Two news organizations in Portland, Oregon have been criticizing
each other over coverage of methamphetamine lately. One offered a careful,
well-sourced analysis. That would be the alternative weekly, Willamette
Week, in March. The other offered up derision, straw men and cheap
shots. That would be the Portland Oregonian editorial
page -- yesterday.
In fact, the hype from
the editorial page has undercut reporting in the Oregonian that’s been better than most media coverage of meth, and encouraged the
paper’s worst excesses.
I don’t know why
the Oregonian is complaining about Willamette
Week’s gutsy cover story about the Oregonian’s meth
coverage nearly four months after it was published - -but the page has become
increasingly shrill in attacking anyone who doesn’t support their party line on
meth. In effect, their position is: If you don’t believe every word we
write, you don’t care if children die, lives are ruined, and all sorts of other
havoc is wrought by meth.
Both the editorial page
and the paper’s managing editor for enterprise, Steve
Engelberg, have sought to recast the paper’s coverage, after-the-fact,
hiding behind some early, excellent reporting and ignoring the rest.
I didn’t see Willamette
Week’s story when it first ran on March 22. I noticed it cited in
a footnote to a recent study which included a discussion of meth and media, and
then forgot about it until the Oregonian editorial appeared
yesterday. Not that the Oregonian actually mentioned the
story - - that would violate the first rule of mainstream media: Never mention
your town’s “alternative weekly” if it can possibly be
avoided. But the editorial reads like a direct response to the WW story.
That story certainly has
its flaws. Most notably, it fails to give proper credit to the series that
essentially kicked off the paper’s coverage, Unnecessary Epidemic by reporter Steve
Suo. Whatever flaws there may have been in characterizing the scope of the
problem are outweighed by the overall thrust of the series - - which remains
the only systematic reporting of its kind I’ve seen in any American newspaper.
Instead of the usual
horror stories about mom and pop home labs, Unnecessary Epidemic focused
on how simple ways to control the ingredients used to make meth at their
source, overseas factories, have been blocked by the pharmaceutical lobby. And
the series documented the existence of a way to manufacture decongestants whose
key ingredient can’t be turned into meth and how the pharmaceutical
industry would not bring it to market.
When Columbia
Journalism Review gave the series a “laurel” it was on my recommendation (and I’m sure the recommendation of
many others). Others who have criticized meth coverage in general, such as Slate media
critic Jack Shafer, also have singled out Suo’s work for praise. Unfortunately,
no big national newspaper picked up on Suo’s excellent reporting.
Willamette Week mentions this good work only in passing,
and criticizes Suo largely for his role in a PBS Frontline documentary
based in part on the series. (Suo did tell WW that he approved Frontline’s
script).
Suo’s series wasn’t the only time the Oregonian got
it right.
On the specific
issue of meth and child welfare, I have repeatedly recommended to journalists a
powerful story by a team of Oregonian reporters led by Bryan
Denson. They followed the case of one infant, Timothy, with one reporter
covering the birth parents, another the foster parents and a third the
caseworker.
The result was a
finely-nuanced story (“A baby in the balance,” March 27, 2005, available in the
paper’s paid archive), which undercuts much of the
hype that would turn up later in the Oregonian itself. The
mother used meth, but was in outpatient treatment and doing well. The
father was not accused of drug use at all. The child was in foster care
because there was no inpatient drug treatment facility in the local community
for the mother, and because of child welfare system’s pervasive bias against
fathers.
Yet, for statistical
purposes, this is a “meth case.” And when child welfare agencies claim
that a huge percentage of their cases “involve” meth use, that includes cases like this one.
Willamette Week didn’t mention this story either.
But where Willamette Week does criticize the Oregonian it’s usually right on the mark. Time after time the alternative
weekly takes an Oregonian claim, usually built on some “advocacy
number” or other, tracks it back to its source and finds - - there is no
source, or at least none that is remotely reliable. And WW’s target often
is the editorial page itself, and its increasingly shrill rhetoric.
WW also took a close look at an August, 2005 piece by Joseph Rose
on meth and child welfare which ignored
and undercut all the good work Denson and his colleagues had done several
months earlier. (“The Children of Meth,” August 28, 2005).
Every cliche that turns up in bad meth coverage can be found in
this story, including the term “meth orphans,” which, if anything, is even worse
than that notorious term from the 1980s, “crack babies.”
The story accepted as fact the claim that Oregon’s astoundingly high rate of child removal is all because of meth. But
Timothy, that child at the center of the Bryan Denson piece, was not an orphan
in any sense. He had a mother recovering from addiction and a father who
was not abusing drugs. And, of course, when Rose accepted at face value
claims that 2,750 children in foster care were taken away because of meth, that
includes Timothy.
Rose’s piece also contains a huge, fundamental error
of fact, which he has refused to correct. The story claims that the
so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act requires states to terminate parental
rights if a child has spent 15 of the past 22 months in foster care. Not
true. ASFA often requires states to ask a court to
terminate parental rights under these circumstances and even then, there are
several major exceptions, including one that covers cases in which parents are
doing well in drug treatment.
I wrote to Rose and asked him where he got this misinformation. In
an e-mail Rose said it came from “various
sources” apparently including grandparents caring for grandchildren taken from
meth-addicted parents. His sources did not include the crystal-clear text of
the law itself.
Hmmm. Which source to choose for what a law requires? Second-hand
impressions of well-meaning grandparents or the actual text?
But my biggest concern with the story was its toxic mix of horror
stories and “advocacy numbers.”
The story begins with Sadie, a child whose experience is atypical
even for meth cases. Most children do not, in fact, live in meth labs and
most do not have parents whose behavior crosses the line from neglect to
sadism. Then come the numbers alleging huge proportions of cases involve
meth. Then back to Sadie. By the time the reader is done, he is left
with the impression not only that almost every foster care case is a meth case
but that almost every parent in such a case is like Sadie’s sadistic dad.
