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Outside the courthouse Friday. Photo by Millie. Thanks Millie!

I spent much of the last week producing stories about the Fulton County grand jury’s pending indictment of Atlanta Public Schools employees connected with the cheating scandal.  It was exhilarating, maddening and — like most stakeouts– unproductive most of the time.  I came away with many questions that I can’t really properly answer.

Was a daily drumbeat of coverage really necessary?  Once you report that the grand jury is considering indictments, is it necessary to stake out the lobby of the district attorney’s office for three straight days to see who walks by?

Enterprise stories on the scandal are always a good thing; done in conjunction with the grand jury activity, such stories are timely.  But the stakeout — of a secret proceeding, wherein most of the players are whisked in and out via secure and unseen entrances and exits — gives the audience the appearance of covering news, rather than actually covering it.

In the DA’s lobby. Luis, the WSB photog, shot pool for all the Atlanta stations.

Does it really take nine reporters to cover the details of an indictment?  WSB tweeted its staffing Friday afternoon.  WXIA had an even larger proportion of its staff covering the story.  It was great fun to see everybody, by the way.  But really.  Really?

Isn’t it time somebody called WSB on its frequent assertions that it breaks certain stories when they are, in fact, broken elsewhere? “All the stations do it,” suggested a WSB employee, as the topic arose during the tedium of the three-day stakeout.  Maybe, but WSB is easily the market leader in casually assuming, incorrectly, that they’ve broken a story.

Must there be so much social media?   If you follow commercial news media folk, you can expect your Twitter feed to be clogged with trivialities–  though every now and then, you may actually learn something.

WXIA’s Blayne Alexander explains the finer points of the Insta-Grahams to her granddad

Is a court order really necessary just to get a TV camera into the Fulton County courthouse?  To shoot pictures in the DA’s lobby?  To shoot a news conference?  Obviously, a court may issue an order on a courtroom camera providing pool coverage of court proceedings.  But it’s ridiculous that the sheriff has instructed courthouse deputies to bar cameras in this public building without a court order.

What about Brian Nichols? I hear you asking.  Nichols, a criminal defendant, shot and killed three employees in the Fulton County courthouse.  Perhaps the sheriff has ramped up security surrounding defendants in custody.  One certainly hopes so.

But the metal detector security at the main entrances is exactly the same as it was pre-Nichols.  The only noticeable procedural difference in security, to me, is the hard line taken against TV cameras.  Which seems to me not one bit related to any real security issue at this courthouse.

AJC photo

If you’ve known for days that you were planning to ask a grand jury to make high-profile indictments, wouldn’t you have a plan in place to actually announce the indictments to the news media?  And wouldn’t you share that plan, as a professional courtesy,  just so that the media can handle deadline logistics?

In other words:  If you’re a big time DA’s office, why is the answer “I don’t know” to three days worth of questions about how the completed indictment will actually be disseminated?  And why are the photogs covering the newser told to move, in thirty minutes time, from the third floor, to the seventh floor, then back to the third floor, then back to the seventh floor?

Lastly:  Is there any question now that grand juries are merely rubber stamps to the desires of prosecutors?  How far in advance of the grand jury’s blessing did the DA have two giant graphics produced for the news conference — one of which read “one indictment, 65 counts, 35 defendants”?

These are my questions.  Thank you.

Here’s a word of advice for members of the state legislature:  Want to make yourself look as bad as possible?  Then dodge that TV reporter trying to ask you questions.

Doug (left) with Rep. Douglas

Example:  Rep. Demetrius Douglas (D-Stockbridge), who had accepted, from a registered lobbyist, a pair of pricey tickets for a Falcons playoff game.  The game was played the night before the freshman rep was sworn in.  Because a state-required disclosure showed he took the tickets before he took the oath of office, I judged this to be a bit of trough-feeding worth highlighting.

Another freshman, Rep. Ronnie Mabra (D-Fayetteville), did the exact same thing.  Accepting such gifts is legal, somewhat commonplace and arguably outrageous.  I’d never heard of a legislators-elect accepting gifts prior to getting sworn in, however.

I spotted Douglas at the Capitol Monday.  As he walked past our camera, I identified myself and asked him to stop and answer a question about the game and the tickets.   I told him the topic before I asked questions, giving him a chance to compose himself and formulate an answer.  But the camera was rolling.

Douglas chose to skulk off instead.  It was not attractive.  Undoubtedly our viewers, like my bosses, were amused.

Mabra was more complicated.  I found him in his office.  We talked off-camera at length.  Mabra came up with some amusing reasons he didn’t want to do an on-camera interview:  He needed to get approval from “the leadership” first.  He had to be someplace else.  He needed to shave first.

