whodunit?

In old westerns, the gunslinger pulls his six-shooter and issues a dire warning: "No false moves." Then the bullets fly.

At WCPO-TV, a Scripps-Howard station in Cincinnati, the shooting is almost over. No real blood has been spilled, but two gunslingers -- I-Team investigative reporters Corky Johnson and Karl Idsvoog -- have saddled up and ridden out.

Questions arise as the dust settles. Who made the false move? Was it Johnson and Idsvoog for their handling of a tricky story? Or was it managers for the station who ordered the reporters to drop a part of that story that involved an influential local lawyer?

The opening scene is early last August, when trial lawyers told the reporters about judges who appeared to tip the scales of justice in favor of contributors. Johnson and Idsvoog, experienced reporters who had trained other Scripps-Howard I-Teams, easily got clearance for a project and began loading contributions into a database so they could look for patterns.

Their preliminary findings, Johnson says, included a lower court judge who contributed to an appellate judge sitting directly above. And there were lawyers who tried cases before judges they had supported with contributions. But the project needed a quid pro quo, a dramatic case in which a judge's findings were so plainly biased that no one could miss the point.

In early September the team got a tip on a long-running custody battle in which the judge had ruled for the father, James E. Evans, a well-connected lawyer who serves as general counsel under the powerful local business magnate Carl H. Lindner, Jr. In the database Idsvoog and Johnson were building, both Evans and Lindner showed up as significant contributors to various candidates for the bench.

"We pulled the court documents on the custody case," Johnson says, "and in early September we had a big meeting. The whole team was there. We spelled the whole case out. They gave us a green light."

The mother in the custody case became a primary source for the reporters. She had been cut off from her child, with only supervised visits allowed. The court had heard lots of testimony indicating that the mother was seriously unstable and that the daughter, now fifteen years old, was facing a mental crisis as a result of an unhealthy relationship with her mother. Telephone contact between the two, and even third-party communications, were banned.

Idsvoog and Johnson say they needed to ask the girl, on camera, if her mother had ever mistreated her. So, early in October, Johnson approached the gift on the sidewalk near her school and handed her a note of introduction from her mother. "These men are here to help re-establish visitations," the note said. "Tell them how you feel. I love you, Mom." The team says they saw the note as simply a way to let the girl know it would be all right to talk. It didn't misrepresent their purpose, Johnson says, because the reporter identified himself to the girl and gave her a business card.

As for the court's ban on the mother communicating with the girl through third parties, Johnson says he and his partner "would never knowingly violate the law. We were trying to do our job and we thought it was crucial to interview the girl."

Johnson says he felt great after talking to the girl, who was videotaped with a hidden camera. "She said she loved her mom, missed her very much." And the question of abuse by her mother had drawn a clear response: "No. God, no," the child said, as Johnson recalls.

The pieces were coming together, at least from Idsvoog's and Johnson's perspective. They had Evans, the father, giving campaign money to judges in the case (as well as to other judges). They had the family court's imposition of severe restrictions on visitation in a ruling based in part on experts hired by the father -- without a psychological evaluation by an independent expert. They had an appellate ruling that faulted the family court judge, in part for relying on the father's witnesses. They had a federal suit, filed in October 1993 by the mother, charging that the state court judges had been swayed by campaign contributions. And, now, they had the girl on camera.

Back in the newsroom later that afternoon, Johnson took a call from Evans's lawyer. As Johnson recalls the conversation, the lawyer was threatening: "You sound like a young man with a career in front of you," the lawyer said. "I hope we don't have to take this to a higher level."

In the following days, Evans's lawyer also called one of the station's attorneys. An executive of Scripps-Howard weighed in with a cautionary comment to the station's general manager, J. B. Chase. News director Jim Zarchin grew more concerned after an informal conversation with a friend whose wife related troubling details about the mother. The three conversations, Zarchin says, left him worried that the custody battle was an ill-fitting case in point for the story.

As they looked deeper, Zarchin and other managers at WCPO-TV say they perceived mounting evidence that the reporters did not have a real quid pro quo, that the painful custody case was the opposite of clear cut.

By mid-October the story was in deep trouble. By then the issue had split the shop -- reporters on one side, managers on the other -- both sides claiming theirs was the journalistic high ground. In conversation with colleagues, Idsvoog and Johnson spoke of corporate censorship. Some staff members matched the Evans case with tales of another story related to Carl Lindnet that had been heavily edited. The place was tense.

Station managers, saying they were concerned with the team's handling of the note from the mother and weary of the censorship charges, pulled the trigger on January 4. They called in Idsvoog and Johnson, read them a seventeen-page memo assailing both the conduct of the team and the news-worthiness of the custody case, then handed them a much shorter one from Chase, the general manager. That shorter memo gave them three choices: apologize to management in a meeting to be attended by the staff, quit, or be fired. The apology, Chase wrote, should "acknowledge that your allegations [of censorship] and your overall news judgment were, simply stated, off base."

Johnson and Idsvoog walked out. A dispute lingers over whether they quit or were fired. Both reporters turned down a severance offer because it included a clause requiring their silence on the matter.

Chase won't comment. A lawyer for the station, John F. Novatney, Jr., says Idsvoog and Johnson "were on a vendetta course" and would not take direction from their managers. "We felt, when everything started to come into focus, that they had lost their objectivity and for some reason had become spokespersons for the ex-wife," Novatney says. "That's where we parted company."

Idsvoog, for his part, believes management had been intimidated by Evans, one of the largest contributors to judges that he and his partner found. He and Johnson, he says, refused a management request to pursue the story without the custody case. "How could we do the story without Evans?" Idsvoog says. "He was among the biggest contributors. This is the worst case of corporate censorship I have ever experienced. There is no way we could accept this and ever call ourselves journalists. So here we are."

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