Oklahoma Editor: I Need ‘To Verify’ The Sources On Our Blockbuster Deputy Story

The executive editor of The Tulsa World newspaper told TPM on Monday afternoon that while she doesn’t “have any reason to doubt” the sources of a blockbuster article the paper published last week she is now working “to verify” those sources after the two journalists who wrote it resigned earlier in the day.

Journalists Dylan Goforth and Ziva Branstetter wrote the article, published Thursday, that alleged supervisors in the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office had falsified training records for a white reserve deputy who has been charged with manslaughter in the shooting death of an unarmed black man.

The case came to national attention after video surfaced showing the reserve deputy, Robert Bates, shooting the man as he was on the ground being arrested. Bates later told investigators he had mixed up his gun and his Taser.

Goforth and Branstetter’s article, which was based on anonymous sources, said supervisors in the sheriff’s office had signed off on firearms certifications and field training that Bates did not complete. (Attorneys for Bates have said he received proper training and they criticized the newspaper’s use of anonymous sources.)

Then on Monday, Goforth and Branstetter resigned suddenly from the newspaper. In an interview with TPM, The Tulsa World executive editor, Susan Ellerbach, said the reporters’ departure was not related to the Bates article. But when pressed on whether the newspaper was standing behind their story, Ellerbach pointedly declined to respond, saying: “That’s all I’d like to say right now.”

Goforth and Branstetter later explained that they were joining a local news website, which has yet to launch, and that the venture was in the works months before the newspaper published its report about Bates’ training. Two other journalists also left the newspaper on Monday to join the startup, they said.

Based on their account, TPM went back to Ellerbach to give her the chance to clarify her earlier comments.

“I don’t have any reason to doubt their sources, but their sources are not sources to anyone else in my newsroom right now,” Ellerbach said. “So I’m trying to establish contact with those sources and make sure that they are standing by that.”

“I don’t know if you’ve ever had two key people that are on a breaking news story walk out of your newsroom at some point, but I want to verify those things for this publication going forward,” she added. “I don’t have any reason to doubt their sources. I want to continue to confirm them for the paper.”

Earlier on Monday, Branstetter told TPM in a phone interview that she and Goforth had vigorous conversations about the article’s sourcing with highers-up before publication.

“Of course there’s conversations about the sourcing of the report before you run it,” she told TPM. “They knew our sources. We talked about whether our sources were solid. We talked about what records corroborated our sources before we ran it.”

There were no concerns raised by anyone at the newspaper about the report’s sourcing after it was published, she added.

In fact, Branstetter had nothing but glowing things to say about working with Ellerbach. She pointed to coverage of a botched execution of an inmate as an example of the support she received. Branstetter and her colleague Cary Aspinwall, who also left the newspaper to join the new media venture, were named as finalists on Monday for the Pulitzer Prize because of their work on that coverage.

“The Tulsa World supported Cary and I through all of that coverage about the execution,” Branstetter told TPM. “We took a lot of heat — The World did — because it’s a state that’s very favorable to the death penalty. They backed us all the way on that and they backed us all the way on this. This is just an exciting opportunity that came along for us at a really weird time.”