CCPOA.org - The PEACEKeeper :: Meet the Press - Page 3 (COVER STORY)

Meet the Press (COVER STORY) - Page 3

by Lance Corcoran, CCPOA Chief of Communications

LC: Interesting. Our official title is correctional officer, and in the minds of many, the term prison guard brings a negative image of the correctional profession. You have chosen to use the title correctional officer when writing about correctional issues. Why do you think so many reporters and editorial writers refuse to use the proper term, correctional officer?
AF: I don't know. I can't speak for them and I've never talked to any other reporters about that.

LC: What made you change?
AF: Phone calls from correctional officers who called me. They were very angry and said, "We're not prison guards, we're correctional officers." After you get enough of them, you know, it's like why offend people? What's the point? I don't want to intentionally set out to offend somebody. So I don't. Let's get beyond that issue. What's really interesting is I've had some correctional officers, a few, say that they don't like being called correctional officers, that they are prison guards, that they are old-timers who go back to another era.

LC: Have you ever had an editor, in the submission of your story, change the term correctional officer to prison guard?
AF: Yes I have. And I've had it done without my knowledge. But, I don't think it was malicious. I very rarely, in fact almost never, read my stories. You know, once it's been edited and once I'm okay with edit and it goes in the paper the next day, I almost never, ever read it. But, sometimes I have to go back and read them if an issue comes up. Now the headline's another thing. I think they use prison guard because it's shorter and, frankly, I think most people in public relate more to prison guard than correctional officer. But, you know, one time back after the trial down in Fresno on the Corcoran beatings, or alleged beatings...

LC: Alleged, thank you very much.
AF: ...alleged beatings where the officers were acquitted, I noticed that I had to go back and read that story years later and I saw prison guards. One reference had been changed to prison guards and there was an editor at the paper then who might have had an issue with that. I don't know this for a fact, but I think that he had a view that people see these people as prison guards.

LC: Do you think that more people relate to the term...
AF: Or it could have just been that they were shortening up a line or something like that. I don't know.

LC: Well, do you think more people relate to the term stewardess than flight attendant? And which is shorter?
AF: That's a really good point.

LC: We're trying to change. We're trying to professionalize. We're trying to let go of the past and move forward.
AF: Yeah, I understand that argument.

LC: And I appreciate the fact that you get it. What we're trying to do is change the dynamic across the board. Now, when a reader objects to either the tone or the information contained in an article, what should they do?
AF: Well, they can call the reporter and bitch, and I get that on a daily basis, and they can write a letter to the editor. And they can contact the ombudsman.

LC: Apparently, The Bee doesn't have an ombudsman anymore, you have a public editor. I don't know what that means, but...
AF: It's the same thing.

LC: So what is the role of the ombudsman or public editor? Do they have any authority?
AF: No, they just give their opinion. It's just like, "Well, I've investigated this, and I've decided that the..."

LC: ...the paper's right...
AF: ...the paper's right or the other guy's right.

LC: Is there any oversight of newspapers and reporters? Let's just say that I'm John Q. Citizen and I think that you totally misrepresented something.
AF: Yes, there is oversight and the oversight is our audience. Our customers. They are the number one oversight agency, and I hear from them on a regular basis and I don't discount what they say.

LC: But I can't write to some place in New York and say I want this guy sanctioned because he wrote an awful story?
AF: You mean like some sort of Federal Communications Commission?

LC: I have no idea.
AF: It's a private business. There's a lot of recourse that people have. You can cancel your subscription, you can sue the paper, you can have other people cancel their subscriptions, you can call the reporters. I listen to what people say and you know there have been times when I've had quotes to something online kind of in haste and then I might check a comment out and if there's something in a comment that speaks to an omission that was in the story or something like that, then, you know, the guy's right, let me put this in the story.

LC: So retractions and corrections occur all the time?
AF: Yes.

LC: I know you have done that for me on occasion.
AF: OK.

LC: You have. I made a mistake, you corrected it. Now, this goes back to something you said earlier. Do you think that a reporter's personal feelings about a subject can sometimes influence the tone of an article?
AF: Yeah. I would say yeah.

LC: This has happened to you?
AF: Yeah, I might get really outraged on something and that might instill a level of passion.

LC: So it leads beyond the facts to sometimes slightly editorial?
AF: I would say no.

LC: What about opinion?
AF: I still can't express my opinion, not there (in a news article).

LC: But can you load the article with things that support the way you feel, meaning quotes?
AF: Uh...yeah. I could do that. And I have, I'm sure. But still, that doesn't mean that I can't be fair. And it doesn't mean that I can't be accurate. You've always got to be fair when you write, it's got to be accurate.

LC: When an organization or individual refuses to respond to a reporter or the newspaper, can that sometimes influence the coverage about the articles and subsequent editorials?
AF: Absolutely. If you've got a case to make and you're not making it, that's not going to help your cause. Again, I have to be fair and accurate and get as many facts with as many sources as I can, but it's your obligation to give me the facts to support your point of view.

LC: So, saying "No comment" is a bad comment?
AF: Not necessarily. It depends on the situation. If CCPOA just got a 25 percent pay raise and somebody calls or says, "Hey, you got a 25 percent pay raise, are you going to Disneyland?" or something like that, and you say "No comment," then I would say that doesn't make you look very good. But if you were to...

LC: ...justify it...
AF: ...to say here's why, because we haven't gotten a raise in so many years, people are doing this and that...

LC: Right, right.
AF: ...and you know, we're not getting this allowance or that allowance and it was built into this, etc. You've got to make your case.

