I have so much to say about this story, I’m not sure where to begin. So, if you’re interested in an overly long discussion on just how incredibly awful the Morning News story on Dallas Observer columnist Jim Schutze is, jump with me and let’s have a long discussion about journalism, the Trinity River debate, and how to read between the lines:
(photo by Elizabeth M. Claffey/Dallas Morning News)
I’m honestly stumped about where to begin, since the story, ostensibly a profile of Schutze, left so much out. So let’s start at the beginning.In 1988, Jim Schutze was a columnist for the Dallas Times Herald. He wrote on the editorial pages. He was the only city columnist here worth a damn, railing on corruption and incompetence wherever he saw it.
He was also my journalism instructor at SMU. He taught me the two most important things I’ve ever had to learn in this business. One, that when everyone is gathered in one spot because they think that’s where the story is, turn around and walk the other way, because THAT is most likely where the story is. Two, if you do your job right, someone will hate you. Comes with the territory.
Flash forward to 2000. I join the Dallas Observer as an associate editor. Schutze is the star columnist.
It’s hard to imagine the pride we and others on staff felt about working at the Dallas Observer then. There were no blogs. There was no FrontBurner. D Magazine was a joke. The DMN was complacent and boring. We were so proud to work there because that paper was the only alternative voice in town. As such, Schutze was the only person railing against and explaining the problems with the Trinity River plan.
This cannot be stressed enough, because the DMN story today misses this point entirely: EVERYONE agrees that the Trinity River plan was DEEPLY flawed at this time. (I write about this more fully in the November cover story of D Magazine.) The ONLY person of local import saying this was Schutze. And he was right. The plan was horrible. Everyone agrees on this now. To discount his role in this vital civic exercise is the worst sort of revisionist absurdity.
Okay, so Schutze was right that the road was flawed. As you’ll see in my story, he and everyone else agree that the plan was saved by Laura Miller in 2003. After a short time, he reverts to his old position, and now he wants the entire plan to fail because he believes it’s terrible for Dallas. You can debate this point with him, and you may have more rational take on the latest incarnations of the Trinity River plan, because he’s pretty stubborn about its faults now (some of which are troubling, unquestionably). But what you cannot do is make him appear as though he was CRAZY to question the plan. Because he most assuredly was not. The plan needed questioning from people like Schutze because addressing critics’ concerns is a vital part of public policy, and because what he’s doing is the very core of what journalism should do: challenge conventional wisdom if the public good is in question, right? Besides the fact that he was RIGHT, according to all involved.
Now, before you say I’m just kowtowing to my former master, understand that I’m still not sure how I’m going to vote November 6, and I believe that Jim Schutze overstates or is wrong on some of the points he makes. In fact, he’s appeared borderline batshat crazy on some posts at the Observer‘s blog. But that doesn’t mean I’m some sort of idiot who discounts the entirety of his work, as this article seems to do. To prove it, let’s present the article and examine it piece by piece:
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Jim Schutze was born on New Year’s Day 61 years ago. Or at least he thinks he was.
It could be that he was born on Jan. 8. There was a mix-up on his birth certificate that his parents never quite straightened out to his satisfaction.
For the Dallas Observer‘s star columnist and weekly thumb-in-the-eye of the city establishment, it was a fitting way to come into the world.
Dealing with murky facts and murkier motivations is his stock in trade.
Wow! Really? That’s how we’re doing to start?! We’re going to take a joke he says about how he may or may not have been born on Jan 1 or Jan 8 and suggest it’s par for the course, because he always gets his facts wrong? Awesome! All my concerns about ticking off the author, Rudolph Bush, just went out the window.
Take the Trinity River toll road plan, a topic that has occupied Mr. Schutze’s award-winning column for a decade. His hatred of the plan has led him to abandon his traditional role as journalistic observer to become an advocate for the forces that oppose the roadway and have forced the issue onto the Nov. 6 ballot.
“Led him to abandon”? Really? Have you read his columns for the past 20 years? He has never pretended to be an observer. He is an opinionated columnist! Same as he ever was. Same as he ever was.
And on an issue in which pro-road forces include most of the city’s power brokers, Mr. Schutze’s Observer columns excoriating the project and its supporters have provided aid and comfort to road opponents.
