Dan Horn

dhorn@enquirer.com

Journalists spend a lot of our time asking people to explain what they do and why they do it, which is ironic, since we tend to be lousy at answering those questions ourselves.

This occurred to me last Wednesday as I sat through a three-hour City Council meeting during which several journalists, including myself, were called ignorant, racist, reckless, shameful and, yes, evil for our coverage of The Center for Closing the Health Gap. Forty-seven people spoke, not counting the City Council members who joined in, and almost every comment revolved around the same theme: We are terrible people.

Some carried signs, to drive home the point. “Horn is a racist,” one said.

I doubt anything I say or write will change the mind of anyone who attended that meeting, and I’m not going to defend myself or my colleagues here against accusations of racism.

I have my flaws, to be sure. But if some of our readers can presume such a despicable thing about me based on an article I co-wrote about how a nonprofit spends tax dollars, I’ll not persuade them otherwise in a few paragraphs.

It’s worthwhile, though, to defend and explain our work. Journalists, myself included, don’t do enough of that. Too often we spend weeks or months working on a story and not a minute explaining why we wrote it.

Maybe it won’t matter, but sometimes a little explanation can go a long way.

I worked on the Health Gap story with City Hall reporter Sharon Coolidge. She’s smart, great at her job and has thick enough skin to write every day about City Hall, which I’ve learned is a little like a big, dysfunctional high school. Lots of drama. Lots of angst.

About a year ago, after Councilman Kevin Flynn raised questions about the Health Gap, Coolidge filed a public records request for information about the group’s spending.

Reporters file such requests all the time. The purpose of this one was to learn more about a group that had received almost $3.8 million from city taxpayers over 10 years.

As often happens, Coolidge got busy with other stories and put the Health Gap records on the back burner. Our jobs are like most people’s jobs in that respect: We juggle many things at once and make decisions about what takes priority. Sometimes it’s our choice, and sometimes the news dictates our choice.

Late last year, the Health Gap moved to the front burner when its leaders said they’d seek $5 million from city taxpayers in the next budget – five times what they got in 2016 and 25 times what they got in 2014. A few months later, the Health Gap requested an additional $2.5 million from Hamilton County’s indigent care levy.

The Health Gap already was the second-largest nonprofit recipient of city tax dollars and it was trying to get much bigger. What’s more, its request came in the run-up to a challenging budget year in which the city’s health department is facing significant cuts.

With more money and responsibility on the horizon, it was time to dig deeper. So we asked for additional records and began looking closely at the Health Gap’s spending. We weren’t alone. WCPO.com made a similar request.

We talked to a wide range of people while reporting the story. Some spoke on the record, some didn’t. Some praised the group, some didn’t. All had experiences and perspectives of their own that shaped their opinions.

And yes, as many argued at the meeting Wednesday, some of those opinions were no doubt shaped by politics. Most things at City Hall are, especially in a mayoral election year.

But we didn’t focus on politics. Instead, we looked at the Health Gap’s contract, its invoices, its tax records and other documents. We did the math and, because we’re well aware of our limitations, we double-checked our math. We also noted that the Health Gap had reduced its request for city money from $5 million to $1 million for 2017.

When we’d finished, we met with the Health Gap’s director and the chairman of their board. We tried to meet with founder and CEO Dwight Tillery, but he didn’t return our calls.

We asked about the Health Gap’s work and learned about the problems it’s trying to solve through educational programs and outreach. Poor minorities are living shorter, sicker lives because they often don’t have access to quality food and health care.

This is serious stuff, and dealing with it requires effort and money.

So we asked about the Health Gap’s spending decisions. We asked why a civil rights lecture featuring Tillery’s brother was paid for in part with tax dollars. We asked why consultants were paid $90,000 for job coaching, public relations and other services. We asked why city money was spent on the Black Agenda Cincinnati, a political advocacy group also run by Tillery.

The Health Gap’s leaders said all of it was permitted under their city contract.

City officials were less certain. They warned the Health Gap to stop spending money on the Black Agenda and they started a compliance audit at the request of Mayor John Cranley, who once was friends with Tillery but had a falling out last year.

We put all of that information in the story and let both sides have their say. We did our job as best we could.

No one likes being asked hard questions, and I’m not particularly fond of asking them. It’s uncomfortable for everyone involved.

But journalists do it anyway because we believe people ought to know what’s going on in their community and their country, whether we cover City Hall or the White House. Why do the men and women we elect make the decisions they make? How do they affect our lives? How do they spend our money?

When we get answers, we tell people about it. What they do with that information is up to them.

Last Wednesday, about 150 of them threw it back in our faces. Tillery and several Health Gap supporters criticized the story again this week at a meeting of The Enquirer’s editorial board.

We don’t take that lightly, any more than we take being called racists lightly. Most journalists want to get better, so criticism of any kind can be useful, even if it hurts. We can and should learn from one another, and we should try, whenever possible, to see the world through another’s eyes.

But race and politics are complicated in Cincinnati, and nothing we cover happens in a vacuum. Some will see a story about the Health Gap’s finances as an attack on the minority communities it serves, no matter how careful or thoughtful we try to be, and no matter how many stories we’ve written in the past about the struggles and triumphs in those communities.

I’d like to think at least some of the speakers who said rotten things about us last week know this and don’t really need us to explain ourselves to prove those rotten things aren’t true.

I especially feel that way about the council members who fueled the crowd’s anger last Wednesday with accusations our work was motivated by race and politics. It wasn’t long ago that some of those same council members cited our work on other stories to promote their own causes and arguments, and to demand changes they said would make the city a better place.

Back then, of course, we weren’t racists or shameless or reckless.

We were just doing our jobs.