the volatile DeKalb CEO.
Some of the most incisive reporting on Jones has been by WSB/Channel 2 reporter Dale Cardwell. Intriguingly, his best reports haven’t exactly been welcomed by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Cardwell says he wonders what’s going on at the newspaper, but he doesn’t want to get sideways with the AJC.
WSB and the newspaper, you see, are both tentacles of the ubiquitous (and occasionally iniquitous) Coxtopus. (CL, too, is 25 percent owned by the monopolists at Cox, a circumstance we hope to change. See the disclosure at the end of this column.)
You’d think a revelation that a high-ranking public official allegedly threatened a woman with a gun would be “news,” even if it occurred more than a decade ago. You might also consider it “news” that, according to police reports, the same public official in 1998 twice became involved in verbal altercations with cops at Georgia World Congress Center.
And, you could make a good argument that those episodes would have heightened importance as “news” once the official, Jones, had been accused in recent months of standing in the front yard of a Lithonia woman and screaming at her. Or that the episodes became “news” in January, when Jones allegedly bumped County Commissioner Elaine Boyer, which she contends was a physical assault.
Seems to be a pattern. But at the AJC, “news” isn’t always “news.”
The newspaper knew about the gun-pointing incident for many months and failed to act. Two newsroom staffers say stories were proposed — and shot down by editors — to lay it all out about Jones. “Not newsworthy, kind of old,” AJC Metro editor Bert Roughton said of the 1989 gun complaint.
Then Cardwell, the WSB journalist, uncovered the incidents. Earlier this month, he had solid back-to-back reports, the first about the gun waving, and the second on the Congress Center confrontations.
After Cardwell aired his findings, the newspaper finally reported the “news,” a whopping 158 words buried on page 6 of the local section about the gun incident. AJC readers (as I write this) still know nothing about the Congress Center events involving Jones.
I submitted a list of questions about the coverage of Jones to the AJC’s two top editors, Julia Wallace and Hank Klibanoff. They, in turn, offered up a subaltern, Metro editor Roughton. The irony is that Roughton conceded that his bosses didn’t clue him in on their discussions with Jones.
Roughton, regarded as having restored some oomph to the AJC’s long-flaccid local coverage, told me the newspaper hadn’t found the right “context” to print the full story about Jones. Even with Jones’ recent questionable behavior, Roughton said the older incidents “don’t strike me as news.”
Jones began finding himself in a pit of doo-doo last June when AJC reporters Ben Smith and Maurice Tamman discovered that the DeKalb CEO had spent $630,000 in tax dollars on his personal security detail since taking office in 2001.
The $630,000 figure is infrequently repeated in subsequent news articles. The newspaper began substituting the more benign (to Jones) wording of “$250,000 a year” in most stories. Readers without a calculator or knowledge of Jones’ tenure are less likely to be agitated by $250,000 for security than by $630,000.
The Smith-Tamman story on Jones’ security prompted a grand jury investigation of the CEO’s expenses. The grand jury finished its report, which stated security expenses were actually $830,000, or about $200,000 more than what Smith and Tamman had reported. Jones objected to findings that questioned his stewardship. He requested, as was his right, that certain portions of the report be edited out. Many passages were.
At about this time, three things happened. First, Jones huddled with the AJC’s top newsroom potentates. Roughton wouldn’t say with whom Jones met, but he confirmed the meeting took place.
Second, the unexpurgated version of the grand jury report was leaked to the AJC. The leak, according to Roughton, was made to one of the daily’s top editors. The AJC won’t say which one. Roughton and Smith say they weren’t told who leaked the report, and didn’t know until I told them. AJC sources told me that notations on one page, which would have revealed the document came from Jones’ camp, were removed. Why? So the newspaper’s own reporters wouldn’t see them.
The third thing that happened was that Smith and reporter Eric Stirgus, who had reported on some embarrassing real estate deals involving Jones, were assigned other beats. Roughton said the moves weren’t punitive. But the bottom line is that two reporters who irritated Jones are no longer covering him.
Roughton said it wasn’t his job to ask from where the grand jury report emanated. But he’s misstating common newsroom protocol. Good reporters have confidential sources. Journalists often are reluctant to tell anyone, even their editors, who their sources are. Editors generally want to vet the sources’ credibility and motives, and depending on a reporter’s reliability, editors may or may not demand a name.
But the grand jury document wasn’t acquired by a grunt reporter. Rather, it came from the newsroom’s executive offices following discussions to which reporters and even Roughton weren’t privy.
The leak turned out to be weighted down with political baggage. The grand jury report was delivered to the AJC by Jones’ political strategist, Angelo Fuster. It took me about 10 minutes to shake Fuster’s name from, um, sources. Then, Fuster himself confirmed to me that he was the man.
Whoa. Let’s think about that. Jones’ political adviser decided that releasing the report — against a judge’s order — was more advantageous than letting speculation fester over its contents. Maybe Jones should be commended for wanting to hang it all out.
Or maybe he had other motives. Maybe there was a deal — as in, why did the AJC sit on the gun and Congress Center stories? Or, as in, why were the reporters reassigned to other beats?
I hope the AJC wouldn’t be so craven. But the press has a credibility problem when it demands openness of everyone and every institution, but then insists that its own inner workings remain cloaked.
Even more intriguing questions: Why was Jones publicly demanding that parts of the grand jury report be squelched when his guy was delivering the unabridged version to the AJC? Why did the daily start obsessively citing the $250,000-a-year number instead of the more clear $630,000? And why did the AJC not report the $830,000 instead of obliquely referencing it as $200,000 more than the paper initially reported?
After the AJC ran its story on the unedited report, CL reporter Mara Shalhoup used her own sources — again, someone close to Jones — to get a peek at it. Shalhoup was interested in the coverage of the “secret” portions of the report.
I edited that story and advised Shalhoup on it, but I have doubts now about our approach. While we and the AJC were engaged in the fairly standard journalistic practice of obtaining leaked information from confidential sources, both of us ended up being used to soften the criticism on Jones.
The difference was that AJC brass were feeding reporters some pieces of information, withholding others, and suppressing news on sensational incidents.
Was the AJC pulling its punches on Jones? Roughton responds, “Anyone who suggests we’re soft-pedaling [coverage of] Jones isn’t telling the truth.”
To be sure, the newspaper has energetically covered the fracas with Boyer, as well as Jones’ real estate dealings. But those stories were inescapable. They either occurred in the public eye or were well known. The groundbreaking work on the security detail by Smith and Tamman also deserves kudos, but raises questions about the AJC’s subsequent coverage.
On other stories — the gun and the Congress Center episodes — the paper seemed happy to be a stooge. The stories were likely to stay buried unless the AJC decided to report them. But even more disturbing was the top editors’ willingness to be a conduit for a politically opportunistic leak.
Folks at the AJC and other Cox operations have a theory: The newspaper doesn’t want to be perceived as ferociously attacking one black leader after another. The AJC had been aggressive in pursuing former Atlanta Mayor Bill Campbell. I raised the possibility with the AJC’s top two editors in an email; they declined to comment.
Beyond the journalism questions, there’s a much more serious one for DeKalb County: What else does the AJC know about Jones that it isn’t telling you?
Disclosure time: Cox owns 25 percent of Creative Loafing’s parent company. CL’s board recently determined that two senior Cox officials used their relationship with us to learn the alternative newspaper business, and then put that knowledge to work by launching a product designed to cripple or kill CL. That’s another story you won’t read in the AJC.
Senior Editor John Sugg, who is a shareholder in CL, can be reached at 404-614-1241 or at john.sugg@creativeloafing.com.