The misimpression is reinforced by Rose’s claim, toward the top of the story that “roughly 2,750 children”
were taken from parents using or making the potent drug
[emphasis added].
Only much later in the story it is noted that of those 2,750
children, fewer than four percent were found in labs. (Even if you double
or triple that number to account for the children in school, clearly labs are
not the heart of the problem). Even a top Oregon Department of Human
Services official told the National Center on Substance Abuse and Child Welfare
that the number of times that [child protective] workers confronted actual
manufacturing was rare in their practice compared to the number of families
affected by methamphetamine abuse and dependence.
And, of course the story ignored the most fundamental fact of
Oregon child welfare: That state has been taking children at an absurdly high
rate since at least 1985, long before it could be blamed on meth.
When I wrote to Rose I offered to meet with him the following
month while in Portland for the annual convention of the National Conference of
Editorial Writers. Unlike Denson, editorial writer Mary Kitch and several
colleagues who’d met with me on a previous trip, Rose declined.
Clearly the WW piece hit a nerve. The day after the piece
ran, and was noted in Jim Romenesko’s media news column,
Engelberg, the Oregonian managing editor for enterprise, sent a long e-mail to WW and Romenesko - -which
both published on their websites.
Unlike the WW story, which was measured in tone, Engelberg lashed
out, calling the WW story: “a
one-sided, intellectually dishonest, fake expose built on anecdotal comments that ignore the facts of The
Oregonian's coverage. It meets no acceptable journalistic standard and
is filled with hyperbole, sloppy reporting and the use of intentionally
misleading statistics.”
And the WW story may explain why, starting last month, the Oregonian editorial
page got nasty with any of us who question anything the Oregonian says
about meth.
On June 6, an editorial declared that “All those people now chattering about whether the meth epidemic is
little more than media hype ought to visit with some of those abused and
neglected kids carrying their few belongings into Oregon foster homes.” This
appears to be a shot not only at Willamette Week, but also at an excellent Youth Today story on the
hype surrounding meth and child welfare -- and it’s off-base about both.
First, the statement is an example of a disturbing habit on the Oregonian editorial
page: setting up straw men. If you don’t believe everything the Oregonian says
about meth you must believe there is nothing to the problem at all but media
hype. No in-between options are allowed.
Second, the Oregonian is particularly unqualified
to criticize anyone else for not talking to abused and neglected kids. Until
late 2004, Oregon was a “black hole” for coverage of child welfare. The
state’s largest newspaper appeared unaware of the fact
that the state had a child welfare system. The paper’s own “public editor” took it to task for lacking “sustained
coverage” of the topic.
In contrast, the author of the Youth Today story
is Martha Shirk, the journalist who practically invented the children’s beat during a long, distinguished career at the St.
Louis Post-Dispatch. Her most recent projects include co-authoring a
book about the problems of children aging out of the foster-care system.
In short, she has almost certainly talked to more foster children
than all the reporters writing about the topic on the Oregonian news
and editorial page staff combined.
Then came yesterday’s editorial attacking
the “tinny little chorus of media critics and drug
control skeptics” who don’t accept every word about meth in the Oregonian as
Holy Writ. The editorial continues in a nasty, personal vein, explaining
that they’d previously resisted deigning to dignify
criticism of their coverage with a reply because, after all, it’s hard to argue with anyone who can look seriously at Oregon and
much of rural America, at meth use and addiction, at meth-related crime and
child abuse and still insist that the problem is a “myth.”
Once again, a straw man. The Willamette Week story
never uses the word “myth” nor does it imply that
the problem is a myth. I’ve used the word, but to describe things like
the claim that meth is more difficult to treat than other drugs - -which is,
in fact, a myth - not to claim that meth is not a problem.
Mostly, the editorial regurgitates Engelberg’s e-mail to Romenesko nearly four months earlier; in particular
the way Engelberg hid behind Steve Suo’s original series. According
to the editorial:
[F]rom the beginning of Suo's initial meth series,
"Unnecessary Epidemic," published in October 2004, The Oregonian has
consistently called for international, national and state steps to control
access to ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, the legal chemicals used in cold medicines
and the central ingredients in meth. Virtually all the world's pseudoephedrine,
Suo found, is produced by a few Asian manufacturers. That makes meth far more
vulnerable to interdiction and control than drugs produced from poppy and coca
fields around the globe. Suo used drug treatment statistics and other data
to show that past efforts to control ephedrine and pseudoephedrine had been
successful, before they were abandoned or subverted.
O.K. So according to the editorial, this 351,000-circulation
newspaper, which can explain itself at whatever length it chooses every single
day, has been misunderstood. Or victimized by a conspiracy of
media critics albeit one too small even to notice. According to the
editorial, “those few scattered critics” (who now are worth an entire editorial
in the Sunday paper) “keep trying to twist our meth coverage.”
Or maybe, if your coverage is so misunderstood, you haven’t always
written about the topic all that well.
The editorial goes on to note that the Oregonian has
advocated only enlightened solutions, such as control at the source and
treatment. But the hype in the editorials themselves and stories like Rose’s
“meth orphans” piece drown out that reasonable
message.
And the hype about meth and child welfare makes meth the perfect
all-purpose excuse for any decision to remove any child from any home under any
circumstances. No one need look at Oregon’s absurdly high rate of removal
going all the way back to 1985, if state child welfare officials can reply to
every criticism just by “crying meth.”
When I wrote to Joseph Rose, I began the letter this way: “Can
a major social problem be serious, real and hyped? Yes. And that’s what’s been happening in the case of
methamphetamine and child welfare.
Why do so many at
the Oregonian find that so hard to understand?
