Model Minority

ULAN-UDE, Russia — Pity the indigenous Siberian.

Ruled by a government five time zones distant, the native population has had its religion muzzled, culture destroyed and witnessed mass migration of hundreds of thousands of Europeans.

It's hardly unique to the people in Siberia. Native Americans, Outback Aboriginals, and the Incas didn't have so easy, either. But here in the capital of Buryata, one of Siberia's largest ethnic minorities, the population is a taking an interesting turn from the type indigenous tale of woe and mistreatment. I don't want to say this to loudly, but the natives here appear to be doing just fine.

I saw my first Buryat on the Moscow Metro, a young woman with long, skinny legs and a slender frame. Her face was a revelation – a completely new type of visage. She had a long, very flat forehead, a broad nose and very small eyelids. She looked almost Korean, but her skin tone was much lighter, just a shade darker than a pale Russians. At first it seemed to be an impossible look, and I thought that this person must be an Kazakh Albino or just exceptionally light-skinned. But every day I would pass a couple people with the same features, and I realized there wasn't anything unusual about her look, just that there are very few Buryats found outside of Russia.

In Moscow that distinctive face can be dangerous. Right-wing, nationalist street gangs prowl the night, taunting, beating, and sometimes permanently disabling Asian faces in the city. The primary target is illegal migrants from Central Asia, Uzebks and Tajiks who come to Moscow to escape dire living conditions at home – conditions exacerbated by Russia's stranglehold on these countries' economies. There's a jingoistic undercurrent to this violence, and anyone who doesn't look Russian is a possible target.

A Moscow Times story describes what happened to a young Buryat, Yury, coming home to apartment one evening:

"About six teenagers, smaller guys, jumped me on the metro. I managed to throw them off me and it wasn't that serious at first," he recollected during an interview in his dorm room. "Then one of them yelled 'What are you waiting for?' and another stabbed me as they ran out of the car," he said, displaying a three-inch scar near his left kidney. As Yury, who declined to give his last name for this story, staggered around the metro station looking for help and bleeding profusely, the police stopped him for a document check. They helped themselves to all his cash and then decided to call the paramedics.

There are only 5,000 Buryats in a Moscow over 10 million. Here things are different. Buryats make up more than a third of the population, with more than a quarter-million in the Republic. That proportion seems low in the capital, Ulan-Ude, where most people have the distinctive face.

I spent most of the day passing those faces, walking the streets of the city. Ulan-Ude is in the middle of a cold snap, which in the middle of Siberia means it's really, really cold. Temperatures were more than a dozen degrees below zero during the day, and quickly plunge to -40 once the sun is down. There is no humidity in the dry, crisp air, so everyone must cover up to avoid the cold. This makes Buryat spotting quite difficult, as there is little difference in the way the two groups dress outside. Everyone wears a long fur coat, men in dark brown or black, women often in a cream. On the head women wear more fur, usually a peaked hat. Men sport something resembling a thick wool beret, which seems to keep the head warm but I'm not sure offers the ears any protection. Shoes and pants are muted colors, and draw the eye up to the dead animal warming the person above.

Fancy wool coats are a mark of luxury in America, and while they are less expensive and more of an essential here, hopelessly broke people don't own them. And the coats look rather new and well put together.

At the post office, mailing some postcards that say "Moscow" and "Warsaw," I wait in line behind several, uncovered women. The one in front of me is especially attractive, hair recently curved and her pale face covered with a layer of cover up. She wears a fire-engine red shade of lipsticks, and carries a fashionable black handbag. She appears to be off to a party after dropping some bills in the mail.

My winter stroll left me hungry, so I stopped into several restaurants looking for food. I found the offerings too upscale for my taste, including a sushi restaurant in a hotel lobby; a Russian restaurant, located underground and down a steep, winding staircase; and a tapa bar that also served sushi. At each place a dinner would be over $20, but the restaurants were all mostly full, primarily with Buryat customers. These middle-class patrons are served by an almost exclusively Russian wait staff.

