He said what?

Here’s another lesson from the really boring frontlines of real, small-time journalism.

Because I don’t look good on television, I spent a lot of years toiling for a midsize daily newspaper. Like most dailies of our size, we had a deep and constant commitment to covering politics and its ugly brother, meetings. Every small town in the area received the free gift of a reporter at each and every meeting of their city council and school committee. For a lot of years, I was that reporter.

A license for a new used car lot. Road striping. The purchase of rock salt in the winter. New swings for the town’s one playground.

That’s what I wrote about, and proudly. The towns and the meetings were both rinky and dinky, but they decided when new school books would be bought, and who would get a stop sign on their street, and that’s the way people live, rinky and dinky.

Oh, sure, every now and then you got the big story. Maybe one of the town’s police officers got arrested for beating his wife, or the graduation rate up at the high school slipped a couple points, but most of the time, you wrote about the spending of relatively small amounts of money. I once wrote three stories in two weeks about people who didn’t want the convenience store in their neighborhood to get a liquor license.

I learned three things.

1. It’s not so much that the devil is in the details as it is that EVERYTHING is in the details.

2. If you’re sick of doing research, you need to do more research.

3. Everything that glitters is not gold, and the one that hollers the loudest isn’t always right.

A sure-to-lose candidate running for office in a town I was covering once brayed loudly during a debate that the town’s employee health insurance program was “millions in the red.” I wrote the quote down in my notebook.

The incumbent denied the accusation. I wrote the quote down in my notebook.

After the meeting, I caught the incumbent out in the parking lot.

“Hey, Bill,” I said. “Are you guys millions in the red for health insurance?”

“Off the record?” Bill said. “Yeah,” I said.

“That guy’s nuts,” Bill said. “We’re not in the red at all.” “Can you prove it?” I said. “Yeah,” Bill said. “Come to Town Hall tomorrow. I’ll show you the paperwork.”

I went to Town Hall. I saw the paperwork. I took copies of the paperwork home and went over it sitting at my dining room table. I showed the paperwork to an accountant I knew. She said everything was in order. I called the state agency with the most oversight of small town budgets.

No deficit. I wrote the story, quoting the challenger as saying the town’s employee health insurance was “millions in the red.” Then, I wrote two paragraphs proving the guy’s claim had no basis at all.

It was a 700-word story, and it ran on page four, but it was what it was supposed to be as a news story, which is to say it was a collection of numbers and facts I got from people who knew.

I suppose it was boring. I could have made the story much more interesting if I’d have just used the quote about the “millions in the red” and the incumbent’s denial. It would have been easy, too. All I needed to do was not do the research.

And we could have joked about it in the office.

“Those monkeys out there in Whoville are gonna eat this up,” I could have said.

And maybe the challenger would have won, and by the time everyone figured out he’d lied about the nonexistent deficit, it would have been too damn late.

The way I covered the story wasn’t shiny; it wasn’t loud. It was pure newspaper tradition.

And as FOX has just discovered, tradition packs a nasty wallop.