By Brian Chasnoff, San Antonio Express-News, June 19, 2009
Last week, the San Antonio Express-News revealed that a cop was driving 98 mph before barreling into oncoming traffic.
Now, the city of San Antonio has fast-tracked a plan to rein in its speeding officers.
“Even death is unreliable: instead of zero it may be some ghastly hallucination, such as the square root of minus one.”
– Samuel Beckett: attributed
“It’s not that I’m afraid to die. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”
– Woody Allen: Death (1975)
* * *
Around the time that swine flu hysteria began infecting the United States and its media outlets, a colleague of mine in the newsroom asked what sounded like an ironic question.
“Are we all going to die?”
The answer, of course, was yes and no. Yes, we’re all going to die. Just probably not of swine flu.
Yet, to many, the H1N1 virus was (and remains) unsettling. Those alien, amorphous agents. That virulent, invisible universe. Those filthy, filthy pigs. Death, we warned one another over and over again, could strike at any moment.
I can’t help but note a parallel to recent coverage of the news industry. As a reporter who took to checking updates on the flu outbreak as obsessively as I already was dunking myself in macabre media industry news, I quickly grew steeped in doom. The death of journalism, in certain gloomy quarters, was a foregone conclusion. The best any of us could do was to hurl our pens into the void as an offering and flee for our livelihoods.
Of course, we all react differently to the end.
By Brian Chasnoff, San Antonio Express-News, June 10, 2009
No one in the San Antonio Police Department is permitted to speak to the media other than official police spokespeople, who often serve as spin doctors or outright barriers, and sergeants at crime scenes, where a minimum amount of information is typically available.
Thankfully, there are (a few) officers who recognize the public’s right to know information that directly impacts their safety. And so it was with an officer who made this unsettling revelation possible.
By Brian Chasnoff, San Antonio Express-News, May 30, 2009
My editor told me to go to a spruced up stretch of the San Antonio River and find a good story.
I got lucky and found Manuel Mendez. He allowed me to compress more than three decades into 18 inches, conflate inner and outer transformations and type the words, “For years, nothing happened,” in a front page news story. I love this job!
