One Target, One Claim, and the Paper to Prove It

Anger comes in a fog. A polemic has to come in a straight line. The first job is to shrink everything you feel about a public body down to one target and one sentence you can prove.

Pick one target

Beginners want to hit everything at once. The mayor, the budget, the consultant, the last three years, the local paper for not covering it. Resist. Every target you add needs its own proof, and readers (and lawyers, and the officials themselves) will judge the whole piece by its weakest charge. Five accusations with one shaky one is a piece about the shaky one.

Good targets are things a public body did on the record:

• A specific vote on a specific date.
• A contract awarded without bids.
• A policy adopted, or quietly dropped.
• An official's conduct in office, documented in a record.

Bad targets are moods. "Arrogance." "The establishment." "A culture of secrecy." You may believe all of those. You cannot attach a document to any of them, so they belong at most as a conclusion the reader reaches after you have shown the facts.

And keep private people out of the crosshairs. The clerk who typed the agenda is not your target. The council that voted on it is.

Write the claim in one sentence

The claim is the sentence your whole piece exists to prove. Write it before you write anything else, and tape it above your screen.

A working claim names who, says what they did, and rests on a fact someone could check. Watch the same complaint sharpen:

Version 4 is the one. Notice that the outrage lives in the facts. You barely need adjectives once the facts are lined up.

Build the case from paper

Polemics usually fail because the facts are wrong, or because the facts are right but the writer never shows them, so readers have to take the anger on faith. Fix both by building from documents.

Sort what you know

Before you draft, sort everything you know into piles.

• Primary records. The agenda packet, the signed minutes, the adopted budget, the rate ordinance, the meeting video, the contract, emails you got through a records request. This is the foundation.
• Secondary sources. News stories, a utility's press release, a state audit summary. Useful for leads and context. Go find the primary record each one rests on.
• Things you believe. What a friend on staff told you, what everybody in town knows, what a Facebook group says. This pile does not go in the piece. It tells you which records to request.

Most of the good stuff comes from records anyone can ask for. In Idaho, the Public Records Act is Idaho Code Title 74, Chapter 1, and the Open Meetings Law is Title 74, Chapter 2; other states have their own versions. Jeff's free Idaho FOIA / Public Records Letter Generator drafts the request letter for you, and the Idaho Open-Meetings Compliance Tracker helps you keep track of whether a body posted its agendas and minutes the way the law expects. The earlier journalism and article modules cover records work in more depth.

Where the good evidence hides

• The agenda packet, not the agenda. The one-page agenda says "Item 7: Utility rate adjustment." The 80-page packet behind it has the staff memo, the old and new rates, and sometimes the consultant's warning that nobody read aloud.
• Minutes versus video. Minutes are a summary written by staff. The video shows what was actually said, and how long the discussion lasted. Thirty-one seconds for a rate hike is a fact. Write down the timestamp.
• Last year's budget. A number only means something next to the number before it.
• The other side's own words. This is the Ida B. Wells move from Lesson 1. If the council's own consultant said a 12 percent increase would cover the pipe work, and they passed 20, the consultant's report is worth more than any adjective you own.

The evidence table

Before you write a single paragraph of the draft, build an evidence table. It never gets published. It is your proof file, and it is what you open when the city manager emails to say you got it wrong.

Every factual sentence in the draft gets a row. If a sentence has no row, it gets a source or it gets cut. No exceptions for the sentence you like best. That one especially.

The Status column matters. "Requested" means you wait, or you write around the gap and say plainly what you have not seen yet. Saying "the city has not released the rate study I requested on March 20" is itself a fact, and often a damning one.

Check your own sources

Before the table is done, run any web links you plan to cite through Jeff's Source Checker, and pull up the original of anything you found secondhand. A dead link in a polemic reads like a fabrication even when it is not.