For years now, people all over the country have been canceling their daily-newspaper subscriptions and turning to the Internet for their news. The situation is somewhat understandable, what with people pressed for time and being able to get a lot of free information at the click of the mouse. But, over and over, newspapers continue to demonstrate their importance, impact and, to me, irreplaceability.
Here are two recent examples, one at the local level, one at the national level.
Local __ On Tuesday, March 30, in the wake of the Watkins Drive crash that killed 12-year-old Damian Slayton and seriously injured his mother, Bri Kneisley, The Star’s Christine Vendel reported in a front-page story that the driver of the SUV, 30-year-old Clayton R. Dunlap, had, at the time of the crash, 16 convictions for driving without a valid license. Dunlap, 30, is now in custody, charged with second-degree murder and driving, again, with a revoked license.
The story struck a nerve with the public, and, by extension, with law enforcement officials. The outrage, of course, was this: How in God’s name could a guy with 16 convictions for driving without a valid license be behind the wheel, posing a threat to innocent people?
There is no good answer, of course. Robert Beaird, the Jackson County Circuit Court judge who lowered Dunlap’s bond last month, enabling him to go free, cited a shortage of jail beds. Although Vendel couldn’t make the public feel any better about the maddening loss of a 12-year-old innocent, she could tap into the anger. She came back with a front-page story on Saturday, April 3, in which court officials and police vowed to keep more revoked drivers behind bars. “The 16th Judicial Circuit Court is taking a strong look at how bonds are set in driving-while-revoked cases,” a court spokeswoman was quoted as saying.
In addition, a police sergeant who leads the traffic investigations squad, said his unit was planning six driver’s license checkpoints, starting in May. “This will be the first time we’ve done this at such a large scale,” the sergeant said.
Would the police and courts have initiated a crackdown in the absence of a strong, coal-stoking story from The Star? Maybe. But you can bet that the March 30 story had Judge Beaird twisting uncomfortably in his easy chair and buttonholing other judges about the need for action. And it had the police scurrying into meetings to plan a full-frontal assault on the idiots who have been revoked and continue to drive with impunity.
National __ On Thursday, April 1, The New York Times ran a front-page story under the headline, “Rushed from Haiti by U.S., only to be jailed for lacking visas.” The story told how, more than two months after the devastating Haitian earthquake, more than 30 survivors who boarded planes to the U.S. remained “prisoners of the United States immigration system.” Prisoners, literally. Locked up in detention centers in Florida.
How can that be, you ask? When they landed in the U.S. without visas, immigration authorities took them into custody and held them for deportation. But deportations to Haiti have been suspended since the earthquake. So, what to do with the new arrivals? Well, lock ’em up, immigration officials concluded. And they did, to the frustration and despair of the refugees’ relatives.
The uncle of two men — 20 and 25 years old — who had been in jail since they arrived in Orlando on Jan. 19, told The Times: “Every time I called immigration, they told me they will release them in two or three weeks, and now it’s almost three months.”
Even as The Times was assembling its story, immigration officials were all but acknowledging the stupidity of their actions. A spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, told a Times reporter that the 30 detainees “were being processed for release.”
In a departure from its sometimes-glacial pace, the federal government impersonated an accelerator-sticking Toyota: The Times was able to report the next day, April 12, that more than three dozen earthquake survivors had been released from immigration jails in Florida. Officials had decided that the refugees could be returned to Haiti when deportations resumed.
Now, why couldn’t the government have come to that logical conclusion in the first place? Well, that’s because The New York Times couldn’t point Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials in the logical direction until the paper discovered the situation.
Would those refugees still be sitting in jails were it not for The Times’ reporting? I’d bet on it.
JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC 