Absence of Motion, a story that's not about Paul Newman

One of the best movies ever made about American newspaper journalism was a potboiler called “Absence of Malice.” And it had one major thing in common with “All the President’s Men.” It had somebody running up to a car. In the one movie, Paul Newman’s character ran up beside a car to find out who was following him. In the other, Dustin Hoffman ran to the corner where Robert Redford had stopped to pick him up. Neither scene had much to do with the plot of the movie, but both showed up in the movie trailers. In each case, the scene was used because somebody moved.

And there should be a law, and it should have a name, and it should be named after somebody who edits movie trailers for a living. It would say that in order to suggest or promise that somebody will actually move in a film about a profession where people talk on the phone and type, you’re going to have to pull something out of context.

Which is an expression newspaper reporters hate. Sometimes when a source says something was taken out of context, it means he wishes he hadn’t said it. But more often than most writers are willing to admit, it means the reporter didn’t get the full quote, or didn't get the meaning, or just didn't get it. And they’re going to fall back on the tape. “We’re gonna have to raise taxes.” Major lede. Pull quote. Political implications. Right there on the tape.

The source is pissed. But the editor sees the notes, knows the source wishes he hadn’t said it, plans to listen to the tape later if he has to, but it looks like the reporter has it right. Back the reporter and keep an eye on him or her. And destroy or file the tape, whatever the policy is, because unless there’s a suit, and there won’t be over a quote like this, nobody will ever have to listen to it again. The editor knows a dispute like this could always go either way, unless he or she just started yesterday, or works for the DNR.

Because reporters don’t just make things up. “If we go ahead with this project, we’re gonna have to raise taxes, and you know we can’t do that.” Reporter’s got his quote, and he didn’t want to be here anyway, because this meeting isn’t on his beat. He knows the gist of the story, of the project being discussed by the board or council or commission, because he’s read the clips, and they’re never wrong. Nut grafs don’t live and breathe and take root unless there’s something to them. And now you’ve got this guy wanting to raise taxes, and the TV’s there, damnit, so somebody will have to tell folks what really happened, so it’s time to start thinking about deadline because this one can’t sit and cook for a day. And just when you’re stuck in a meeting you don’t really want to cover you’ve got to deal with the problem of being distracted by a TV person. They are usually small, or at least thin, and they carry a huge amount of equipment, and even if they’re not attractive, although most are, you’re going to spend some time looking at them wondering how someone that small carries that much equipment. You are now anyway.

But the guy running up to the car is not the best thing about “Absence of Malice.” The best thing is when the Melinda Dillon character sits on her porch waiting for the newspaper to arrive, and she looks at it, and then she begins running from house to house in her neighborhood picking up all the newspapers so people can’t read what it says about her. Any reporter who can see that scene and can really get it is going to be a better reporter. Because what they have to get is that those few words they write about somebody might be the only words the vast majority of the people in her town ever read about her. And if the story’s not really about her, but she’s just a point that explains something else in the story, then there’s going to be even less there to add some body and nuance and character and context to the only thing most people will ever know about her. The only thing. That’s it. End of story. 30.

That’s something I’d often sum up by telling a reporter, “You’re going to write eight stories this week, but that person will only be in the newspaper once (in their life) (this year) (this month).” Too often the reporter heard how many stories he or she was going to write and stopped listening. There are 40 or so cars dropping kids off at the elementary school in the morning, and the people in each one know each other to talk to, and all the others know about one of them is caught up in those 300 words in the newspaper last week. The sanctuary of the church holds 800 people, and all that most of them know about the guy sitting over there with his family is what was in the newspaper. Dozens of people cross the parking lot every morning, and one day one of them notices another and knows it’s that woman who was in the newspaper.

And the source knows that. And maybe they’re proud of what was in there, or maybe they’re not. Maybe what was written could have stood another sentence of explanation, or maybe the source is relieved that the reporter didn’t ask just one more question. Maybe the source was the main course in the story, or a side dish, or maybe just a condiment whose moment of local fame comes from the editor asking for some more color in the story.

