Media: The Attack Dog
JEFF COLE IS 50 years old, married, with two sons. His wife works in development in health care. He grew up in rural southeastern Massachusetts, one of six children, including a fraternal twin brother, Jon Cole, who’s a TV sports anchor in North Dakota. His mother left teaching to raise the family. When Cole was in high school, his father lost his job as a banker — unfairly, as Cole recalls — and went through a tough time.
“Not to make this sort of pop psychology,” Cole says, “but there is something about watching a family member being treated in a way that you think is both unkind and unfair that, at least in my instance, made me want to, in some sense, pursue wrongdoing. I don’t want to sound like Superman. But I’m interested in that, seeing what’s wrong and trying to chip at it a little bit. The other thing is, frankly, I like the action.”
Four years out of the University of Bridgeport, in 1984, Cole got a gig at WFSB, the CBS affiliate in Hartford. He was a morning anchorman for a while, but the desk job didn’t quite fit. “The first piece I did that had any investigative smell, we were tracking the advance of what was then called rock cocaine, crack cocaine,” he says. “We went into public housing projects where people were willing to show its use right in front of us, right on camera. My news director said, ‘You like this?’ And I said, ‘Yeeeah.’” Cole spent 16 years at WFSB.
When the opportunity arose to come to Philadelphia in 2000 and cover municipal corruption, well, it was like being offered the fashion beat in Paris. Though it’s been decades since most Philly stations did serious shoe-leather reporting, local Fox stations are known in the business for having investigative units. Fox doesn’t have network shows from 10 to 11 p.m., so many of its stations slot hour-long news there, creating breathing room, and a need, for stories like Cole’s, which can take eight or nine minutes to tell instead of 90 seconds.
It wasn’t too long after arriving that Cole got a hard-to-believe tip that City Councilman Angel Ortiz had been driving without a license for 25 years. “One thing I’ve learned is that Philadelphians are folks who, when they’re angry, they like to squeal,” Cole says.
Cole’s team taped Ortiz driving around and confronted him getting out of his car at City Hall one day. “I said, ‘Hey, you’ve got a license to drive, right?’” Cole recounts. “And he looks at me and says, ‘No.’ And there we go. It’s not exactly Watergate. But the idea of a city councilman driving a city car, in a city that’s self-insured, and you don’t have a license to drive?”
More stories flowed. Cole exposed a puppy mill in Lancaster, found police badges for sale on eBay, asked about a pickup truck bought with Homeland Security funds. His team won a regional Edward R. Murrow Award in 2006 for stories that led to the firing of a water supervisor, the resignation of an inspector general, and an investigation of a police officer. In June 2007, Cole confronted Mayor Street proudly spending a workday outside a computer store, waiting to buy an Apple iPhone.
