Copyright © 1998 by the Boston Phoenix, Inc. All rights reserved.

This Just In: Follow-up

The police versus the Globe: Whose truth is truest?

By Dan Kennedy

The Boston Globe Spotlight Team reports that the Boston Police Department, despite falling crime rates and an innovative neighborhood policing program, is beset by a culture of corruption that its well-meaning commissioner, Paul Evans, can't seem to break. Top police officials respond that, in just five years, they've built perhaps the most admired big-city police department in the country, and that Evans himself has taken the lead in rooting out corruption.

Who's right?

The two sides are now doing battle in the midst of the Pulitzer Prize competition. The Globe hopes to win journalism's highest honor for its two-year, 25,000-word-plus investigative effort. The police department is trying to convince the Pulitzer board that the Globe's reporting is -- as Sergeant Detective Margot Hill, the media-relations officer, puts it in a letter to the board -- lacking in "accuracy and fairness" ("Don't Quote Me," News, February 20).

Yet to read Hill's letter, dated February 6 and obtained last week by the Phoenix under the Freedom of Information Act, is to see that the dispute is more a matter of spin than substance.

For instance, Hill dwells heavily on alleged exaggerations in a cover letter Globe editor Matt Storin wrote to accompany the paper's Pulitzer entry, even though it is unlikely in the extreme that the Pulitzer judges will make their decision on the basis of that letter. (Hill has said that a copy of the Globe's confidential Pulitzer entry, including Storin's letter, was delivered to police anonymously several weeks ago. Storin this week declined to release a copy of his letter to the Phoenix.)

That's not to say Hill's complaint isn't important. Indeed, her letter, accompanied by a thick stack of supporting material, raises fascinating questions about which stories the media choose to tell, and whose truth those stories serve.

In response to Storin's allegation that the police stonewalled the paper on its Freedom of Information Act requests, Hill cites the need to protect ongoing investigations. And she offers numerous examples of the Globe's ignoring or playing down information that showed top police officials were taking an active role in rooting out corruption. For instance, in response to Storin's claim that the Globe was responsible for sparking an investigation that led to the indictment of two detectives, Hill writes that Storin overlooked a "simultaneous Anti-Corruption Division investigation" conducted by the Boston Police.

"Supporting documents of facts provided by us continuously during the construction of the series were summarily ignored, misrepresented, or mediated," Hill writes. "Often the facts were cut or diluted, then woven into an account supplemented with information gathered from hostile sources." At root, Hill is complaining about what reporters and editors do every day: weighing various sources of information and weaving them into a coherent narrative. Perhaps Hill is being naive, but there's an emperor-has-no-clothes quality to her critique that's not easily dismissed.

In fact, the Spotlight Team could have reported exactly the same stories and placed them in an entirely different narrative framework: an in-depth, ongoing examination of how Paul Evans, his predecessor Bill Bratton, and Mayor Tom Menino turned around a deeply troubled force, and of how corruption continues to stand in the way of Evans's efforts to reform an entrenched police mentality.

"The Globe chose the older, well-established, very familiar watchdog frame over the newer social-trend frame, which is at least as credible and at least as important," says Richard Parker, a senior fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, part of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

Ultimately, Hill's complaint is about context. Thus, it's interesting to note that Hill cites glowing accounts the police department has received from out-of-town media such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time magazine, and even the European press. Globe editors point out that they've run plenty of pro-police stories of their own -- including a huge, largely positive profile of Evans last year by Dick Lehr, one of the Spotlight reporters.

No one denies that the Boston Police have made enormous progress during the Bratton-Evans era. The question is whether that progress has been enough to make Hill's spin more credible than the Globe's.