So John Cosgrove made a reporting error of about $600 bucks.
The Virginia Pilot’s Patrick Wilson believes this to be the next Watergate scandal, and it would appear as if they did everything they could to blow it up, which strays into those fine lines between journalism, reporting, editorializing… muckraking… hit pieces:
Cosgrove declined to answer questions about the report and questioned a Pilot reporter’s journalistic integrity.
“To us, it looks like a witch hunt,” he said during a phone call. “It’s obvious that you have an agenda here.”
Gee, ya think?
So out of 140 folks — Joe Morrissey included — why Cosgrove?
Cosgrove, a Republican, said he believes The Pilot targeted him because he has introduced legislation that would weaken the mandate that certain notices be placed as ads in newspapers.
“You have not looked at anybody else but me,” he said. He said that once a story was published, “we are more than willing to answer via social media” and “I will definitely have a backlash.”
To be clear — I haven’t talked to Senator Cosgrove, his staff, his close associates, his dog… so I’ll refrain from joining in the public backlash that is already ensuing on social media. Nor will I comment on the journalistic integrity of the Virginia Pilot or Mr. Wilson (who apparently made a good faith effort to cage this story in its entirety — otherwise we would not have had Cosgrove’s side of the story).
But it isn’t any secret that the Virginia Pilot has been on hard times. Nor is it any secret that the mainstream media in Virginia has been positively hostile to any intimation that government subsidies to the print media — namely an unfunded mandate to localities to publish RFPs that are highly lucrative for print publications — should be reviewed much less reconsidered or even turned over to a digital post on the county website in a 21st century environment (radical cost-saving thought, I know).
Nor is it any secret that in Virginia’s rather poisonous political environment, you can go to jail for vitamin pills much less intimations that you are somehow abusing the public reimbursement purse — an allegation made by the Virginia Pilot against Cosgrove that barely stands up to scrutiny save in one respect: it happened, it was clearly a clerical mistake, and Cosgrove upon learning about it quickly moved to correct it.
Backlash might be too strong a word. I know John Cosgrove to be a good man, and his staff to be exemplary. I don’t know Mr. Wilson at the Pilot, but I know he has massive shoes to fill and is under pressure to deliver (Wilson is probably a great American, just with a bad story and perhaps some editorial pressure this time around). But a disheartening lack of confidence in our MSM outlets continues to erode the public trust in our institutions for quick clicks online, and someone at the Virginia Pilot should have known better.
Cosgrove was right about the ink. Readers are also right to bemoan the lack of integrity when stories such as these run. The trade of character for clickbait just is not worth it.
