Who Will Rid Me Of This Troublesome Reporter?

You don’t really need to find out what’s going on.

You don’t really want to know just how far it’s gone.

— Don Henley, lyrics to “Dirty Laundry.”

Do the people of Trenton really need to know if the mayor has a slush fund to add to his half-dozen mayoral aides? How about whether the city council is being pressured to raise the tax rate, to avoid possible police layoffs? Do parents need to be informed when a young child brings hard drugs to school—twice—and the wrong parent may be getting the blame from authorities?

Those are three different news stories over the last three years. They have one thing in common: Significant facts in each were first brought to wide public attention by Trentonian reporter Isaac Avilucea. Oh, and there’s one other thing… all three stories brought attempts from politicians and officials to remove Isaac from his regular beat. Twice it worked, with active investigations by authorities, each eventually concluding that not only did Isaac do nothing wrong, no one did; there was never anything to investigate.

The most recent call for Isaac’s removal came earlier this month. It was literally just a phone call, but it was made directly to the Trentonian’s editor by Mayor Reed Gusciora. That crosses a bright red line: Politicians do not get to handpick the journalists who cover them. Not President Trump, whose attempt to banish a CNN reporter from the press room was blocked by a federal court order, and not Mayor Gusciora.

Defending the public’s right to know is a noble concept for many, but polls show that about 40% of Americans share President Trump’s view that journalists are too adversarial, even if most disagree with Trump’s assertion that the press is “the enemy of the people.” But on the local level, the right to know is immediate and real, as real as higher taxes, police layoffs, and drugs in school.

Isaac dug deep to uncover those stories, although he learned of the tax-hike simply by covering a budget hearing that the rest of the press ignored. Sometimes only a dedicated beat reporter knows which doors to open. “Speak about this not as a reporter’s privilege. Speak about this as the public’s right to know.” Those words are from Vice-President Mike Pence, in 2006, when he co-sponsored the Free Flow of Information Act in Congress. “As a conservative who believes in limited government,” said Pence, “I believe the only check on government in real time is the freedom of the press.”

Isaac Avilucea nearly lost his freedom in late 2017, when the NJ Attorney General’s office, under the Christie Administration, threatened him with prosecution if he did not sign-on to a gag-order, with regard to the investigation of drugs in school. He refused to sign and the AG’s office backed down on the jail threat, possibly because Isaac was hospitalized, undergoing chemotherapy for cancer, or possibly because the AG’s office realized it simply had no criminal case. But that didn’t stop prosecutors from enforcing the gag order on Isaac and the Trentonian, until the AG’s office was slapped down—hard— by the NJ Appellate Court, which specifically affirmed that “prior restraints on speech and publication are the most serious and the least tolerable infringement on First Amendment rights.”

Whose First Amendment rights? Yours. Isaac and the Trentonian knew all about what was going on; only the public was denied its right to know. Prior restraint is not supposed to exist anywhere in the United States, ever… yet it existed in New Jersey for five months, until the court’s decisive ruling.

That was two years ago. This past Christmas it must have seemed like déjà vu all over again for Isaac and the Trentonian, when Yoshi Manale, the Chief of Staff for Trenton’s mayor, called police, telling them that his office had been burglarized, and name-dropping Isaac as a suspect. Let’s skip right to the end on that one: Surveillance video reveals that there was no crime, it was just the janitor cleaning-up. In fact, that’s exactly what it looks like from the start, in our opinion, if you view the police bodycam videos (available on the Trentonian’s website). Manale’s office looks undisturbed, except for a few papers on the floor. Manale claims that his reference to Isaac was a joke; on the bodycam footage he says, “I would love for it to be Isaac.” Yet in speaking with us last week, Manale acknowledged that not much was funny at the time: “If it were not during that period, I would not have thought anything… things were on edge.”

A full viewing of all the police videos reveals, in our assessment, Manale going to great lengths to describe a suspect who matches few people, if anyone, other than Isaac, the Trentonian’s City Hall reporter. Manale’s comments describe both motive and opportunity. Manale takes the officers into the hallway to speculate how the suspect probably knew City Hall well enough to hide in the blind spots of the security cameras. But who would do such a thing? Was anything of value taken, police ask? “This is all information value,” says Manale, “which is worth more than money, at times.” Anyone who reads the newspaper in Trenton knew which reporter valued that information.

We spoke with Manale late last week. While he expresses regret, he declares, “This story was created by the Trentonian. They said he (Isaac) was under investigation and that was not true. They took a police source who saw the bodycam videos. The Trentonian created the story, not us.”

You mean if it is not in the paper, it didn’t happen? First, Manale acknowledges that the Trentonian got its information from a credible source, a person within the police department who saw the actual bodycam video. At that point, the Trentonian HAD to remove Isaac from the City Hall beat, because, no matter what, he was now part of the story.

Further, if Isaac didn’t reveal that he knew about this because of the police tip, his actions after that could have been interpreted as “consciousness of guilt.” He did not know that a security video would later reveal that all that occurred was routine maintenance by the janitor. The facts are simple: Burglary and theft are crimes, the mayor’s chief-of-staff reported the “break-in” to police and mentioned Isaac’s name. People have been jailed for less. At a newspaper, words have meaning, facts are facts and when the story checks out, you publish it.

To get the bodycam footage that cleared Isaac, The Trentonian had to file a request under NJ’s Open Public Records Act. When the city did not comply, the paper filed a lawsuit and promptly received the video. The administration of Mayor Reed Gusciora justifies the delay by saying there was an active investigation underway, not into who committed the burglary—which the city quickly knew had never occurred—but to find the “leaker.” That seems like convoluted logic, as the leaker obviously already knew about the bodycam footage; only the newspaper—and therefore the public—was in the dark.

Of course, one person’s “leaker” is another person’s informed source, who lets us know what’s really happening in our government. And, to be fair, one person’s “slush fund” is another person’s “discretionary budget.” The problem is not what you call it, the problem is when the public doesn’t know about it at all.

Journalists have called upon the administration of Mayor Reed Gusciora to issue a clear apology and search for better ways to inform the people of Trenton. Whenever you are linked to a non-existent crime, somehow “oops” doesn’t seem to cut it. Manale apologized privately, but still blames the Trentonian for publishing the story. His boss, Mayor Gusciora, went further in the opposite direction, calling for Isaac to be removed from the City Hall beat over an alleged lack of objectivity, in a completely different story.

You know what? Maybe an adversarial relationship is not such a bad thing. Journalists and politicians shouldn’t get too cozy. But we cannot allow politicians to turn that necessary tension into a weapon to remove reporters they don’t like, on the basis of “lack of objectivity,” whether it happens in Washington, DC or Trenton, New Jersey.

The National Writers Union, affiliated with the International Federation of Journalists, believes that we cannot protect the institution of journalism by letting unfounded accusations trample the rights of individual journalists. Isaac Avilucea lost his beat for nearly a month. There is not always a videotape to exonerate the innocent.

The American system can only work if certain rules are enforced by the general public. When you hear politicians crying about their coverage, you can read a different newspaper or follow the politician on Twitter. But just as it is wrong— and illegal—to toss a reporter in jail for what they write, it is also wrong to toss them out of City Hall. When informed reporters are banished, the “right to know” that disappears may be your own.