“It’s only a puff piece if you let it be”

By Jeff Browne, Q&S Executive Director

SPOILER ALERT: This review contains information about the plot of “Bad Education” (but the story happened 16 years ago, so you can Google it, no problem).

“It’s only a puff piece if you let it be a puff piece.” — Hugh Jackman as Frank Tassone in the HBO movie “Bad Education”

That was advice Roslyn (N.Y.) school Superintendent Frank Tassone supposedly gave to a student reporter in 2002 assigned to cover a story about a proposed skywalk at the wealthy public high school on Long Island, just 20 miles away from Manhattan.

If you have an HBO subscription, I’d suggest watching “Bad Education” for lots of reasons, including the acting, script, dramatic tension and — not least of all — the heroine of the story is the same high school journalist who eventually turned Tassone’s advice into a story that began to unravel an $11 million fraud perpetrated on the district by Tassone and his assistant, Pam Gluckin.

Of course, as in so many cinematic interpretations of real-life stories, the filmmakers took some license with the truth and portrayed the student’s role differently than it played out in real life. But the simple facts remain:

• Two school officials bled the district of millions of dollars.
• A student journalist helped uncover the fraud and her reporting helped lead to their arrest, conviction and incarceration.

Back in 2004, when the story broke, Rebekah Rombom wrote in the New York Times about how she broke the story for the Hilltop Beacon at Roslyn High, a Quill and Scroll school since 1947, where she was a co-editor her senior year.

Here are some basic differences between the movie and Rombom’s account.

MOVIE

In the HBO film, it’s 2002, and the student journalist (Rachel Bhargava, a junior) simply wants to do a basic story about the skywalk project, but is encouraged by the superintendent to challenge herself.

“It’s only a puff piece if you let it be a puff piece,” Tassone tells her.

Bhargava then asks Gluckin for documentation of bids for the skywalk project and is handed the keys to a storage room full of official records. She writes a story with the documentation but is told by her editor that the story isn’t appropriate for 15-year olds, so he tarts it up and publishes a puff piece under her byline.

Later, when Bhargava (played by Geraldine Viswanathan) senses something nefarious is at hand — the purchase of a pizza oven that never showed up at the school — she again is given the keys to the record vault. That’s where she finds a trove of unaccounted for expenditures.

She teams with her father, a sympathetic figure who got caught up in an insider stock-trading scandal, to track down the bogus expenses, including nearly $1 million that went to Tassone’s life partner.

The story Bhargava writes details Tassone’s questionable expenses and leads to an emergency school board meeting and eventually to police involvement, arrests, lawyers, judges, convictions and jail time for both Tassone and Gluckin.

REAL LIFE

It’s 2004, and Rombom and her co-editor-in-chief, Sam Floam, are both given tips about the firing of Gluckin two years previous. They try to ask for interviews and do some basic open-records requests, but they get nowhere.

Then they attend a school board meeting at which the topic is Gluckin’s dismissal and allegations in the letter that Tassone was in on the spree and that it accounted for more than the original $250,000 that Gluckin was accused of stealing from the school district. Tassone denied the allegations.

Rombom and Floam felt they were at a dead end, but they were encouraged by their adviser to keep reporting and to publish the story about Gluckin’s crimes, which they did, omitting Gluckin’s name.

“We were a newspaper, he told us, and it was our responsibility to report the news. We decided to do just that,” Rombom wrote.

The story had been reviewed by the principal and another administrator before it was published.

Tassone was sentenced to 4-12 years, but was released in 2010 and receives a $174,000 annual pension from the state of New York.

TAKEAWAYS

• Big news outlets don’t always get the biggest stories, and that’s more true now than it was in 2004. High school journalists have an obligation to hold their officials to account. If you’re uncomfortable doing that, engage a professional journalist in the hunt.
• Anonymous tipsters are only as good as the real and true documentation they can provide to back up their accusations.
• Advisers are your best friends. They’re full of sage wisdom and advice.
• Always look at the real story behind Hollywood’s interpretation of history. There are some great story possibilities in a regular feature in which you fact-check movies.

NOTE: HBO Now has a free 7-day streaming trial if you want to watch “Bad Education” and see a positive, if slightly altered, interpretation of scholastic journalism.