Buryats run the convenience stores, the hair salons and the travel agencies. On the pedestrian shopping street, Buryats mingle with rusting Socialist statues celebrating the Double Helix and scientific progress, carrying bags of new clothes from the post-holiday sales. I go to a music store to find cheap, bootleg Siberian music and instead find fancy cell phones and iPod Nanos at nearly double their American price. There is a line at the register.

A consistent theme of Russia journalism in the Western Media is the presence of "Two Russias," Moscow and the poor countryside. Here in Siberia the capital's wealth appears to be spreading, impacting people in provincial cities and historically-repressed minorities. It's amazing and completely unexpected. I wish I had the services of a Russian guide, and could look up at academic at the local Buddhist university. I want to know why things seem O.K. here, and if this model could help the fractious relations in the multi-ethnic republic to the south.

I'm not naive enough to believe things are fine here; life for the Buryats is not easy. The countryside is still very poor, the birthrate is not high, corruption is widespread, costs are increasing for everyday items with the surplus of foreign currency. But these are problems of the entire Russia, not just the minority populations. In this world, that's a real sign of progress.

The Capture of Jiang Zhendong

WICHITA, Kan. - At 8 p.m. on December 19th, Wang Donghong picked up the phone at Central China Television's Beijing office.

The caller, a man, didn't immediately reveal his reason for calling. He would only admit that, "When I see a police car or hear a police siren, I get very afraid," and that he was involved in a crime.

Wang pressed for more, but the man didn't give any additional information. She gave him her cell phone number, and the next day he called the studio.

"My name is Jiang Zhendong," he said. "I am from Funing county, Qinhuangdao city. I committed a crime in Tangshan."

Jiang wanted to surrender, and for Wang to accompany him when the time was right. They agreed on December 20 in Beijing.

When Jiang arrived at the studio, police were in place on the floor above the interview room. But Jiang was having second thoughts. He thought he might not turn himself in after all. What he didn't know was that the news crew had already made the decision for him.

"Ultimately, Jiang Zhendong was not especially clear about surrendering. On the other hand, we cannot let a known wanted criminal just walk right out. Therefore, we still needed to notify the police. As soon as the police are involved, everything has to follow the judicial process. Therefore the police gave Jiang Zhendong a lot of time to think about what he wanted to do," said producer Fu Liaojun.

Halfway through a catered lunch with his mother, the police escorted Jiang out of the building. He is now police custody, facing an unknown sentence for economic crimes.

Xu Youyu, a Chinese academic, disagreed with the reporter's action. He believed Wang erred by notifying the police about this man's crime. The decision to surrender is Jiang's alone, and Wang broke her journalistic responsibilities by informing the police. Here are a couple of answers from an interview Xu gave with the Chinese magazine yWeekend in response to the case:


Q: What do you think the reporter should have done?
A: She should not tell her supervisor, and she should definitely not tell the police. I believe that she ought to find some personal friends who can give her advice. At the very least, she ought to feel that it was painful and immoral to inform her supervisor and the police.

Q: But this reporter received a call to the program unit during office hours. It was not a personal telephone call. Should she inform her supervisor and the police?
A: (brief silent pause) I am going to insist on my viewpoint. Even if she was at work, she is not a machine spare part. She is human above all, and so she ought to heed the call of morality. Perhaps my viewpoint is extreme. But I am worried that they made sure that many fugitives who might have wanted to talk will choose to continue to remain in flight because they are afraid of being turned in.


A criminal wants to turn himself in for a crime. Should the reporter involved notify the police?

This would be a tricky situation no matter the country. Is the reporter just an observer, or are there times when he or she become part of the events unfolding around them?

***

Dawn on the second day of the Kansas autumn arrived under clear skies. The sun rose parallel to the eastbound lane of Kellogg Drive, Wichita's main traffic artery. I saw the rays through my rear view mirror, speeding at 67 mph towards a stand-off in the suburb of Maize.

