The Solomon Scandals A Washington newspaper novel by David Rothman

Scandals and the Internet—or lack of it

The Detroit Free Press and the rival News decided to print home-delivery edi­tions just three days a week. Com­pe­ti­tion from the Web killed off the other four days. Sim­i­lar sce­nar­ios are or will be unfold­ing else­where, as shown by the move of the Seat­tle Post-Intelligencer to the Web.

So how does the Inter­net fig­ure in The Solomon Scan­dals? Mostly through the lack of it. Dur­ing the 1970s, the main era in my Wash­ing­ton news­pa­per novel, the Net was a long way from a mass phe­nom­e­non. Alter­na­tive papers existed like the DC Gazette, but with­out the reach of the main­stream media.

In some respects, the big boys in the main­stream actu­ally had their good points. The most estab­lished papers could pay their peo­ple decently. Where else would read­ers go for local ads? Even TV was only so much of a threat. Google, Craig’s List, and eBay had yet to suck up adver­tis­ing. And fewer video dis­trac­tions existed. The very best news­pa­pers ben­e­fited from mass lit­er­acy and in some cases even con­tributed to it through smart, meaty writ­ing. Some of that goes on today despite the rise of video.

But the main­stream press often had and has a ten­dency to dig just so deeply. In The Brass Check, his non­fic­tion expose pub­lished orig­i­nally in 1919, Upton Sin­clair made a pow­er­ful case against America’s news­pa­pers. He tells how the Chicago Tri­bune actu­ally tried to dis­credit his expose of the Chicago meat­pack­ing indus­try, the very stuff that inspired his muck­rak­ing novel The Jun­gle. Many news­pa­pers refused to review The Jun­gle, espe­cially in a pos­i­tive way.

The Net vs. media coverups

Flash ahead to the 1970s. Here’s Jonathan Stone eager tell the world about Pres­i­dent Eddy Bullard’s secret invest­ment in an IRS/CIA build­ing, at the time of its construction—the one that has just col­lapsed, with hun­dreds of peo­ple dead. Will he go on TV to share the facts that his edi­tors wouldn’t let him print? No, instead he tries to sneak his story into the Telegram, the dom­i­nant daily, which eas­ily over­shad­ows its evening com­peti­tor. Both papers must worry about local adver­tis­ing from the real estate com­mu­nity and pre­fer not to offend it.

So what would have hap­pened today, in the era of the Net? Plenty, maybe even before hun­dreds died in the col­lapse. Who knows, per­haps enough of an out­cry would have arisen for the feds to avert the collapse.

1. Lew Fen­ton, the con­struc­tion union man in the novel who sounds the alarm that Vulture’s Point may tum­ble down, might have posted his con­cerns on the union site. Would peo­ple have paid atten­tion? Still a bit iffy. But he’d have found a larger audi­ence, and per­haps some con­struc­tion experts might have ral­lied to his aid

2. Some local blog­gers might have taken up the cause and warned about the pos­si­ble col­lapse. Again, still no guar­an­tee that this would have resulted in mas­sive pub­lic­ity. But the more adven­tur­ous mem­bers of the main­stream media would have had more of a chance of notic­ing and act­ing since their read­ers could call up the blogs, too. Between the accounts on the union site and those in the blogs, the story about the rick­ety build­ing would have been neatly pack­aged for the mass media (for the time when the main­stream press had no choice but to print the story).

3. Per­haps unions rep­re­sent­ing fed­eral work­ers at Vulture’s Point would have been more respon­sive, given all the details float­ing around in the blo­gos­phere. Maybe extremely so. When I inves­ti­gated an AWOL cafe­te­ria, which was miss­ing from the leased head­quar­ters build­ing of the Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency, despite a con­tract call­ing for one, I got help from union offi­cials. The union involved was far, far more hon­est than the one at Vulture’s Point.

4. Stone him­self might have gone to work for a pub­lic inter­est group or another inves­tiga­tive orga­ni­za­tion and have blogged away about the shoddy con­struc­tion prac­tices of Sey­mour Solomon and oth­ers. I’m not sure. He was a bit of a jour­nal­is­tic careerist, not just a lover of good muck. But if he risked his career in his efforts to sneak the story into the Telegram, then why not?

Look­ing ahead, one won­ders about the future of the Inter­net as a place for the unmen­tion­able to cir­cu­late. I’m opti­mistic, long term. But whether the issue is pornog­ra­phy or copy­right, you can bet that cer­tain politi­cians will do their best to muz­zle the Net.The pos­si­ble elec­tion of Sarah Palin to the White House just might be a dis­as­trous set­back for civil lib­er­ties online and in gen­eral, given all the wacky, McCarthy-style charges she was mak­ing against Barack Obama. We may yet see her in the Oval Office, mer­rily appoint­ing Supreme Court Jus­tices and FCC com­mis­sion­ers and help­ing to sway con­gres­sional elections.

Mov­ing still fur­ther into the future, imag­ine the era of cyborgs and dig­i­tized mind-readng. Will the gov­ern­ment live down to the fan­tasies of the tin-foil hat crowd and insist on implants inside the skulls of the uppity—with Net-based, real-time report­ing?  “Report­ing chips”? Maybe used against real reporters, to ren­der them use­less for inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ism? That pos­si­bil­ity in fact arises in Scan­dals’ afterword—simply as satire. But who knows? Big Brother’s tele­screens could be rather pathetic com­pared to the pos­si­ble Net-enabled threat ahead.

Note: This is an updated ver­sion of a post that, in its orig­i­nal form, appeared before Scan­dals’ offi­cial publication.