I was right about covering Fredericks

I was pretty sure I would take some lumps from my media brethren if I went forward with a story about ex-KVBC Channel 3 weathercaster John Fredericks. It wasn't my intention to write about Fredericks again. One swipe was more than enough, but I think it's important to respond to some of the criticisms raised by Review-Journal media critic Steve Bornfeld and by some of Fredericks' supporters.

In case you didn't see my report on television, I wrote about Fredericks a few weeks ago. In a nutshell, Fredericks met a woman on AfroRomance.com, an interracial dating site. They chatted, saw each other twice, then the woman ("Jane") says she got a bad vibe and decided to give him the brush off. Fredericks, however, was smitten. He started calling Jane's phone, leaving message after message, explaining that he had fallen head over heels for her, referring to her as his sweetheart, asking when they could hook up again. Jane did not answer the calls.

The messages from Fredericks piled up ... a dozen ... two dozen ... more. He told Jane that he had friends in high places, knew judges and lawyers and cops, and that he had used his status as "a public figure" to dispatch law enforcement to her house. He assured her they would arrest Jane for stalking him, even though she had given him the brush off and hadn't contacted him whatsoever after their second date.

Then Fredericks played his trump card. This big time dog-lover threatened to turn Jane in for abusing her pet. He was prepared to lie about this to his friends at the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (where he is a sitting member of the board of directors), maybe have her pet taken away, and get her arrested to boot.

Jane eventually checked her messages, called Fredericks and let him have it. Still, he called some more. A Metro detective called Fredericks and warning him to knock it off. And still Fredericks kept calling. It was only after a second call from the cop that the calls finally stopped.

According to Bornfeld, the R-J also received tapes of the phone messages and decided to pass on the story -- without bothering to call the woman who was being harassed, without learning that a police report had been filed or that the detective's warning had been ignored, and most important, without digging up information about the other women who had been threatened or harassed by the same John Fredericks.

If the newspaper had delved into the story, a reporter might have stumbled across the information on the chat room at AfroRomance.com. They might have encountered another woman who went through something similar with Fredericks, just one week before Jane's troubles began. This other woman told me she had to move out of her apartment to get away from Fredericks, that he proposed marriage after one date, then later threatened to have her arrested to the point she was afraid she might lose custody of her two kids. This woman told other women in the chat room about her experiences with Fredericks and they came to refer to him as "the stalker." An R-J reporter might have also heard from yet another woman who continued to get harassing phone calls even when she was on her honeymoon.

Bornfeld argues that since Fredericks is no longer on the air, he really isn't a public figure anymore. Fredericks was on the local airwaves, five days a week, for more than 12 years. That makes you a celeb and a public figure, like it or not. And Fredericks wallowed in it, even after KVBC wisely showed him the door last year in response to some really bizarre behavior. If you had caught his website before he took it down last week, you would have seen that he still promotes himself based on his TV career. At a minimum, Fredericks sees himself as a "public figure." That's the term he used when he wanted to convince Jane he had enough juice to have her busted.

The R-J had no such reservations about the NinaGate story. I was offered the lowdown on that story a few weeks before it broke elsewhere. After some basic checking, I took a pass on it because it seemed to me it was a private matter between Nina Radetich and her employer, KTNV Channel 13. Why was that spat a legitimate news story -- which Bornfeld wrote about -- but these threatening calls that led to a police complaint were not?

There are always lots of great reasons for not running with a story. Ethics professors tell us why we shouldn't show certain video or why we should have left out the names of alleged rape victims or juveniles, or omit gruesome-if-accurate shots of a crime scene or tragedy. We're always being asked to sugar coat it, down play it, omit this and leave out that, to be sensitive to individual privacy and dinner-time sensitivities. I think our job is to get the story, get it right, and tell it, no matter who it helps or hurts. That was the lesson taught by my former managing editor, the late Ned Day. It was what he called the journalist's ethical imperative. He railed against the self-censorship that has become all too common in the age of political correctness.

Bornfeld is right. Reporters are not cops. But I strongly disagree with his belief that it's not our job to make people stop doing bad things. I think that's a legitimate and often productive use of this bully pulpit, whether it's a crooked real estate agent renting out houses that aren't his or crooked lawyers who are fleecing their own clients for millions, or a politician who uses public money and facilities to line his own pocket. If we know about it and can make them stop it by doing the story, then I say we do the story.

In the case of Fredericks, I hope he follows through with an alcohol treatment program he says he's in, though I have reasons to doubt his sincerity in making this claim. (The 14 e-mails I received from him last Sunday, starting at 5:30 a.m. in which he boasted that he was working with other media and planned to "bury my butt" and "pull my card" along with some other insulting tidbits, suggest to me that he is still dealing with the same issues that led to his departure from the airwaves last year.)

And sure, some of this might seem to be private information, just as those taped messages were private, but when you wad them all up into a big slimy spitball, they mean something. Based on the public response to this story, I can say with some certainty there are some women in town who are relieved to know that someone finally believed their story about John Fredericks.