Yeah.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.

It is my honor and privilege to be here today to speak to you guys.

The truth is the truth, no matter how popular it is.

And I'm blessed to be able to work for a locally owned television station owned by the Manship family for decades with my partner in crime, as you just heard, Joe McCoy.

We have done some incredible work over my Obie at WB Zee for 16 years in June.

And so a lot of the stories that we do are not always popular, but like I said, they are the truth.

So the first thing that I want to get to is what is investigative reporting.

Investigative reporting involves exposing public matters that are hidden either deliberately by someone in a position of power or accidentally.

Well, I think we've come to find out here in Louisiana.

Usually it's no accident.

And then especially when we uncover it, there are just layers of the story that just it's like peeling back an onion.

And so the response is what really matters to the public.

Whenever a public entity gets a call from us saying, hey, look, we're looking into the situation, their response matters and we bend over backwards to make sure that they have the ability to respond to our stories.

So sometimes you'll see the story aired on the evening news.

Those entities possibly had 6 to 10 different opportunities to talk about the situation.

And they either declined or ran away.

And so that's when you see some of the scheduled versus unscheduled interviews and that term called Getting Nakamoto.

So I want to play that for you right now.

That zero tolerance policy requires that media companies in this case have a free policy.

Yes.

And explain how Mr. Palmer's hunger strike policy was is so going to require to have a surface sensitive.

So we operate.

Right.

And so because we want to follow policies which might be free.

And so if you come to me after this is over, but we ask for of you, you know, that I'm okay and I'm asking you questions that I can always on my own, you know, I could give them a lot of answers on how you want to positively with your money is raising more questions than answers.

And what do you say to the public?

Because this really seems like giving not enforcing the zero tolerance policy here to selectively enforce a no fly is someone who failed a drug test here that that's why we're investigating.

You're investigating wanting to continue to say, I don't like this.

What are you going to do?

I'm going to get back to you.

Okay.

We can pause it there.

So Bill Deville had numerous opportunities to do an interview with us.

He chose not to.

The story absolutely needed his response to the story we were doing.

And so we got him in the car at his car as he was leaving the cats office.

Things did not end well for him.

He was terminated by the cat's board.

The person who we exposed who had failed that drug test was also recently terminated as well.

And there is a big investigation now by the PBR Metro Council pertaining to matters of public funds at Cats.

So that's something that is still continuing to go on.

So that was an unscheduled interview that we did.

Here's a scheduled interview that we did involving the leader of civil service who said, Yeah, I'll sit down with you.

We exposed that him and some of the top officials within his office all got handsome raises.

One guy got $20,000.

Another lady right under him wound up doubling her salary.

Unheard of.

Raises when you're talking about the public sector.

Let's play this one off the board for the rest of your family.

Now, I don't have the funding to do the appointment for the top part of the operation, but only because the investigative unit uncovered the agency's top leaders got large raises.

Director Body of Executive Deputy director Chris Year and Chief Operating Officer Nicole Tucker receiving more raises last fall.

Three years, five decades.

I was making $154,000 at the start of September, but his salary ballooned to more than $175,000 by the end of the month.

I'm more than $20,000 raise in 30 days, the way the phrase doled out to the public.

Why were the big salary increases only given to the top three?

The director claims they were the ones working the hardest like every other agency, and how to retain the staff that is critical to your organization.

You were testifying and you had to recognize those top performers, especially during the time we're in right now.

So the top three were the only top performers.

And what do you want raised?

When we did see some market adjustments, but we're not seeing the level of raises that you bring down.

You see a lot of public policy statements.

In fact, I think what they think is fair.

But you were incorrect.

We have made other payments to other people in our agency outside of money.

Individuals are often from the W because the investigative unit requested salaries for dozens of other employees.

Their document showed they didn't receive nearly the level of pay raises that I'm not happy with the interview ending as we were still in the process of getting video, we walked out of the room.

So that's an example of when somebody thinks that they can answer the questions and is still wrong and gets upset and winds up leaving.

The point is, is when you're wrong, you're wrong no matter whether you sit down and do an interview with us or whether you don't.

