Paul Nyden, a longtime investigative reporter at the Charleston Gazette, used to say he had two tenets that guided his work. The first was: "Figure out who the bad guys are, and fuck 'em." And the second was: "Then fuck 'em again." Not exactly what they teach in J-school. But in West Virginia, where the entire arc of the state's history has been perverted by a seemingly endless run of bad guys, it's not only a justifiable approach to journalism; it's an essential one.
Guys like Johnson N. Camden, one of the state's founding fathers, who sold out to Standard Oil in the 1870s and then conspired with John D. Rockefeller Sr. to crush West Virginia's nascent refining industry, before retiring to a private island off the Florida coast. Or William MacCorkle, a son of the Confederacy who got rich helping outside investors get control of the state's timber and mineral wealth ("I smiled, and the money came," he wrote in his memoir), then exploited racial fears to get elected governor in 1892.
Or, more recently, Governor Wally Barron, who went to prison in 1971, for—stick with me here—bribing the jury foreman during an earlier trial on charges of, yes, bribery, of which he had been acquitted. Or Arch Moore, the three-term governor who was dogged for years by corruption allegations, and who finally was put away (thanks in part to Nyden's reporting) in 1990 after pleading guilty to five felonies, including extortion and obstruction of justice.
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