Paper, Reporter Come To Terms p.26

By: Dorothy Giobbe

THE BURLINGTON (VT.) Free Press has reached an out-of-court settlement with a former employee, a few days before the case was scheduled to go to a jury.
Lawyers for the Free Press and its parent Gannett Co., said details of the settlement could not be disclosed because of a confidentiality agreement between the parties.
"I feel the principle I stood up for, which was you can't fire a journalist for getting the story right, needed to be made," Paul Teetor, a former reporter for the Free Press, told the Associated Press after the settlement was announced. Gannett Co. lawyers declined to comment on the arrangement.
The settlement stems from Teetor's 1993 lawsuit filed against the newspaper. (E&P, July 10, 1993,
p. 12).
The reporter was fired after his editors claimed that he was a problem employee with a string of inaccuracies in his reporting. Specifically, they claimed, he misrepresented events at a city forum on racism in an article that ran in the Free Press.
According to Teetor's article, at the forum, an African-American woman "brandished" a cane while describing an instance of racism.
The article also stated that a white woman was cut off from speaking at the largely black function.
Teetor's editors found fault with the tone of his article, saying it "failed to meet our standards of fairness, accuracy and completeness."
A correction ran in the Free Press the next day, stating that the African-American woman did not brandish her cane, and that the white woman had not been stopped from speaking.
Teetor said the correction defamed him, even though it did not refer to him by name.
Editors at the Free Press said Teetor's article on the racial forum was "the last straw" and he was fired. Soon after, he filed a lawsuit against the Free Press, Gannett Co. and several top editors at the newspaper.
During the almost two-week trial, Teetor's lawyers called witnesses who backed up his account of events at the forum.
His lawyers also argued that Gannett Co.'s "mainstreaming" policies had fostered slanted news judgment.
Teetor, who said he may write a book about his experience, is a three-time winner of the Vermont Press Association's Reporter of the Year Award.
"This sends a message that you can't treat journalists like crap," Teetor told
the AP.
"We all know the trend in journalism is not to offend people. That's a scary trend."