“. . . And it’s not like I’ll be a total stranger up there in Carson City. The warden will recognize me; and the Con Boss - I once interviewed them for The New York Times. Along with a lot of other cons, guards, cops and assorted hustlers who got ugly, by mail, when the article never appeared.

Why not? They asked. They wanted their stories told. And it was hard to explain; in those circles, that everything they told me went into the wastebasket or at least the dead - end file because the lead paragraphs I wrote for that article didn’t satisfy some editor 3,000 miles away - some nervous drone behind a grey formica desk in the bowels of a journalistic bureaucracy that no con in Nevada will ever understand - and that the article finally died on the vine, as it were, because I refused to rewrite the lead. For reasons of my own.

None of which would make much sense in The Yard. But what the hell? Why worry about details?”

“The Crisis of Foster Care” by former Time reporter Timothy Roche is my all-time favorite investigative reporting work. The introduction is brilliant: horrible, heart-wrenching, and then straight to the point. The reporting is thorough and the composition beautiful. It draws you into the issue with case studies but doesn’t hold back data. From the article

“The autopsy photo shows a little boy who looks relieved to be dead. His eyes are closed. A hospital tube protrudes from his broken nose. He has deep cuts above his right ear and dark linear scars on his forehead. The bruises on his back are a succession of yellows, greens and blues. On the bottom of his tiny feet are unhealed third-degree burns. He had been battered and tortured. He had been tied with panty hose and belts to a banister by the woman who had become his foster grandmother. The state of Georgia had taken him away from his mother, then abandoned him in the woman’s care. Little Terrell Peterson had so many injuries that the medical examiner gave up counting them. The child was six years old. He weighed only 29 lbs. The foster-care system is not working in Atlanta.“

The article was noticed, and I remember seeing a string of similar stories in broadcast form following this article. But seven years later, the foster-care systems in most states are still very much in crisis. Unfortunately, disadvantaged children don’t vote. Which is one of the reasons I admired Time and Roche so much for doing this story.

Why hasn’t Time had anything on par with this article lately? General media consolidation? Priority shift caused by…? General print media problems caused by lower readership and subsequent lower ad revenue? I couldn’t tell you, but I am curious. Probably not one thing.