I arrived 10 hours in to find a pile of weary Maize residents hunched against a fence near a street corner. Blocking their entrance were half a dozen police cars and a Salvation Army van. These people told me, drooping eyes testament to a night without sleep, how they'd been cleared out of their homes around dinnertime by police, who said a neighbor barricaded himself inside a nearby house and claimed to have explosives. They had to leave right away, unsure of when they'd be back.

The Salvation Army arrived soon after the standoff began, offering food, hot drinks and hotel vouchers. Few took the vouchers, sure that they would be back inside long before daybreak. Nearly half a day later, it looked as if vouchers would have been the smart option.

Three hours later, it appeared as if I might be wasting my time as well. I had little to report back to the office for several hours on the scene. A stern police officer blocked my approach to any of the negotiators, and all anyone else at the scene had was constant but false rumors that the standoff would soon end.

I crossed the street where the police cars gathered and sat down on the sidewalk. I took out my breakfast - a mostly crushed bag of Chex - and started to eat.

"Hey. Excuse me," a voice said from a white SUV parked just up the road. It belonged to a woman, in her early 30s, with bleached blond hair messily arranged in a ponytail. She wore a white T-shirt with a faded design on it, and a mostly smoked cigarette sat in her right hand.

"Do you have a cell phone charger? I really need to make a phone call. It's urgent."

I did have a cell charger, but we quickly realized that my ancient phone wasn't compatible with her model.

I stood there, apologizing, when the woman started unloading her story: She was the girlfriend of the man inside the neighborhood. He had a couple warrants against him, but he was a good person. Now the police surrounded the house of another friend, guns trained at the man she loved.

Her phone rang. The conversation was short, her battery was almost dead.

"He says he's going to turn himself in." She looked up at me, tears forming in face, "No, no, no, No! NO! NO!"

I rushed over to the neighborhood's entrance, trying to see the action that was about to unfold. I couldn't. The only media who witnessed the surrender was one of the local television stations, which raised a camera to the top of their truck's transmission tower. My editor, watching back in the newsroom, saw the man leave his home peacefully, wearing no shirt or guns, and be swarmed by over a dozen police officers.

A police captain walked through the barricade and fielded questions from the standoff. Who was this man? We don't know, we know he didn't live at the house, he said. Are other people involved?

"We know that the man was talking to people inside the home," he said. "We'd like to talk to those people."

During the press conference, two police officers went over to the white SUV and escorted the woman away.

Back in the newsroom, I wondered if I should have gone to the police when I first met the girlfriend. The police would have wanted speak with her, and trained negotiators might have been able to end the standoff sooner.

But I'm a journalist, not an agent of the police, and that's why I believe I made the right decision in holding back. I can report the actions of suspected criminals and their associates without turning them into the police. Criminals should be captured by the police or turn themselves in out of their own free will, not because they decided to tell their story to a journalist.

Wang Donghong's decision to interview the Jiang Zhendong was a good one, even more commendable because it took place in China. And since Jiang hinted that he wanted to turn himself in, bringing the police to the station was also a good idea.

I admire Wang's careful balance of duty to her audience and her legal responsibilities. As I know, the decision can be difficult.

(The facts and quotes of Jiang's case presented here are based on EastSouthWestNorth's translation of the yWeekend article.)

How to Ace that Interview

WICHITA, Kan. – At the end of the interview, a source sometimes will say as a form of salutation, "Don't make me look bad!"

There's a paranoia that our time together was only for me to gather ammunition to earn my salary and make people look stupid. If only they knew the lengths that many other journalists and I go through in order not to embarrass people.

So far this summer I've omitted juicy but not tactful quotes from sources informing me that "all politicians are crooks," "birds are sacred creatures of nature" and more than one reference to "those Asian people." People I interview – "sources" in journalist speak – are usually nervous when I begin asking questions. Then pause, restate what they've already said, and sometimes give short responses. Then, after about five minutes, they seem to forget that I'm standing three feet from them scribbling down everything they say.

