Tag-Teaming Dr. Dino's Trial

Apparently, the Pensacola News Journal intends to cover Dr. Dino's trial for tax evasion straight, no chaser. No H.L. Mencken to give us the colorful commentary; no 'kick, bounce, or leap' in the style of A.J. Liebling, no Runyonesque accounts of the certifiably weird characters in the Dr. Dino trial who surely rival the cast of the Daddy and Peaches soap opera.

Just the facts, ma'am?

Well, not quite. The paper seemingly has decided to use a tag-team of reporters, switching from one to the next with each passing day. It's a terrible decision, no doubt driven by Gannett Corporation's devastating cuts across the news room. But once made, you'd think the dwindling staff of PNJ reporters sentenced to cover the case would at least read the news dispatches filed by their predecessors before they rush off to court themselves.

Apparently not. Today's front-page, top-of-the-fold coverage of the tax evasion trial of Dr. Dino is the handiwork of reporter Amy Sowder. Somehow, she manages to drain even more blood and context from the event than did her colleague, Angela Fail, in yesterday's paper.

For proof, we submit Ms. Sowder's lede as Exhibit 1:

"Two people who worked for a Pensacola evangelist testified Wednesday in federal court that they didn't consider where they worked to be a church."

That's a two-fer. In a single opening sentence, Sowder has managed both to focus the reader's attention on the most irrelevant part of yesterday's testimony and to camouflage the most pertinent part.

Whether Dr. Dino's "Dinosaur Adventure Land" is a "church" or not is legally irrelevant to the charges he faces. As Angela Fail reported yesterday, prosecutor Michelle Heldmeyer explained it this way in her opening statement to the jury:

"...though the Hovinds refer to their business as a ministry, it's not affiliated with a church, she said.

"It's not a church," she said. "But that doesn't matter, because a church still has to pay payroll tax."

The camouflage starts with the headline -- "Workers Testify In 'Dr. Dino' Trial" -- and is repeated throughout Souder's dispatch. "Workers." That's a nice, neutral-sounding word. What Souder doesn't tell her readers is that she's using that word to avoid addressing a central issue in the trial: not whether "Dinosaur Adventure Land" is a church, but whether the people who were staffing it -- the "workers" -- are employees or independent contractors.

If the religious zealots who took money from a gullible public at Dr. Dino's emporium of ecclesiastical effluent were "employees" then Dr. Dino was required by law to secure and file W-4s, withhold payroll taxes, send out W-2 forms, and escrow both employee and employer Social Security taxes. If, instead, they were "independent contractors" then he wasn't.

The standards for resolving that issue are well known. As the IRS explains it on the web:

"In determining whether the person providing service is an employee or an independent contractor, all information that provides evidence of the degree of control and independence must be considered.
* * *
A general rule is that anyone who performs services for you is your employee if you can control what will be done and how it will be done.

Reporting facts without context is bad journalism. Even so, we'd be ready to forgive all if only the PNJ reporters would write their trial dispatches in a compelling or entertaining way.

But readers of the PNJ will search in vain through the past two days for any hint of what the witnesses really looked like on the witness stand. Did they sweat and shift uncomfortably in the seat as they came into the presence of the self-proclaimed "steward" of "god's money"? Did any of the jurors visibly react to the testimony? Is the judge keeping a tight rein on the proceedings? Or, instead, is she letting out leagues of loose rope with which Dr. Dino and his lawyers are invited to hang their own case?

Is there no moment of levity in the courtroom to break the tension among the lawyers? (That would be a first.) No quick exchange of Christ-like beatific smiles between Dr. Dino loyalists in the gallery who still believe god sent him something like a text-message to open up a commercial bank checking account and have "his employees to sign nondisclosure agreements if they wanted to keep their jobs"?

Little wonder serious people are asking if newspapers can survive the digital information age. The answer is: not if they report trials the way the News Journal is covering this one.