Inside Out: Journalism 101 and covering stuff you might not buy yourself

A lot of smart people really seem to believe one part of a good reporter’s job is to ignore certain people.

I’ve written about this before but here I go again. A leader in this community, someone whom I respect, complained to me privately about the fact that I covered the remarks before the Town Board of a resident who has always been a critic of the 4-poster tick control system. His argument this time was to show, using data from the state Department of Health, that there is no evidence 4-posters have lowered the number of Lyme disease cases on Shelter Island.

There’s room for a good investigative news piece on this topic but, with no time for that last week, I simply included the resident’s remarks in a Town Board wrap-up piece. I accurately reported what he said, for readers to take or leave as they might.
I am very skeptical about the data our resident used to show Lyme disease has been occurring at a very low level on Shelter Island for years, with or without 4-posters. Does anyone really believe there have been fewer than five cases a year for most of the last decade? An erratic, haphazard reporting system may have more to do with the statistics than the true incidence of Lyme disease.

But that’s an opinion and it certainly didn’t belong in last week’s Town Board wrap up — not without finding knowledgeable sources to back it up. The meeting was on Tuesday and the paper — one of the biggest of the year — had to go to press the next day and I had other, more immediate priorities, including an evolving story about the Shelter Island Nursery.

It’s always frustrating to me that we don’t do enough enterprise reporting here. But whatever limits time and resources place on us, our first priority is to report the news that lands in our laps (by covering a meeting, say) fairly, accurately and thoroughly.
The complaint I received last week wasn’t about the data our critic had used. The complaint wasn’t about the 4-poster-Lyme disease issue at all. The complaint was that I should not have paid any attention to the resident because he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I should have ignored him.

There often are topics that come up at the board’s work sessions that I leave out of my story that week: I usually lack the time and space to cover every single topic. Some I leave for a future follow-up. Some I skip because they’ve been reported before and there are no new developments. Some I leave out, or barely mention, because they contain nothing that I consider real news.

But I do not leave out discussions that reflect a new development or twist on the local scene or in an important local issue.
I think it’s news when a resident publicly, before the board, before me and my notebook, in front of the Channel 22 camera, makes a clear, cogent argument that 4-posters have not reduced the incidence of Lyme disease. I may suspect he’s wrong. I may be skeptical of the data he used; I may consider him a chronic, knee-jerk 4-poster critic.

But I ask myself: did he raise an important issue? Was it relevant to the community?

Of course it was.

This first-grade lesson in reporting must be a little tiresome for the people who get it. But I think there are a lot of people who don’t. They can’t step away from their own special interests and agenda to grasp the concept that a reporter or editor must not use personal opinions about people to decide who is and who is not worth listening to. This is especially true when one’s first priority is merely to report clearly and accurately what went on at a particular Town Board meeting that the public might find interesting or important.

What kind of paper would Shelter Island have if the editor routinely ignored people he or she disagreed with? Or wrote only about the people whose opinions he or she favored? What if every story he or she wrote was meant to grind an axe or push an agenda? How much value would that newspaper have as a source of news and information? Everything in it would be suspect — even more than usual.

There are “newspapers” like that all over the place. They used to be mostly small weeklies run by eccentric grumps. More and more these days, they include major dailies — thanks to people like Rupert Murdoch and others who don’t believe in core values of good journalism.