I struggle with these notes when I return to the office. Is my job as a reporter to give the objective truth – even if that means portraying someone in a less than pleasant light? I think the answer is no – most of the time. Since most people are only going to be quoted once or twice in the article, I usually go for a statement that gets at the heart of what they are trying to express. Sometimes I'll supplement that with a particularly insightful or funny comment, but rarely a rude one. People read the paper to be informed. It shouldn't be a place where they can get a few laughs because someone has no tact.

That being said, sometimes it wouldn't be ethical to not report a comment. If I was interviewing Mel Gibson and he said something anti-Semitic, that would have to go in the paper. The same with most politicians if they said something over the line. With people in public office or positions of authority, I'm much less likely to hold a comment because I believe they don't realize how their comments might be observed. These are generally skewered people, who know what they are saying when it comes out of their mouth.

The moral of this little tale is next time you're being interviewed by me or another reporter, take a deep breath before you answer each question. Trust me, I really don't want to have to make you look bad.

Parking Lot Pimpin'

WICHITA, Kan. – For me, an ideal Saturday would be dinner at a trendy restaurant, a drink at a fun bar, a few more at a good club and then some greasy late night snack before crashing at an ungodly hour of the morning. For some people in Wichita, it's a trip to an empty piece of pavement, where they pop their hood, roll down the window and blast some music.

I live across the street (different street than the recent armed robbery) from Kansas' largest flea market. Two days a week, this lot fills halfway with people from the surrounding towns, buying cut-rate used books, jewelry and faux-folk crafts at not terribly good prices. If a strongly-accented caller to my desk a couple weeks back is to believed, they also aren't paying sales tax.

The building's day function doesn't concern me. What does is on Friday and Saturday nights, when dozens of cars return to the lot. They are teenagers mostly, although some are well into their 20s. It starts around 10, and I've seen them there at 3 or 4, when I return from a night out. They play music, sometimes shout at each other, but mostly stand around.

Their scene – I use that term loosely – is impenetrable. Even though these people are roughly my age, they way they point their cars toward each other isn't welcoming. When I pass by them on a late night drunk run to QuikTrip, they don't beckon me over with a wave. Instead they glare, wondering why I am on their piece of pavement.

Now comes news that elsewhere in town, these armies of parking lot vagrants are causing trouble. In Wichita's northeast quarter, a group of nearly 900 people assembled in the Kenmar strip mall parking lot. At around 3 a.m., someone opened fire into the crowd, getting off nearly a dozen shots before disappearing ahead of the police. No one was arrested, and police are now patrolling the area. (One of the Eagle's reporters wrote an excellent article on the situation, which appears in today's paper.)

It should come as no surprise that 1,000 people + alcohol + gang affiliations + Late Nights sometimes equals violence. But I'm not sure whether the police should take any action about the people hanging out in the flea market parking lot. Although I don't think their gatherings seem particularly exciting or welcoming, that doesn't mean they don't have the right to do it.

So parking lot people, you're welcome to your post. Maybe someday you'll find something better to do.

Dispatch from the Other Side

WICHITA, Kan. – Crime has a way of happening right around meal time.

Seconds after I walked back into the newsroom after a tasty sandwich, a call came over the scanner. People were being arrested! Near a school! Many of them! I was on my way, still digesting as I drove my car down Douglas Avenue.

I arrived. Hundreds of students were on the front lawn, playing hackey sack, soccer, chatting on cell phones and just looking aimlessly off into space. In front of the school were the cops: at least six cars, with red-and-blue lights still flashing. Inside many of the cars were teenage boys looking aimlessly into space.

These must be the suspects. These cops were the ones who did the arrests. Now all I needed was someone to tell me those very facts. I went up to a low ranking officer. She was friendly, but told me to wait over on the sidewalk. Not just the sidewalk in general but one tiny square of the sidewalk. It felt like I was the one back in high school.

