Plagiarism, Pain, and a Free Press

Forgive me if this sounds angry. I did not really sleep last night and I have a roaring headache.

The Founding Fathers did not put freedom of the press first in the Bill of Rights so that we could bring you photos of puppies and cute cat videos. They put it there because, in order for a democratic system to function, there has to be a free press able and willing to bring unwelcome news.

I am not the first news publisher or politician to realize this. When President Barack Obama spoke at the Democratic National Convention this year, he emphasized the importance of voting “down-ticket.” He told a national audience, “we’ve all got to vote—not just for a President, but for mayors, and sheriffs, and states’ attorneys, and state legislators.” He did not stop there. After you go out and vote, he insisted, you have to “hold [those in political office] accountable until they get the job done.”

Hold them accountable.

Let me ask you something. When was the last time you attended an East Lansing City Council meeting? An East Lansing School Board meeting? Odds are, you don’t. Odds are you don’t ever sit down for an hour to speak to the East Lansing Police Chief about management of bias. You don’t spend hours carefully examining City Council candidates’ campaign finance records to find out who is paying them. You don’t compare the Councilmembers’ declared ethics policy to their actual behavior and then let them know where they are out of line.

The way you know about this all—the way your local public officials and those they appoint are held accountable—is via a free press. And frankly, the only free press around East Lansing—with any consistency—is ELi. I didn’t found ELi because I felt like spending this much time and this much money on a news site. I founded it because I thought it was important that people in this town be empowered with news and information they could not otherwise personally obtain as needed. I was raised on the idea that you don’t just care about democracy, you work hard for it.

Sometimes as that free press, we bring you news you’d rather not hear. Sometimes we bring you news I really don’t want to hear. For some of us this week, that’s news about plagiarism by a School Board candidate in a prior application for School Board.

We’re taking grief right now for that reporting. We expected that grief. We can take that grief. But I’ll be honest: I also personally find it exhausting, because, as always, it comes with notes that say, “From now on, I won’t give you any money.”

Let me tell you why that attitude is so dangerous to your local life. But first, let me tell you why we reported this story.

If you’re a legitimate nonpartisan news organization, as we are—heck, if you’re a legitimate partisan news organization, as so many are—and you find out that a candidate for office allegedly plagiarized when previously applying for that office, you have to look into it, and then if you find evidence for it, you have to report it. A school board election is surely no place to make an exception to this very basic reporting rule.

When our source on this story came to me, I pressed her to go public herself with the allegation. She refused. I personally find that cowardly. But her cowardice is not a get-out-of-my-job-free card. I could not pretend I did not know about what she brought to my attention. Doing so would be fundamentally shirking our most basic responsibilities as a local news organization.

We did not play “gotcha” with this. (We don’t play “gotcha” with anything.) I wrote to the candidate about what we needed to report and gave him five days to respond. We then extended it two more days. I told him when we were going to report it and the basics of what we were going to report, and invited his statement, which we printed in full.

I don’t think anyone can honestly question our handling of this, although they can try to kill the messenger.

Which brings me to why that impulse is so dangerous.

If you are going to support news organizations based entirely on when they tell you only what you want to hear and make decisions only as you might make them, you will quickly have the situation we increasingly have around us—news organizations being closed, reporters and editors being laid off, real news dwindling. You will have the situation East Lansing found itself in until ELi was born as a nonprofit service a little over two years ago:

You will not know we are facing almost $200 million in debt in this City.

You will not know which developers are getting millions in tax incentives based on votes from whom.

You will have very little information on local candidates other than what they tell you in their shiny mailers.

You will have no one to ask to investigate things you want to know about.

If that is seriously what this town wants, I am ready to go there. Heaven knows there are a handful of people in this town who are very much hoping we fail and close up shop.

I have given two years of my life to this project—unpaid, 30-40 hours a week. My husband and I have put tens of thousands of dollars in donations into ELi to support the paid editors and writers and tech staff, to supplement what many of you have generously donated. I don’t regret that service to this community.

But if this town wants to have nothing but photos of puppies and videos of cute cats, then I can have back all the time for my own career as a nationally-recognized historian of medicine and writer, and all the money we are diverting from our own savings to this project. There are many thankless days when I’m looking for an excuse to do just that.

Taking grief from people for reporting what is our absolute responsibility to report? Being told this negates everything we do for you that you do value? That’s a pretty good excuse for me to chuck it.

On days like today, it is the memory of why the Founding Fathers created the First Amendment that keeps me going. That and the largely unappreciated and utterly underpaid work of my Managing Editor Ann Nichols and our reporting team. But I know they’re pretty tired, too.

Have a look at these:

• Why Was ELi Founded?
• The Destruction of Local News
• Jon Oliver on the Importance of Local Journalism