Author: Dick

My friend Marcy sent me a story which came from my town’s local daily but was apparently rewritten by the Associated Press.

“A holdup?

Hilarious.

Police say a Southeast Texas bank teller thwarted an attempted robbery when she read the holdup note and started laughing.”

The story which first appeared in the Beaumont Enterprise was basically a rewritten news release from the Beaumont Police Department.

I replied to my friend, the contents of that reply will be a bit less graphic here, that it might have been really funny had the newspaper obtained a copy of the note from the police. “Let us in on the joke,” I wrote.

Now, a spokeswoman for Wells Fargo — whose bank it was which was robbed — said the teller did not laugh and the newspaper story said the video proved it. Of course, the story said it was the Wells Fargo spokeswoman who said surveillance video proved the teller didn’t laugh because the company takes such matters “seriously.” CYA? Maybe. Did the cops who wrote the report or provided the information for the press release, which the Enterprise’s story copied, get it wrong? I would doubt it.

So what’s going on here?  An odd story about a bank robbery that lacked, as far as I can tell, any original reporting? A story the corporate flacks spiked because they are worried about getting sued? Sadly, the folks here in Beaumont will probably never know unless the same would-be robber is arrested and tells all during a confession in a city in which the media actually reports news  rather than acts as a stenographer.

For the longest time I defended our local paper, but I can no longer do that. The Enterprise, a Hearst newspaper, has fallen to its lowest point that I can remember and I have been reading the paper for the majority of my reading life. More and more it seems as if the editors are content with stories which are sent out via an e-mail alert from the  police and fire department. I know about the content of the stories as opposed to that of the press releases because I also receive the same e-mail alert and read the same releases.

At least from the time I worked as a reporter until recently, the Beaumont Police Department would not have won any “sunshine in open government” awards. I will give it to the Enterprise that they have fought the law and the law didn’t win when it came to open records in a few cases. But in reality, using open records laws to gain information is like shooting fish in a barrel. The Beaumont police have had some embarrassing events lately although the public would have hardly known about it were it not for lawsuits in which the information freely flows.

I am not saying that the Enterprise does not have good journalists. I know of a few who are both good reporters and writers. I might know more were they either allowed to report or made to do so.

Good reporters can get information, the real skinny, if they have one iota of  talent. That is no matter how stingy a police department is with its newsworthy intel. I have worked in places where one would have thought the police owned and had copyrights on information. Even more though, I worked where cops and prosecutors told me everything. That’s not always good either, but I was hooked.

I have a few other beefs with my local newspaper. One is that I can’t stand the stupid, race-baiting blog on their Web site. I will not give it any notice by mentioning its name on my blog although I am ashamed to see that once again the writer of that poor excuse for journalism won first place in the state’s Associated Press Managing Editors Assn. awards. Then again, I’ve won a couple of first place awards from that same organization. Newspaper awards mean more to newspaper publishers and editors and reporters’ egos than anything of substance.

The other beef and it is a major one is that I bought a newspaper one day last week for the first time in a year or so and I was disturbed to find stuffed inside was the Southeast Texas Record. The Record is a weekly newspaper that reports from all the local courts in the area and in the federal Eastern District of Texas. When I say report, I mostly mean its reporters draw information from court records.  The only problem I have is that the Record is one of several papers in the country published by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Why would the U.S. Chamber of Commerce publish a paper in Beaumont, Texas, you might ask? That is because this area has garnered a reputation — rightfully or wrongly — of being a “judicial hellhole” or a place in which juries and sometimes judges are plaintiff-friendly.

I do not have the time nor patience to debate the whole “frivolous lawsuit” issue. In fact, the U.S. Chamber’s part in trying to deny an American citizen’s right to a civil trial as specified under the 7th Amendment is only one area in which that behemoth of American commerce is a threat to the average citizen. The chamber is also exceedingly anti-union and pro-Republican. If you want to do some research into donors to the Republican party, you just might find a great deal of those dollars coming from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Obviously, I have a bunch of pent-up anger toward my local newspaper. There are various reasons why. But I would much rather someone at the top start kicking some ass and taking names to make the Enterprise a real newspaper once more than to read press releases I can get at my own fingertips.

The Enterprise has pointed out that it just stuffs the Record inside and it has no “marriage of convenience.” Nevertheless, the BE has long been an editorially-conservative newspaper and its stuffing the U.S. Chamber of Commerce inside it just too much for a moderately liberal union guy to bear.