For Mr. Schutze, the campaign to build a high-speed toll road between the Trinity River levees is premised on half-truths, outright lies and obscured facts.
Proponents say the roadway is essential to easing downtown traffic congestion and is a key to further improvements.
But Mr. Schutze believes the people of Dallas were duped in 1998 into voting for the toll road when what they really wanted was a world-class park. Road supporters say it was always a prominent element in that campaign.
No right-thinking person can deny that the road was always a prominent element in the debate. Also, no honest human can deny that the park was what was sold visually to the masses. BTW, none of this matters now, and only folks who are trying to win debate points or smear profile subjects care much about this point.
Over time, he writes, the powers that be twisted the plans for the road, the plans for the park and the funding for both into something that had no resemblance to what voters approved.
“The park and lakes that voters thought they were voting for are just about gone, eaten alive by an expressway the city wants to build right inside the park area,” he wrote in March.
Mr. Schutze wants a reckoning so badly that he has twice hit the stump against the toll road, once for a debate with pro-toll road spokesman Craig Holcomb and once on the airwaves of radio station KERA.
He is definitely a supporter of the get-rid-of-the-tollway plan, and I found it odd he engaged in a debate with Holcomb. But the KERA deal you can listen to here. He’s on the show with Dave Levinthal, a DMN writer. Would Bush say Levinthal is representing the other side in this debate? Of course not! Because they’re both there simply to answer the host’s quesions. Tacking the KERA thing onto his point is horribly disingenuous.
BTW: The interesting thing about the KERA show is that he said during it that he could live with the outcome if the toll road stays. Said he disagrees that it should, but he would be okay with it. But ask him now, as I did and as Bush did, and Schutze says he’s reconsidered this. He is so wound up in this fight that he would be deeply despondent if the no vote passes. It shows how personally he’s taking this battle. If you know that, makes the next graph more powerful, I think. It shows a bit of the inner turmoil, makes him more human.
“I admit a different sense of passion, a different sense of importance of this story. … I’ve come to see it as a sort of O.K. Corral confrontation between new forces in the city and the old forces. And I admit I want the new ones to win and the old ones to lose,” he said in a recent interview.
Long before City Council member Angela Hunt became the unquestioned leader of the anti-toll road effort, Mr. Schutze was railing against it in his column.
“Buried at the back of a report by the Army Corps of Engineers is an admission that the $2 billion Trinity River project may make flooding in the region worse, not better,” he wrote on Aug. 6, 1998.
As the years wore on, Mr. Schutze kept writing about the dangers he believes the toll road poses.
The columns were key, Ms. Hunt said, to keeping the issue alive.
“I really do believe it was his continuing to seek the truth and educate the public about what was actually taking place that laid the foundation for the petition and the referendum,” she said.
The problem with Mr. Schutze’s column, say toll road supporters, is that he isn’t seeking the truth, or at least he isn’t presenting it if he’s finding it.
My story in D Magazine isn’t about the particulars of the debate. It’s about the characters who shaped the debate and the personal/professional investments they have in seeing a certain outcome. But I did a good deal of digging into the particulars of the debate (the number crunching), and I can tell you that Schutze, to my mind, does exaggerate some claims. Actually, let me be more clear: he takes legitimate concerns and amplifies them so that if you don’t enter the discussion with the same level of horror he shows, he calls you a mindless troll working for the blue hairs of the city. That’s where I think he loses some folks, but, again, it’s part of the way in which he’s framing the story in the reader’s mind. I can get into those topics next week if you folks so desire. But it also can’t be argued that he has brought several hugely important issues to light. To suggest, as this paragraph of the DMN story does, that Schutze lies to meet an end, without acknowledging the things he’s made public, like partial funding for important stages of this plan and complete phantom funding for other portions, is ridiculous.
Mr. Holcomb, who debated Mr. Schutze during an Aug. 20 forum, said the columnist has made a number of false statements over the years, especially about the intentional duping of voters in 1998.
“Whether in his heart of hearts he believes those facts that I think are wrong, I don’t know,” Mr. Holcomb said.
Mr. Schutze has written many times that voters in 1998 weren’t aware that the city was planning a major toll road inside the levees. But Mr. Holcomb noted that the toll road was mentioned constantly at the time during public hearings, debates and literature about the Trinity project.
