Unfit to print

With the news of Bush’s OUI arrest in hand, the Press Herald fumbled. But it’s not the first time the newspaper has dropped the ball.

By Sam Smith

TED COHEN: outside the Kennebunkport police station where he learned last July about George W. Bush’s OUI arrest. “It made sense to me to do what my editor suggested.”

Under normal circumstances, Jeanine Guttman’s column in the November 5 Maine Sunday Telegram wouldn’t have seemed strange. It was the executive editor’s typical soft-serve musing on journalism; this one about her first editor, Red Metz, and what a great teacher he was (“Today, I try to be the sort of editor that Red was…”). The thing is, though, that column did not appear under normal circumstance. Far from it.

The previous Thursday Portland had become ground zero in the race for president as the story broke on Fox 51 news that George W. Bush had been busted in Kennebunkport for drinking and driving in 1976. Friday, Erin Fehlau, the reporter who broke the story, was on the morning talk shows, and the city was overrun with national press playing catch up on the biggest news in the country. As the story developed, it branched out: Who tipped off Fox 51? Was it a plot by the Democrats? Who was the sheriff that busted Bush in ’76? And buried within the Press Herald’s report on Saturday was this tangent: “. . . editors discovered Friday that a reporter in the York County bureau had actually learned of the arrest in mid-July.” The Associated Press released a story the same day: PORTLAND NEWSPAPER KNEW OF BUSH DWI ARREST THREE MONTHS AGO, DIDN'T PUBLISH. The AP story ran all over the country.

Under these remarkable and enormously embarrassing circumstances, the paper’s executive editor spent her weekly column discussing Red Metz and the qualities of a good editor (“work systematically,” “rekindle the joy of learning”).

But it’s not just the readers who have gotten the silent treatment from Guttman. Apparently staffers have received no explanation either.

“Nothing has happened since,” says Tom Bell, a Press Herald reporter. “There’s been no newsroom discussion or announcement from the top editors. Things are going on as normal. They’re treating it like we misspelled the name of a council member in Freeport.”

What Bell and other staffers say is that the Press Herald these days is an accident waiting to happen. Because of poor management under the paper’s new owners and a lackadaisical culture that has been fostered by the Press Herald’s top editors something like the Bush OUI screw-up was bound to happen.

“My first reaction that night when I heard the news,” says Bell, “was ‘I bet we had that story.’ ”

He’d have had reason to think so. After all, this isn’t the first time Guttman’s Press Herald took a pass on a big story. In February of this year, Guttman had a factual story in hand nailing both the city and the University of Southern Maine for bypassing their own purchasing rules on how to spend taxpayer dollars. The story was held for six months. A story tying convicted killer Jimmy Hicks to the deaths of two Maine women (to which he ultimately confessed) was fully reported by a Press Herald staffer four years ago, but did not run in the paper until October of this year — after Hicks had already confessed to the murders.

“I remember when [Guttman’s predecessor] Lou Ureneck was executive editor,” says a staff member who asked that his name not be used. “People worked harder even though we had more people. We did get out a better product. He wasn’t popular, but he was a journalist.”

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Last July, as widespread suspicions (which were never confirmed) about Bush having once used cocaine were swirling nationwide, Ted Cohen, a 25-year veteran of the Press Herald, started working up a hunch (a hunch is a reporter’s best friend, you might read in Guttman’s column some Sunday). George W. was a little wild in his youth, Cohen thought. As a young man he spent summers in Kennebunkport; maybe he’d gotten into trouble there back in the day.

“So I called the chief of police and said, ‘Do you have any dirt on George W.?’ ” Cohen remembers. “And he told me about the OUI charge. I said, ‘OK, thanks.’ I wanted to think about the information I’d just been given.”

A few days later Cohen met with the chief and asked if Bush’s record would be available to him if he wrote a story. The chief said yes. There it was. There was his story — a huge national story — sitting in a filing cabinet for 24 years waiting on him. He went to tell his editor, Andrew Russell.

When Cohen describes what happened next, he starts to sound a little like W. himself: “I didn’t listen to my heart,” he says. “I’ve always been a news dog, and I knew I had a big story. I talked to my editor about it — I was in on the decision not to print it as much as my editor. He said it’s old, 24 years, we know he was a drinker. He thought we shouldn’t run it. It made sense to me to do what my editor suggested.”

And so they did nothing, and apparently told no one else. But it stayed on Cohen’s mind.

“I never stopped thinking about it,” he says. “But what stunned me was none of the big papers had thought about it. I began persuading myself we made the right decision. For good or ill, I played right into my own rationale.”

Cohen was home watching the news the night the story broke.

“The only thing that prevented me from jumping out the second story window when I saw the news was I knew I told my editor. I could look myself in the mirror and could say I was clear, I brought news to my boss.”

