Small Town Prank Or NSLA Misstep? The Fraught Climate of Covid Reporting And Some Words About The Soul of Journalism

Earlier version published at UnCoverDC May 25

Update: Did The NSLA Really Order A NY Restaurant To Take Down Mask Signs?

On Friday evening, May 21, UnCoverDc published an article I wrote based on the account of a restaurant manager in Amenia New York, that struck people as being hard to believe, possibly false news. [I can’t find it now but I had reported that a restaurant manager was called and emailed by NSLA and told to take down mask signs.]

Being only 2 days after Gov. Cuomo’s  sudden“re-opening” of the Empire State, people were like prisoners hanging onto the bars, distrustful of hope. Then paranoia and hostility set in, like the Twilight Zone Episode of the neighbors who turned on each other, fearing a UFO was in the sky. 

Nerves and relationships shattered; Fear set in to replace the momentary joy of what we first believed had happened. America has become the land of “gotcha,” and the land of Ozark, where nobody trusts anybody.  It’s also the land of goodness, and random acts of kindness.

Freedom fighters I know kindly offered to send people to the restaurant to lend support. 

In all of it, and well aware this is all a preposterous exercise in myopia, our story lands on what Snopes would call “MOSTLY TRUE.”  Or “True But Containing A Few Question Marks We Can’t Straighten.” 

Here’s the upshot: 

—The NSLA (New York State Liquor Authority told us they did not issue any edict for restaurants to take down signs.  We do not know why or how Mr. Miller and the owner of the restaurant both got such a notice as well as a phone call, or who was behind it. If somebody “pranked” Mr. Miller, it’s a felony. 

— We learned that NYSLA have been in touch Amenia Steak House since they were sent our story by another reporter, in my view, neglected the sensitivity of the situation and reached out to NSLA without first trying to speak with Mr. Miller. Why? Because this is tyranny and restaurant owners are especially targeted. I went on Marty’s word and memory and could not dream it was a prank. I still don’t have the final answer what happened here. And that’s no longer what I’m writing about.

—Thankfully, when reached yesterday, NSLA confirmed to us that the restaurant remains in excellent standing and is not “in trouble.” (Mike Smith from the NSLA was not a petty bureaucrat, but quite decent.) 

More Myopia

Here’s the twist, and why I said, “Mostly True:”

On May 24, I was at a restaurant in Litchfield CT, 40 minutes from Amenia, at a place called DiFranco’s. Just like The Amenia Steak House, all masks were off, staff and patrons, and there were no mask signs anywhere. The owner and I were chatting and I asked him if he had taken down his signs; He confirmed that he had. I asked when— he said May 19, the same day as Mr. Miller did, based on what he believed to be NSLA’s order. I asked if he got any edict from NSLA or any other government office. He said no, but rather, he had heard on TV, in news reports, that restaurant owners were “no longer required” to have signs up, so he took them all down. “Connecticut follows New York,” he told me. 

“You’ve been vindicated,” said Mark Crispin Miller, professor of Media Studies at NYU, and a friend.  

I thought for a moment. Not quite. 

“It was true from another angle, harmonious with what was happening overall, but the original fact was wrong, or at least possibly wrong, unless somebody from NSLA made a mistake,” I said. “It winds up all being mute since everybody’s signs are down if they want them to be, but this restaurant in Litchfield was totally relaxed about it. There were simply NO Covid vibes there. It was fully normal.”

I draw the line at requesting a forensic examination of Mr. Miller’s emails and incoming calls. 

“You were just trying to spread a little bit of hope,” my London based friend Anna said, when I shared my anxiety about possibly harming a person’s life with my reportage. “It’s time to jog on, my darling.”

“Covid” as we have all learned, painfully, has made people considerably less gracious, polite, and considerate of the feelings of others. A coarsening of a whole culture and people, as happens in times of terror. My lesson was that “..when something seems too good to be true it probably is.”

Or, it’s true, but just can’t be proven true just yet.

 Can there be sterile accuracies and fruitful errors? Is journalism just an illusory system of “nailing down” ever morphing situations, to create little bricks with which we build straw houses? 

Journalists live in fear of being factually wrong, but rarely wrong a humans, because we are supposedly exempt. 

One should not publish precipitously, if anything is in doubt, I suppose, but again, stories are alive, they keep moving like trains, taking on new passengers as they go. 

Tracy, my editor at UnCoverDc said: “Imagine if they could have applied this degree of fact checking to Russiagate,” one of many stories she was vindicated on, rather thanklessly. 

I tend to reach fast for branches of hope in the rushing rapids of misery. Now I feel like a moose in a small town, who should have kept my head down. 

But hear me out. 

I come from a tradition of inspirational story-telling, with heroes, fighters, and kind people taking center stage. My father, who told such stories on the radio for 60 straight years, had a quip that will make J-School types reach for their stomach-settling tablets.

“Too many good stories are ruined by over-verification.”

Did you laugh even slightly? 

We are tightly wound, humorless, expectant of ruin and persecution at all times after 13 months of this miserable insanity.  

Before it was all over, I saw terror and brokenness in the tear-filled eyes of a rural restaurant manager loved by all.  “I work so hard,” he said, wiping his eyes.

“I know you do,” I said. I promised it would all be fine.

But the truth is we do live in a vaporous, structure-less totalitarian system none of us can understand, and it causes chronic trauma, and anybody could lose their business at the drop of a mask. It’s like being a child in a house of rage and never knowing what exactly gets you “in trouble.”

Like a more psychotic version of GDR: Every vocalized concession to not worshipping the Covid State’s restrictions subject to loss of work, career, income and social belonging.

I wish, before he died, I could have said to my father, whose name was Barry: “We’re not journalists. We’re story-tellers, minstrels. We paint people in words. Their hopes, dreams, vulnerabilities, efforts to triumph over evil. Until such time, God forbid, we can no longer discern the ‘human,’ in all of this.”

—Celia Farber