Listen on the go: Four Days investigation, narrated by Kevin Donovan and produced by The 4 Days Film Festival, is released on Vimeo.
There’s a lot of talk out there about the state of journalism. Some call it the “fourth estate” others call it “fake news” and finally, as I noted here on my last blog, some call it media bias.
So as I started thinking about which state was my own, I wondered what the world around me was like and how to approach a story that seemed more than a little strange.
A friend of mine had recently been asked by The New York Times Magazine to report on an investigation at the highest levels of the New York Police Department. Her story was in an October 14, 2016 issue. I’d been following the story since its early days in New York Magazine and the Huffington Post last year.
We were supposed to meet on Monday, February 2nd at the Times Magazine offices in New York.
I’d left Manhattan’s Times lobby a few days earlier with a heavy case file full of notes, with a stack of photos and stories, and with a sense that what I had written was far too narrow. The Times Magazine story was written with a “what if” mind frame as we all go through life. What if the cops had killed a man and a cop? What if the cops had falsified a crime scene and it was later proven his death was caused by the fireman? That happened in the movie “The Departed.”
If you’ve never seen “The Departed,” or seen the movie in its entirety, it’s a movie about a retired federal agent who kills two people after they get into a deadly game and he is eventually imprisoned.
The movie is set at a time when federal agents were investigating a federal crime and also a local crime, both connected to corruption within the New Orleans Police Department. The two crimes take place in the same region in the same city, so the story is set. One of the movie’s characters is a retired federal agent who is now making a living
