by James C. Sherlock. Updated Aug 3, 9:50 AM
Just another day in the neighborhood here in Virginia Beach.
The Virginian-Pilot, which used to be based in Norfolk, is a shadow of its former self. It has combined with the peninsula-based Daily Press.
The paper announced on May 4, 2020:
The Virginian-Pilot has officially moved out of the downtown Norfolk building that it had occupied for more than 80 years.
The newspaper reported Sunday that its owners turned the keys over to a developer who plans to turn the building into apartments.
The Pilot will move to offices in Newport News that are already being used by its sister paper, the Daily Press.
Mostly these days it consists of a very thin mess of Associated Press articles, rehashes of local press releases, old sports stories, a crossword puzzle, paid obituary postings and short opinion pieces and letters.
But the Virginian-Pilot crossed the water on Sunday to headline on the front page two articles “Discussions about RACISM.” The paper’s capitalization, not mine. The word racism, and that word alone, was in an enormous font.
One of the articles was about a church that has been in Virginia Beach since 1637 and a church that has been in Hampton since 1610. The article usefully explained that the Hampton church had a building constructed in 1728 that was “likely built by slave labor.” Ground-breaking investigative reporting. A Pulitzer awaits.
The other article — actually it properly would have been on the opinion page, but it is too long for a page about the size of a napkin — presented itself as an expose of a local prep school in Virginia Beach.
The article quoted an African-American defense-contractor executive who had been a director of that prep school since 2018 as saying that the school had “issues of race and diversity” for which sins he and his wife pulled their three students out of that school.
To give you a taste of the journalistic ethics displayed, I share my letter to the editor concerning the story about the prep school. I don’t expect to see it in print otherwise.
Mr. Coutu built the entire article, including a half-page picture of Mr. Smith’s family, on his declaration of dissatisfaction with the school.
Did Mr. Coutu ask Mr. Smith, who stated that he withdrew his children from the school after at least four years “for reasons of race and diversity,” why that coincided with his family’s move to the D.C. region rather than years earlier?
Was another school in Virginia Beach ever considered?
Did Mr. Coutu ask why a racist school would ask Mr. Smith to be on its Board where he was, in effect, Mr. Garran’s boss?
I have never met Mr. Garran, but he is officially cancelled.
He is unlikely ever again get a leadership job, and perhaps any other job, in a school.
Recruiters will check the internet for his name, see the story in the Pilot headlined “Racism” in “Japan Bombs Pearl Harbor” font, and eliminate him from consideration as not worth the potential blowback.
Mr. Coutu has his first “kill.” I hope the story was worth it.
I also hope the libeled head of the school sues for what is left of the Pilot.
In addition to selling off all assets in South Hampton Roads, the owner of the Virginian-Pilot released all of its talent.
There is nothing left on this side of the water but the stench of this story.
I suspect the alleged complainant quoted in this story is a decent man. He is certainly successful. Given the ethics of this story, we have no idea what he actually said.
It is a dark day when a “reporter” two years out of University of Wisconsin at Madison can destroy with a gross misrepresentation the career of the head of the school, a man widely respected and successful in his chosen profession.
If Mr. Coutu had an editor worthy of the title, he would not have green lighted a story centered on the claim that a former director of the school, having spent two years on the school’s Board which is its oversight authority, pulled his children out of the school for “reasons of race and diversity” after four years there when he moved his family to Washington for a new job.
I suspect Mr. Coutu and the Pilot will be showered with regional awards by their woke peers. Coutu will on the radar of the New York Times and the Washington Post. Which may have been the point of this disgraceful article.
No word on where the head of the school goes to get his reputation back.
And the once-important Virginian-Pilot will continue to wrap fewer and fewer fish until it disappears, now unlamented, from the scene.
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