Neither Russell nor Guttman would speak to the Phoenix about this story. (Guttman did comment that a postmortem will be held on Friday to go over the election coverage and the Bush OUI issue will be discussed then. Just before the Phoenix went to press on Tuesday it received a copy of an internal memo from Guttman extending an invitation to Press Herald reporters to the postmortem. The meeting had been scheduled the week before for editors only). Questions were passed to the paper’s director of marketing and communications, Ted O’Meara.

O’Meara reiterates what Guttman had said in a release to the AP, that the story was handled inappropriately and that the information Cohen gathered was never shared with Guttman or anyone else.

“Reporters and editors make hundreds of judgment calls a day, collectively with a paper this size,” says O’Meara. “Sometimes you make a mistake. I don’t think it’s a defining moment for the paper.”

And that’s where O’Meara and, assuming he’s speaking for them, the top editors at the paper split with a number of reporters. This was the ultimate defining moment for many.

“I think the fact we’re not as aggressive as we could be is not in dispute here,” says reporter Mark Shanahan. “This paper, I think, was at one point more aggressive about stories. There was more emphasis on thinking critically about news. We don’t really talk about what is news and what is not news; we seem concerned mostly with just making sure we have the stories to fill the paper.”

There’s no question Cohen and Russell hold blame for dropping the ball on the story. But listening to Press Herald staffers talk about the paper, about the sort of priorities that are set from the top down, it becomes clear that the reporter and assigning editor hold only a fraction of the blame. If Cohen had shown a string of bad decisions, that would be one thing; but by all accounts he hasn’t. On the other hand, the leaders of the paper, those setting an example — the teachers, as Guttman said in her November 5 column — have shown their capacity to blow a good story. When Cohen and Russell decided to pass on the Bush OUI story, it could be they were simply following the example being set for them.

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Steve Vegh was a reporter at the Press Herald for seven years until he took a job last month at the Virginia Pilot. When he heard that his old paper had blown one of the biggest stories of the presidential race, he says, “I felt ice in my bowels.” But it wasn’t the first time Vegh had seen the Press Herald with a solid story in its hands and no idea what to do with it.

Last February, Vegh was covering the civil lawsuit brought by NAACP president Moses Sebunya against three county officials who Sebunya claimed had stifled his right to free speech when he was employed at the county jail. At one point in the trial, Sebunya commented on the stand that since his employment with the county jail had ended he had worked as a consultant for the USM and the city of Portland. It was an innocuous enough comment, but it caught Vegh’s attention.

“I got copies of those contracts from USM and the city,” he says, “and realized that there was no competitive solicitation done for the contracts. My big question was how come? Isn’t that one of the standard safeguards that public agencies exercise so they can be accountable to taxpayers?”

After further investigation, Vegh confirmed that the contracts had not been put out to bid; they had been awarded to Sebunya without properly ensuring that taxpayers were getting the best deal for their money, and in doing so USM and the city were avoiding their own purchasing policies.

“This was February,” says Vegh. “I was ready to go with the story.”

But, at Guttman’s direction, the story was held — not for a day, not for a week, but for nearly six months. Long enough for the Press Herald to be scooped on the story by Casco Bay Weekly.

“I was told, ‘What we really need to do is broaden the story and look at the entire issue of competitive bidding by the city and USM,’ ” says Vegh. “I didn’t oppose that, but this was information I had checked out as factual. I had it. Maybe I’m old-school, but I think if you have information you get it out. If you get more information, you put out another story later.”

O’Meara says, “There was a feeling on the part of the editors that the story needed to be broadened. There was a feeling that there were some problems with the system, they were broader than any one individual.”

The story finally appeared on August 1.

About two months later, on October 8, another big story ran in the paper. Like Vegh’s piece, this one had been held by the editors. It was a story on convicted killer Jimmy Hicks, and the writer, Jason Wolfe, had been waiting four years to see it in print.

Wolfe, who worked at the Press Herald from 1989 to 1999 and is now a writer in Portland, was put on the story by Tom Ferriter, a highly respected line editor at the paper, who thought it would be worth Wolfe’s time to investigate the disappearance of two women Hicks was connected with; one of the women was Hick’s girlfriend.

Three women with ties to Hicks had disappeared in all, Hicks had been convicted of killing one of them, and as Wolfe discovered, he was the last person to have seen the other two. He had a detective with the state police verify that Hicks was a suspect in their investigation of the disappearances. The story, Wolfe says, did not try to accuse Hicks of murdering the women, but it did attempt to lay out the facts so the readers could reach a conclusion on their own.

“The initial version of my story probably went a little too far in accusing him of foul play in the disappearance of his girlfriend,” says Wolfe. “The final version was a lot softer.”

