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Michael McLeod
Jack. That is a very sad but also a very beautiful story.
Here's another funeral piece. Sorry to be so somber but it happens.
(I didn't write this. Note byline below.)
KINGSTON, R.I. — Where the black hearse had stopped, the honor guard began: nearly 60 journalists standing in silent formation outside a church on a rural New England road. On another morning we might be enemy combatants, but here we stood in solidarity, representing television stations, radio outlets, newspapers. The media.
One of ours had died. Jim Taricani had been a Rhode Island television reporter so formidable that Providence Journal reporters like me would dread six o’clock each night, for fear of another Taricani scoop about the scandal du jour in Pawtucket, Woonsocket or the State House. He was 69 when he died late last month, and had been contending with health problems for as long as most of us had known him.
Now came the pause just before the gray-gloved pallbearers present the coffin to the white-robed priest — when death sheds its last vestige of abstraction. And in that solemn stillness, a man standing on the quiet road shouted a full-throated expletive that included the choice:
“Burn in hell!”
None of the journalists ran to confront him. After all, he had merely exercised his freedom of speech. A few of us even imagined how Mr. Taricani might have relished the boorish disruption of somber ritual.
But the hateful bellow had unintentionally underscored why we had gathered, each of us wearing a symbol of the power of the word — a golden quill — pinned to our chest.
More than anything, it was to honor a fearless reporter — a mentor to many, including CNN’s Christiane Amanpour — who had paid a price for his journalistic principles. But our presence was also a stand for a free press when that fundamental concept is so cavalierly cast in doubt, as well as a reminder to the smallest state, if not the entire nation, of the essential value of robust local journalism, now also in doubt.
Jim Taricani was the template. For nearly four decades, mostly for WJAR-TV in Providence, he produced investigative reports that changed laws and lives in Rhode Island, his mission interrupted only briefly by a heart transplant in 1996. No public official wanted to hear that Taricani from Channel 10 was on the line. His reputation for fairness explained the invitation he received to the wake of Raymond L.S. Patriarca, the glowering boss of New England organized crime who, as far as I know, was never once described as “media friendly.”
In 2001, while federal agents were digging into the muck of Providence City Hall — an investigation aptly called “Operation Plunder Dome” — a confidential source handed Mr. Taricani a copy of an F.B.I. videotape showing a $1,000 bribe being accepted by the top aide to Vincent A. Cianci Jr., mayor and future convict.
It made for delectable television. As Mr. Taricani later noted, the tape showed the public what corruption looks like. But it was also secret grand jury material.
A federal judge demanded the source’s identity. Mr. Taricani fully understood the potential implications for his heart and health by not cooperating. Still, he refused to give up his source.
“It’s an effort to be able to do our job and use the tools available to us,” he told The Journal in 2004. “To bring out the truth.”
Mr. Taricani was sentenced to several months of home confinement, after which he returned to disrupting the evenings of his competitors. He retired in 2014, but remained committed to several causes, including organ donation and a federal shield law for journalists. When he died, the Rhode Island House of Representatives paused in silence to honor a man who had routinely upset the stomachs of so many of its members.
We journalists filed into the cool of Christ the King Church in Kingston and formed two rows up the aisle in subdued welcome to other mourners, including Rhode Island’s governor, Gina Raimondo. Both the homily and eulogy reinforced the need for a free press. The Mass ended, and we walked out the church doors, into the heat of these days.
The very next day, June 28, the nation’s newsrooms would recall the first anniversary of the shooting at The Capital newspaper in Annapolis, Md., that killed four journalists and a sales representative. Then, at a gathering of world leaders in Japan, President Trump would joke about the “problem” of journalism with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, where journalists tend to die unnatural deaths.
“Get rid of them,” Mr. Trump would say. “Fake news is a great term, isn’t it?”
And here in Rhode Island, local journalism is not nearly as vigorous as when Mr. Taricani roamed. The state has a very good public radio station and a tenacious news website or two, but repeated cutbacks have taken their toll. The once-dominant Providence Journal continues to shrink, with barely more than a dozen news reporters to interview candidates for office, attend school board meetings, hold the powerful accountable and cover a state once described to me as a reporter’s theme park.
Outside the church, the journalistic honor guard reassembled for Jim Taricani and for a free and healthy press. The funeral procession left for the cemetery, leaving the rest of us to stand in the hot June sun and ponder what — not whom — might be going to hell.
Dan Barry (@DanBarryNYT), a senior writer for The Times, was part of a team of reporters at The Providence Journal-Bulletin that won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for exposing corruption in the Rhode Island court system.
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