You know how the police are. Their squad cars say we serve and protect. Officer Friendlies stroll into neighborhood meetings and say, please share your concerns. You’ll spot officers idling on the edge of a mellow Jazz Fest crowd, savoring the night as much as you are. But that’s all the whipped cream. The police aren’t paid to be nice. It’s part of their training, but mainly they’re trained to be tough customers. To be a cop is to piss off a lot of people.
I called Fitzpatrick to find out more. She’d written a story about a Midlothian GI whose family was driving to Colorado to meet him as he returned from a year in Iraq. But his mother lost control of their van on a Colorado interstate, the van rolled over, and the GI’s father was thrown from the vehicle and killed. The mother was injured, and so was an infant boy.
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And of course, the story was also written because that’s what we do.
Lauren Fitzpatrick can’t bring herself to refer to any story as “cheap”—a dismissive judgment she heard constantly at the criminal courts when she covered them—because she knows it’s not cheap to the people it happened to. Also: “When I get yelled at I feel an inch big.” But she doesn’t feel a need to be likable. “Isn’t that what a publisher’s for?” she asks. “To make nice with people? Isn’t the publisher the diplomat of the paper, smoothing things over, keeping in touch with the chamber of commerce and people like that, extending the olive branch if he or she thinks it needs to be extended?”
Bryant also apologized to Fitzpatrick in a comment on the Reader blog. He got a little prickly defending his station against any suggestion that it had stolen her story: “As for attribution, our policy here is to always credit the original reporting source. Our intent is to collate and synthesize the news, not unscrupulously borrow it.” True, his station did credit the source.
