Held to answer

In the 1998 Japanese film “After Life,” the recently deceased arrive at a celestial way station (it looks like a social services bureaucracy), where they are assigned caseworkers who help them find a moment in their lives that they can relive for all eternity.

At one point, the caseworkers complain about how boring and predictable some of the dead can be – the kids who want their after-life moment to be Disneyland, or the men who brag about their sexual conquests and insist they can’t settle on just one.

With guidance from the caseworkers, the Disney kids find a memory unique to them. And the men with so many sexual choices? After some serious thought, they settle on an eternal after-life moment with their wives.

If Bob Caldwell landed in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “After Life,” he wouldn’t need any assistance from a caseworker to find a memory that really mattered. Old-school newspaper editors are often written off as a cynical bunch, but they are some of the most brutally honest people – perhaps because they are called upon to carefully craft the truth so the fewest readers will get offended.

Caldwell, a husband, father, grandfather and a long-time editor at The Oregonian, died of a heart attack at age 63. Within 24 hours, the condolences and memories turned to sneers and snickers – even some attaboys – when it was revealed he had died having sex with a 23-year-old woman in her apartment.

His funeral was Saturday. Had he been watching from a celestial way station, he probably would have appreciated the look back on his entire life. The newsman in him, though, might have played at writing a tabloid head: “Editor thinks with dick, pays with life.”

I didn’t know Caldwell, but I worked for years in newspapers. Other professionals are seldom held to the same standards as newspaper reporters and editors.  The editor who initially tried to skirt the truth on how Caldwell died (falsely stating he suffered a heart attack in his car) was fired.

A cop or a doctor can kill someone through incompetence and continue their career. In newspapers you can get fired or demoted for plagiarism, lying, pissing off a major advertiser (when papers still had major advertisers), disturbing a sacred cow (which can range from national deities like the Catholic Church and the NAACP to former local idols like Neil Goldschmidt), or simply questioning authority.

Commenters to The Oregonian’s Web site demanded every dirty morsel about Caldwell’s relationship with the young woman. (I’m surprised someone didn’t inquire about her bra size.)  And, of course, they complained about the hypocrisy of an editor who has editorialized about other people’s faults – as if hypocrisy were unique to newsrooms and not a member of every workplace, every family.

Many newspaper readers – indeed, many Americans – want hypocrisy. They don’t want raw, unpleasant truths.

Reporters routinely deal with readers who think they can call a newspaper and order a news story the same way they order a pizza, picking and choosing what facts it should include.

In my first year as a newspaper reporter at an Oregon daily, I discovered that a few years earlier one of the editors had been beaten up at a bus depot where he supposedly had been soliciting young men. Back then, the standard explanation for not reporting these kinds of details was, “This is a family newspaper.”

There used to be a joke in the newspaper business that a good copy editor had to have a dirty mind in order to catch any possible double entendres or anything potentially offensive. When I was a city editor on a Washington state newspaper, one of the copy editors – a young woman – was forever seeing erections on male subjects in photographs. We would tease her about this obsession, but some of the photos were cropped or substituted.

As a reporter in Southern California, I did a series of stories about street prostitutes. A police sergeant told me some prostitutes were addicted to sex, and when I ran this past a prostitute in her early 40’s, she was incredulous: “I’ve been a hooker for 16 years, and I ain’t never had a climax. That’s like asking a waitress if she likes being on her feet.”

For a week, my editors argued about that word “climax,” as well as another quote, this one from a young prostitute who’d had a knife held to her throat. In repeating what the man with the knife said to her, the young prostitute said, “He told me, ‘I better not feel your teeth on my, uh … you know.’”

Eventually, the climax quote survived – courtesy of a female editor who put up a vigorous fight for it. But she couldn’t sway the top two male editors on the teeth quote.

Any reporter or editor who has spent any serious time in newspapers will have stories like this. So the Caldwell story is shocking … yet it isn’t.

It’s shocking to read in the newspaper. But is it shocking that a 63-year-old man was having sex with a 23-year-old female he wasn’t married to? Do kids like Disneyland?

It’s the kind of cliché that caseworkers in the “After Life”  hear again and again.

– Pamela Fitzsimmons