I’m not sure what to make of this.
On Tuesday, I reported Donaldson Enterprises, Inc. was apparently working for VSE Corporation under a $150,000 subcontract for “destruction services” involving seized fireworks at the time of last week’s explosion in a Waikele storage tunnel that killed five people. The larger prime contract to VSE was from the Treasury Department.
Today, the Star-Advertiser reported the connection between Donaldson Enterprises and VSE based on the statement of a federal investigator.
Donaldson Enterprises was contracted by VSE Corp., a federal contractor, to store and destroy the fireworks, Holmstrom said.
Enough said? Apparently.
What I don’t get is why you would rely on an unverified statement when more specific documentation is readily available?
My post on Tuesday provided links to the contract data from USASpending.gov, a contract database maintained by the federal government. It is clearly marked: “An Official Web Site of the United States Government,” apparently a reliable source.
The Star-Advertiser could have used the investigator’s quote and then followed with something like this:
The government online database, USA Spending, confirmed a $150,000 subcontract was awarded to Donaldson by VSE in November 2010. It was part of a larger $25.9 million contract awarded to VSE by the Treasury Department.
Gordon Pang is a very good and experienced reporter, so resting on the “soft” evidence of a verbal statement by the investigator puzzles me.
It would have been easy for an editor to ask about the unsupported reference to the contract. Apparently didn’t happen.
I have to conclude it’s a reflection of the prevailing approach to “objectivity” that reduces reporters to compilers of statements by other interested parties, while the reporter remains outside of the discussion. Objective, if you will.
But this kind of objectivity shortchanges readers by reducing or eliminating the responsibility to attempt to test any of those reported statements by comparing them to available documentation, public records, or other types of external evidence beyond additional statements by disagreeing “authorities”.
It’s a very small point, and I don’t mean to pick on Gordon, who has my highest respect. I’m probably irritable because Meda’s traveling and I’ve spent too much time talking to the cats in the past 24 hours. And I confess to being very much a “documents” kind of reporter. I’m much happier with a box of public records than a room full of sources. Old school.
Whatever. Enough for now.
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Why apoligize about expressing a legitimate concern about journalism?? The Star Advertiser is slipping!
I get your point, Ian, but I’m not sure that the elaborating information would have added much to the story.
To my limited understanding, a reporter requires a second “source” for confirmation only when the first is not being named and, therefore, can not be assumed reliable by the reader. What seems to be missing from the brief statement by Gordon about the underlying contract is an attribution.
I agree that the source of the factual assertion he made, e.g., “according to federal investigators . . . .” or “According to the federal government’s procurement database . . . .,” should have been provided. But I’m not sure, at least not yet, that the fact that Donaldson was working on a subcontract from a specific federal contractor or that the prime contract was for a specific amount with a specific federal agency is terribly relevant to a daily’s story. That’s the value that I think secondary analysis provided by bloggers such as yourself bring to the table.
I, too, hold Gordon in high regard and have seen egregious examples of what I have to think are bed editorial decisions that have distorted his stories. While I think there should have been at least a brief attribution, maybe the editors here thought further detail, such as that you provided, was not necessary. This time, I can’t say I disagree.
Actually, Gordon did attribute the quote to the lead investigator by name. That’s not the issue.
My issue here is a preference for detail, precision. In the absence of documentation, certainly a named source is a good alternative.
But what if you have both (a) good documentation, perhaps the contract sitting in front of you, and (b) someone willing to talk about the contract. Should a reporter rely on what they are told about the contract, or look at the contract and quote from it directly? Perhaps that’s the underlying difference in perspective that caught my attention. I notice few stories actually quote from documents, but instead let people talk about documents. Most times it probably makes no difference. Is it nonetheless an issue? I believe so.
Once you start talking about a specific contract, someone will wonder…What’s in the contract? What did it require in terms of safety, etc? Were contract requirements being met? I have no reason to think that they weren’t in this case, except for the generalized question of what made this whole thing blow up. Once the contract is drawn in to the reporting, though, it opens up lines of questions. That’s where precision creates movement, even if it doesn’t add much to the immediate story, as in this case.
As I say, I’m old school on this stuff. And probably one of the reasons why I’m not reporting in this new world.