Folks, listen to me. Most of these people making these statements were not in Dallas and/or were not paying attention during this time. So know two things: most of the big-impact ads focused on the park and de-emphasized the road. Also, if the ballot language had simply used the words “toll road” instead of “parkway,” we wouldn’t be in this mess. The DMN‘s attempts to ignore this are weird and counter-productive, if the paper is indeed “pro toll road” — and this publication (D Magazine) is for the toll road, remember. Yet even I know what you should and should not be arguing about. Because the News‘ odd refusal to understand this leads more and more people to Angela Hunt’s side in the debate!
Now, the DMN will say, Hey, we did a big story detailing how many times the words “toll road” were in the debate. The easy comeback is this: this why weren’t those words in the ballot? There is no answer for that. If the ballot, for example, had replaced the word “parkway” with “strippers,” I guarantee it would have passed with 80 percent of the vote. The lesson: words matter, and the DMN is for some reason still trying to ignore that fact. Now, that doesn’t mean the toll road isn’t a good idea. It very well might be. But this sort of continued nitpicking when it’s clear the ballot language should have been different makes me crazy. So let’s move on …
The facts over the toll road have been disputed hundreds of times, and both sides of the debate seem to find a way to fit them to their conclusions.
Mr. Schutze’s unique contribution is an air of conspiracy.
Really?!!!? That’s his only contribution? That’s why you’re doing a story on him? Because he only contributes an air of conspiracy? That’s why he’s on the front page? Really? REEEEAAALLLLLLY? Are you effing kidding me?
It’s a familiar theme in his column. Week to week he features a regular cast of ne’er-do-wells that includes Dallas’ millionaires and billionaires, its politicians and developers, and the executives and editors of this newspaper.
Right, I addressed this a bit earlier. So there’s a legitimate point here, but it has to be put in context.
Oh, man, now I have to actually teach a class here. See, folks, Jim Schutze is a writer. People at the DMN may struggle with that, because not a lot of writing goes on at that paper. Okay? And since I have been the subject of some of his themes, I believe I’m qualified to say that what Schutze does — and this is common in cities with a literary heritage, where they freaking get it, in other words — is put public characters into the human comedy he is exploring on the page. Anyone can go into specific columns Schutze has written and make him sound like he has a tin ear to what’s really going on in city government. (Trust me, it was tempting when I was writing my story.) But if you read his columns every week, you actually have a window into the human condition, and how it affects public policy, and why you should freaking care. It’s why people care about the Observer and why no one is passionate about the Dallas Morning News. For $700k, I will discuss this at length with top brass at the paper, but not until we handle the paperwork. Let’s move on again …
There is a sense, however vague, that they meet in some secret and finely appointed room to plot how to divvy up the city’s spoils.
According to Mr. Schutze, Mayor Tom Leppert was the Dallas Citizens Council’s “Manchurian Candidate.” Business leaders like Ross Perot Jr. and Harlan Crow are “telling us to hurry, hurry, don’t tarry, don’t fret” on the path to the toll road’s construction.
“Where the concerted elites are focused, they are able to exert great influence,” Mr. Schutze said.
In this case, the DMN is right, Schutze overstates his case. But, again, he’s not being literal. No one believes that folks are in a back room. He’s making a point that coincides with the literary tradition of — oh, hell, I’m not going to do all the DMN‘s work for it. Let’s move on.
The toll road is their pet project, and it’s all about their money, he writes.
This newspaper is their house organ, and its writers toe the party line, he suggests.
News editors dispute that viewpoint.
“Our stories speak for themselves. Anyone who reads them — and they’re all available on our Web site — can see that we take great pains to talk to all sides and to fully explore their claims,” managing editor George Rodrigue said.
Tim Rogers, our executive editor, should actually address this. He’s for the toll road. I’m still very much on the fence. So I’d like him to point out how the DMN‘s stories, for the most part, for the past month, have been incredibly biased. (Okay, re-reading that last sentence this morning, I realize I should have said “a few high-profile stories” read very biased. Just as I told Schutze to his face that I thought his blog posts were so full of vitriol that they undermined his serious points on the toll road debate, so, too, do I think someone needs to show the DMN that printing “he said, he said” doesn’t in and of itself make a story unbiased. I’ll leave that to the guy not on vacation.)
