The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Good sources equal good journalism
Prisoners breaking out. Only to break in again. With beer, Mexican takeout, guns and drugs. It was a bonanza of contraband that no prison, anywhere, could tolerate and hope to maintain order.
It is, as penologists describe it, a gross and dangerous failure of basic prison operations.
The only reason the public now knows about the degree to which the U.S. Bureau of Prisons allowed the inmates to run amok in its Atlanta federal prison camp is because AJC reporter Rhonda Cook is good at getting people to trust her with information.
An inmate with a contraband cellphone and a surprising sense of justice provided her photos of food and beer and other goodies that should not flow freely through a prison.
Such inside information, the kind that is not meant for public consumption, is essential to a free and active press. It’s vitally important to our watchdog role; we need independently verifiable inside information to hold accountable those who we entrust to run our prisons, build our schools, clean our water and police our streets.
Agencies like the federal Bureau of Prisons and the FBI can be notoriously closed and even unnecessarily guarded with what is, ultimately, the taxpayers’ information.
The prison story, which ran on the front page in Thursday’s edition of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, is an example of this and it underscores how our journalism is only as good as our sources.
Seldom are our sources prisoners. Typically, it’s a document or a firsthand account from a government official. Sometimes it’s a dash cam video or raw data that we collect and analyze to tell a story.
The Atlanta Public Schools test cheating story is such an example, as it was built on reporters and editors putting a skeptical eye on freely available standardized test data. But even that story required insiders to confirm that the discrepancies in test scores we found strained credibility and should be scrutinized.
Media large and small must decide how and when to use whistleblower information. It’s an editor’s job to determine the credibility of the source and the veracity of the information and to vet what we’re given.
In this case we got photos that we were able to verify.
Many would be surprised at who, when given the privilege of anonymity, might become a whistleblower.
Typically, whistleblowers are front-line employees working in local government. They’re court officials who point you to legal documents you might not otherwise know exist.
Sometimes it’s political operatives; often it’s Democrats outing Democrats or Republicans outing Republicans.
There was an example of that this past week.
On Thursday, a former Jackson, Mississippi, manager who was in charge of an aspect of contracting said she was fired because Kisha Powell, a former colleague who now oversees Atlanta’s sewer system, steered contracts to favored bidders. It’s the latest twist in the ongoing corruption probe involving the city of Atlanta. The strength of that case may well lie in how many people who saw something are courageous enough to say something.
Any veteran journalist can tell you about times when an inside source provided vital information to a matter of public interest.
Back in 1994, I was a reporter in Sumter, S.C., when a city employee told me about an offensive videotape — this was way before social media — that police officers were sharing among each other. It depicted a pair of white hunters tracking another man in blackface. The title of the video: “How to Kill a N-word.” It shed new light on complaints that some black men were being profiled and harassed by these officers.
Years later, I was a business writer when I fielded a call from an employee from a prominent local company who complained his payroll check had bounced. A colleague, the late Jim Davenport, received a similar call. And through dogged reporting he discovered that the company’s owner, whose business was built on federal security contracts was looting the company to finance a lifestyle of high living and martial infidelity.
I was an editor in Greenville, S.C., when a group of small investors complained about a local securities firm giving them the runaround when The Atlanta JournalConstitution wants to explain openly to readers what we do and why. Discuss this column and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s coverage of other areas at editor Kevin Riley’s Facebook page, www.facebook.com/ ajceditor. they wanted to cash out their investments. Eventually about 8,000 investors, mostly farmers and textile workers, lost $275 million when a company state regulators should have been overseeing went bankrupt. Instead of hiring real financial auditors, we found out through whistleblowers that the South Carolina secretary of state had given key regulatory positions to unqualified political appointees.
Then there was an anonymous email I got in 2009. The subject line said “this is your governor.” Pasted in the email were a string of romantic exchanges between Gov. Mark Sanford and his mistress. When he went missing, those emails were a key piece of evidence to his whereabouts. We met him at the airport attempting to sneak back into the country after his office told the nation he was hiking the Appalachian Trail.
To this day I don’t know who blew that whistle. It doesn’t really matter. What’s critical is that when folks see something they say something. Otherwise, people get defrauded, greed wins and government works only for narrow self interests.