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| Since December 22, 2004 |
NOTE TO DANA HULL, MURKY NEWS
As major media corporations consolidate and local daily newspapers start to fold, a growing conundrum about the role citizen journalism plays in the delivery of news and information is being debated in magazines, blogs and newspapers. Can a blog deliver information and news content in the same way as a newspaper? Don’t blogs rely on the major newspapers, radio and television news for their content? Or do blogs provide a type of content traditional media can’t?
The major media is most always once removed from a story; they do not work for the companies, know the politicians or bear any relation to the people in their articles. Then there’s the whole question of bias that does not need repeating here. The Unruly Advocate began in part because of the biased, lazy reporting taking place in The Mercury News that spent more time chastising teachers instead of investigating the innumerable controversies surrounding former superintendent Esperanza Zendejas (
“Backtracking on the Wrong Horse").
One could argue, in fact, that The Advocate spent us as much time criticiz ing The Murk as it did reporting on the shady politicos and totalitarian administrators destroying public education. Our primary foil was John Fensterwald, the former Murk editorialist, who had a nasty habit of writing pro-charter school articles gushing about Downtown College Prep without mentioning that then-Mercury News publisher Mr. Ridder chaired Downtown Charter Prep’s advisory board. Then there was the unhealthy relationship Fensterwald had with Zendejas herself, which turned the Murk into a microcosmic version of Fox News for the admin-side of the public education debate. We cheered when the Murk finally ate a little crow over Zendejas’ resignation.
We cheered some more when we won Best Local Blog in The Metro for the second year in a row three months later.
While stories from our site instigated Metro investigations, The Murk acted like we didn’t exist. To acknowledge us would have been embarrassing, even an admission of fault on their part.
Imagine our surprise when The Murk cited The Unruly Advocate in one of their hit pieces on Nunez this summer. The reporter, Dana Hull, mentioned Unrulyrus and cited our investigation into Nunez’s tenure in Riverside. While we appreciated the nod, we couldn’t help but feel a little dirty. Did we really=2 0just help the Murk investigate a story?
No. As usual, The Murk missed the main point. We looked into Nunez’ record because of the parallel between the way day care workers were fired and rehired in Riverside and the way nearly 90% of East Side’s teachers were laid off and rehired within a month. Hull used our research as a starting point, never really delved into the layoff issue, and proceeded to ask Riverside officials about Nunez’s spending practices.
There’s nothing wrong with an examination of Nunez’s spending practices, but in education one always, always, always has to lay blame at the feet of those who approved those expenditures. Nunez was an assistant superintendent in Riverside. While he might have had some sort of discretionary budget, Riverside’s board of trustees had to approve the purchases at some point. Why did their board approve questionable purchases?
Hull’s article doesn’t answer that question.
When we did our original Riverside story, we speculated that there mu st have been a connection between the pink-slipped day care workers and Nunez’ dismissal. There were no articles about Nunez’ questionable spending practices we unearthed. Hull appears to have asked questions tailored to her narrow focus on spending practices. While that is the issue for The Murk, it is just as feasible that Nunez — for whatever reason — was fired for laying off, hiring back, and unnecessarily enraging a bunch of local registered voters. East Side’s school board supported Zendejas to the end.
That is, at least until the end of April, when all those layoff notices were rescinded and thoughts turned to gearing up for fall elections.
Hull seems to have no problem buying into the administrative claptrap that employee benefits are bankrupting the district. In fact, if she keeps buying into those arguments, she’ll become the next Fensterwald. If she needs help with a story, she can start with the question about how many districts in the valley actually provide full benefits for teachers. Maybe she’ll discover there’s a huge discrepancy between the elementary districts that serve families with seven-figure incomes and those on the East Side. Maybe she can ask East Side Board President Pat Roach to explain why some of the middle schools in Franklin-McKinley where Roach works lost 80% of their tenured staffs to distric ts like Evergreen Elementary. Who knows? Pretty soon she might have to write an investigative piece on Roach herself. We’d welcome that story.
How Hull penned an article slanted against Nunez only to publish the actual contract that vindicates him boggles the mind. She seems to be falling into one of Fensterwald’s traps: hyping a scandal over vetting her sources. Savvy East Side employees read between the lines of her articles. While some teachers, classified staff, and parents emotionally reacted and reached for their pitchforks, others with no feelings toward Nunez one way or the other tried to figure out who set Nunez up by the end of the article. Couldn’t a Mercury News reporter versed in the local political scene recognize an obvious political set-up?
