Celebrating the gift of our First Amendment

For starters, I’ll go ahead and ask the question.

Who’s the “enemy of the people” again?

Admittedly I’m biased here. I started writing for newspapers just a couple of years after Watergate, when the field of journalism was still one of the most highly respected and admired careers anyone could ever wish to enter.

Obviously, in the eyes of many, that’s changed. We live in a time when too many people listen only to news sources that tell them exactly what they want to hear, and ignore the rest. I’ll be the first to admit that too many journalists have long since cast their lot with one side or the other, which can make it hell on the rest of us.

But sometimes, a story comes along that reminds us of why journalism, and the First Amendment, are still so incredibly important.

If you need proof, just look over at Chico State and the events of the past 10 days — and then try to imagine what would be different if we lived in a world without newspapers.

The stories emanating from the university and its handling of biology professor David Stachura’s consensual affair with a graduate student — with trysts found to have taken place in his office, overheard in adjoining rooms — and the subsequent alleged threats on the lives of people who cooperated with the investigation have cast an unimaginable pall on this holiday season for an incredibly large number of people. Not just for the colleagues who say they were threatened, but also for students and others who spent more than a year at Holt Hall wondering if their lives were in danger — and why the school didn’t seem to care.

Without journalists, you can bet your bottom dollar that none of these details would have ever seen the light of day, and administrators would have no doubt liked it that way. To paraphrase a line from every episode of “ScoobyDoo,” they would have gotten away with it, too — if it wasn’t for those meddling journalists.

This story wasn’t anything that developed overnight.

First, we began receiving anonymous emails from concerned employees and their associates on campus. Eventually, one person stepped up willing to go on the record. We knew a story of this magnitude would require hundreds of hours of investigation and research — a monumental if not impossible task for any smalltown newspaper staff in 2022.

Enter Thomas Peele, and EdSource.

Peele is as respected of an investigative journalist as there is in the business today. From his Pulitzer Prize (for his work as part of a Bay Area News Group team effort on the tragic Ghost Ship fire in Oakland) to his gripping book “Killing the Messenger” about the 2007 murder of journalist Chauncey Bailey, Peele is a journalist’s journalist, a dogged reporter who’ll stop at nothing to find the truth.

We knew he had already written several Title IX/ CSU stories for EdSource (many of which we’ve published). Also, we consider him a colleague; he was an investigate reporter for BANG (owned by the same company as this newspaper) for 20 years and covered many stories in our area, including the Camp Fire. We knew the story would be in the hands of one of the best in the business, so we reached out to him with what we knew.

Also, in the interest of full transparency: My wife works as an administrative support coordinator in the Biological Sciences Department at Chico State. That has all the potential of making this too personal to me, which was another good reason to hand the story off to somebody else. So after reaching out to Peele, I recused myself as the editor for the project and handed its day-today management duties over to city editor Dan Reidel.

With the support and backing of management at EdSource for this timeconsuming project, Peele took it from there — and just look at everything that has happened as a result.

In the first eight days after Peele’s first earth-shaking story, Stachura was placed on a 60-day leave; President Gayle Hutchinson apologized for the university’s handling of the situation; the union that represented Stachura in his appeal said it regretted helping him; Stachura’s “Outstanding Professor” award from 2020-21 was revoked; the university said because of “new information” uncovered during forums (including another colleague who said she had also been threatened) that they’d take a fresh look at the case; the Academic Senate voted to ask the CSU Board of Trustees to begin an independent investigation of the school’s handling of the investigation, file a gun violence restraining order under California’s Red Flag Law against Stachura and demand his immediate termination; and finally, provost Debra Larson announced her resignation. All in eight days.

Think any of that would have happened without the work of Thomas Peele?

Not on your life — and I don’t use those words lightly.

The end result is this: An unforgivable mess that left hundreds, if not thousands of people in fear is finally being addressed only because a reporter did his job — and in this case, because there are non-profits like EdSource committed to covering K-12 and higher education in California and providing that reporting to outlets ranging from the LA Times to radio stations and even papers smaller than the E-R.

So today, on a day when many lucky people remain stressed about nothing more critical that the final week of Christmas shopping, I think it might be a good idea to pause and remember that as Americans, you’ve got a pretty remarkable gift every day, and it’s called the First Amendment — the hallowed words that attracted so many of us to this business in the first place. We don’t always report things the way you might want, and we certainly can’t be everywhere at once, to a degree unmatched in the long history of newspapers in America.

But we can still shine a light into dark areas where bad things are hidden. And sometimes, the amount of change that comes about as a result is incredible.

Be thankful.