Eight Feet Deep

A media out­let — be it news­pa­per, radio, TV or Inter­net — may some­times find it pays off to get scooped.

It was some­thing I found dis­taste­ful when ink ran through my arter­ies, to have another news pur­veyor break a good story. It was also some­thing I tried, at least on what­ever beat I was work­ing, not to let happen. But when you have a story that is a rel­a­tive deep, dark ques­tion pit one may have to let the com­pe­ti­tion jones go for a bit until some mys­ter­ies can be solved. A story that is sure to raise some hack­les in my neck of the woods is a fine example.

A  man in described by police as “men­tally chal­lenged” in Kir­byville, Texas, died of an appar­ent heart attack while wait­ing some 30 min­utes for an ambu­lance to arrive, accord­ing to local news out­lets. Kir­byville is about 40 miles north of where I live. The ambu­lance that finally arrived came from Sils­bee, about 30 miles away, and belonged to a com­pany that does not even reg­u­larly oper­ate in that area.

Now some­one wait­ing on an ambu­lance for 20–30 min­utes is a long time in a city or most sub­ur­ban areas. How­ever, I am sure there are rural areas in cer­tain parts of the coun­try, even in par­tic­u­lar por­tions of Texas which have to wait even longer. So even though the long “wait” is being focused upon by the local media — and I am not being crit­i­cal here, rather I am think­ing out loud — there are a lot of ques­tions which need answer­ing to make this a much more mean­ing­ful story:

1. The story states the Kir­byville chief of police and another per­son per­formed CPR on the man before the ambu­lance arrived. Does Kir­byville have a crew of trained and ade­quately equipped first respon­ders? I think I know the answer but I’m not sure. I think there are a cou­ple of  vol­un­teer fire depart­ments nearby but how many do first response on med­ical emer­gen­cies? If any do, where were they?

2. Jasper, a city of almost 7,500, is about 20 miles north of Kir­byville. They have at least one ambu­lance ser­vice, or at least they did. How many EMS vehi­cles are based in Jasper and were they all busy at the time? I don’t know. I wish some­one would find out.

3. Was the com­pany oper­at­ing the ambu­lance that picked up the vic­tim indeed not oper­at­ing in its reg­u­lar area? I’m not so sure about that since it report­edly was an Aca­dian EMS ambu­lance and this arti­cle says that Aca­dian was assum­ing oper­a­tion of Pri­or­ity One EMS in Sils­bee. The lat­ter com­pany had an air ambu­lance last time I drove by their head­quar­ters. The for­mer own­ers of Pri­or­ity One were recently con­victed in fed­eral court on charges of con­spir­acy to com­mit health care fraud and mail fraud, hav­ing bilked Medicare, Med­ic­aid, Blue Cross and Blue Shield out of  almost $1.75 mil­lion, by the way.

4. The heart attack report­edly hap­pened at that area’s men­tal health facil­ity. Does that facil­ity not have a defib­ri­la­tor? Are they sup­posed to have one? I don’t know. I’m just saying …

From what I can gather with these sketchy details of the story, the Kir­byville chief of police sounds as if he did quite a job to help that man and deserves praise for his efforts. Per­haps his city might reward him by buy­ing him a defib­ril­la­tor for his car, at the very least.

Yes, there are a lot of ques­tions remain­ing, even though tongues are, fig­u­ra­tively, wag­ging over the length of time it took for an ambu­lance to reach the vic­tim. But there are plenty of answers still wait­ing to be dis­cov­ered such as why weren’t first respon­ders there within a decent time inter­val with the equip­ment and drugs that might have kept the man alive and sta­ble? I will leave this up to the local media to answer these ques­tions since I don’t have time, nor do I fore­see any­one pay­ing me to solve these puzzles.

Like prob­a­bly mil­lions of other busy­bod­ies I am, at the moment, caught up in the whole David Let­ter­man scan­dal. My inter­est is that it is a com­pelling story involv­ing a high-dollar black­mail plot against a very unique enter­tainer whom I hap­pen to like.

Also grab­bing my atten­tion is the fact that the guy who allegedly tried to extort $2 mil­lion out of Let­ter­man over the star hav­ing sex with co-workers, Robert Halde­man, is him­self an Emmy-winning tele­vi­sion pro­ducer. Infor­ma­tion from an arrest war­rant for the man also says that the sus­pect lived at one time with one of the women with whom Let­ter­man was hav­ing an affair. That woman, Stephanie Birkitt, has been seen many times on “Late Night With David Let­ter­man.” Birkitt — who hosted Win­ter Olympic cov­er­age on the show in 2002 and 2006,  is not accused of any crimes. It appears just to be a pawn in the alleged blackmail.

I have no feel­ings one way or the other about any who are involved in this saga, at least from the stand­point of their involve­ment or non-involvement. I think Let­ter­man was smart to get out in front of this. I always thought Birkitt was cute and funny cast as a faux air­head. I actu­ally thought she would one day go some­where in show business.

The prob­lem with this type of story is we will get sick of it because it will be cussed and dis­cussed ad nau­seum as the media has a propen­sity for dead horse beat­ing. The rea­son is that the media, in most cases cor­rectly, assumes the pub­lic always wants more of a great story espe­cially one involv­ing celebri­ties. Another fac­tor is that the media is lazy. It is eas­ier to con­tinue milk­ing a story for every last drop than crawl­ing around out in the trenches look­ing for news.

