I met Suzi Parker in the spring of ‘23.
We now know it was a fake social media profile that made our paths cross. Suzi was investigating curious arrangements inside Arkansas school districts. So was I.
I had been investigating districts, and the unique arrangements made in empty rooms once a month. That's right, the dull world of school boards. What had I learned? That your local school district controls a very large portion of the hard-earned taxes we all pay.
As our paths collided over the common interests in these boards, their decisions, the ridiculous money spent, we quickly found common ground. Investigating, we sparked a friendship that has grown into a small business.
The Reckoning.
If you have been following the Reckoning you likely realize that investigating is a key component of the work we do. That investigating nature, questioning everything, has led us to breaking many stories ahead of all of the legacy media.
For instance, we recently investigated and broke the story about the 2024 election manipulation in Pulaski County by an employee in the County Clerk's office during early voting. In fact, we had reported that story on three occasions before other media took over the story, claiming it as their own.
We've had an advantage in a way of landing scoop because of Suzi's extensive experience as an investigative reporter.
Who is Suzi Parker?
Born in Pine Bluff, a local yokel she is not. A stranger to news? Nope. New to the scene, not hardly. She even has bachelor's and master's degrees in journalism. Here's some information that the wordsmiths and hacks won't tell you.
Let's look at some of Parker's work history.
One of her first big scoops was landing an exclusive interview with Whitewater scandal figure, Susan McDougal, for the New York Times Magazine after her acquittal. Read it here.
Have you ever heard of the boys on the tracks? The date Aug. 18, 1999, Parker's headline “The great Arkansas railway mystery” for Salon.
The Arkansas River Delta is known for farming. Have you ever heard of the human prison plasma farming that took place right here in Arkansas? Read Suzi Parker’s “Blood Money” another Salon article from 1998.
Ever heard of US News and World Report? Check out Parker's article on the Obamas and their teleprompter training.
Do you remember Gov. Mike Huckabee receiving “The Yellow Ribbon Medal of Freedom” from Tony Orlando in 2011? Parker wrote that for US News and World Report, too.
The Washington Post, who hasn't heard of that one? Here's an article I found where Parker describes her early years in journalism working for the Dem-Gaz writing obituaries: “When Death Was My Muse”
In 2010, Suzi was knee-deep in Arkansas politics apparently. Do you remember when Attorney General Tim Griffin ran a successful primary campaign against Scott Wallace for the 2nd Congressional District of Arkansas? You can check out Parker's report in The Daily Caller, the website Tucker Carlson once owned.
I have a confession to make. I, too, love catfish like the AG. That brings me to the Christian Science Monitor, and yet another great read by Parker check out: “Whiskered catfish stir a new trade controversy”
Suzi Parker took some heat in the early 2000's for writing about sex. This time you can read about her much-anticipated appearance on the “Dr. Phil Show” in the Dem-Gaz “Paper Trails.”
Once upon a time people were concerned about a pile of dead fish in the river. Read “Thousands of white bass turn up dead in Arkansas River” from where? Reuters.
The Daily Beast contracted with Parker in 2019 to connect the dots between Bill Clinton and Jeffrey Epstein. She did just that on July 24, 2019, after spending days in the archives at the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock. You can read it here. Another date of importance, August 10, 2019, Epstein met his demise, just 17 days after being deeply tied to the Clinton White House.
Hunter Biden recently made headlines again. It seems that Joe just had to pardon him for everything while so many Americans are locked up for doing so little. In 2023 Parker covered a Batesville trial for ol’ Hunter over his child support for The Daily Beast. Read “Three-Ring Circus as Hunter Biden Paternity Case Swamps Small Arkansas Town”.
Have you ever driven past a chicken house in South Arkansas on a hot humid summer afternoon? Read all about the stench and problems it was causing around the country written by Parker for Grist here.
Parker, who wrote for years for The Economist, even wrote for Town & Country magazine. Read “Plum Posts” about ambassadors before Arkansans Warren Stephens and Mike Huckabee landed upcoming ambassadorships to the United Kingdom and Israel.
Folks, it's no secret that the Arkansas media outlets are intentionally trying to snuff us out. Every time they fail to give the Reckoning attribution; they are in reality being very disrespectful to one of Arkansas most well-known national journalists. And they know it.
I asked Suzi to explain how her freelance career actually worked.
We often make reference to mainstream legacy media and their advertising revenue. We did not start the Reckoning to rely on advertising revenue. I asked Suzi to go over some of the key points that brought us to that decision.