And so it's a good example of why the truth is so important.

It's so important about what we do right now.

There's so much ammunition out there in the public to question everything that we're doing.

And like I told you, I've worked at WBEZ now for going on 16 years, and we built our reputation on trust and being able to tell accurate stories and all of that can be undone with one inaccurate story.

And so we're very, very acutely aware of how important our jobs are.

I want to talk a little bit about when law enforcement lies, because we just exposed a big situation at Louisiana State Police over the last couple of years.

I think your speaker, who was supposed to be here today, was Colonel Lamar Davis, and he was unable to attend due to the Mardi Gras holiday.

But anyway, from our perspective, it all started during the summer of 2020 when a state trooper mustered up enough courage and said, hey, I'd like to have a meeting with you, you know, to talk about something really, really important.

And so I'm thinking to myself, normally whenever we meet with people, people recognize me out in the community.

So we tell them, Hey, come to the TV station.

We can go sit in a conference room if there's any sort of documents or anything you want to give us, we can meet.

And it's a lot more protected that way.

Well, this guy was so terrified to even just meet, you know, at the TV station.

So he said, just meet me at this grocery store.

So against my better judgment, I think I told my wife, hey, if something happens to me, I'm going to be in this grocery store, you know?

But we literally I pulled up in my personal vehicle.

He pulls up in his unit and he says, Ronald Crane, you need to remember that name and you need to start asking questions about it.

This was in June of 2020 when we originally got the tip.

We immediately started asking questions to Louisiana State Police, and that's when the cover up began, an extraordinary cover up that has now basically led to the upheaval of all of Louisiana state police.

We have a new colonel.

We have a new second in command at Louisiana State Police.

As we start getting that tip and asking questions, that's when the lies began.

So we start asking questions.

Our first story didn't air until September of that year, and that's when we kind of exposed what had happened to them.

State police wanted the public to believe that this man was driving on a rural North Louisiana road and crashed his car and died.

Body camera video obviously, that was released later showed that was not the case at all.

He was viciously and brutally beaten and the cover up stretched all the way here to Baton Rouge.

It was almost like tentacles.

So people would say, well, why are you covering something that happened in Monroe?

Well, all the decisions that were made in Monroe were being made from right here in Baton Rouge, in our backyard.

And when you see just the level that they went to to try to conceal what was actually happening, it really was extraordinary.

You had some of the top officials that went out their phones or raced amid a state and federal investigation.

Unprecedented.

And you would think, you know, why would these people not be charged with obstruction of justice?

You know, if you or I were involved in something and we went and hid or concealed evidence, we would have been arrested, charged and be under the jail.

But it's certainly appears that there was a certain set of rules that apply to them.

Our reporting led to the complete overhaul of Louisiana State police.

Like I said, our state and federal investigations are still currently underway.

There's a still top to bottom pattern and practice investigation of Louisiana State Police by the Department of Justice.

They've launched that investigation amid our reporting.

And just recently in December, five officers, including four troopers, were indicted for the death of Ronald Green.

So it's still a situation that is continuing some four years now after it happened.

And as we continue to ask questions, there just still is just this lack of transparency.

And so it just really speaks to the reason why what we do is so important.

You know, people will say, oh, you know, you're just going after these people to make them look bad.

We have no agenda whatsoever.

Whenever we do a story, it's always how do we get both sides?

We bend over backwards, How do we get this person to respond?

How do we get this person to respond?

It's never anything personal.

So if we did a story on your friend or family member, you know, again, it was not a personal attack by any means or any stretch of the imagination.

I want to leave you with this.

Evil triumphs when good men do nothing.

That's a quote from Thomas Jefferson.

And so it takes good people to muster the courage, like I said, to talk about something uncomfortable, to alert somebody or what we do is is important and knowledge is empowering.

So even if it doesn't create a big change like what we just saw at state police, knowledge is empowering to the public because a better informed public means you will be more educated when you go to the voting booth, when you can go make a decision or inform your neighbor about what's happening.

And so for good men to do nothing, that's when this evil proliferates.

