The Press: The Devil in Duval County

In Hawthorne’s allegorical short story, Young Goodman Brown, the ingenuous Puritan wanders into the forest one dark night and catches all his friends, neighbors and saintly village elders in mortal sin—in this case devil worship. It might have been just a dream, but it made a lifelong cynic of young Brown. Much the same thing happened not long ago to a young reporter named Charley Thompson, who wandered into Jacksonville. Fla. The sin was not devil worship but pollution, a suitable modern equivalent. And it was no dream.

WJXT-TV in Jacksonville had a reputation for crusading. Last year when the station hired Thompson, 28, an experienced Memphis newspaper reporter, he was told: “We have no sacred cows here.” Assigned to the pollution beat in March, Thompson turned out a series of explosive documentaries that named names, showed proof and dumped skeletons out of some of the best closets in Duval County. A local political candidate with a strong conservation program turned out to be board chairman of one of the county’s worst polluters. A member of the water quality control board also served on the board of a paper company with a dreadful record for water pollution. A company cited for befouling both water and air boasted an executive on the air quality control board. One of the area’s major employers proved to be an ocean polluter of vast proportions. Thompson even discovered that WJXT dumps its film-processing chemicals into the St. Johns River, although that story never went on the air.

Approving fan mail poured in, but Charley was soon caught in a stampede of sacred cows. He got blamed when the station manager was dropped from the Rotary Club and when the Chamber of Commerce accused WJXT of “trying to keep Jacksonville from developing.” Employees of one embattled company made explicit threats on his life. He began to worry when the station’s ad director sarcastically offered him a list of WJXT’s customers “so I could hit them systematically instead of one by one.” The herd kept pressing, and several weeks ago Thompson was fired for doing his job too well. “I’ve covered civil rights marches and jail riots,” says the bewildered Young Goodman Thompson, who also picked up 18 decorations in Viet Nam. “But this conservation thing is the one that really scared the hell out of me.”