Q: Suzi, were you an employee of all these national outlets?
Never. I had contracts with each one of them. Sometimes a contract was for just one assignment like the Town & Country story. Others were contracts as a regular contributor or as a correspondent. It depended on the assignment and the publication.
Q: Who determined your paycheck? Did you have a per word or per story rate? The editor usually determined it and if i did good work, the editor went to management and asked for a raise for me. Sometimes I got paid by the word but most of the time it was by the story. Then there were those times, a publication's budget was cut and so was my freelance gig or rate. Sometimes an outlet closed its doors and poof! There went that gig. Other times, an editor never paid. There are still stories out there I never received the pay I was promised.
Q: How did you discover story ideas? How often were you given assignments by editors? Nine times out of 10 I pitched ideas to the editors. I had to keep hustling story ideas. If breaking news happened, I would get a call from an editor with an assignment, but usually I pitched ideas all of the time. One time I pitched an editor seven times in one day and got rejected. On the eighth time, he accepted the pitch. I never gave up, and I don't give up.
I believe everything is a story or could be a story. Everyone has a story to tell. I also have a great network that sends tips to me. Then there's this infamous line: Not everything is a crime. It just may be a story. Yes, it just may be a story worth writing even if no one goes to jail.
Q: Can you explain how newsroom bias happens? For instance, how can a reporter fairly cover state government when state government provides a steady stream of revenue to the news outlet through advertising?
I think a lot of times when my story ideas were rejected, it was likely because an advertiser or someone higher up had told an editor not to publish something about so-and-so. More times than not I sold the idea or a variation of the idea to another outlet that apparently didn't have connections that would silence the story.
Newspapers and magazines used to have more stringent firewalls between advertising departments and newsrooms. I believe this has almost completely vanished and now it is get the money any way you can. This, of course, affects coverage.
I truly believe if a publication is getting advertising dollars from a county, city or state, there is a decision that occurs at a management level about how hard a publication wants to pursue their coverage of an issue.
You can see this in the Reckoning’s coverage of local school boards, for example. Local papers may not go so hard on a school board and its issues. They could lose advertising because say, a school board member owns the local real estate agency. Will that advertising get pulled from the local paper? The editor may go to church with a school board member. That could be awkward. There are a lot of dynamics and repercussions to truth telling.
Chances are the publisher could be friends with a CEO who is covering up something in a company, a reporter is close to a source who is involved in a scandal or an editor knows members of a board and won't cover the corruption.
I truly believe readers do not get all sides of most stories or even fair coverage on issues. Media, politics and government often are all in bed together. Sometimes literally sharing the same bed. It's a messy, nasty business.
Q: Have you ever been told to stand down and drop a story?
Only a few times. But I was always independent so I would just find another outlet to publish it. Occasionally I just never published the story. I was told to stand down on a story about a school board member who was a doctor who died. But I fought for that story to be told.
I've had politicos call editors and try to get my contract yanked, fire me essentially, because I had scoop that they didn't want published.
At one outlet by one specific editor, I was told to always make Hillary Clinton look good because women stick together. Really? Yes, really.
Media completely went haywire around 2007 when Hillary ran against Barack Obama and then again in 2016 when Hillary ran against Donald Trump. Interesting years in media for sure.
I was also told to stand down and away from a school board and a major employer in an Arkansas town. I've had several stories assigned then unassigned because the powers-that-be got to an editor.
Q: Can you explain why the Reckoning does not currently take advertising from local and state governments?
If you take money from someone, don't you feel a bit like you should protect the hand that feeds you? If you uncover something nefarious about the hand that feeds you and report it, chances are you can say goodbye to that ad revenue.
If you only take subscriptions, you are beholden to the reader. If you take ad revenue, you will ultimately have to kiss someone's ass for that money and turn a blind eye to any curious shenanigans.
I'd rather approach journalism with a completely holistic and pure mindset. Other writers on Substack are doing the same thing. Many are former journalists who want to be able to tell the truth that legacy, mainstream, corporate media do not want you to know because they could possibly lose ad revenue.
Let's be honest. The ad revenue say in Arkansas for an outlet will be in the hundreds of thousands if not millions. The ad revenue on a national level will be tens of millions or more.
Mainstream media love election years because politicians pour money into media. But year around, ad revenue pours into newspapers, magazines and TV in Arkansas and beyond.