Morning finds the reporter, like Frost’s breeze in “Wind and Winter Flower,” already one hundred miles away. The source may feel as cool as Paul Newman. He or she may feel just brushed by the breeze. Or they might be running from lawn to lawn picking up the newspaper and wondering who you see about taking something back.

Julie and the Mayor

There is a woman working in the Charlottesville Old Navy who would look just like Jodie Foster if her hair were not black. I noticed her and knew I could do a couple of things. I could stalk her around the store until I figured out who she looked like, or I could ask her if she’d ever been told she looked like someone famous. She reacted with the appropriate embarrassment and said, yes, that actress in “Silence of the Lambs.” I saw it then, and would have figured it out except for the hair.

It made me think of Julie, who did look like Jodie Foster, light hair and all, or at least she did when she had the hair cut to just past chin length, except nobody ever noticed it. Maybe it was because she wore her hair longer when she was at the newspaper, or maybe it was because she was so self-possessed that she could mirror Elvis’s claim, “I don’t sound like nobody.” Or look, in her case.

Julie was technically beautiful, but it was rarely an issue on the job. She tended not to let it be. There was never a hint of acknowledgement in anything she did. If it was an issue – a problem – it was someone else’s.

That someone else, as it turned out, was the mayor of one of the small towns that speckle Rockingham County. Julie had gone to cover the town council meeting and as she entered the council chambers, the mayor greeted her by walking by her and swatting her on the ass. Not to put too pretty a face on it, he sexually and physically assaulted her in a way that said he thought he could get away with it or he was too old and ignorant to know there was anything wrong with it.

Julie came back from the meeting either stunned or amazed or shaken, and maybe a little of all three. As she told me about it, I realized that there was something missing from her tale, something that I still expected then, in the early 1990s, something I would almost certainly have seen ten years before. There was absolutely no sense on her part of having done anything wrong. Her attitude, blessedly, was that it was her ass, and he had touched it, without permission, while she was working.

Ken, the managing editor, was going out of town the next day, so I wrote up a memo for his boss, the general manager, Dick. My best memory is that I just ran through the options, from helping Julie push a criminal case, to what I saw as the very least, a story on the front page of the paper.

It’s hard for me to say that they didn’t do anything. Partly because then I have to admit I didn’t resign, and partly because they did do something. They wrote me up, slipped a letter of reprimand into my file, for two things. One was going over the managing editor’s head to the general manager. The other was for what they saw as exaggerated and inflammatory wording in the memo to Dick. Because they didn’t think it was an assault.

But I didn’t resign, partly because I had a family, partly because they hadn’t met my standards. I had decided a couple of years before, when we were still actively covering up a series of sexual assaults on delivery boys, that I had to be better prepared, to decide in advance how much I could stand. In this case, I had decided I was going to resign if either Ken or Dick asked what she was wearing. And they at least didn’t meet that standard. Eventually they would fire me, for complaining about Julie’s assault and a number of other issues they saw as equally annoying and showing equally faulty judgment. I should have left by then, because I kept coming up with the standards. I started too many days telling myself if they stop short of such and such a level of idiocy on this issue, I won’t quit. I can keep working. Because I loved the job when those two were out of the building.

Ken went on to be the oldest man ever to play college basketball, without ever realizing it was a stunt. He was serious about it. Dick left his profession in disgrace after being caught selling news stories. I don’t know if he was still teaching his class in business ethics at the time.

The class apparently didn’t include assaults. At least not in this case. Because that’s not what they thought it was. Mink called me into his office to show me the letter of reprimand, and to explain to me what I was obviously too dumb to understand. “Dick said it wasn’t an assault,” Ken explained, condescendingly. “The mayor was just trying to cop a feel.”

