the town dandy / By Hank Sims

Telling Tales

Ho, that’s quite a little backlash brewing against the Times-Standard‘s recent homelessness series, in which obese reporters James Faulk and Chris Durant spent a few days living on the streets to see how it was done. First Glenn Franco Simmons, editor of the rival Eureka Reporter, turned up his nose at the T-S, claiming that the undercover nature of the experiment violated all sorts of professional codes of conduct. Now comes Humboldt County’s only paid professional media scold - our very own Marcy Burstiner (Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, Class of ‘89) - leveling essentially the same charge. The Fat Guys are in the fire.

However, the Town Dandy comes to praise these grotesque tub-o’-lards, not to bury them. Face it, pecksniffs - the Fat and Homeless series was the most gripping thing that has been published in either of the daily papers for some time. Readers were actually looking forward to the next installment. Think of that. Imagine a world in which daily newspapers are exciting, and not a tedious civic duty. Well, we don’t have to imagine it. For one fleeting moment, there, we actually sort of lived it.

We’ll concede one point. Yes, the series would have been even better had it included a little bit more on the actual, flesh-and-blood homeless people who live in our county. They all have fascinating stories, no doubt, and it would have been nice to hear them. It was a little unclear why our correspondents failed to tap this goldmine. On the one hand, it seems that they were a little bit freaked out by the people they were sent to interview. They often reported themselves as feeling “nervous” or “uncomfortable.” But there may be another explanation, one that lies in the particulars of the cover story the intrepid reporters concocted for their subjects. Homeless folks may have their problems, but you’d have to be superhumanly dense to swallow the idea that these specimens were looking to hitchhike to Alaska to be homeless there. In December. If our boys were looking to gain street cred, they might as well have said that they were looking to hitchhike to Antarctica, or to the middle of the Sahara desert.

A tactical error, then. Was it, pace Simmons and Burstiner, an ethical one as well? We think not. The Times-Standard‘s justification for the subterfuge - that the story couldn’t have been gotten if the reporters went as reporters - seems to us unanswerable. A small society based in large part on the breaking of laws (sleeping illegally, ingesting illegal substances) is not going to throw open its arms to welcome public attention. Still, this particular small society is something that all of us should know more about. Durant and Faulk’s small first-person experiment at least showed us some of the challenges faced by people living on the street, and did so in fine prose.

It’s obviously not desirable to have reporters consistently going around lying their heads off to everyone they meet, but we have to take issue with the high priests of the profession, as cited by Simmons and Burstiner. “Undercover is a method of the past,” they say. Well, then Nellie Bly is a thing of the past, as are John Howard Griffin‘s Black Like Me and Barbara Ehrenreich‘s Nickle and Dimed. Are they? Maybe they are, maybe they are. If so, we are all the worse for it.

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