We don’t normally pay that much attention to the local daily
news. Not in a professional way—it’s too much work for too little
reward, and we’re constantly annoyed at how the paper has become more
about pictures and graphics than about actual news stories.
But
certain broad cultural trends had us interested in seeing the newsroom
flick “All The President’s Men” the other day, and it was fun to see
Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford on the phone so much. Newsrooms, from
what we hear, are intensly competitive places. If you work at the
Washington Post, you first read your own paper to see who among your
collegues have been favored by the makeup editors, and you keep a daily
calculation of a wide variety of grudges and jealousies. Next, you read
the New York Times, for a broader, more ecumenical kind of
self-loathing and professional jealousy. And if you get scooped by the
New York Times, you go to the bathroom and splash cold water on your
face and you curse loudly, and you wonder if you’re in the wrong
business.
We couldn’t help noticing in all the national hype
about the alleged Chai Vang murders—Fox News! LA Times!—that BOTH of
our hometown papers really got scooped in the embarrassing way. Yesterday,
a New York reporter at the Times published a story that had a number of
local Hmong sources saying Chai Vang was, in fact, a shaman in his
St. Paul community—a widely respected religious leader among his people
who on more than one occasion has performed intense religious rites to
exorcise evil demons from those who require such services.
It
became painfully clear that no one at either Twin Cities newspaper had
actually picked up the phone and talked to anyone in Vang’s extensive
circle of friends, relatives, and acquaintances. Judging from Stephen
Kinzer’s story in the Times, it was the worst kept secret in the St.
Paul Hmong community. So how did the Star Tribune and the Pioneer Press
manage to not overhear this bizarre and interesting news?
What’s
even more interesting to a layperson like ourselves is that neither
paper has, at this point, acknowledged that contribution to our
understanding of who this controversial figure is. (Today’s Star
Tribune has the groundbreaking scoop
that Vang had a warrant out for his arrest on previous trespassing
charges. Yawn. And Todd Nelson, at the Pioneer Press, does talk to
friends and relatives, and writes a nice profile of Vang—but
this is basically what you’d call a rear-of-the parade followup story
to the Times which does not acknowledge whose shit it was that the
Pi-Press was shoveling a day late.)
Also, it is not uncommon
for the Star Tribune or the Pioneer Press to reprint stories from the
New York Times—but they’re not doing that with this story. Why?
Probably because it would make both papers look pretty stupid to have a
local story reported better from some desk in Manhattan.
Like we
say, we’re just casual observers. We’re not in the news business per
se, so we don’t wish to cast aspersions. We will, though, toss the inky
wretches a freebie here: If you read to the end of the Times piece, you
might notice that a person named Noah Vang was credited with local
reporting from St. Paul. Is this the same Noah Vang who was indicted on
murder charges last year, in a Hmong after-bar knife incident?—The
Editor in Cheese
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