Then Susan entered my square. She looked in my the eye, shook my hand, and asked me who I was. Right then I knew she was a PR person. Only PR people care about who you are at events like these, and that's because they want to control you. Susan was well put together, as PR people tend to be. In her middle 40s, with dirty blonde hair pushed by into a ponytail, her look was confident, but not too confident, a kind of casual that takes work to pull off. It exudes trust.

The policeman, who I needed to talk to, was taking his time making the statement. He seemed to be more interested in walking between each of the six police cars and seeing if anyone had snuck out. ("Nope? Better go check the first one then.") I decided to put my time on the sidewalk square to good use, and interview Susan, not about the arrests, but her career.

Do PR people make a lot of money? Well, no that much, but more than journalists.

Why'd you leave journalism? Too much time at the office, and as a TV producer, I never got to leave. We had to do all the work, got none of the credit, and still took the blame.

Is PR easy? I still work long hours. This arrest is killing me. I'm going to have to come tomorrow to finish this (On Saturday really? Yes - really.) But we get spring break off every year. That's nice.

Should I stay in journalism?

Before she could answer that one, the officer came over and answered my questions about the crime. Or he told me that yes, those were people that were arrested, and that yes, they were arrested by police officers. And I went back to the office, mostly digested and definitely not a PR person.

A Kansas Life

WICHITA, Kan. – How long have you been here in Kansas? How long have you worked at the paper?

I get asked these questions all the time. When you inquire for a living, people will turn the tables quite frequently. At the beginning, I was cagey about the answer. After all, I didn't want everyone knowing that it was only my third or 14th day on the job. By now, I've gotten to the point where the answer isn't completely embarrassing. Two months or ten weeks doesn't sound half bad. People assume I at least know where the copy machine is by now (although I can't get it to work more than half the time).

I've come to a point now where the idea that I can only live in Blue States or large coastal communities doesn't make much sense. There are places here I'm quite familiar with. The taco stand where I grab a torta pastol. The bar where I get a Wheat Boulevard. All of the QuikTrips where I purchase a variety of strange soda mixes, paid with a credit card. I've been to these places enough times to feel comfortable; like they are touchstones of my daily life.

The same is true with my apartment. It may be dirty, permanently smoky and have walls that let know exactly what my neighbor is viewing on T.V., but the other day I caught myself referring to it in conversation as "home." It was a pretty scary thought, but two months does seem enough time to put down roots. There's a reporter who joined the paper two weeks ago. She seems pretty settled now, already telling funny vignettes about run-ins with strange sources. Maybe I've been here that long, too.

The train of thought is dangerous, because it leads to more questions: Why do I live in such a dump? Why is there frequently violent crime in my neighborhood? I went to college so I could live here - I know people in Albany who didn't graduate high school living in better places.

Finding answers to these questions requires breaking the little illusion I've sometimes fostered in the last few weeks: Wichita isn't really home. In fact, it won't be terribly long before I break out of here. Perhaps the reason that I haven't put down roots in the ways the new reporter at the paper has is that I know that my ticket out of here is visibly on the horizon. I'm not in countdown mode yet, but there's no point in calling myself a Kansan when it's almost time to pack my bags.

The Phone Call I Had To Make

WICHITA, Kan. – Being a journalist means doing uncomfortable things.

We have to stand around as a criminal comes out of a courtroom, badgering him with questions when all he or she wants to do is see their family. We have to rush to the scene of a crime, hoping to see someone arrested. We also will stand outside an event, seeing if anything goes wrong.

Our obligation to cover the news means that we have to do these things, but as a journalist, I can tell you that there are plenty of other things that I'd rather be doing. Like drinking a beer.

Today I had to do something very unpleasant. I was covering a big story. A man murdered his girlfriend and a friend before shooting himself while the police looked on. It was incredibly graphic. I'm glad I didn't see any of the pictures the police took on the scene. It was definitely the most graphic crime that's happened here for months.

I spent the first few hours gathering information from the police. Then I turned to the extensive criminal history of the now deceased criminal. It was very large, including 46 violations inside jail. The next thing to do was talk to the other people involved. While a colleague when to the scene of the crime, I got out the phone book. I wanted to speak to the victim's families, to see if they knew anything.