Dana, if you want to avoid the embarrassment of a retraction, or assist your paper restore its readership by demonstrating credibility, we have some helpful suggestions. You can start by vetting your sources. When you sit down with a trustee like Pat Roach, try to figure out what her ulterior motives are. We’d be willing to wager you didn’t even know about the nepotism. It’s probably a good idea to question why only one administrator filed an EEOC complaint when eighteen were laid off. If racism was rampant at the East Side district office, why wasn8 0t a group complaint filed? And, if you’re so eager to question people in Riverside about Nunez’ spending habits, why not take the time and save on the long distance charges and ask some folks in East Side for their opinion on the credibility of Geraldine Forte’s complaint?
The worst thing you can do, however, is trust the credibility of the “sources” who post in your forums. For those readers who don’t check out the Mercury News online, The Murk has a place after every article where people can leave comments. Usually the comments are innocuous. Sometimes a reader can post a question the reporter didn’t consider in the rush to print the story. As a reporter, it’s one thing to read the comments, but quite another to post an open letter on the forum encouraging people to publish rumors about Nunez and East Side. You’ll never distinguish credible sources from whack jobs.
Let us help Ms. Hull identify a whack job. Since the Nunez story broke, a forum contributor under the name EastSideInside has rabidly posted all kinds of disparaging comments and rumors about Nunez, the other trustees, and the general state of East Side affairs. The choice of moniker and the content of the posts suggests an employee, former employee or community member with close ties to the district. In one post, EastSideInside blames the teachers’ union for failing to contribute to their benefits, implying a close association with administrative management. EastSideInside also published an email from a union leader that included personal information like private email addresses and telephone numbers that had to be taken down since it violated the Murk’s posting policies. That narrows it down to an administrator/management person with more anger than common sense.
Frequent Unruly Advocate readers should already have a suspect in mind about EastSideInside’s identity.
Former East Side Trustee Craig Mann has laid low the past couple of years as a board member at the Santa Clara County Office of Education. Mann fancies himself a well-connected political insider, a person who’s traversed the corridors of power in San Jose and aspires to higher office — once the taint of past scandals fades from voter memory.
Mann is a frequent reader of former mayor McNerny’s blog San Jose Inside, where he’s even been known to leave a post or two, proving he has no qualms with technology and posting internet comments. San Jose Inside to East Side Inside? Doesn t take that much of a leap. The real evidence, however, is in the style, and Mann has some choice stylistic devices that seemed to have shown up in EastSideInside’s posts. Another Murk reader debated EastSideInside over the number of “guilty before proven innocent” posts. EastSideInside told the poster at one point to “come up for air.”
Funny, that’s the same line Mann used on an Oak Grove teacher he attacked in an email during his tenure as a trustee.
In a recent Mercury News article about East Side trustee’s bid to run for city council, EastSideInside posted this:
“c) When there was a vacancy on the East Side school board in 2006 and there were four men left on the board with one open seat, he voted for his "homie" (his words), Eddie Garcia - another man over a more qualified African-Am woman (30 yr educator) making it the East Side boys club”
The African-American woman mentioned in the post is Barbara Boone, the wife of a former East Sid e teacher and a former administrator in the Cupertino Unified School District. When Mann left the board in 2006, he openly threw his support behind Boone in an email sent to African-American educators.
To be fair, we cannot prove conclusively that Mann is EastSideInside. There are other candidates. Recently laid off disgruntled East Side administrator Geraldine Forte comes to mind. EastSideInside’s posts are filled with the disgruntled rants and a litany of accusations. Some responders cheer EastSideInside on for his or her detailed knowledge of the district; others see EastSideInside puking up sour grapes. Team Unruly knows that Geraldine Forte was sitting next to Barbara Boone at the August board meeting.
To summarize, Ms. Hull, encouraging a disgruntled ex-employee or Santa Clara Valley’s answer to Rod Blagojevich to feed you information will not make you the heir apparent to Woodward and Bernstein. Whistleblowers, by definition, act from a crisis of conscience, not out of a need for revenge or to satisfy a large ego. Unless you’re vying to take Fensterwald’s place as the Information Minister. Then by all means, trade your journalistic integrity in for a quick story. If the investigators find fault with Nunez, we are prepared to eat crow20and print a retraction. Our sources don’t have the sordid past preferred by Mercury News reporters, however.
Thanks for citing our website, Ms. Hull, and providing us the opportunity to be the check to The Mercury’s lack of balance.
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