I remember laughing, and I remember that Ken had no idea why I was. He didn’t get angry, or seem offended, and actually smiled with me. He had opened up a door, and stepped through a time warp from a 1950s sitcom, and didn’t know he was standing in 1993. He had no idea where he was, or what the world was like, only that in the insulated comfort of the Daily News-Record newsroom, he could say something like that and be safe from any hint that the world had changed for the better and that ten years later, in that same newsroom, someone would be fired for sexually harassing a fellow employee. But in 1993, the mayor was just trying to cop a feel.

We didn’t agree that I would be the one to speak to Julie. It never came up. Ken and Dick didn’t think there was any need to tell her anything. The issue was settled, and there was no need to do anything else. But I will always be grateful for one thing about Julie’s angry response. “You mean they’re not going to do anything?” she asked, and I felt a sense of relief that she had said “they.” Not that the story was all about me, but by then, to the bosses, it was. I was the one in trouble.

Julie wasn’t in trouble. They figured she was young, and just didn’t know any better.

Eating the bait

Look here for a description of the original golf course vote, and some of the background. If you're a city voter, contact me and I'll give you a copy.

City Council and Job Creation

A DNR reporter left a phone message on Labor Day asking about job creation as an issue in the City Council election. The answer goes beyond a sound bite.

The City Council’s ability to create jobs is negligible, particularly during a long economic downturn. The tax policies and workforce to attract new jobs already exist here, but the city, in attempting to draw new jobs, is in the same buyer’s market as the roughly one in six Americans who are unemployed or underemployed. The city’s policies looking forward should be aimed at protecting what we have, particularly in two areas. The first is maintaining the current level of services without raising tax rates or, as the city has done three times in the past twenty years, creating new taxes. The second is in adopting a housing policy that puts the needs of the city as a whole ahead of the needs of specific developers, especially regarding new student housing. The city should instead adopt a moratorium on new student housing complexes, and begin looking for new ways to get tax revenues from students.

Campaign initiatives based on job creation or budget issues should be taken with a grain of salt. Cities in Virginia have limited budget options to begin with, and those options shrink during a downturn. The city’s most important choices will be on development, and candidates who have a record in that area should be judged on that record.

It is odd that the DNR would do a story focusing on jobs and the Council considering its own past failings in that regard. In 2003 the DNR did a news story that fantasized a faux feud between two members after one of those members put forth a project he claimed would create jobs. The DNR has consistently declined to follow up on that story. But lest I create or continue a story-line, I should point out that the DNR declining to follow up was not based on its coziness with the city’s establishment, but on the laziness of the reporter involved.

We can't go back

Development in Harrisonburg for a long time followed a straightforward model. A person owned land, and tried to find a use for it, balancing what they wanted to see there with what would reward them the most financially.

The attitude that created that situation was sensible. Townhouses made good starter homes for the Valley’s sons and daughters. And student housing had multiple advantages. It kept college kids, who were away from home for the first time, out of neighborhoods. It kept students apartments on the tax rolls, instead of in state-owned dorms. And it allowed the rapid growth of JMU, which even the most ardent foes of the university admit has brought financial and other benefits for our community.

But what was a good idea in 1985 may not be a good idea today. By the time we decided to build a new high school almost ten years ago, there was talk that we were running out of land. In reality there was plenty of land, but it cost too much because it could earn more if it were sold for housing.

We need to start consistently looking at development decisions as binding and permanent choices about what kind of community we’ll be. We’ve run out of room for mistakes, and every zoning and building decision has to look at the city as a whole. Nothing can be built any more that’s not next to something, and what it’s close to has to be a part of the choice.

We still are the community we were 25 years ago, but we can’t go back to the city we were back then. When we were a smaller city, we could make development decisions based on who asked for them, because everybody still knew each other. But as we grow, we need to acknowledge that you rezone the land, not the builder, and our choices will linger for people not yet born.

We can’t go back, but we have to remember who we are and what kind of city we want to be as we move forward. The community is still there; but we have to manage the change, before the city we were 25 years ago disappears.