This is an incredibly painful time for the families. They just found out their young children were unexpectedly murdered. I really, really, really didn't want to bother them, but I would be derelict in my duties if I did not. I picked up the phone and dialed. On the third ring, a woman answered. She wouldn't give her name, only idenifying herself as a family member. I'm pretty sure it was the young woman's mother.

"I think the media knows more about it than we do at this point."

A pause.

"We saw her... off-and-on."

Another pause.

"Her family loved her very much. And I think that's about the extent of our comment."

And then she hung up.
I thanked her and said I was sorry for her loss. I really was.

Propelled

WICHITA, Kan. – Long before the Chunnel made it simple, Ken Paxton went to Europe daily.

His method of transport: the B-17 bomber, a medium range plane from World War II. He navigated, making sure the plane reached one of the 2,000 daily targets the Allies bombed in 1944.

The planes ran out of North Albion, which quite close to London. I made my way through there during a visit last winter, on the way up to Oxford.

Today it's uninteresting suburbs, but during the war it was a valuable airfield. Paxton was one of thousands of Americans who operated out of the site.

I met him at another air base, one that's much less strategically important. Jabara Municipal Airport isn't even Wichita's most important airport: that would be the wonderfully named Mid-Continent International Airport. There's also a major air force base here, McConnell. No, Jabara mostly is a place for rich corporate types to launch their private jets without having to deal with McConnell security.

This weekend, though, it's hosting the Wichita Flight Festival.

I interviewed young families, children, and people with lawn chairs. The Melting Pot of America was on display. I attempted talk with three Asian people who couldn't speak conversational English. (This is an anomaly. Most of the time Asian-Americans, and Latinos and other immigrants here have been excellent interview subjects.)

Mr. Paxton thought the festival was pretty damn good, he said as he watched three plane fly upside down in formations from the shadow of an airplane hangar. Did he ever do stunts like that in the B-17?

"No, no, no," he said, chuckling. He was in the business of straight-up flying.

Dirty Reading

WICHITA, Kan. - A journalist does not eat well. The long hours, constant deadlines and high levels of stress mean that I subsist these days on high amounts of sugar and caffeine. It's not surprising that I spend a fair amount of time in the office bathroom.

For whatever reason, I'm usually in the bathroom mid-morning. I close the door to one of the two stalls, and take a seat. This is one of the few times during the day when I have five to seven minutes to kill without a chance of a phone ringing, an editor wanting a quick meeting or being called out to a chemical spill. I can just "be."

I'm a Type-A personality, though, so I need to do something. When I look around the stall most days, I see the same thing: a section of the newspaper. Invetiably, I pick up this folded piece of paper to see one thing: it's the sports section. I hate the sports section. Why does it always have to be in the bathroom? Do people really not have time in during the course of their day to check the box scores or see about the latest trades? Why is this considered necessary reading?

The sports section in the men's bathroom is such a cliché. It was the same at my last two papers. Sports is ever-present, although in Scranton at least the business section would pop up from time to time. Here it's 99 percent sports. Why are men enforcing gender stereotypes? If I could check the women's bathroom, would I find teh features section? Or perhaps most women secretly admire sports, but hide their interest by reading in the bathroom?

I've been fighting this trend by bringing my own reading material into the bathroom, the obituaries. Mid bowel movement is the only time I can remotely justify reading these things. They're not going to produce any article ideas, and I'm sure not going to get any interesting stories to tell my friends. But I find it nice to sit back and look at lives well lived and ponder my own mortality for a few minutes each day.

That's what I call taking care of business.

On Police

WICHITA, Kan. - A policeman is one of those professions, like being an astronaut or a race car driver, that fascinates children of a certain age. Ask a few 6-year-olds what she or he wants to be when he grows up, and an assortment of professions that deal with high-tech gadgets, frequent danger or swashbuckling will come up.