So if you got those tips, that's a way to get in contact with me.

And we're always happy to look into additional tips.

And so now I'd love to take some questions if you guys have them.

Yes, just two questions.

What kind of a budget do you have?

I mean, how many people are in this investigative reporting unit and how is it to work in the same building as well?

So to answer your first question, we have three people that are part of the investigative team.

It's myself.

It's my photojournalist right there in the green shirt, Joe McCoy and Eric and Aaron McWilliams.

She's right now out because she just had a baby.

And so in terms of our budget, maybe that would be a better question for my news director right there, Jonathan.

You know, let us know what we're not spending so we can start spending that.

But honestly, being locally owned is really a blessing because we have been given the just basically green light.

If there's corruption in town to go after it, there's not some like top down structure where you have to go get permission from this executive or that executive.

It's, hey, look, we're looking into this and we've never been told no and so on.

We're very fortunate to be able to work for a locally owned TV station in the community that is committed to investigative journalism.

And how is it to work with Ralph?

It's great.

He comes in on holidays and always brings in meals and stuff like that.

He's a great jokester.

We love working with Ralph, right?

And yeah.

Yes.

What's the process for investigating when you receive a tip, what's the next step?

So typically what happens is we'll get a tip.

So her question was what is the process?

When we get an investigative tip, how do we get it out and how do we wind up going through with it?

So essentially, a tip will come in either through an email, a phone call, or an in-person meeting where somebody wants to talk to us.

And so what we do is usually by the time these people reach out to us, they've kind of exhausted their avenues at their public entity and they're pretty frustrated.

And so they'll usually have some sort of documentation that they can say, Hey, look at this email or Hey, look at this text message that I have.

So that's a good starting point for us to start asking questions once they bring us something like that.

And then once we start verifying that, we'll have an editorial meeting to kind of talk about, Hey, look, how would we proceed with doing this?

Is this something we kind of want to tackle?

And then if it is something that we believe rises to the level of a news story, we'll start continuing to ask more questions, requesting documents on our own through public information requests.

And then what we'll do from then on is try to line up those interviews once those requests come in.

But we always verify, verify, verify before somebody just comes and says, hey, this is happening.

I treat every phone call that comes in as either I'm being recorded or it's a set up to try to undo our credibility.

There's just that much ammunition out there in the public to try to label what we're doing as fake news.

And so we have to go above and beyond each day to make sure what we're putting out is accurate and factual.

Yes.

And then two questions.

One is what percentage of the tips you get do you actually end up doing a story on a number two?

I want to know, what was the head like clip or whatever you did that got you the national award that Ralph is talking about?

Sure.

Okay.

So to answer your first question every day, I probably have 15 voicemails on my work phone.

I usually get maybe 10 to 15 emails from various different people, and then it never ends either.

I'm also getting them on Facebook, Twitter and now Instagram too.

So we have to literally sort through all of that.

So probably say on each day there's probably between 50 to 60 different tips that are coming in and out of those 60 tips that are coming in, maybe 2 to 3 results in a story.

So an investigative story, some may result in some sort of general assignment story that you see that airs the day of where we get the tip and then we can work on it.

But I'd say in terms of like a hard hitting investigative story that we work on, that's probably maybe three out of that volume of stories that are coming in.

And then the state police situation, I did not show the clips of that because we've really reported on it extensively over the last three years.

But it was a compilation of what we did at State police from exposing that state police have their cell phones sanitized to the body camera videos that got leaked out of rhino green being beaten.

And that's what essentially got us that national award.

When Ralph was talking, I was actually speaking with one of the jurors.

We just returned from New York two weeks ago to accept the award.

There were people from 60 Minutes there, people from National Geographic, PBS.

Certainly it's the Pulitzer of broadcast journalism, this award.

And one of the jurors told me there were actually 600 entries that were submitted.

They narrowed it down to 150 and from 150 from the screeners, they narrowed it down to 30 finalists, and then they picked 16 winners.

What's interesting about this is there were no categories to submit.

It was literally the best of the best journalism in the country that was selected for this award.

And it really is prestigious.