LC: Many members of CCPOA have a distrust of the press, why do you think that is?
AF: I think, and I hear this pretty regularly, that a lot of CCPOA members are probably politically conservative. Certainly law and order conservative types, and they have a perception that The Bee is liberal. I would say that in a simplified version of reality, the people who are conservatives think that liberals are anti-law and order or soft on crime. So, I think that a lot of people come into reading these kinds of stories with that kind of perception, that The Bee is out the gate soft on crime, soft on criminals, you know, hug-a-thug, anti-cop, and I think that is the number one thing right there. It's just kind of a real simplified, conservative view, this view of liberalism that washes over at The Bee, which influences their perception of our coverage.

LC: I'll combine these next two questions: In your opinion, is there a reason why so much of the coverage regarding Corrections is negative, and is this an example of a newspaper playing the role of an advocate attempting to effect social change?
AF: Right. We've got to break those up. Why is so much of the coverage negative? A couple of reasons, number one you've got a crisis situation going on that's been building for years and is now coming to a peak, so if you have this overcrowding crisis and this funding crisis, that's a negative situation.

LC: True. But The Bee has advocated for tax increases on occasion, so this is not about a taxpayer issue, we're talking about social change.
AF: Alright, let's deal with that second.

LC: OK.
AF: Why is the coverage negative? I think that the nature of incarceration is a negative, it's just a negative thing. You know, putting somebody in prison and having somebody who doesn't want to be there, who's done something pretty bad. It just starts out bad and it gets worse. So, that's just a negative situation, that's just kind of the reality of it. And then, I think, there was this coverage that started in the mid-90s. First of all there's the movies and the way that prison guards were portrayed in the movies generally wasn't a happy depiction and I think people have that perception. I think that there are certainly some reporters that have the perception that that's what they're dealing with, and when you had some reported reality in the mid-90s of inmates being shot to death at Corcoran State Prison, that fed into this background story of the negative prison environment, the negative prison guard being a knuckle-dragging thug, that fed into it. That kind of dominated coverage for five years and again, not all that coverage was fair, I agree with you on that. Some of it was.

LC: But to a certain extent, beyond social change, isn't there also a journalistic concept that says if it bleeds it leads? I mean, isn't there also a motivation to sell papers?
AF: I think that's more of it.

LC: Wait, do you think people are more interested in riots, escapes, and scandals than in inmates trying to help blind people?
AF: Yes. I agree. I know as a reader, I am. I'm not just a reporter, I'm a newspaper reader. And I'm a T.V. watcher.

LC: You've said prisons are a negative place. Nobody really wants to be there, not even the officers, but we do have some success stories and we do many things right.
AF: We have to go back to the second half of your question. The first half was why are things so negative.

LC: Is this an example? Is advocacy by the newspaper an attempt at social change or is it simply about selling papers?
AF: Okay, getting back to advocacy. I have never, ever considered myself an advocate on this, and, again, I'm not speaking for everybody and I'm not going to make a judgment on some who may or may not be, but I don't think I've ever been an advocate for anything other than doing the best story I can that's in front of me on an issue of general interest. And it's a big story and I am trying to keep people informed on this big story as it unfolds. The crisis as people try to deal with it, the ramifications and implications and consequences; maybe do some stories that might show whether this solution is working or not, doing other stories that take the reader into areas that need discussion and debate. That's all I do. I've never seen myself as an advocate.

LC: Other than for your son's baseball team.
AF: Other than for my son's baseball team–for which I'm a huge advocate.

LC: (Laughter)
AF: And what was the rest of that question you asked?

LC: Well, the second part is being that prisons are a negative place, do you think that an editor, a reporter would ever be interested in writing something about what we do right? About some of the good things. Following up on, you know, the inmates at the Folsom project for the visually impaired, the fact that they help blind people, the fact that they help deaf people.
AF: Yeah, people would be interested in that, but I have to admit, as a journalist, I am looking for tension spots in what I do. Maybe I'm wrong, I don't know, but as long as there's a crisis and there are tension spots, and I've only got so many hours in the day, I think that I need to be focused on the crisis rather than the feature story on the inmate who's...

LC: Or on the good guys...
AF: ....helping somebody, helping the blind see and the lame walk, you know. But there are people at our paper who do those kinds of stories and are good at it, much better than me.

LC: In closing, what would you say to our members who are out there every day in California's prisons, who think that the press is out to get them? The morale is low and every time they pick up the paper there's some new story or editorial talking about either a scandal or how overpaid we are as correctional officers. Is there an agenda to attack anything and anyone in Corrections?
AF: I don't think so. It's obvious that there's a lot of editorial writers who think that correctional officers are overpaid and shouldn't get a raise, and I would say that when you're talking about editorial pages, yeah, I think there are agendas. I think it's pretty clear, but in terms of news coverage, I'm just looking for stories and if they've got story ideas, call me at (916) 321-1141 or email me at afurillo@sacbee.com.

LC: (Laughter) Andy, I can't thank you enough and I think our members are going to very much appreciate this. Let me just follow that up real quick. So, Andy, what is your opinion of correctional peace officers?
AF: Everyone is different. I think that's the bottom line in reporting, you can't come in with a view of everybody being the same. Everybody I talk to is different. You're different than Mike Jimenez. Mike Jimenez is different than Chuck Alexander, Chuck Alexander is different than Rick Newton. You know, everybody is different and that's where you start having problems as a reporter is if you start making these generalizations of people and you go into a prison and you expect everybody to be a certain way, because people aren't. Everybody's different. If you go in with this point of view, you're not open to hearing what somebody might have to tell you.

LC: But at the same time, does Andy Furillo have an agenda against correctional officers?
AF: No, no.

LC: That's a fine ending point because that's what I want my fellow members to hear. Thank you so much for your time.

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