Sorry, I was looking at a different part of the article when I wrote the remark about attribution. However, even being every bit the info junkie that you are, I don’t see any issue raised in the story that would be resolved by a link to the contract. That time may well come (e.g., were they following contractually specified/referenced procedures for storing and handling the materials, training their employees, etc.?). I just don’t see it, yet. Of course, I totally missed the more than obvious “Holstrom said” in making the prior post so I’m probably missing this one, too!!!
If not, contrast that with a story I read about non-renewal of a town manager’s contract, as opposed to termination, during a select board meeting, the notice for which did not include the contract non-renewal as an item of business. That online publication (with no print presence like the S-A, which defaults to non-hyperlinked text) included links to the town charter, the select board’s by-laws, and a conflict of interest disclosure by the select board member pushing the vote on the un-noticed item. These were all directly relevant to the issues raised by the article, namely, was the issue properly before the board and could the board avoid due process for the town manager by calling the action a vote to not renew his contract as opposed to a vote to terminate him.
I guess my point is that I’m not certain I can fault Gordon or the S-A for not yet including links for the terminally curious such as ourselves when there is not yet an apparent issue that our curiosity might help us resolve.
Add me to the old-school roster.
West Hawaii Today recently quoted Councilwoman Brenda Ford as saying that the average Hawaii County employee makes $60,000 a year.
A recent letter to the editor from a county worker in response said that he is the top non-managerial worker in his office, has been there 15 years, and makes significantly less than $60k. He went on to say that he inquired about the salary figures and was told that Ford was informed that the $60k included overtime for fire and police, and that more than two-thirds of county employees make less than $55k.
The $60k figure sounded high to me at the time and I wondered why the reporter/editor presented the information without question or confirmation. I’m still wondering.
The letter writer said he could only assume that the councilwoman used such a figure to cast county workers in a bad light. I would hope it wouldn’t be so, but perhaps the same could be said for the staff of the newspaper which at times seems to be waging a vendetta against the county.
Present article aside, I see a tendency for reporters to simply accept statements from the authorities rather than to go the extra 9 yards to an authoritative source. I suspect this is partially a product of limited time and budgets, but the authorities often know little themselves except what they have been told. There may be important exceptions or complications that get lost from blanket official statements. DOH is a glaring example.
Sooner or later we are going to wish that someone had asked the hard questions.
I agree on (at least) two things:
1) Gordon Pang is a fine reporter, and
2) Reporters should go beyond authoritative opinion, where possible, to determine the facts.
Is “fact” a suspect word in this post-modern world? I am only half-joking. Too many articles rely upon dueling spokesmen, a sort of “he said, she said” journalism. It is as if the reporter feels it is inappropriate to value fact above opinion.
Some of the academic left fell for this intellectual fad: “there is no objective ‘truth,’ only competing narratives.” but mostly it comes from the amorality of sales, marketing and advertising.
So call me “old school,” if you want, but I believe in facts and the resonsibilty of reporters to ferret them out, when possible, instead of relying upon authoritative opinion.
I don’t think I disagree with you — or Ian , at least once I got my “facts” straight ;-), but I still have to wonder: if the statement from the “authoritative” source was accurate, does it matter that there was not a link to corroborating info that adds nothing to the story?
I’m just saying there’s enuf for which to criticize the paper without complaining that the reporting was not cpomplete because it did not cite multiple sources for the same proposition. Had the article said the nature of the contract was unknown, or that it was with the State, not with the feds, THEN we would have an example of not doing a little digging, or just getting it wrong, respectively, that could have been corrected with the info. Ian found.
I just don’t think that’s the case here.
Slipping? I think the Star-Advertiser fell off the cliff quite a while ago which is why I don’t give them any credibility and read Ian’s blog every day.
this is not related to your entry, but i thought you might enjoy this video, which reminded me of LNN — http://www.ted.com/talks/view/lang/eng//id/1119
Reporters don’t like to use material that directly or indirectly comes from an outside blog. That is unless they can’t get the material any other way and they need it to “enliven” the story. No reporter will tell you personally, but most do not like your blog. They would say they don’t read it. But they do check it out periodically, regardless of how blase they are about it. One might argue that even newsy blogs for the most part don’t follow journalistic standards as you and I once knew them. But most newspapers have blurred those standards so much that there is no standard-bearer in sight. Fuzzy stuff that will only get fuzzier.