When you look at the history of this award in Louisiana, there were only maybe six or seven TV stations in Louisiana who have ever won it, dating back to 1942.

So it just shows you how important this is to journalism and what a big win it is for our community to have an investigative team like this in our backyard.

Yes.

New Orleans native Latoya Jackson recalling that the the efforts of the people to get the role certified and that hadn't been properly done and any kind of story, The Jungle Book.

So that's really interesting that you bring that up.

We kind of respect our markets.

And so you don't typically see New Orleans coming in to Baton Rouge to do stories unless it's something at the state capital, because that's super local to New Orleans.

We probably may just mention it here and there, but it probably wouldn't be something where we would go down and invest all of our investigative resources to investigate that.

They have four TV stations down there that I'm sure are going through that whole certification process.

One of the stories that we actually did in 2014 led to the recall of a public official here, which is extraordinarily rare in the history of West Baton Rouge Parish.

No one has ever been recalled except for the Rhode Island mayor.

You guys may have remembered that story.

Dee Dee Slaughter And she was just telling all sorts of lies and essentially we exposed it.

The public gathered enough signatures.

They had a vote.

They recalled her.

And then our reporting led to a lobbying change because she turned around after she was recalled and ran in the next election.

So when our stories basically led to a change in the law, that if you're recalled, you can't turn around and run for public office again, you have to sit out at least one term as well.

Yes.

I appreciate the investigative reporting.

Have you ever gone in and investigated something?

And it is the truth was revealed to you and you felt ethically that it might be all right to maybe not give that story because it might hurt more people or hurt the region or hurt the country.

So something like classified information and you find out you don't want to reveal that.

That's a great question.

The raw vetting process.

Absolutely.

That has happened multiple times, where we go vet and maybe get 60% through our process and then the story isn't really adding up.

And so we'll just pull the plug on the whole thing and just not go forward with it.

So if it if I'm not comfortable putting the investigative unit brand on it, then we won't do it.

I know we have discussions with my photographer, our editorial team, our news director, and it's all the same way.

If there's any sort of questions.

I mean, we have discussions about what is going to be on TV and what's going to air.

I mean, it's just that important.

What we do.

And so if we are uncomfortable with it or there's too many unanswered questions, we're not going to air it until it's ready.

If the story's not finished cooking in the oven, we're not going to pull it out early.

And so, yeah, there have been many times where that's happened, where we've gone through the process and then said, this doesn't pass our our smell test and we're just going to we're going to cut bait with it.

Yes.

With the story we had the most show who the most fun, you know, a lot of our stories are so serious and they affect a lot of people's lives.

So, I mean, I wouldn't say that that's necessarily fun to see something expose.

But I think what's most rewarding about stories that we do is whenever there's some injustice that happens and then we can turn that wrong into a right.

So, for example, we've done stories before where something as minuscule as, you know, we expose something at a school and then the school makes it right.

That's rewarding to see something like that.

And it's actually fun and rewarding to see that we really do enjoy our jobs.

We get to meet people every day.

We get to talk to new people every day.

And I think that's what's really, really cool about what we do.

And as those tips keep coming in, we get to just, you know, continue talking to people and meeting people.

And I think that's the funnest part of our day, being able to do that.

Yes.

Have you ever been afraid yourself when you had an interview or you know, there have been a couple of times where the hairs on the back of my neck stood up.

I have a restraining order in my car right now for someone who tried to do something and like another person, drove by our house many times we have cameras on our house.

So, yeah, what we do is definitely I mean, it affects people's lives and so it's not to be taken lightly, but by the time I get on the interstate, I'm looking all around.

I'm always where my surroundings, when I get off the interstate, I'm looking to see what car is behind me.

There have been times where I pulled into my subdivision and I saw a car exit off my exit and then got in my subdivision and like I didn't stop at my house.

It just kept going.

And so I'm always aware of my surroundings.

Yes.

Yes.

Have any particular preparation coursework, you know, experience to help you prepare?

I do feel investigative reporting is very hard hitting different.

Yeah.

