On November 8, Tom Casey, a reporter at the Hudson Register-Star, a community paper in upstate New York, wrote an article about a city budget meeting. The next day, he was fired. The week after that, nearly half of the newsroom resigned.
The story that Casey, 24, wrote contained a lot of interesting information—the proposed budget for 2013 ($11.9 million), the amount taxes would increase (they wouldn’t), and next year’s salary for aldermen ($9,500), but Register-Star publisher Roger Coleman thought it was missing something: the fact that one of the city’s 10 aldermen, John Friedman, had not stood for the pledge of allegiance at the start of the meeting.
In an earlier meeting, Friedman had also declined to stand for the pledge. One of his fellow aldermen noticed and asked him why he remained seated, but then the meeting proceeded without incident. Casey, who covered that meeting, was not sure whether the pledge anecdote was newsworthy and discussed it with the rest of the newsroom at the daily 4:30 p.m. news meeting. After a short discussion, attendees came to a consensus that since it wasn’t relevant to the topic of the meeting and no one made a big deal about it, Friedman’s decision to remain seated probably shouldn’t be included.
Theresa Hyland, the executive editor of the Register-Star, was present at that meeting. But she evidently had second thoughts after it ended; according to Casey, she took him aside and told him, “Listen, I think we missed something here. Next time it happens, it’s going in the story.” At the subsequent meeting, Friedman again refused to stand for the pledge. No one at the meeting commented about it or even seemed to notice. Exercising his news judgment, Casey did not include it in the story. “Nothing happened. I can’t write anything!” he reasoned. Francesca Olsen, his editor at the city desk, agreed with his judgment. But Hyland and Coleman did not.
After Casey finished writing the story and went home, his newsroom extension rang, and Olsen answered it. It was Hyland, calling for Casey. She was not happy that Casey’s story didn’t include the fact that Friedman had refused to stand for the pledge. She told Olsen that she wanted Casey to add a few paragraphs to his story about the pledge non-incident. Olsen pushed back. “I told her I thought it was a really bad decision. I’m an editor, and I don’t support bad writing,” Olsen said.
Hyland then called Casey at home and instructed him to return to the office and add information about the pledge to his story. He did. (Initial reports inaccurately indicated that the paragraphs had been written by an editor and inserted after the fact; in fact, Casey wrote them, but not voluntarily.) An hour or so later, he called Olsen and asked her to take his byline off the piece. The story reflected poorly on him, he thought, with its mish-mash of budget reporting and the alderman’s decision not to stand. Olsen readily agreed.
Late the next afternoon, Hyland spoke to Olsen in private. She told Olsen that Casey had to be let go. According to Olsen, Hyland told her that it was unacceptable for Casey to remove his byline from the story because “we pay him to write this.” Olsen was shocked, and asked whether this was decision was hers or Coleman’s. According to Olsen, Hyland then admitted that the order came from the top. After that conversation, Casey was called into Hyland’s office. According to Casey, she asked him where his byline was and he replied that “I thought we were making an issue out of nothing.” He was then fired.
“We were all furious,” Olsen recalled. The next week, some of them wrote a letter, signed by the majority of the nine-person newsroom and addressed to Coleman and Hyland. “Tom was fired for doing what any journalism professor would want him to do, stand up for the integrity of his own reporting,” they wrote in the letter, which called for Casey’s reinstatement and a meeting between Coleman and the newsroom to discuss the incident. Coleman ignored the letter, instead choosing to meet with each member of the staff individually.
Of course the incident should have been in the story. Of course the reporter shuold have left his byline on the story. The people who resigned have taken the wrong stand on an absurd premise.
#1 Posted by jim, CJR on Mon 19 Nov 2012 at 03:18 PM
The major problem is that Casey originally disobeyed a directive from his executive editor: Next time it happens, it’s going in the story.
While we may all agree that the incident wasn't newsworthy, I'm not sure Casey was in any position to dicate newsroom policy or demanding that his byline be removed from the edited version of the article.
When you're an "at-will" employee - which I assume was the policy at the paper - your rights are pretty much limited.
#2 Posted by Mike Lange, CJR on Tue 20 Nov 2012 at 08:17 AM
I hope @Jim is trying to be facetious.
Editors rewrite and revise, but inserting out-of-context material over the objection of the reporter is not appropriate. Removing your byline is an appropriate response and should be honored, not be the basis for firing the reporter.
The written statement of the executive editor and publisher shows their lack of regard for facts and integrity, raising serious questions about why the owners of the paper have entrusted them with these roles.
One solution here was for the executive editor and publisher to put the information in an unsigned sidebar or shirttail.
A better solution would be to assign a story with context about the officials' decision to not stand during the pledge, unlike the misleading by omission insert that reporter Casey objected to.
The executive editor and publisher get paid to exercise sound judgment. In this case they showed atrocious judgment.
