Opinion Piece by B.J. Strawter, Jr
Watching Who Killed Garrett Phillips? reminded me that journalism is not simply about reporting what happened. It is about refusing to accept that the first explanation is necessarily the right one.
I was watching Who Killed Garrett Phillips?, the two-part HBO documentary about the 2011 murder of a 12-year-old white boy in Potsdam, New York.
Garrett was found strangled in the apartment where he lived with his mother. It was a terrible crime in a small town that wanted an answer.
The police found one.
Oral “Nick” Hillary was Garrett’s mother’s former boyfriend. He was Jamaican. He was Black. He had coached soccer at Clarkson University. And in a town that was overwhelmingly white, authorities quickly decided he was the man they needed to investigate.
Hillary was eventually charged with second-degree murder. Five years after Garrett was killed, a judge acquitted him.
Garrett’s murder remains unsolved.
I’m not writing this to retry the case. I wasn’t there. I haven’t reviewed every document or interviewed the people involved.
What stayed with me was something else.
The questions.
Not only whether Hillary killed Garrett, but why the investigation narrowed around him so quickly. Why certain facts were treated as important and others were not. Why people with power appeared to receive different treatment from the Black man authorities had placed at the center of the case.
And what happens when the people responsible for finding the truth become too invested in the answer they have already chosen.
The official story is only the beginning
There is a version of journalism that simply repeats what officials say.
The police announce an arrest. The headline reports the arrest.
A prosecutor files charges. The story reports the charges.
A school district releases a statement. A politician holds a press conference. A company sends over a response polished by its communications department.
All of that may be accurate. None of it necessarily tells us what happened.
The most important question is often the one that comes next.
How do you know?
Show me the evidence.
Who else was questioned?
What doesn’t fit?
Whose account are we accepting?
Who benefits from this version?
What are you leaving out?
That is the work.
A journalist is not supposed to begin with the assumption that every institution is corrupt. But a journalist cannot begin with the assumption that an institution must be right simply because it is official.
Power already has a microphone.
Journalism is supposed to ask whether what comes through that microphone is true.
Curiosity is not a software feature
We are having a lot of conversations right now about whether artificial intelligence will replace journalists.
I use AI. We are building with it at BLAC. It can search through information, organize records, summarize documents and help us see connections faster. Used correctly, it can give a journalist more time to do the work that requires a journalist.
But speed is not curiosity.
A machine can identify a contradiction. A journalist has to care enough to find out why it exists.
A machine can generate a list of questions. A journalist has to sit across from another human being and know when the answer does not answer the question.
A machine does not knock on a door three times after being turned away twice. It does not earn the trust of somebody who has spent years believing no one would listen. It does not sit in a courtroom and notice who is treated with patience, who is treated with suspicion and who already appears guilty before the evidence is presented.
It does not decide that something feels wrong and give up nights, weekends and sometimes years trying to prove it.
That takes curiosity. It takes judgment. It takes tenacity.
It takes a person.
Black people know what an accusation can do
Nick Hillary was acquitted, but an acquittal does not return the years taken from a person.
It does not erase the headline announcing the arrest. It does not restore every relationship, job or opportunity damaged by suspicion. It does not make everyone who decided you were guilty reconsider what they believed.
And an acquittal did not solve Garrett’s murder.
That matters too.
When authorities decide too early that they have their person, there may be two injustices. An innocent person can be pursued, and the person who actually committed the crime can remain free.
Black people understand the danger of being turned into the answer before all the questions have been asked. We have seen accusation treated as evidence and proximity treated as guilt. We have watched institutions protect their conclusions long after the facts stopped supporting them.
That is one reason journalism matters so much to us.
Not journalism as content. Not journalism as people arguing on television. Not journalism as a steady stream of rewritten press releases.
Reporting.
Someone reading the documents. Someone staying through the hearing. Someone noticing that two accounts do not match. Someone calling again. Someone asking the question everyone else has decided is impolite, inconvenient or already settled.
What disappears when local journalism disappears
The Garrett Phillips case became the subject of an HBO documentary directed by Liz Garbus. Most stories never receive that kind of attention.
They happen in a school-board meeting that no reporter attends.
They happen inside a police department nobody covers regularly.
They happen when public money is approved in a room with six people in it.
They happen when a neighborhood changes, a business closes, a child is failed or a family is dismissed.
If no one is there, the record belongs almost entirely to the institution.
That is what concerns me when local newsrooms shrink. We usually discuss the loss in terms of fewer stories. But the greater loss may be fewer questions.
Who is watching?
Who knows what was said last year?
Who recognizes the name buried on page 83 of a public document?
Who asks why the numbers in the presentation do not match what residents are experiencing?
Who stays with the story after everybody else moves on?
Communities do not only lose coverage when journalists disappear. They lose scrutiny.
This is why BLAC exists
I own a media company, so I understand how easy it is to get consumed by platforms, traffic, algorithms, social posts and whatever technology is supposed to transform publishing next.
Those things matter. We have to reach people. We have to build a sustainable business. We have to use the tools available to us.
But none of those tools is the purpose.
The purpose is to look closely.
To ask better questions.
To tell stories that would otherwise be missed, flattened or told by someone without enough context to understand them.
Sometimes that means celebrating Black people who are building something beautiful. Sometimes it means documenting our history before it disappears. Sometimes it means examining an institution that would prefer we accept its statement and move along.
Journalism is not important because journalists deserve to be protected from change. Every industry changes.
Journalism is important because power does not question itself.
Somebody has to ask the next question.
And then listen carefully enough to know when the answer requires another one.
Case details were verified against the American Film Institute’s interview with director Liz Garbus and North Country Public Radio’s reporting on the documentary and unresolved case.
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