Media: The Attack Dog

Driver’s-license and time-sheet irregularities seemed to become Cole’s specialty. You sometimes wonder how he would do on a larger scale, on the hard-core Philly stuff: pay-to-play, political power struggles. Cole feels he does go after important issues — just not the obvious ones. The scourges nobody sees are everywhere, and you do get the feeling that if Cole didn’t check into them, maybe nobody would. He’s reported on open-air methadone sales in Camden, city health inspections in school cafeterias, and the amount of money fund-raisers actually give to charities. But those stories just “don’t draw the same viewer interest” as catching cheaters ducking a camera, he admits.
 
Sometimes, even in a little case of iffy time sheets, there’s a door behind the door. With Thomas Nace, shortly after Cole’s TV report, Nace was jailed on drug charges unconnected to his work hours. With Latrice Bryant, a subsequent Cole report revealed photos said to be of Goode and Bryant together on a beach in Jamaica in 2005. Zack Stalberg, president of the political watchdog group Committee of Seventy, pressed the city’s board of ethics to consider such boss-employee relationships, and says, “Cole was probably the first TV journalist to show up at a board of ethics meeting.” (Goode wrote the city a personal check for $836.35 to cover Bryant’s missing time.)
 
During confrontations, Cole politely hounds and nags and pecks the hell out of his victims. On-camera, buttoned up in a gray suit to introduce a story, he can come off as prim and prickly, the indignant man perpetually offended by life’s scoundrels. His eyes squint; his head shakes in incredulous disappointment. His voice may modulate widely in pitch as he makes a point, a vocal roller coaster that calls to mind Robin Leach. Dave Davies, a Daily News political reporter and WHYY radio host, remembers a 2006 Cole piece on Democratic ward leader Carlos Matos driving with a suspended license.
 
“For days after that, we were all imitating Jeff Cole, saying, ‘Carlos, what are you doing in that caaarrrr?’” Davies says. “What’s great is that Jeff combines rigorous research with just the right amount of theatrics. He’s got that flair for the dramatic, that exuberant tension in his voice.”
 

OFF-CAMERA, COLE dials it down. His language may still seem fussy at times (he talks about reporting with sleeves “drawn up” instead of rolled up), but the shrill TV character is gone. At home, he watches boxing, baseball. He runs but isn’t obsessive: 5Ks, not marathons. His preferred music playlist is free-form and mellow: “Stan Getz, Coltrane, Miles Davis, Bill Evans.”
 
Cole’s work has brought results, awards — and lawsuits. That’s another consequence when your job is to take an issue a step further than anyone else has. There was his 2002 report involving bones at Merion Memorial Park. A disgruntled former employee told Fox 29 the cemetery was digging up old graves and dumping bones, and it made a saucy story. But the source later admitted he was lying; the cemetery sued in 2003, and Fox “paid a substantial amount to settle the case,” says attorney Gerry Dugan, who represented the plaintiff.