Pressing Issues: Heavy Mettle Fans Call for Encores

By: Greg Mitchell Given the current assaults on the press by the Bush administration, the TV punditocracy and the online idiotocracy, nothing could be more timely than a call for renewed dedication to "staying the course," and I don't mean in Iraq. Arriving just in time is the Summer 2006 issue of Nieman Reports, titled "Journalists: On the Subject of Courage," which features several dozen articles by journalists from as far afield as Liberia and Nepal.

John F. Kennedy called courage the most indispensable virtue, for it makes anything possible. He wasn't referring to journalism

specifically, but the sentiment applies.

The scope of articles in the Nieman Foundation quarterly is remarkable, from a look back at H.L. Mencken's stand against lynching to risk assessments for reporters in Iraq by John F. Burns and Farnaz Fassihi. Judy Woodruff pays tribute to brave women, Jim Boyd explains "Why Courage is Hard to Find" on the editorial page, and so on, with contributions by Lance Morrow, Geneva Overholser, Hodding Carter III, and Barry Sussman, among others.

One essay that quickly gained wide attention came from veteran Washington Post national security expert Walter Pincus, who urges national reporters to resist official spin and find "a new kind of courage" by ignoring "the latest bulletin, prepared event, or the most recent statement or backgrounder."

At the other end of the spectrum, at least in its grassroots focus, is "A Local Newspaper Endures a Stormy Backlash," by Dean Miller, managing editor of the Post Register in Idaho Falls, Idaho. He recounts how, last year, in exposing Boy Scout pedophiles and those who failed to boot them out of the scouting program, "we energized three of our community's big forces against us, including those most able to punish our newspaper: the community's majority religion, the richest guys in town, and the conservative machine that controls Idaho."

The story, in brief: A pedophile caught at a local scout camp in 1997 had dozens of victims. "When we went to the courthouse to look for the civil suit filed by these victims, the clerks (and the computers) said there was no such case," Miller recalls. "We later learned that the national Boy Scouts of America and its local Grand Teton Council had hired two of Idaho's best-connected law firms to seal the files and hide what came to be known as the Brad Stowell case."

The Post Register went to court in late 2004 and learned that as early as 1991 scout leaders had been warned about Stowell and hired him again anyway. Others who knew something did little or nothing, including top-level local and national leaders of the Mormon Church (which sponsors almost all Grand Teton Council scout troops), a local bishop, and lawyers for the Boy Scout organization.

In February 2005, the Post Register launched a six-day series. The backlash included:

An outcry from Mormons, who make up 70% of the population in some counties the paper serves;

The pullout of several big advertisers;

A local millionaire running numerous half-page ads in the Sunday paper, which included attacks on one of the paper's reporters for being "gay." This led to harassment directed at the reporter.

Also, the president of the company that owns the newspaper (who was running for governor) publicly praised the Boy Scouts organization. At that point, Miller writes, "the newsroom was really on its own."

In the meantime, the Post Register had gathered evidence of four other pedophiles in the local scout council. Eventually, the paper's coverage would be hailed as "courageous" by judges when it won the Scripps Howard First Amendment prize.

"With no corporate bankroll to fall back on and coping with the pressures any newspaper publisher faces today, our publisher, Roger Plothow, took lonely risks to uphold the principle of open government," Miller reveals. "In doing so, he gave victims the opportunity they needed to speak out against those who had harmed them. By his example, Plothow stiffened the spines of minority stockholders (many of whom are staff members at the paper), who stood firm."

But one of "the sweeter moments" for Miller was this: New circulation figures showed that "we were among the nation's faster-growing daily papers. For us, these numbers testified to the value of fortitude. Publishing uncomfortable truths needn't be an act of hot-blooded courage; it should be a cool-headed exercise in focus: Find the civic heart of a story, steer a steady course to it, and serve the public's legitimate interests in openness and justice.

"Do that and, even when the story rocks your boat, trust that the waves won't capsize it."