| Chapter 1
The
Crime Beat
By
Dave Krajicek
Source Conflicts of Interest
Source conflicts can be financial or personal.
The first form is simple: Accept no gifts or favors, and give none
in return. The second is more nuanced, because a journalist is bound,
over time, to develop relationships with sources.
One-time journalist-source relationships can be complicated, as
well. TV news segment producers and bookers for news talk shows
admit that competitive considerations often prompt gray-area financial
promises, such as an expenses-paid trip to New York, where the interview
is to take place.
Even mere groveling can be questionable.
A few years ago, a Houston reporter wrote a 1,200-word note seeking
an interview with an accused serial killer, Angel Maturino Resendiz.
The writer plied Resendiz with flattery about his intelligence and
command of English and enthused about their mutual love of puppies,
babies and angels.
The reporter wrote, "I would like to be the reporter here
[in] the USA that tells your story. ... You have a right to tell
your story." The phrase "your story" is an essential
issue in reporter-source relationships.
The reporter was telling a little lie because the journalist, not
the source, controls the story. If the source owns the story, it
is publicity, not journalism.
The letter ended up on the Internet, and many journalists cringed
– not because we were embarrassed for the profession, but
because it could have been any of us. All writers use a rap to convince
a source to talk. We schmooze. We pretend to be interested in things
we really aren't. We do what we need to do to wheedle information
out of people.
But as the adage goes, "The writer always betrays."
This sometimes unsavory part of the business gets complicated when
the source being courted is a criminal.
One example was the Fatal Vision case, in which Army doctor
Jeffrey MacDonald was accused of killing his pregnant wife and two
children in Fort Bragg, N.C. MacDonald teamed with author Joe McGinnis
to prove his innocence. The two men lived together during the murder
trial, and the writer was given full access to MacDonald's defense
team. In 1983, four years after MacDonald was convicted, McGinnis
published a book that portrayed MacDonald as a narcissist who probably
killed his family in a moment of psychotic rage, perhaps induced
by drugs.
MacDonald sued, accusing McGinnis of fraud and betrayal, and embarrassing
letters from the writer to the killer were made public during the
trial. In one, McGinnis wrote: "There could not be a worse
nightmare than the one you are living through now – but it
is only a phase. ... Total strangers can recognize within five minutes
that you did not receive a fair trial." In another he wrote,
"It's a hell of a thing – spend the summer making a new
friend and then the bastards come along and lock him up. But not
for long, Jeffrey – not for long."
In her book about the MacDonald/McGinnis mess, the writer Janet
Malcolm concluded that reporter-source relationships are freighted
with "ambiguity, obscurity, doubt, disappointment, compromise
and accommodation."
"Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself
to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible,"
Malcolm wrote in The Journalist and the Murderer. "He
is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance
or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse."
Hoax Sources
The perfect source who materializes at just the right moment may
be too good to be true.
Both broadcast and print journalists have been burned in recent
years by phone-in sources during breaking news events. Frequently,
they claim to be eyewitnesses. Others have claimed friendships with
a crime victim or perpetrator.
A Wisconsin newspaper was victimized in 2001 while seeking information
from classmates of Luke Helder, an accused mailbox bomber. A reporter
called Helder's high school classmates, one of whom offered that
Helder poisoned dogs, tortured cats and carved swastikas into the
chests of mannequins he kept in his garage. The details were widely
reported in national news accounts.
But the source made it up. He didn't even know Helder.
Don Huebscher, editor of the Leader-Telegram, wrote in a note to
readers, "Obviously, we have taken steps to try to prevent
a future occurrence. This episode has done a number on our credibility,
and in this business, that's all we've got."
'GOYA/KOD'
Crime scenes can be good venues to meet potential sources, especially
if you are the only journalist there. Cops will notice if you show
up consistently.
Anecdotal evidence indicates that journalists rely on electronics
ever more frequently when reporting. Telephones and e-mail are fine
devices, but nothing gets you wired like being there.
One South Carolina reporter on the CJJ discussion list described
reporting at her newspaper: "Cop reporters here do everything
from the desk. They mostly use PIOs, never go to crime scenes, never
look at police reports and other records and especially never go
to the police/sheriff departments."
The issue harkens to the famous Watergate-era message – "get
off your ass/knock on doors" – from a newspaper editor
to a staff that was losing the battle for stories about the Nixon
scandal.
The editor thought too many of his reporters were navel-gazing.
He wanted them working (or developing) sources.
In the figurative sense of the admonition, crime reporters are
well-served to stay abreast of their agency, comparable agencies
and the competition. There is no excuse for myopia today, when the
Internet makes exceptional stories published nearly anywhere in
the world accessible.
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