Reacting to the news like rabid animals

A few months back, a member of Marion’s city council angrily yelled at Record reporters: “All you ever do is ask questions!”

He was right. Reporters ask questions. It’s how the public gets answers. And reporters are never more likely to ask questions than when it seems the public isn’t being told everything it needs to know.

Reporters don’t do it to sell newspapers, add rating points to newscasts, or encourage clicks online. They do it so the public has as complete a picture as possible of what’s going on. That’s how democracy functions. Democracy flourishes in sunshine and dies in darkness.

Asking questions is never more important than when public health and safety are involved. Last week’s disclosure of a suspected rabies case at Marion County Park and Lake is a perfect example.

Rabies is deadly. It’s relatively easy to be exposed. And by the time symptoms develop, it’s almost always too late for treatment.

Disclosure that a stray cat may have had rabies a week ago at one of the county’s most-visited locations should have been an alarm.

Rabies typically takes three to eight weeks to show up in cats. Anyone who went to the lake for the Fourth of July weekend might have encountered the infected animal even before it was obvious it was infected.

What the public needed to know was what the cat looked like and where, precisely, it was found. But to this day, county health officials have refused to release that information.

In fact, county health officials have refused to answer any questions other than to post on a Facebook account with just 227 followers that a rabies case was suspected.

Apparently wanting to control the message, officials shunted all questions to the county administrator, who at first didn’t have any answers and then declined to release them.

In a series of back-and-forth exchanges, even the question of whether the cat was destroyed and its infected remains removed has been answered in multiple, conflicting ways.

It’s now clear the cat wasn’t actually tested for rabies. And it’s somewhat understandable why. Personnel feared that to obtain the necessary samples, they might become infected.

We’re not even sure it was rabies. It might have been a reaction to toxic algae infecting the lake. Either way, it remains a significant concern to the public. But even so, information wasn’t shared with other responsible officials, either.

At the end of the day, we were told there might be some reason for all this secretive behavior, but no one will say what that reason is. We’re simply supposed to trust that someone told us all we need to know, and this somehow is how small towns operate.

Quite the contrary, small towns operate best when everyone knows everything — and usually they do. Forget gigabyte speeds for Internet connections. Information spreads much faster than that in small towns — but only if the information is released.

Small towns also have an almost unique capacity for neighborly understanding. If there truly is a reason not to share certain information, all anyone has to do is explain the reason, and most people will accept it.

What no one can or should accept is secrecy and contradiction. Exposing such behavior may seem inflammatory, but the real blame lies with those who weren’t forthcoming and honest.

This week’s story about the rabies scare should be a wakeup call to county officials that the county’s system of crisis communication needs a complete overhaul.

A classic case study in crisis communication goes back to the Extra Strength Tylenol tainting scare in 1982. Marketers expected the brand never would survive the scare, but in a strategy lauded as exemplary in business and communication schools, Tylenol’s makers saved the brand by being completely forthcoming and transparent.

It’s a strategy that could have prevented alarm and confusion in the suspected rabies case and might have saved Marion and Marion County potentially millions of dollars after the 2023 raid on our newsroom.

Instead, what probably will happen is that a newspaper that dared ask questions on the public’s behalf will be boycotted by one or more advertisers. We already have been threatened with such if we refused to retract our stories about the scare.

We’re not retracting them. If we make an error, we’ll admit it. We always do if we’re aware of the error. But we won’t shirk our responsibility to the public just because someone wants us to or threatens to boycott us.

If we did, we wouldn’t deserve to be called journalists.

— ERIC MEYER