Editors ran this version of the story by the Press Herald’s lawyer, who voiced concern that the piece could open the paper up to a libel suit from Hicks. Based on that recommendation, Guttman (who had only recently assumed control of the paper from Ureneck) and the paper’s publisher decided not to run the story. But, as Wolfe says, it was never discussed.

“There was never a point where we sat across the table and talked about this,” he says. “I mean, is a convicted killer really going to take us to court where he’d have to talk about all this? But there was never that kind of talk about the story. It just fell by the wayside.”

Wolfe says he was frustrated by the decision. But he says one of the hardest parts about it was calling the families of the victims, whom he’d interviewed at length for the piece.

“The family members were so pleased that the Sunday Telegram was looking into this,” he says. “At that point they didn’t know what happened [to the victims]. They thought if we can just get the story out there somebody might see it and remember something that could help us find them. Maybe the paper could help in finding these women.”

But the editors decided it would be best not to run the story.

Last April, Hicks was arrested after assaulting and trying to kill a woman in Texas. When the story broke, Wolfe contacted his former employer and asked if the paper would like him to rework his story from four years earlier.

“There was some initial excitement,” says Wolfe, “but then it fell by the wayside again.”

Facing life in prison in Texas, Hicks confessed to killing the missing women in exchange for a transfer to a Maine prison, where he’d be closer to his family.

Once again Wolfe called the paper, and finally, guided by Ferriter, the story made it into the October 8 edition of the Maine Sunday Telegram.

A few days later Hicks was brought back to Maine and took police to where he’d buried the bodies.

“When I heard he was arrested in Texas,” says Wolfe, “I just thought, ‘We could have exposed this guy four years ago.’ ”

The problem in this decision-making process, as well as in the case of the Bush OUI story, speaks to a fundamental ethic in journalism, says Al Tompkins with the Poynter Institute, a journalism school and ethics lab in Florida.

“These kinds of stories are best handled when we say, ‘How can we run this story?’ rather than ‘Do we run this story?’. Focusing more on ‘green light ethics.’ It’s about trying to find ways to report stories, not trying to find ways not to report them. And these decisions should be made with as many people involved as possible.”

Amy Mitchell, associate director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism in Washington DC, agrees, and frames her comments around the fact that the Press Herald has no direct competition in the region.

“Anytime you have a monopoly the risk is to assume that you are perhaps all-knowing, to not question yourself,” she says. “If you are a monopoly it’s even more important to have as much diversity of opinion, to have open discussions, to have discussions about what you’re doing and if you’re making the right decisions. It’s very important to have open discussions about newsroom decisions.”

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When you talk with reporters at the Press Herald about what the embarrassment of the Bush OUI story has done to morale, they are quick to point out that morale at the paper was in the gutter before the Bush fiasco. And if the editors hold blame in the Bush OUI incident for setting a bad example in judging news, the new owners of the paper hold blame as well for eroding reporters’ enthusiasm for their job.

When the Press Herald was first purchased by The Seattle Times Company in 1998, staffers were enthusiastic that the new owners would foster a cooperative relationship with the Newspaper Guild, the union that represents the vast majority of the paper’s non-management employees. But union members have not been able to negotiate a contract with the new owners and have not received a raise since 1997. Plus, in order to cut costs a number of positions vacated by reporters have not been refilled. There is a strong antagonism that has developed between union members and the paper’s owner, and that has taken a toll.

“There has been a slow, steady decline in morale,” says Shanahan. “The newsroom has become such an airless, unhappy place. Some very good people have left because they don’t need this.”

“They’ve lost some people and not replaced them,” says another staffer, who asked that his name not be used. “That puts the burden on the people who stay. And the job just isn’t going to be done as well with fewer people. I think the readers have come to expect less from their daily paper.”

“Reporters have had a hard time getting aggressive news stories into the paper quickly,” says Bell. “My hope is the newspaper and its owners will use [the Bush OUI] incident as a catalyst for changing the culture at the paper.

“The paper is filled with talented reporters, editors, and photographers,” continues Bell. “They don’t deserve this.”

Cohen says he has hired a lawyer to represent him if he is called to task by his bosses for speaking out about what happened with the Bush OUI story. “There could come a point where an editor says, ‘I’m sick of hearing this guy tell his story,’ ” says Cohen. “If they come to me and say, ‘Come in, we have something to talk about,’ I’m going to say, ‘Talk to my lawyer.’ ”

O’Meara says the paper doesn’t feel one way or the other about Cohen’s decision to speak out about what happened. He says he feels management has been forthright themselves about the situation. And he also says, “Morale is fine. Obviously, everybody would like to get [contract negotiations] over with, but I don’t think it’s affecting the quality of the paper. From where I sit, from what I see, I think things are fine.”

Sam Smith can be reached at ssmith@phx.com.