Q: Where do you see the future of media in America? Will corporate mainstream media ever regain the public’s trust?
No. Media is damaged, and in a way, it asked for it. Commentary became news, lines blurred, news became divided based on political leanings, social media filled a void. All of this happened because why? Media wanted more advertising revenue. They got greedy. Plain and simple.
Q: Do you believe that the readers truly understand the influence of advertising revenue on the news cycles generated by mainstream legacy media?
Definitely not. People need to start looking at ads — not as something to buy — but as a major influencer on the news.
Say, a company is in trouble. They are about to be sued. They will go into damage control and buy advertising. When I see a lot of advertising by an entity, I automatically wonder why they are advertising so much especially if it isn't for a product like a hot Christmas item.
Q: Do you think your career as a national journalist is influencing the state media’s agenda to not give the Reckoning credit for the work we are doing?
The Arkansas media is a club, a fraternity of sorts, that I have never belonged to and I don't want to belong to. It involves not just reporters, editors and publishers but public relations executives and even politicos and politicians.
See, reporters and editors don't tell each other's secrets. It’s an unwritten rule that media don't investigate media. That's because say you are working as a reporter at, let's call it the Daily Planet. An editor's job comes open across the street at the Old Grey Telegraph. The Daily Planet reporter wants that job but if he has written something negative about the Planet, he likely won't get the job.
A lot of reporters also leave newspapers and TV to get cushy public information jobs at corporations and state agencies.
Burn too many bridges and you won't land public relations gig. You won't have a way to pay your bills.
I am now seeing blurred lines between news outlets with “Shared Content” between two outlets and even shared grants. It's a very curious situation and one that makes me raise my eyebrows. Who are behind all of these grants in journalism and what agenda do they have?
Q: Finally, can you tell our readers what attribution is and how outlets who do not properly attribute original works back to the original source stifle's growth?
Attribution is when ethical journalists and editors do the right thing and credit the original source of a story.
For example, I'm going to quote this about attribution.
“It could be a person you interviewed, a public institution or commercial enterprise putting out a statement, a published report or study, or another news outlet with an exclusive report,” according to Jerome Socolovsky in an article for “NPR Training.”
See? I gave him credit, the outlet credit and linked to the article.
By attributing where that quote about attribution originated, I'm giving the reporter credit and the outlet. By linking, you can go read it for yourself.
It’s ethical to do this. If an outlet breaks news, especially an investigative story, attribution should be given. If a reporter or editor doesn't say where they got the information, it is misleading to the reader. The reader assumes the reporter whose name is on the story dug for all of the information when in fact, it may have come from another outlet like the Reckoning.
Stealing other reporters’ work is an epidemic in Arkansas from print media to online outlets to TV and radio. It's embarrassing. And more embarrassing is when they refuse to admit their mistakes. If a reporter has the scoop first, give them credit or just don't cover the story. Many reporters need to stop being lazy or go find a cushy public relations job. But I'm noticing reporters aren't even giving press releases credit. Maybe these unethical people just need to get out of media forever.
Folks, I could go on and on about Suzi Parker and her career. There's just not enough space here to do it.
I want to take a minute here to apologize for a couple things that you'll notice if you go to all the links in this post.
First of all, I'm sorry if this post seems to brag on my business partner here at the Reckoning. It's not meant to be that way. I just took you all on a investigation, who is Suzi Parker, similar to the one I performed after Suzi and I first met. Though our critics make light of the Reckoning, Suzi has a career like no one else in our state.
The next thing I'm sorry for is that you likely have to close annoying pop-up ads on some of the links to these examples of her national work. That's where the Reckoning is different. No ads here. We aren't influenced by the revenue generated by advertising dollars.
Hey, I'm not bragging. The fact is other outlets are cashing in on advertising revenue. If there's anything to be jealous of, it's definitely the money they are rolling in from advertising.
We believe that there's value in the work we are doing. Most of our original content eventually turns up in the legacy media's news cycles. Since they refuse to give the Reckoning attribution, we feel forced to call them out.
The bottom line here is that they aren't going to make their readers aware that we exist. So it's up to each of you. Share our work. Tell your friends, when you read a story here on the Reckoning and you see it days later in their feed take notice. And when you read it, and you do not see “As first reported by South Arkansas Reckoning” you will truly understand that its intentional circumvention of our work to hinder our growth. It's not always illegal, but it is unethical. Suzi has earned her stripes. She is a veteran of real journalism.
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