You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy
The fear of knowledge.
A butcher sells meat. A doctor fixes people. I barter in information.
News is a series of facts that are either known or not known.
Sometimes you get these facts with a whisper. Sometimes it’s an explosion, like a building fire.
This morning it started with a text message.
“You ready for a tip?” the text said.
The tip was from a source that I communicate with almost every day.
He seldom has anything. He always says when he gets it, he will give it to me.
Today, he gave it to me.
He started talking and I knew this was a story. It sounded like Dr. Phil episode.
Woman hires a private investigator to help her find her long-lost daddy. P.I. finds daddy in the penitentiary in Tennessee. She visits the Volunteer state and sends correspondence to dear old dad.
Bad Dad serves his time, is released, and the daughter goes home with him.
A month later, the father allegedly forcibly rapes the daughter, the detective tells me.
My jaw hits the floor.
The woman seeks her long-lost daddy for years. She finds him and he rapes her?
It’s a terrible story if it is true.
Daddy is back in jail now charged with Incest.
What a terrible crime. What a horrible life moment.
How bad must this young woman feel?
So I start on the story.
It’s hard going from the get go.
The detective can’t talk. The chief won’t talk. The perp in jail won’t talk. The daughter won’t talk. The D.A. won’t let anyone discuss the case.
Well, isn’t that interesting.
Nobody will talk about a story that is begging for anger and tears and a demand for justice.
But nobody will budge. They are all afraid.
But afraid of what?
“You called the D.A.” the detective says when I arrive.
He looks agitated, nervous, sweaty.
“I called everyone,” I respond. “I called your chief, the DA, the sheriff, anyone who has a link to this thing”
The cop seems anxious.
“They don’t want us to talk about it,” he says squirming at his desk. “You’ve started a fire storm he says shuffling papers on his desk.
“It’s all public record,” I say.
He pushes a ripped piece of paper toward me.
“This is all you will need.”
The crumpled piece of paper is an arrest affidavit.
It is a juicy document.
It specifies what the perpetrator reportedly said to his daughter after raping her.
The alleged text is gross, callous. It is from a gutter snipe with all the parental resolve of drain sludge.
“Can anyone talk about this?,” I ask.
I am frustrated.
This is good newspaper story. It’s a terrible TV story.
TV needs sound bites. It needs emotion and anger.
This story would go national if Bad Dad would talk?
But he’s in the grey bar hotel.
This story is a fantastic story if the victim tells me what it was like to hunt down her daddy only to be his sexual assault victim.
But nobody will talk. Everyone’s afraid.
This story is sinking faster than a bowling ball in a lake of cold fear.
“I don’t know who you can talk to,” he says shuffling papers on his desk. “Nobody is allowed to talk about the case.”
I look at him, wondering why he even called me.
I thank him and leave. I sit in my car in the parking lot.
I’m pissed.
The arrest is public record. The affidavit is public record. The cops did a good thing getting a bad daddy off the street.
And nobody wants to talk about it, take credit, let the public know in case there are other victims out there.
Bad Dad was in the joint for sexual offenses.
You just don’t go to jail and get religion all of a sudden, you know what I mean.
He’s been out for weeks. Perhaps there are other victims.
So there it is.
A Dr. Phil exclusive. Just one problem. No Dr. Phil.
So what to do.
I shoot the documents and order up pictures of prison bars and anything else I can think of.
The story will have zero emotion. But it will have a lot of production values.
I work from the affidavit and I put the story on the air.
Not a sound bite.
All me all the time.
I got faces and jail cells and silhouette women floating all over the screen.
It’s a good piece. It’s an important piece.
A butcher sells meat. I sell information, sort of.
Today I have filet, just no knife to cut it up into fine chewable little pieces.
Sometimes even the correct information, public information, makes power brokers uncomfortable.
Life happens and they deal with it and it’s information that is available to a free society, yet they act like this communist Russia and we have to duck and cover.
Why?
Oh well. I’m a journalistic knight jousting with the darkness and exposing wrongs.
It’s my job to shine the bright light of justice on the corrupt.
Life’s Crazy™