The day the apology to Chiquita Brands International Inc. ran in The Cincinnati Enquirer under a bold headline of the size usually reserved for disasters, reporters were greeted at their office building by a local radio station handing out bananas. “We shouldn’t be eating bananas,” one reporter is said to have sighed. “We should be eating crow.”
Other Enquirer reporters on their way to work passed by newspaper honor boxes in the street, but instead of glancing at their work with pride, they saw only the unexpected apology, screaming out above the fold. The humiliation continued as the day progressed, as reporters called sources and heard such comments as “Are you going to write lies about me too?”
Many sat at their desks, taking calls from reporters from other news media, including myself, who were pursuing the story. No one at the Enquirer was allowed to comment on the paper’s more than $10 million settlement with Chiquita in connection with the alleged theft of voice-mail tapes by a reporter, nor could they explain the apology and retraction of a special investigative series.
“As much as it irks me, I can’t talk,” said one. It was an ironic twist for people who make their living urging others to tell their side of the story.
As another reporter remarked, “As bad as it is, it’s something all reporters should have to go through. Then you really understand how it feels to be on the other side.”
Many of us have been there, and nothing makes you question more what you do as a journalist and why you do it. Although we all believe we know right from wrong, sometimes it’s hard to tell where the lines are or when we are being too invasive. Some boundaries are blurred and are crossed, others never approached.
But personal involvement in any story is an uncomfortably sharp clarifier.
In 1996, I was assigned to cover the closing arguments of a murder trial that dated to 1973, when a 16-year-old girl was raped, stabbed 61 times and left in a Will County cornfield. The suspect confessed in 1992 after investigators planned to use DNA technology to try to link him to the murder.
On that day, I was sent at the last minute and was hurriedly reading background on the case in the courtroom. When I saw the girl’s name, a sick wave of realization washed over me–when I was 6 years old, I had attended the funeral of that 16-year-old.
She was a cousin. The evidence an attorney was holding in a plastic bag–a child’s clothes ripped to shreds by a knife–was hers. And relatives whom I had never really known were quietly sitting behind me in the courtroom.
Dazed, I called my editor who instantly pulled me off the assignment. I sat through the trial finale anyway, noticing how dramatically my objectivity had vanished.
Later, as I reconnected with family members and saw their obvious pain surfacing again, I wondered how I had ever dared to interview others who had lost children. I wondered why grieving people had ever talked to me.
Like every job, there are many unpleasant aspects to journalism, from the banal to the serious.
As a sportswriter, I loathed standing in the locker room, trying to interview athletes who were getting dressed. I cringed when I found myself sprinting out of the Bears pressroom with a pack of other reporters chasing quarterback Erik Kramer to his car. Was it really necessary? It was. Because if someone had information I didn’t, I wasn’t doing my job.
And it never stops.
In fact, the pressure grows, and with so many news media outlets, the competition escalates to find something first, something different.
Reporters covering the schoolyard shooting in Jonesboro, Ark., were asked–begged, even–to respect the mourners and stay away from the funeral. I didn’t go inside, though I drove by and lingered, just in case.
The next day The New York Times article described a tiny cross around the neck of one of the girls who had attended the funeral of her classmates–a tiny detail, but one of many that suggested a reporter had been inside.
I second-guessed myself about not having entered the funeral home–though covering such a service was a line I had never been comfortable crossing–until an editor observed, “I always say I’m a person first, a reporter second.”
Words to live by. Sometimes, though, it is hard to separate the two, and that is what we try to balance every day.
Because as people, not necessarily reporters, we end up listening to those we interview, extensively, sometimes when no one else will.
One former editor for The Cincinnati Enquirer who now works at another newspaper thanked me for letting her talk off the record because she wanted to express her confusion and frustration to someone who understood the industry. How could the Enquirer-Chiquita debacle have happened?
For the most part, reporters still go into this field because we are idealistic enough to believe we are watchdogs and can provide a voice to the voiceless. Even when the circumstances of gathering news make us look rude or unfeeling, we keep pursuing all sides of stories to present the most accurate picture possible.
I know now that grieving people talk to us because they want to, because they trust we will treat their feelings and words with great care.
Everyone has a story to tell, and it’s important to have someone to tell it. We are trusted to tell it right.
When anyone in the industry betrays that–whether it is a newspaper reporter who steals, a magazine writer who fictionalizes, or a television station that rushes an inadequately sourced story on the air–we all end up eating crow.
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