Media watchdogs are necessary

Have the crazy regime in North Korea and this country’s other enemies taken note of the Obama administration’s susceptibility to intimidation in the case of the black Agriculture Department employee, Shirley Sherrod, who was peremptorily fired on a false charge of racism and then begged to come back to work?

It began when a conservative Internet journalist posted a few seconds of video of a speech given by Sherrod to an NAACP group four months before in which she recalled her reluctance, many years ago as an employee of a farmers aid group in Georgia, to help a white farmer because many black farmers were hurting too and not getting help.

As the right-wing hysteria machine revved up to exploit this supposed racism in the Obama administration, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack ordered Sherrod fired without even giving her a chance to defend herself. The president, who once taught constitutional law, was briefed about the matter and approved.

Whereupon news organizations looked into Sherrod’s speech and found that there was much more to it than had been posted at the conservative writer’s Internet site — that she had gone on to explain how she came to see that people should be helped without regard to race; that she indeed had helped the white farmer after all, even if her heart had not been in it at first; and that the farmer credited her with saving his farm and they had become friends.

That is, the real story was about the overcoming of racism and racial resentments, a profoundly admirable and moving story. The administration quickly apologized to Sherrod.

As it turned out, the conservative Internet writer had set out to mislead for political advantage, and he did manage to embarrass the Obama administration, if not as he intended. He also demonstrated that the traditional news media may remain the only antidote to the often hateful and lying polemics of the Internet.

But a recent sensation from California still suggests that hateful polemics may replace journalism as the traditional news media weaken from the recession, competition from the Internet and the country’s generally plunging demographics and diminishing public interest and involvement in civic life.

A number of weeks ago the Los Angeles Times disclosed that municipal officials in Bell, a poor suburb of 40,000 people southeast of the city, were getting preposterous salaries — nearly $800,000 per year for the city manager, $400,000 for his assistant, $460,000 for the police chief, and $100,000 for four of the five part-time city council members.

Responding to the Times’ disclosure, angry city residents mobilized and got the manager, assistant manager and police chief to resign. But those officials couldn’t have been too upset about resigning, as two will qualify immediately for similarly preposterous pensions and the third will qualify in four years.

Of course this exploitation didn’t happen overnight in Bell. The city long has paid the preposterous salaries, getting away with them because there has been no serious journalism in the city. The Times’ report on this situation was “parachute journalism� — reporters were parachuted into a long-overlooked jurisdiction right under the paper’s nose. The paper’s media writer acknowledged as much in a column headlined “How Many More Bells Are Out There?�

“There is something wrong in this city,� a Bell resident said at a protest outside City Hall. “But nobody can find out anything about what is going on. There is nowhere to go.�

This kind of thing is happening in Connecticut, too, as traditional journalism shrinks and is not fully replaced by anything on the Internet. But even when such exploitation is reported in Connecticut, nobody gets as agitated as the people of Bell just got.

Connecticut abounds in double-dipping public employees drawing both huge pensions and huge salaries. And the recent salary scandal in the Connecticut State University system has been fully reported without result. The system’s “chancellor� is paid $400,000 per year and Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven has two presidents simultaneously being paid about $300,000 each.

While Gov. Rell recently urged the university system’s board to freeze the salaries of non-union employees, the board declined and the governor meekly went away, perhaps anticipating receiving her own ample pension next year.

As traditional journalism declines and the public gravitates obliviously to “social networkingâ€� on the Internet, the prospects for those feeding at the public trough are getting brighter  — in the dark.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer.