Finally, Walker summoned me. “I think we’re ready to roll.” I scanned the story on the screen. It included lots of the detail I had gathered in pretty much the form I had given it to Walker.
“A pilot neglected to notify authorities that his airliner hit a telephone pole a half mile short of a Charlotte airport runway Tuesday night, bringing 121 people 20 feet from near-certain death,” the lead said. It was classic Walker: the story was good; an attempted cover-up was even better.
Walker hit the “send” button on the computer and the story went to the front-page editor on its way to the copy desk and then production. At this stage in the evening, this close to deadline, there would be no questions.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said.
“I need to talk to you about that other story.”
“Sure,” he said with an enthusiasm that surprised me. It had been a long day for him. I hadn’t come in until afternoon. He started at 9:30 every morning, which meant he was due back at his desk in nine hours. But Walker loved a story. And if you had one, he wanted to know about it. I followed him to the conference room with the Famous Front Pages. Walker slouched in an easy chair with his feet on the coffee table. He leaned his head back against the pillows, balanced a Ticonderoga #2 pencil between his lip and his nose and closed his eyes.
“So watcha got?” he said, straining not to move his upper lip and upset the pencil.
I told him about Bradford Hall showing up in the newsroom, a reminder that the whole situation started with me just doing my normal nightshift job. I explained the basics of the Wallace Sampson story: a thirteen-year-old boy shot in the head with a deer rifle shortly after midnight following minor civil unrest, a murder apparently uninvestigated and unsolved despite widespread suspicions in the black community; a crusade by a wealthy Yankee plantation owner to solve the killing which had aroused opposition in his family.
What I didn’t get into is the personal commitment I had begun to feel. Some think reporters are supposed to be objective, to chronicle the events of life and not get involved in them. There is no question reporters can and must be fair and that a reporter has to take pains to ensure that all sides in a story are conveyed completely and accurately. That is a standard of the profession. But objectivity is impossible. Everyone, journalists included, has an opinion. Everyone is a product of their past.
“Walker,” I said, “the uninvestigated murder and Bradford Hall’s search for justice is the minimum we get. That in itself is a helluva story. And the maximum story we get is that we solve the murder.”
Walker sat upright. The Ticonderoga went flying. “Here’s what we need to do,” he said. “We’ll get all the great investigative reporters and line them up at the South Carolina border and we’ll have them ride high in the saddle through the state from the mountains to the sea. They’ll write stories they flush out as they go. It’ll be like hunters flushing out birds. My God! There’ll be Holy Shit, Mabel story after Holy Shit, Mabel story. Pulitzer Prize after Pulitzer Prize. There’s probably a million Sampson cases down there.”
“Let’s just start with this one.”
Walker sighed. “It is a good story. There’s just one problem. Hirtsboro isn’t in our circulation area. There are a lot of good stories out there. A lot of them. The Middle East. That’s a good story. The ferry crash in the Phillipines. That’s a good story. But we won’t be staffing them either because they are not in our circulation area.”
It was true. The Charlotte Times billed itself as the newspaper that covered the Carolinas from the Appalachians to the Atlantic and at one time that had been the case. But over the years, maintaining outlying circulation proved expensive. Charlotte-area advertisers had been reluctant to pay for distribution to people who would seldom travel to Charlotte to shop in their stores. So distribution to far-flung areas of the Carolinas like Hirtsboro had been cut back, at first restricted to single copy sales from racks and then eliminated entirely.
“Maybe there’s a local angle,” I pressed. “We won’t know unless we investigate.”
“What kind of local angle? Bradford Hall passes through Charlotte on the way to the plantation?”
“Walker, sometimes you have to do a story because it’s a good story. Hirtsboro isn’t in our circulation area but it isn’t in anyone else’s either. If we won’t do it, it won’t get done.”
“I’m not worried about stories in Hirtsboro not getting done. I’m worried about stories not getting done in Charlotte. Matt, in case you hadn’t noticed, we have six empty desks in the newsroom. Six reporting jobs I can’t fill. Why? Because the publisher has decided we’re in a hiring freeze. No hires until ad lineage improves and circulation starts going up again.”
“Uh, maybe we could improve the circulation numbers by not cutting back in places like Hirtsboro.”
Walker laughed. We both knew the newspaper’s business and marketing policies were suicidal. Cut back distribution, reduce the number of reporters and thereby stories in the paper, and then wring your hands wondering why fewer people are reading. Go figure. As managing editor, it was Walker’s job to represent management to the journalists. But Walker was enough of a journalist himself that he couldn’t pretend to defend top management’s decision-making when it was so obviously indefensible.
I felt an advantage and pressed ahead. “Walker, this is the kind of story that gets people reading wherever they live. It’s a Holy Shit, Mabel story. And it’s a story only a newspaper can give them, not TV or radio. It’s why we exist, for God’s sake.”
Walker closed his eyes and sighed. “Matt, it’s a tough time to argue that. I’m gonna have to bite the bullet and tell you something I was hopin’ I wouldn’t have to. The Jeffries hire kinda put us in the hole. The publisher’s makin’ noises about cullin’ the herd even more to make up for it.”
It took me a moment before I understood him. “You talking layoffs? To pay for Jeffries?”
“Pardner, it’s worse than that. You’re on his list.”
I was stunned and hot. “It’s not all about Jeffries, is it? The son of a bitch is gonna cave! He’s gonna sacrifice me because of the heat we’re taking!”
“It hasn’t been a fun time,” Walker admitted.
He was right about that. For the last two weeks the Charlotte Times had been the subject of vocal protests from some in the black community over a minor story I’d uncovered about supervisors in the Department of Public Works using city workers for their private projects like driveway paving and roof repairs. It ran on the front page of the local section along with photos of four of the seven supervisors. The problem came because the pictured supervisors happened to be black and the ones whose photos were not used happened to be white. An unfortunate headline referred to taxpayer money going to a “black hole.”
The Charlotte Times hit the streets, as always, by dawn. The first press conference to denounce the newspaper for racism occurred by noon. The local caucus of black officials—led by a city councilman running for mayor—threatened a subscriber boycott. Members of the black clergy denounced the newspaper from the pulpit, encouraged picketing of the Charlotte Times building and organized a letter-writing campaign. Because few in the public understood that the reporter doesn’t write the headlines or choose the photos that go with a story, the protesters focused their anger not just on the Charlotte Times but on the reporter who had produced the story—me. I’d received more than one hundred letters, some addressed by name, many addressed simply to “The Racist Reporter.” A handful had come to my home. Picketers marched for two days until the publisher agreed to their demands for a meeting and apologized for the newspaper’s unthinking mistake, as he should have.
“Walker, none of that’s my fault,” I argued. “The story was fair. It was the news desk that screwed it up. You know I’m no racist.”
Walker gave me a weak smile. “Of course. All along I’ve been thinking this