So I think what every year we've been fortunate enough the station has made an investment to send us to Iree, which is an investigative reporter and editors conference, and they have sessions all day long that basically help you become a better investigative journalist.

And so that coursework helps throughout the year.

Also, just being inquisitive, I ask a lot of questions, and so when somebody answers something and I'm not comfortable with the answer, I'll say, Well, why?

Why is that?

And then I'll answer why to the why or ask why to the why.

And so I think just being inquisitive is really, really important.

And there's always going to be a need for investigative journalism.

There's always a need for journalism.

But I think in this digital revolution that we have right now, it's really shifting the way we we do things.

And so when I first got to WBEZ in 2007, we'd be able to work on a story when we got in at 9 a.m. and hold it until the 6:00 news.

WILL Now, when we're working on something, it's going out on your phones through push notifications, through Facebook, Twitter.

I mean, the viewers are so hungry now, they want information at their fingertips immediately and so it's just totally shifted what we do.

It's good in a sense, but it also can be bad in a sense.

There was a situation maybe two or three years ago where there was an allegation that shots were fired at the Burbank, Walmart.

And the sheriff came out and at a news conference and said, oh, yeah, we've got some victims at the hospital.

We have two of them at the hospital.

But it all turned out to be false.

And so us The Advocate 933 everybody published what the sheriff had said in this news conference outside the Walmart.

And then when the story didn't add up, then it was all like we were left holding the bag, saying what you put out was fake news and it wasn't fake.

I mean, you don't typically have to vet what a public official was telling you who's being briefed from his detectives.

But in that situation, there was just some bad information.

Yes.

What is the difference between local reporting, investigative reporting, and, say, the national kind of news that we get?

So her question was, what is the difference between local investigative reporting and national investigative reporting?

Local investigative reporting is more local to the area.

So like, for example, we may cover something that involves the state of Louisiana or the Baton Rouge area proper, but the national media may cover something that could affect anyone from California to Washington State to Minnesota.

Are you competitors?

Are you colleagues?

We're more or less colleagues with the national media.

And I think our competition in terms of the local media is just focused to arm the advocate And then the other two TV stations in town.

Yes, with the exception of that Wal Wal-Mart story, have you ever done a report all the way through and everything we've done?

And it turned out we just got it wrong?

No, fortunately, fortunately for for my sake, no, that has not happened because like I said, there's such a vetting process that we're not going to go like literally we'll ask ten questions, you know, for each question that that that we have just to make sure that it's airtight.

And if the story's not airtight, it's not going on the news on WB or the other stations may put that on but not A, B or C, And so if any of us are uncomfortable with something or we don't have the answers to a question, we're either going to get the answer or we're not going to do the story until we have the answer.

Yes, stopped you and lawyers called to tell you not to run the story or that we've had that happen multiple times.

And no, it has not stopped us.

So we've we've actually been threatened with numerous lawsuits.

We've been sued numerous times, and we prevailed always.

We have never lost one of those.

This being in Baton Rouge, many times the state officials get removed from their office and this accusation has occurred.

If you ever investigated and find out that they really didn't do anything wrong, it was really just they were being used as a scapegoat.

Do you have an example?

The first one that comes to mind is my kindergarten at the Department of Health and Hospitals or the Dependent Children.

Okay, that's a good example.

Well, she was the head of DCFS and obviously, you know, it was over DCFS when two children died.

So she was the figurehead who had to answer the questions as to what was happening under her leadership.

And so she held a news conference with all the media in town after the second child died and said she was in lock step with the governor.

Well, then, once all of this other stuff started happening, we went and asked the governor, Are you in lockstep with Marquita?

And he couldn't answer that question.

And then she wound up resigning not far after that.

I know she's really well-liked in this community.

And so, you know, that's back to what I said at the beginning.

You know, nothing has ever been personal, but we have a job to do and we have to ask questions and tough questions.

And these public officials take these jobs because they are the ones who can answer the tough questions when the tough questions get doled out.

And so, unfortunately for her, with all of that that happened under her watch, she fell victim to that.

I guess, you know, in the eyes of the public having two kids die while she was the leader of that agency and.