I don't know any astronauts or race car drivers. But I do know cops. I spent the better part of 40 hours this week with them, stumbling my way through a week on the police beat.I covered a runaway truck, a domestic violence beating, pickle juice damaging a car and a shooting. It was a pretty normal week.

Police talk to media more than any other profession, even politicians. Therefore police departments need to have specific protocols for handling the media. Here in Wichita, that means a daily briefing, held in the monolithic police headquarters downtown. From a dull conference room, a captain reads the most important items off of a dispatch known as the Interwatch. He takes questions and then repeats the most important cases for radio and television cameras. As he's talking, sheets are passed around with arrests and reported incidents in the past 24 hours. Reporters furiously scribble down cases that they believe are interesting, the vast majority of which will prove irrelevant later in the day.

The briefings are generally light. One captain makes self-deprecating jokes about his lack of hair, another allows himself to be taunted for not wearing a bulletproof vest.

One heavily pregnant reporter gives daily updates on her hopefully-soon-to-be born child. A few minutes before a 3 p.m. briefing today, she cracked this joke:

"The date is the 31st, but my husband thinks it's coming today," she said. "At three o'clock."

The chief of police smiled, and then read from a statement about how one of his officers beat up his own mother while trying to destroy his apartment.

That's the thing that bugs me. No matter how many awkward jokes they make or times they allow me to peek a couple feet over the line, I can't be convinced that I should let my guard down around cops. These are people who control one of the really "cool" gadgets that children like: the law.

Wednesday I was interviewing a witness to that runaway truck. The poor man watched as a 15-foot rig slammed into the side of his sister-in-law's shiny red Mustang. I left, but forgot to ask him the rather obvious question of whether the back of the cab was attached. I stopped the car across from the Mustang on the narrow street.

Then an officer came up from a nearby van.

"What do you think you're doing?" he said to me. "You stay like that and I'm going to have to write you a ticket."

My wheels were facing the wrong direction, he said. This offense carries a $120 fine -- three days pay to a minimum wage worker.

He didn't write me a ticket, but he could have. There are enough laws that cops can almost always find a reason to charge people. I have to wonder what someone did to get a charge of "disturbing the peace" or "asking for money." Surely dozens of people do these things each day without getting arrested. Who does is solely up to the man in the uniform. He may come armed with a few jokes these days, and make cameos in elementary school classrooms, but he can still put me away for a long, long time.

Excuse Me While I Play God for a Moment

WICHITA, Kansas - There are two sides to every story: the part that goes in the paper and the part that doesn't. The great mission of the reporter is to find information, the great burden of a reporter is to select which facts to broadcast.

There are times as a reporter, including here in Wichita, that I've had information that I wanted to share with the general public but couldn't. It wasn't a question of whether the information was relevant or valid, or even true -- it was that this information was not obtained in a way that makes it runnable in the paper.

Newspapers have very good reasons for the standards they employ. They are in many cases excellent reasons. Legal obligation. Being able to confirm information. Not reporting something until the full truth is known.

But this also means that people who know the system of the paper, what we can publish and we cannot, sometimes come off better in print than those do not. Oftentimes these are people who already have trouble with traditional avenues of power: minorities religious, ethnic and racial. But what can I do? I'm more than happy to print their side of the story, but it needs to be presented in an acceptable way. If they refuse to do so, there's not much I can do.

This might be too vague to make sense, but I'm sure you understand that in a case like this I can't provide examples. Here are some historical quandaries:

1. Should the newspaper report the name of the Kobe Bryant alleged rape victim?
2. Should the newspaper allow informants to criticize the government if they refused to be identified? Under what circumstances should this be allowed; ie it affects a war or national security?
3. Does gossip belong in a newspaper? What if people like it?

This feel is a common among reporters. Maybe it's why newsrooms are always full of rumor and gossip. The spoken word is the only way these interesting stories are getting told.

It doesn't solve the problem. Remember this Chinese idiom: 口说无凭立字为据. "Spoken words fly away, written words remain."