Children sometimes fall into the habit of saying something insulting, thereafter quickly disclaiming the remark by declaring that they were only teasing. It’s not an attractive habit, but it’s easily corrected.
It’s a habit less attractive, and even less credible, in adults. One assumes that an adult’s critical assessment, especially a serious and considered one, will not be one he blithely disclaims, or tries to counterbalance, without serious and considered reasons.
When the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published a detailed, thorough, and comprehensive series on mental health abuses in Milwaukee County’s Behavioral Health Division, one would have assumed that their disturbing findings meant something to that paper’s editors. Patients in Peril was that well-documented series. One could be proud, for all one’s life, of a series like that. Justifiably, more than one publisher would have visions of an award or two from Patients in Peril.
I read each story in it, still ongoing, and posted on some of those stories. The chronicle of abuses, misconduct, negligence, lies, and injuries was both heart-breaking and infuriating. One could not escape the reasonable conclusion that then-County Executive Scott Walker simply didn’t care about those patients, and offered cover for the administrator on whose watch the abuses occurred. Walker acted slowly and timidly, lest bold action reflect negatively on his campaign for governor.
Those patients had lives and rights; Walker had a campaign.
Then again, one feels this way from reading and understanding the Journal Sentinel‘s Patients in Peril series. One wonders if the JS editorial board understood –even now understands — the series half so well as a common man.
That wonderment arises because on October 24, 2010 (months after the series began), the Journal Sentinel endorsed walker for governor. They endorsed not simply any man named Walker, but the one who stood by while so much suffering took place, and then worked so hard to ignore or weather the critical attention. Endorsing Walker required ignoring or deprecating the painful truths the paper’s reporters revealed.
A compromise, I’d guess, simply to preserve influence with the new governor.
That sort of influence is fleeting; enduring influence depends on principled independence, not expedient servility.
It does no good for a paper to reveal misconduct, lies, and bad policy, only to vitiate the significance of those revelations through an editorial that says, ‘pick him anyway’ or ‘we hope he ignores the controversy our story engendered.’
Having published a story, a newspaper has two principled choices: stand by it or retract it.
‘We said it, but we really didn’t mean it,’ isn’t among those principled alternatives.