Behind the News, The Water Cooler
Carl Monday On Relentless Reporting, a Murder Confession and His Real Name
The Cleveland journalist who recently reported a piece about sexual misbehavior in area libraries talks about the reaction to the story and where he draws the line.
By Edward B. Colby Tue 4 Jul 2006 08:30 AM
Carl Monday (courtesy WKYC)
Carl Monday, an investigative reporter with WKYC-TV in Cleveland, received wide attention recently for a story on sexual misbehavior in area libraries. Earlier in May, WKYC broadcast a weeklong series by Monday, “The DUI Dilemma,” which followed the exploits of a chronic drunk driving offender, Patrick “Bubba” Naska. Monday, 55, who was named “Best TV Investigator” by Cleveland Scene, has won 42 regional Emmys in his career. CJR Daily spoke with Monday last week.
Edward B. Colby: Your reporting is relentless, and two of your recent main subjects, Michael Cooper and Patrick “Bubba” Naska, were later arrested after your stories about them aired. But when one of your stories ends with you taking refuge in your car from a father going berserk, and [another includes] Bubba saying, “I’m about ready to kill you,” no matter how intoxicated he was, do you ever think, “Hey, maybe I’ve gone too far?”
Carl Monday: Well, first of all, I don’t think our intention when we decide to take on a story is necessarily to get somebody arrested, or make life miserable for anybody. In both of these cases, the story kind of took on a life of its own, especially with the library story. In the case of Bubba, we felt we had to approach him at some point, and he was all too willing to talk to us, so we just let him ramble on. I think we’d asked him what right did he have to be behind the wheel and putting us all at risk, I think it’s a question that our viewers would have asked if they had been put in that position.
As far as the library story, again, we started off just doing a story. We got statistics and crime reports from the Cleveland and [other] public library systems, and we found, I think just in the past six months, over 50 examples of significant crimes being committed in the library, and a lot of sex-related crimes. And when we found that we said, well, let’s take a hidden camera into the library, and just see what’s happened. We certainly didn’t expect to find somebody [23-year-old Michael Cooper] actually masturbating in the library. And then when we got the video, we spent actually, I bet you it was two weeks before we arrived at a decision on what to do with the video, and we agreed that it was representative of some of the kinds of things that we found in the reports themselves. We felt that it was the right thing to do to air the video, but we naturally wanted to sanitize it as much as possible to make it acceptable for air.
We didn’t have any complaints about the video itself. Nobody complained that “Hey, you were too graphic,” or that “You put sexually-related video on the air,” but there were questions about whether we should have put it on in the first place. Again, that decision was made based on the fact that we had complaints of a lot of sexual activity in the library, sometimes in front of minors; a lot of downloading of sexual content, of sexual predators in the library, sexual predators approaching librarians, grabbing librarians, and on and on and on — sex in the bathroom. So that was what was behind that decision process.
EBC: But still, many bloggers, as you put it, “seemed more than ready to tar and feather” you. Do you think some of their criticisms were justified in terms of the library story, or would you still present the story the same way next time around?
CM: Yeah, they’re certainly entitled to their opinion. We expected to take some heat for it. I think we could have done a better job of making clearer that, one, he was an adult and fully responsible for his actions. We did tell the audience that this was not his first time doing this. He admitted it, so did the library, and I think that was part of our decision process, as well, that he’d been doing this on more than one occasion.
Maybe we should have approached him somewhere else, maybe in a more private setting. We should have made it clearer that we did not approach the family, because a lot of the criticism concerned our quote-unquote interview with the father and the mother. We never knocked on their door — they saw us talking to their son, they came out on the front lawn and started getting verbal and physical with me and my photographer, Mike Leonard. And, well, we had them there, they wanted to know what we were doing there, and I said, “We’re here because your son did this, you know, what do you think about it?” And that’s when all hell broke loose. And of course then we had to decide whether do we include that in the story, and we decided, well, let’s not make that a focal point of the story, let’s put it at the end of the story, and this is what happened while we were out trying to interview Michael Cooper.
This thing has really, like I said, taken on a life of its own. I mean, they’re selling t-shirts on the Internet, “Carl Monday Caught Me Masturbating,” and cartoon strips, and it’s been on every blog and Web site … We certainly like our stories to be seen and heard, but we never thought it would get that kind of exposure. It’s been on MSNBC, it’s been everywhere.
EBC: How long have you been doing investigative television reporting?
GollyG
Wed 5 Jul 2006 03:58 PMYou're with me, Carl Monday.
Andrew Boggs, BA
Mon 29 Sep 2008 10:42 PMInvestigative reporting is a dangerous living, one makes a lot of enemies. I worked with Carl Monday in the late 1970's to mid-1980's at Newsradio 1300. I've seen Carl come back with a black eye and a messed-up wardrobe from time-to-time. Carl was and I imagine still is a "matter-of-fact" reserved type of guy. I always thought he was a little older than I - was suprised to realize we were about the same age. Anyway, if you read this, HI CARL!!!
- Andrew, MALL727net- (formally, NewsRadio 1300)