The Poop Scoop
(Dec. 1, 2011) There is no such thing as a bad question. But how you ask it, well, that’s another matter. A question becomes an accusation if, by asking it, you force people to defend themselves for something you have no evidence they did — more so, when a reporter repeats the question again and again.
Did you poop and pee on the bank? Did you? Did you?
That’s what makes a recent video of two reporters, Kelly May and Betsy Lambert, tearing their way through the Occupy Humboldt encampment in front of the Humboldt County Courthouse so compelling.
The video is now viral. That’s a term for something on the Internet that people feel compelled to pass along to every friend, family member and co-worker. For those of you out in the hills without broadband, here is the recap: In early November, Eureka police reported that someone defecated and urinated at the entrance of the Fifth Street branch of US Bank in Eureka. In response, the two Chanel 3 reporters stomped through the Occupy Humboldt encampment and asked that question over and over. They went up to one person after another, and even stuck a microphone through tent flaps to force answers out of sleeping occupants.
Some of the occupiers turned the question around. They argued that it is the banks that poop on us each day. The exchange is so entertaining it elicited commentary on web blogs from as far as San Antonio and inspired the North Coast Journal’s Andrew Goff to record an “Ode to Betsy Lambert,” set to the tune of “The Times They Are a Changin.’”
Humboldt County YouTube viewers are now so caught up in what’s become known as Poopgate that we forget what preceded the video. Someone did in fact urinate and defecate on a bank. Shouldn’t reporters try to get to the bottom of that? Don’t we complain that news organizations these days are too timid, and they won’t spend the time necessary for investigative stories?
What makes the video so compelling for me is the gulf it represents between journalism’s promise and its reality. We so need reporters to be tenacious. Too often news organizations seem cowardly. Important questions go unanswered and reporters fail to ask follow up questions to official statements that say nothing.
If only, I thought, we could Photoshop out the unnamed Humboldt occupiers with the faces of the chairmen of each bank that has financially defecated on this nation over the last few years: Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citibank, JPMorgan Chase and let’s throw in US Bank as well. Get two reporters out there and ask the bankers this: Did you poop and pee on the American economy? That’s an accusation you can back up with evidence: Sub-prime mortgages, foreclosures, bankruptcies, credit card usury. What the financial industry has done to this country and the world is enough to make me want to drop my pants and unload on my local branch.
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on the cover
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Some Other Proposed North Coast Railroads
Choo-choo Fantasies
Exposing this east-west rail nonsense
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Undeterred Will
Will chides Andrew for lack of attention to detail and makes plans for his inevitable victory.
Recent media maven
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April 5
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March 1
Take the Money and Run With It
Today
44th Annual Kinetic Grand Championship Race
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FIVE Comments
Comment / By Troy McLevin / Dec. 1, 12:29 p.m.
Wow, a tiny masterpiece!
Thank you.
You smartly answered your own question why local reporters don’t question local banks with equal veracity…the banks own them!
So, what keeps HSU’s student reporters and journalism teachers from poking their heads behind HSU’s curtain?
Another of life’s disturbing ironies….
Comment / By yep / Dec. 1, 1:33 p.m.
One of your better media maven’s for sure. Carrie P-D (for short) recently wrote that she’s a practitioner of “old school” journalism in which reporters are neutral observers of a story unfolding before them. But what I know of old school journalism (it’s in the family) is that it prides itself in go-gettum ball-busting headline-grabbing news that isn’t afraid to take a side and expose the bullshit of another. The J. Jonah Jameson’s, the media reporting from behind enemy lines. Even if not to better the world around us, but just to make a name for oneself, they take a definite side to communicate their idea.
The journalist as the writer (artist).
The truth comes out about the reporter anyway, as this poopgate bullshit (not a pun but intended) demonstrates. The reporters clearly take the side of “the establishment” and bust the balls of the little guys. Couldn’t be more blatant. The NCJ’s journalists can’t hide their sides either….
Cristina Bauss wrote a two part story about Caltrans’ plot to make hte freeeway bigger through our own Richardson Grove. She wondered out loud blog debate why her supposedly complete and unbiased report was lauded by pro-development types and called short by environmentalists and people who oppose the project. Blind to her own bias. Zach St. George never fails to slant his stories from the corporate side of the fence, so to speak. Ryan Burns has a distaste for “hippies”, etc….
They can’t escape their inherant bias…why do they even try, if not to attempt to convince us of something? It all comes across as pretentious…not old school journalism. More like new-school pandering.
Comment / By Carrie Peyton Dahlberg / Dec. 1, 2:53 p.m.
Yep: Re the “old school” thing — I didn’t write that, and I have very mixed feelings about the utility of pretending to be neutral. Possibly you’re thinking of something the publisher, Judy Hodgson, wrote recently about her own journalism training.
Comment / By yep / Dec. 1, 3:24 p.m.
Sorry CPD (for even shorter) I was actually thinking her when I wrote you.
It would be naive to think a reporter doesn’t have an opinion on any story they’re writing. I think it can be a strength not a weakness to exploit it.
Comment / By Terrence McNally / Dec. 3, 11:21 p.m.
That was the first time I’ve read Marcy and did a prat spit with my beverage.
The only thing Betsy Lambert teaches in that video is how not to obtain information from a potential source.
There is no news pending. It’s entertaining material for an O’Reilly Factor producer or a Michael Moore minute, but little content of worth gets generated by jumping folks on the street, mic in hand, despite her folksy vernacular.
And she’d receive a similar response by harassing local bank managers about their fiscal peeing and pooing. Corporate headquarters would be none wiser.
A couple weeks after the poop event, Lambert is no closer to her poop source. Nor would she have dug much deeper into macro economics by making Main Street BofA bankers’ days even worse. It’s just bad interviewing.
Funny. But bad.