Opinion | A Reporter for Whom ‘Burn in Hell’ Meant a Job Well Done

A federal judge demanded the source’s identity. Mr. Taricani fully understood the potential implications for his heart and health by not cooperating. Still, he refused to give up his source.

“It’s an effort to be able to do our job and use the tools available to us,” he told The Journal in 2004. “To bring out the truth.”

Mr. Taricani was sentenced to several months of home confinement, after which he returned to disrupting the evenings of his competitors. He retired in 2014, but remained committed to several causes, including organ donation and a federal shield law for journalists. When he died, the Rhode Island House of Representatives paused in silence to honor a man who had routinely upset the stomachs of so many of its members.

We journalists filed into the cool of Christ the King Church in Kingston and formed two rows up the aisle in subdued welcome to other mourners, including Rhode Island’s governor, Gina Raimondo. Both the homily and eulogy reinforced the need for a free press. The Mass ended, and we walked out the church doors, into the heat of these days.

The very next day, June 28, the nation’s newsrooms would recall the first anniversary of the shooting at The Capital newspaper in Annapolis, Md., that killed four journalists and a sales representative. Then, at a gathering of world leaders in Japan, President Trump would joke about the “problem” of journalism with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, where journalists tend to die unnatural deaths.

“Get rid of them,” Mr. Trump would say. “Fake news is a great term, isn’t it?”

And here in Rhode Island, local journalism is not nearly as vigorous as when Mr. Taricani roamed. The state has a very good public radio station and a tenacious news website or two, but repeated cutbacks have taken their toll. The once-dominant Providence Journal continues to shrink, with barely more than a dozen news reporters to interview candidates for office, attend school board meetings, hold the powerful accountable and cover a state once described to me as a reporter’s theme park.

Outside the church, the journalistic honor guard reassembled for Jim Taricani and for a free and healthy press. The funeral procession left for the cemetery, leaving the rest of us to stand in the hot June sun and ponder what — not whom — might be going to hell.

Dan Barry (@DanBarryNYT), a senior writer for The Times, was part of a team of reporters at The Providence Journal-Bulletin that won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for exposing corruption in the Rhode Island court system.

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