We waited outside the building, and Mabra conveniently exited.  I approached.  We rolled.  He talked.  To his credit, he hung in there until I’d run out of questions.

The scalp of Sen. Bill Heath (R-Bremen)

The guy who should know better is Sen. Bill Heath (R-Bremen).  Unlike Mabra and Douglas, Heath has been around the Capitol a few years.  Heath is the Republican who unseated legendary House Speaker Tom Murphy (D-Bremen).

Lori Geary wanted to talk to Heath about some snarky responses he sent to people emailing him with complaints about the cushy job given to a former state senator at Georgia Public Broadcasting.  Geary probably asked him politely first, and realized he wasn’t going to submit easily to an on-camera chat.

She saw Heath exit the Senate chamber and went into chase mode.  Heath ducked into an office and literally went into hiding.  Geary’s video, apparently shot through the door, amusingly shows a thatch of Heath’s hair tucked behind a copier.

It was not attractive, and it got way more attention than it would have if Heath had simply manned-up and answered Geary’s questions like a grownup.  Geary’s viewers, and bosses, were undoubtedly tickled by what they saw.

It’s your choice, ladies and gentlemen.  Do you want to look ridiculous or not?  We’ll do our stories, one way or the other.

At 6:02pm Friday, I found myself responsible for an on-air gaffe that had understandably outraged some viewers of WXIA-TV.  It was an embarrassing conclusion to a day that had been rough from the get-go.

Pastor Creflo Dollar

The story was about the arrest of Creflo Dollar, pastor of the World Changers megachurch.  The gaffe was that my story showed an image of Bishop Eddie Long when identifying Dollar at the top of the piece.  My mistake was failing to view the piece, which was edited by an experienced and trusted coworker, before it aired.

One cannot overstate the seriousness of the gaffe.  Both pastors, Dollar and Long, are prominent African American megachurch preachers in metro Atlanta.  Long was in the news for months for allegedly having intimate relations with young men at his church.  Long was never arrested, but the scandal rocked his church.  Dollar was arrested for a one-time domestic violence incident at his home, concluding a confrontation with his teenage daughter.

Transposing their images was unintentional yet unforgivable.  It feeds into longstanding racial distrust, and notions that white folks have trouble distinguishing black folks from one another.

At 11 am or so Friday, WSB-TV tweeted that Dollar had been arrested on the family violence charge.  Tom Jones broke the story.  I’ve become an admirer of Jones’ work over the last decade or so.  He’s been rattling cages in Clayton and Fayette Counties on a daily basis for years, and I’m not surprised he learned of Dollar’s arrest before anybody else. Jones works out of a live truck every day in an unglamorous but news-packed Atlanta suburb, and breaks stories in WSB’s A-block regularly.

(Jones is also a tough SOB.  Following his near-death experience in a live truck, he showed up for work the next day.)

Tom Jones, WSB

Jones and a photographer were there when Dollar exited the Fayette County jail.  The raw video shows Jones respectfully but persistently questioning a mostly silent Dollar as he walked from the jail entrance to a waiting Mercedes.  It was, to use an insider phrase when referring to competitive newsgathering, “a nice lick.”  Nobody else had it.

About ten years ago, I remember attending an Emmy awards ceremony.  I recall hearing a half-dozen or so Emmy winners thanking God and Pastor Creflo Dollar during their acceptance speeches.  Dollar has his share of admirers in the news media.

Following the WSB tweet, a coworker and I headed toward Fayette County.  “Would you know Creflo Dollar if he walked past you?” I asked him.  We both agreed neither of us would recognize him.  Later that day, I went to the World Changers web site and pulled some images of Dollar.  We had also pulled some file video of a story about a federal investigation into megachurches.  That video included combined images of Dollar and Bishop Long.  I’m pretty sure that piece of file video was the source of our mistake.

Bishop Eddie Long

I was standing in front of Dollar’s church, where  I introduced the pretaped piece we’d produced.  A few seconds after I tossed to the piece, a producer’s voice in my earpiece told me that we’d used the image of Long while referring to Dollar.  (I couldn’t see the piece during my live shot.)

Her voice had a tone of disappointment and disbelief, and I was stunned.  When I appeared again at the end of the piece, I said something like “the image at the top of the piece should have been an image of Pastor Dollar.”  I acknowledged the error but probably should have expressed regret for it.

It certainly would have been genuine.  It was a humbling day from the start, and I’d only made it worse.

It was my responsibility to ensure the accuracy of the story before it aired.  The error was offensive, and I’m very sorry I made it.