'E&P' Editorial: Shredding Credibility

By: Lucia Moses This unsigned editorial appeared in the June 16 print issue of E&P.

For newspapers, a journalist's notes have always been something more than just the raw material of news. When those notes are demanded by law enforcement or angry story subjects, newspapers go to great lengths to protect them. A few reporters, with their papers' support, have even gone to jail rather than obey court orders to surrender notes.

Yet, on or around Sunday, June 29, The Cincinnati Enquirer will destroy all the notes two of its reporters compiled during a year-long investigation that became the infamous 18-page report published May 13, 1998 about the business practices of Chiquita Brand International Inc., the local banana company then owned by Cincinnati tycoon Carl Lindner.

The destruction of journalists' notes after five years is the final obligation the Enquirer undertook in its craven 1998 settlement to avoid further legal problems from Chiquita. The Enquirer and its parent Gannett Co. were running from a big problem: Some of the many serious allegations made against Chiquita in the stories were supported by voice mail messages illegally obtained by the newspaper's star (and since fired) investigative reporter, Michael Gallagher.

This was supposed to be a secret agreement, and the Enquirer's brand-new publisher, Margaret E. Buchanan, apparently doesn't want to talk about it. She ignored our messages asking for comment. But two years ago, E&P Washington Editor Todd Shields got hold of a copy and revealed just how much the Enquirer had ceded to mollify Chiquita and Carl Lindner. The banana company received not only a $14 million payment from the Enquirer, but a guarantee that the newspaper would forbid certain journalists then on staff from ever again investigating Chiquita or the Lindner family's many Cincinnati businesses.

So all that's left is the issue of how the notes and other material are to be destroyed. The agreement -- so lawyerly precise in every other clause -- leaves the method of destruction up to the newspaper. It is a choice freighted with so much semiotic resonance. There's always the shredder, of course. But Enquirer executives may want to avoid the image of corporate suits in a panic, wheeling all those carts of printouts through the halls of Enron, into a room with the constant churn.

Perhaps the Enquirer could take a page from the Nixon White House. Executives could deep-six the so-called "Series Material" in the Ohio River, and watch as the Portage Professional Reporter's Notebooks float for a while, then slowly sink like mad Ophelia in "Hamlet."

But the Enquirer has shown such a blindness to the bigger journalistic issues at stake in the Chiquita affair that we think only a "Fahrenheit 451" end will suffice. The notes should burn -- and the Enquirer should be forced to live with the consequent stench.