News - Question of trust at the Atlanta Journal

Trust, a journalistic sage once told me, “is all we’ve got.”
And she was right. If readers don’t trust a journalist, they won’t value what that journalist has written. And once they don’t value what you’ve written, they have no reason to read you.
An Atlanta Journal editorial writer violated that trust last month when, in a column on a proposed commuter rail from Athens to Atlanta, she failed to disclose her personal interest in the issue. When asked last week about her potential conflict of interest, she compounded the error by offering a false answer to a crucial question about the column.
Susan Laccetti Meyers already had written a couple of unsigned editorials for the Journal deriding the idea of an Athens-Atlanta commuter rail. Then, Meyers got the rail groupies really angry. She took a ride on a freight train from Atlanta to Athens, and — in an Oct. 25 bylined column — used that ride to critique the proposal.
The column itself contained misleading statements: For example, Meyers complained that the ride took more than three hours, withholding from her readers that the commuter ride is expected to take about half that time because track improvements would enable commuter trains to whiz past slow-moving freight trains. She also opined that trestles along the route looked rickety, without bothering to mention that the trestles already carry far heavier loads than commuter trains.
But the rail advocates became more perturbed about what Meyers didn’t mention. Ticked off about the article, they started researching.
They used an address they found for Meyers in the phonebook and a search on mapquest.com to determine that she lived in the Diamond Head subdivision, one street over from the line on which the commuter train would travel.
Although it didn’t mention her connection to Diamond Head, the column was particularly sympathetic when it addressed the fears of residents of neighborhoods in that vicinity.
Some residents there are convinced property values will drop if commuter trains are carried on that track. They fear that track improvements might widen the right-of-way or cause trees to be cut down. The Diamond Head neighborhood organization has mobilized against the commuter-rail project.
Meyers confirmed in an interview that she once was active with that organization. But she at first insisted that she and her husband had moved away from the address in question in June 1998. Therefore, she stressed, there was no conflict of interest, adding that her opposition wasn’t rooted in neighborhood concerns anyway.
When it comes to analyzing commuter rail, “we [Journal editorialists] don’t care about the neighborhoods. We don’t care about the environment,” Meyers told me, adding that she was on a mission prescribed by Journal editorial page editor Jim Wooten. “All we care about is the cost.”
When I told a source that I might not do this story because Meyers said she didn’t live there anymore, he became upset. He insisted that her story didn’t add up because this year’s phonebook continues to list her at the Diamond Head address.
So, on Sunday, I went to Meyers’ listed address and knocked on the door. When I asked whether Susan was home, a man who said he was her husband said she’d be back. When I told him who I was, he repeatedly stated that I should have called before I came by and should do so if I ever came around again. “Asshole,” he declared as he slammed the door.
That reaction reminded me of the way politicians respond to reporters when they’re caught doing something they don’t want the public to know about. Journalists often talk about their own need to maintain the high ethical standards they demand of the people they write about — and there’s general agreement about what’s right and what’s not right for newspaper writers. Among other things, the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics tells journalists to “avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived” and to “disclose unavoidable conflicts.”
Meyers’ boss, Wooten, doesn’t believe this was a case that demanded such disclosure. An AJC veteran well-known for staking out a conservative position for the afternoon paper on highways and development, Wooten notes that almost everyone in metro Atlanta lives near a road or a development that might be affected by the metrowide debate over transportation and air pollution.
But this differs from such a general debate: It’s a specific project that might affect a specific neighborhood in a unique way. And readers have a right to know whether a journalist has a special interest that might skew her perspective.
Then there’s the question of truthfulness. On DeKalb County tax records, Meyers is listed as the owner of the Diamond Head house, where she declared a homestead exemption and recently paid her taxes — the house she originally said she left two years ago.
In response to messages left Monday about that discrepancy, she amended her original story: “I have not and will not cooperate with you about where I live because my husband wants his privacy.”