So I guess I will enjoy the story until it starts get­ting on my nerves. When it comes to news, one must know when to say when.

Some­times I like to head for places I never been or never even heard of and see what’s mak­ing the news there. It’s not that I like to make fun of small-town news. As I have men­tioned here before I was a small-town news­man. Some peo­ple might call all the papers at which I once worked small-town news­pa­pers. Most were, although three were dailies and the last one I worked for on a full-time basis was a medium-sized news­pa­per. My first job, though was edi­tor of a daily that had a cir­cu­la­tion of about 1,200. I was chief cook and bot­tle­washer, as my Dad used to say.

Reporters and edi­tors, sales peo­ple, print­ers, cir­cu­la­tion man­agers, deliv­ery folks, all those good salt o’ the Earth peo­ple who ply their trade for news­pa­pers in small towns see news up close and per­sonal. The peo­ple who are vic­tims of car wrecks are their neigh­bors, peo­ple in their churches, the water rates raised by the town coun­cil affect the reporter and the edi­tor, and of course, foot­ball ties the town together until a los­ing coach tears the town apart. So off we go to the hin­ter­land and see what is hap­pen­ing among the salt o’ the Earth:

It’s prob­a­bly not a moun­tain lion in Nebraska. Chris Dunker, staff writer of the “Beat­rice Daily Sun” in Nebraska, gives a pretty exten­sive look at whether a big ani­mal peo­ple have seen around those parts is a moun­tain lion, coy­ote or just your run-of-the-mill uniden­ti­fied big-ass ani­mal. (UBAA, I guess.)

It ain’t heavy, it’s our neigh­bor­hood moose calf. Another ani­mal story. This you have to expect in Alaska, unless Sarah Palin is around. Then you have to expect a dead ani­mal story. Some neigh­bors in Mud Bay got together to res­cue a moose calf from a pond, accord­ing to the “Chilkat Val­ley News.” Their motto is: “Serv­ing Haines and Kluk­wan since 1966.” And now the can add the lower Sabine-Neches Val­ley of South­east Texas. Or not.

This might sound obscene but it’s not. You expect the quaint from Ver­mont. But some­how this head­line from an arti­cle writ­ten by Stephanie M. Peters in the “Rut­land Her­ald” (Oh stop it! We haven’t even made it to the head­line yet,) which is: “County phi­lat­e­lists pull out of state fair.” Rut­land was the only place I vis­ited in Ver­mont. Nice place, but I won­der if the stamp enthu­si­asts will go to a place more hos­pitable to their phi­lat­el­ing. Maybe Albany or Stockbridge.

Oh no! It’s a … it’s a … empty box. The Hoover (Alabama) police bomb squad was called to inves­ti­gate a sus­pi­cious con­tainer that two men in an SUV dropped off in a Food World gro­cery store park­ing lot in Pel­ham, Ala. Food World employ­ees thought the men’s activ­i­ties were sus­pi­cious, as did the Pel­ham police chief, thus the bomb experts from the nearby big­ger city (Hoover, about 70,000 peo­ple) were sum­moned. It turned out to be an empty stor­age box. There was no indi­ca­tion, accord­ing to the “Shelby County Reporter” in Columbiana, whether any lit­ter­ing charges are pending.

Finally, the police beat or blot­ter or what­ever has long been a high-interest sec­tion of many news­pa­pers. The lit­tle briefs vary from place-to-place. I wrote the briefs at sev­eral news­pa­pers and I can attest to the fact they are well read. Some places, where they are still able to pull it off, have a rather humor­ous take on the police beat or at least a funny head­line or two. Peo­ple seem to get ticked off about the least lit­tle thing and since humor seems lost among the right­eous bas­tards more and more funny will likely dis­ap­pear. But as long as we can still enjoy it, have fun with the Cops brief head­lines from one of my favorite news­pa­pers (or at least with a few of my favorite news­pa­per folks) “The Daily Sen­tinel” in Nacog­doches, Texas. I will let you read the briefs your ownself.

“How is this my fault? I didn’t put the road here?”

“How I am I going to get extra mints on my pil­low now?”

“Fine you can play through.”

Ah such fun. But I don’t miss count­ing head­lines, hot wax, car wrecks at 2 p.m.  on the road next to the big oak by the Johnson’s in Podunk, writ­ing 15 sto­ries a week, elec­tion night pizza, school board exec­u­tive ses­sions until 2 a.m., “Grip and Grin,” and finally, “Oh, I think I know a lit­tle about jour­nal­ism. I took a jour­nal­ism class in 1) high school 2) col­lege 3) high school and college.”

But I tell you young whip­pah snap­pahs out there who aspire to great­ness in jour­nal­ism, think big by think­ing lit­tle. If you want to learn about jour­nal­ism, learn about peo­ple. If you want to learn about peo­ple, go get your­self down to Podunk, get a job as a reporter or edi­tor of the weekly, and learn jour­nal­ism. And don’t worry, you won’t starve, the Lion’s Club always got good food as does most Rotary Clubs. Con­flict of Inter­est? Ethics vio­la­tions? If you can be bought off with a chicken-fried steak, you cer­tainly don’t need to be a journalist.