The Johnson family of Watertown, NY, who have a reputation as superb small town publishers upstate, have declined comment so far on the matter and on their two executives, who needlessly put at risk the reputation of the Register-Star, which in turn threatens the foundation of the family's fortune, which in turn is based on trust and integrity. The Johnson family should be pressed to deal publicly and forthrightly with this ugly insult to journalistic integrity.
#3 Posted by David Cay Johnston, CJR on Tue 20 Nov 2012 at 01:00 PM
So did the reporter ever approach the council member and ask why he declined to stand during the Pledge of Allegiance? CJR reports that another council member asked, but the meeting proceeded without incident. Without an explanation as well? I detect some artful evasion in this account.
Editor possibly just doing her job -- a) making sure a competitor doesn't beat them to what could be a bombshell story, especially if the meeting was televised and seated councilman is already talk of the town; b) ensuring her paper is accurately portraying elected officials whose statements and gestures in public meetings could poorly represent city and constituents; and possibly c) making sure newsroom is not favoring or taking sides (reporter with council member, nor city editor with reporter). As a former small-town editor, I've dealt with all those scenarios.
Of course, editor and publisher seem to have handled this situation at least as poorly as the reporter. Instead of seizing opportunity to teach news judgment and reader advocacy (and value of following employer instructions) to a pig-headed 24-year-old rookie, they now have a very ugly, very public incident. I've always said the problem with newspapers is that they're run by the people who run newspapers.
#4 Posted by Ex-hack in exile, CJR on Tue 20 Nov 2012 at 02:02 PM
But was the alderman in question a good Protestant Christian? I assume from his treasonous refusal to stand for the Pledge that he was a Dirty Hippy Liberal and thus had no flag lapel pin, but if he was also not the right sort of Christian, but belonged to one of those Heathen Cults, then obviously he should not be allowed to be an Alderman. The editors were exactly right, and the owners, of course, will support their good sense. That sort of information is essential to the voters when they consider whether the city is in good hands or not. Also, the length of each Alderman's hair, and whether or not he belongs to the dreaded order of Freemasons must be noted. I'm glad to see that New York still stands for traditional values such as this.
#5 Posted by JohnR, CJR on Tue 20 Nov 2012 at 02:07 PM
JohnR has it right. The only people who care about whether someone stands for the pledge are those offended by someone not standing for the pledge. There is no law requiring it; there is no crime in not doing it; it bears no reflection either way on the performance (or otherwise) of any job whatsoever. Reporting it as though it were news betrays a very specific bias-- that standing for the pledge is correct, and doing otherwise is wrong. That may be a common belief, but it is by no means reality.
#6 Posted by kabosht, CJR on Tue 20 Nov 2012 at 04:38 PM
There obviously is a story here, but the approach to how it should be addressed was poorly handled. The reporter should have recognised the potential but dug in his heels when the editor deployed the "I'm the boss" bludgeon. Immaturity and pigheadedness, respectively. I detect the whiff of other agendas.
#7 Posted by Frank Niering, CJR on Wed 21 Nov 2012 at 06:11 AM
The fine lines of politics, profit potentials and exploitation for whatever agenda rears its ugly(?) head again..... Integrity, truth, principles, justice, journalism principles are pretty dependent on a lot of other variables, especially risk factors by many other different degrees such as personal, local social values, and trending social values. The balance seems to be changing from simple professionally acknowledged standards and principles of integrity to a miss-mash from one extreme to the other. The search continues for profit within the discordant streams of bits from every and any source. As the profit base is eroded the standards and principles are collapsing. Unfortunately the young and old idealist or principlist with or without principles usually wind up losing their position and then fumble for some kind, any kind of employment, usually not in the old institutions that have been publicly acknowledged as newspapers. Isn't the new integrity just based on the principle of "winner takes all", or "winner gets away with whatever". The winner of course is any member of the wealthy elite. Every one else is infighting within the remaining dregs of whatever has been left. (All puns intended).
#8 Posted by lisa , CJR on Tue 18 Dec 2012 at 10:28 AM
I have looked further into this story. It appears that Roger Coleman, not unlike a lot of publishers and owners, had a bias and an interest in "making news" of the alderman's refusal to stand because the Pledge of Allegiance invokes the phrase, "One Nation Under God." But, it also seems that this issue had not arisen in any publicly disputatious way, and, what's more, the courts up through the SCOTUS have upheld the right of the alderman to remain seated during the pledge.
Roger Coleman more recently has taken to suppressing commentary from his readers, seemingly in the wake of the national automatic weapon controversy in the wake of the Newtown shooting tragedy. It seems Coleman, with several guns and ammo advertisers was unhappy with the largely negative response his upstate gun-friendly constituency has been having to the NRA's advocacy of upping the armed guard rate in lieu of an effective national gun control policy.
#9 Posted by Robert T. Mark, CJR on Mon 24 Dec 2012 at 11:18 AM