In an interview, Mr. Schutze acknowledged that the city’s establishment doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt in his column.
“It’s fair to say that my take on the powerful is basically unfair. If I’m on the wire, I’m probably always going to jump to the negative side where they’re concerned,” he said.
Only the second direct quote of the story!
In his columns, the powerful don’t just act in their individual interest but collectively to protect and promote one another.
It’s a pattern he also saw in Detroit, where he took his first major daily newspaper job in the 1970s with the Detroit Free Press.
“He has a conspiratorial turn of mind. He thinks there are forces out there that need to be watched and combated,” said Kurt Luedtke, former executive editor of the Free Press and an Oscar-winning screenwriter.
This is the most chickens*** quote I can remember in a DMN story. If I wanted to, I could find someone somewhere at some job in your past to give me one sentence that fits with my preconceived notion of your worldview. That’s what this is. If I wanted to find someone who said Wick Allison was an insane bastard who has no idea what he’s doing, I could find that person. If I wanted to find someone who said he was the most kind, caring, imaginative boss that person had ever seen, then done, no problem. I can’t even talk about this, it’s so ridiculous.
But the impression of conspiracy is unfair when it comes to the toll road, Mr. Holcomb said.
The issue has been argued before the public for years. There have been committees and subcommittees and citizens meetings and town hall hearings and debate after debate, he said.
“Jim still feels like there are a bunch of rich old white men who run the city strictly for their personal profit. That may have been true at one point, it’s just not true anymore,” Mr. Holcomb said.
Have you noticed yet that Craig Holcomb is quoted a lot more than Jim Schutze?
Mr. Schutze would largely disagree, but then, he has always seen things unconventionally, friends say.
“He had his own take on most everything that was about 45 degrees from everybody else’s take,” Mr. Luedtke said.
Right! Good columnist! The story is behind you! Turn the other way! Etc.!
In many ways, there are two Jim Schutzes. One is a demure and self-effacing man who tells funny stories and has written true-crime books that have been nominated for literary prizes. The other is the fire-breathing voice of a column that has won awards from the Press Club of Dallas.
You know what Reggie Bush? There are about 18 Jim Schutzes, just like there are of all of us. And yet you’ve managed to describe the same Jim Schutze — badass writer man — and suggested that he contradicts himself.
“I think over the years he has changed and become much more aggressive in his writing. I think there are personal attacks that are much stronger,” Mr. Holcomb said.
Many admirers of Schutze have said he’s made this debate too personal. This is a fair point, one with which I agree. I’ll give you that. I think it detracts from his valid muckraking on this issue.
Mr. Schutze said the stakes are too high now for him to rein in his writing.
Almost every elected official in Dallas says the defeat of the toll road would pose serious problems for the city’s economic health. But he believes such a result would be a sea change for good.
“There will be a whole new sense about downtown and how to grow it and what to do with it. I just think the old guard doesn’t get it. It’s not a question of malevolence or evil. It’s not even a question of greed,” he said.
Finally, this point is presented as though it’s proof of his insanity. Schutze and I, at the end of our interview, had a long talk about the possible outcomes of this vote. We disagree on what is needed, as he openly says the entire plan is so polluted that it needs to die — parks, road, everything. I disagree, although I’m not sure the toll road is still fiscally responsible. That’s the real question for me. However, the idea that a more organic growth from the core, minus big projects like this, is actually a better solution for future growth is a very interesting topic from an urban planning standpoint. We must have talked about it for 20 minutes. And although I didn’t put it in my story, because my story is much more narrowly focused than that, I do think that tossing off his last quote is intellectually dishonest. As though the thought that the road to sound urban development must run through this plan because “every elected official in Dallas says the defeat of the toll road would pose serious problems for the city’s economic health.” What does that even mean? Now, I think Schutze/Hunt have some things wrong in this debate, serious wrongs that need countering. Also, I think the pro toll road folks have their collective heads up their bums in how to sell their vision. I’ll detail all that next week when I get back, hopefully in a more intellectually honest way than the newspaper has dealt with Schutze.
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