This is not a profession I take lightly. I know that every week
I make decisions that can have a profound affect on lives or
events. I’m thankful that when I’m not completely certain of how a
story should be handled, I have colleagues at major metropolitan
newspapers across the country that I can turn to for advice, which
I have done on many occasions over the past three years, especially
the past few weeks.
This is not a profession I take lightly. I know that every week I make decisions that can have a profound affect on lives or events. I’m thankful that when I’m not completely certain of how a story should be handled, I have colleagues at major metropolitan newspapers across the country that I can turn to for advice, which I have done on many occasions over the past three years, especially the past few weeks.
Most recently was when we discovered a court file in Merced County that we believe shed light on the character of Art Cantu, a candidate for San Benito County District Attorney. While I felt the information spoke about the candidate, I wondered if we had discovered the file too late in the game, if our Oct. 17 story would fall too close to the Nov. 5 election to be fair. The public’s right to know won out. Voters, my mentors said, deserve to know that the candidate who has made juveniles the thrust of his campaign has given up the right to see his own six minor children, that because of apparent misuse of corporal punishment, both parents have been ordered by the court not to spank their children.
As I have experienced often during my three years of owning and running The Pinnacle, when people are unhappy with our reporting and when they have no defense against the facts, they make the attack personal against me or the newspaper. After our story ran, Cantu filed a complaint with the state Political Fair Practices Commission alleging all kinds of nonsense – from a reporter being angry and out to get him because he spurned alleged flirtatious advances to The Pinnacle being “in cahoots” with his opponent, John Sarsfield who, as far as I know, was as surprised to read the story Oct. 17 as many of you. The commission, a spokesperson said, cannot comment on investigations, or even whether a complaint, no matter how farfetched, is being pursued.
These kinds of allegations are an obvious smokescreen to detract the public from the facts and are part of the territory that comes with journalism. Instead of attempting to explain behavior he might now be ashamed of, Cantu, like other politicians before him, has misrepresented the truth and told mistruths, as did a certain Internet attacker a few years ago, as do those political gossipers who allege that we write or don’t write certain stories or endorse or don’t endorse certain candidates because someone (I’ve heard about a half-dozen names) has a financial interest in The Pinnacle. (My accountant always gets a perverse kick out of that. Shame on those who invent the lie and on those so quick to believe.) Newspapers live and die by their credibility, by the trust you place in us to report stories accurately.
Art Cantu and I faced each other in Merced Superior Court last Friday – he in person, I by telephone. The hearing came because the day we discovered Cantu’s divorce file, the newspaper filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Los Banos Police Department asking for the investigative reports that resulted in some of the allegations. Last Thursday, the last day the law allowed for Los Banos officials to hand them over, Cantu and his Hollister attorney, George Barton, filed an Ex Parte Petition seeking a preliminary injunction to stop the department from releasing information that was public record. In it he made many of the same false allegations that he had made to the fair practices commission, but added that, apparently based on that Oct. 17 story, the newspaper is running a “smear campaign and has every intention of using this material to further its efforts in its dirty campaign.”
Despite Cantu’s absurd allegation, California law clearly states that a record is either public or it’s not; it matters not what a person intends to do with the information once it’s received.
“I find it disturbing,” said Jim Ewert, attorney for the California Newspaper Publisher’s Association hours before the hearing, “that a candidate is trying to use a public institution to prevent the local newspaper, on behalf of the community, from getting information about him.”
But that erroneous argument wasn’t Cantu’s only downfall. Judge Hansen blasted Cantu and his attorney for turning in inappropriate forms, for filing a motion that – in the judge’s words – was “procedurally defective.”
I successfully argued for the information to be released and, yes, the information we received was unsettling. The allegations in the police reports made it clear why the Merced Courts ordered both Cantu and his ex-wife to stop all corporal punishment of their children. It adds little, however, to what we’ve already reported.
The overall experience, though, is information you should have to make of it what you will on Nov. 5 and beyond. To me it’s that “The suppressing of evidence ought always to be taken for the strongest evidence.”
When any candidate asks for the most precious thing voters can give – and that is their trust – we must make the candidate earn it.
