THE MEDIA

The Press Herald’s Bush OUI reporter is suspended

By Sam Smith

TED COHEN: “It's clearly payback.”

Ted Cohen, the Portland Press Herald reporter who gained notoriety last fall as the guy who had the Bush OUI story but under instruction from his editor didn’t run it, was suspended from the paper on Wednesday, January 31, for a week without pay.

The suspension resulted from an incident on Tuesday, January 30, when Cohen was reporting on the day’s harsh weather and was told by his editor, Andrew Russell, to report from the turnpike, where several accidents had left traffic backed up for miles. One accident resulted in a fatality.

“I had already talked with Lieutenant Randall Nichols, who is the Maine State Police Turnpike Commander,” explains Cohen, a 25-year veteran of the Press Herald. “He said there is no question the roads are treacherous. He also underscored that all non-essential state employees had been sent home because of the conditions that day.”

Already hesitant about the assignment, Cohen left the York County Bureau office to go to his car and slipped and fell on the icy sidewalk. “I got my wits about me,” says Cohen, “and took a moment to consider my judgment. I made the decision that I was at great risk.”

Cohen called his editor back and said he would report the story over the phone but felt it was too dangerous to go out to the turnpike. It was this refusal to take his editor’s assignment that management cites as cause for his suspension. (Press Herald management, which has a policy of not discussing personnel issues publicly, would not offer comment for this story.)

“It’s clearly payback because I went public when I explained through the media how our newspaper failed to publish the biggest story we have ever had,” states Cohen, referring to comments he made in the Phoenix and other publications about the botched OUI story.

The Newspaper Guild, the union that represents the vast majority of the paper’s non-management employees, has filed a grievance over the suspension, citing Article XXI of the union’s contract, which states in part: “An employee may choose not to perform an assigned task if the employee has a reasonable apprehension of death or serious injury . . .”

“From the union perspective, this is clear as a bell,” says Ed Murphy, Press Herald reporter and union vice president. “Ted was not refusing to do the story. In fact, he’d already started to work on the story. He was simply exercising his contractual rights.”

Even beyond the straightforward language of the union’s contract, Murphy points out, the paper has set precedent in the past for abiding by that language. On New Year’s day, 1996, Shoshana Hoose, a former Press Herald reporter and current coordinator of communications for Portland public schools, was on assignment to report from Baxter State Park. On her way there the weather turned ugly.

“I called my editor and told her about the weather,” Hoose explains. “My editor [Jane Lord who has since left the paper] made it quite clear it was up to me whether I felt comfortable. I was given the choice to go or not.”

Hoose says she eventually continued to Baxter, mainly because a photographer from the paper had already gotten to the park. But, she says, “nobody ever told me I had to go.”

With all this in mind, Murphy says he’s at a loss as to why Press Herald management reacted the way it did. Other staffers, however, have theories similar to Cohen’s.

“There are a lot of people who think it’s retribution for the whole Bush OUI incident, when Ted talked to the media,” says David Connerty-Marin, a Press Herald reporter. “I mean, what they did certainly seems like a disproportional response.”

A number of Press Herald staffers, showing their disapproval of management’s action, refused to fill in for Cohen’s Saturday shift. Over 60 newsroom employees signed a letter, which was delivered to executive editor Jeannine Guttman on Monday, blasting the paper for its treatment of Cohen.

But while there was much indignation in the Press Herald newsroom last week, there was also apprehension. Reporter Tom Bell, who broke from his colleagues and filled in during Cohen’s Saturday shift, says, “I had mixed feelings about the whole affair. If you ask a lineman or a policeman or a teacher what you expect a reporter to do when they’ve been assigned a story, they’d say it was a reporter’s job to go do the story.”

Murphy says a meeting will be held with management to settle the union’s grievance. If an agreement can’t be reached, the matter will go to arbitration.

“We’re seeking Ted’s pay for the week and removal of references to this from his personal file,” says Murphy.

“It’s kind of ironic,” he continues. “Now Ted is in trouble for not doing what his editor said. He did exactly what his editor said in the Bush OUI issue and got in trouble then, too.”