Tax Student Cars?

A lot of people wonder if there’s a way to make college students register their cars here so they’ll have to pay personal property taxes. The best way might be to ask them.

Granted, students already pay taxes to the city, directly and indirectly. The apartments they live in pay real estate taxes. They eat in restaurants more, and pay the meals tax. They pay sales taxes at Harrisonburg’s businesses.

And if they have cars, their parents pay the car tax on those vehicles in Virginia Beach, Chesterfield County, Norfolk and Fairfax County. Even though Harrisonburg’s tax rate is lower.

We should be encouraging the parents of our college students to register their cars here and pay their taxes here. They pay less, but the city makes more. And if those other localities think that’s unfair, they can always lower their tax rates to match ours.

There might be a legal reason we can’t do this. It’s often the case that the best ideas haven’t been tried because the state or the feds won’t let us. That might mean we can’t do those things. But it doesn’t mean we should stop thinking about them.

Heritage Oaks' Future

Ten years after a divided city council approved the Heritage Oaks golf course, the city has more options about how to make the project pay for itself.

A lot of people may think I’m not the one to be making those choices. They still ask me about the campaign promise to shut down the golf course. The short answer is: there wasn’t one. But the long answer requires a look at the city’s recent history.

Emotions ran high in 1999 and 2000 about the proposed golf course. The people of Harrisonburg didn’t want it, and the city council did. Those emotions were hard to gauge in the 2000 city council campaign. It became apparent well before the election that those of us who’d been opposed to the golf course would win. But what wasn’t clear was what people expected us to do. Did they think we could shut down the project, or were they just expressing their anger about it?

Neither option was available to the City Council. A flawed bond issue had tied us to the course for at least ten years. Stopping it then would have hurt the city’s credit rating in ways we’d still be paying for. Three lawyers, including Virginia’s attorney general, told us we were stuck with it.

And I tried to tell people that during the campaign. But, as I said, emotions were running high.

Ten years later, the city has choices to make. Should we sell beer? Should we out-source the marketing? Should we hire an outside manager? Should we try to attract a restaurant to the property?

Those are all ideas worth looking into. But in 2000, we didn’t have a lot of options. The city had signed a contract. The trees had been cut. The money had been borrowed. Closing down the project was just not possible. If we’d shut it down, we wouldn’t have opened three new schools.

The commission we appointed told us the questions wasn’t whether we should have built a golf course, but whether we had to continue the project.

That’s similar to the question we face now. I hope people can get past the emotions of ten years ago. I’d like to be on City Council again, to use my experience and knowledge about this and other continuing issues. You may not always agree with me, but you know I’m willing to make tough decisions.

Student Housing Moratorium

One thing I’ve mentioned in my campaign is a moratorium on rezoning for student housing. That’s not an anti-student stance, or even an anti-housing stance. Here’s what it means.

There are more student apartments in Harrisonburg right now than there are students. There will be for at least ten years, and for longer than that if developers build more.

We can’t flat out ban student housing, but we can stop rezoning more land for it.

The question nobody has answered about new student housing is this: Who moves into the old housing? If a development on South Main draws a thousand renters, who’s going to move into the empty apartments on Port Road? Will it be young men wanting to live closer to campus? Will it be families who can’t afford to live anywhere else? If the changes produce new costs for the city, who pays for them?

Those answers are a time bomb for Harrisonburg. We should stop rezoning land for new townhouses and apartments. We have plenty of that kind of housing in Harrisonburg, and the people building it have plenty of money.

Sparta to Harrisonburg, the principle's the same

Does voting really matter? (Longer version)

A lot of people think it doesn’t. There isn’t that much difference between the candidates, they’ll argue, and partisan districting means a Democrat may not win the 26th Delegate seat or the 6th Congressional District in our lifetimes.

YOUTUBE ON THIS TOPIC

But it you’re getting this letter, it’s because you’re on the list of people who vote. You know it matters, and here’s why I think it does.