In mid-June I was called to Denver as an expert witness for the defense in the trial of Timothy McVeigh. My role was minor, but it created new conundrums for me. Having become a potential source instead of a reporter, I had to decide how — and whether — to face the press.
My job was to tell the court what McVeigh knew or believed about the 1993 events at Waco, about the raid and siege of the Mt. Carmel complex and the death of David Koresh’s clan. My authority did not derive from anything that McVeigh had told me, nor did I know what he thought. Instead, I was to explain what he might have learned, or come to believe, from magazines and video tapes. McVeigh’s lawyers had asked me to testify because I was familiar with the literature that had influenced him, and because I had written the definitive book about the Waco events. In Denver I became, in effect, the voice of a defendant who would not take the stand.
Like anyone who still thinks of himself as a journalist — though I am now out of the trade — I flinch when the word “court” is mentioned in connection with my name. Courts usually mean trouble and peril for reporters. When we’re not being sued for libel, in court we’re usually being pressured to reveal confidential sources. Reporters do not like to cross the bar.
I agreed to testify because journalistic aversions weren’t the only factors in mind. During the guilt phase of the trial prosecutors had brought up Waco and had spoken as if the flames over Mt. Carmel were nothing of consequence. Their confidence, I thought, challenged Waco critics to respond by telling the story as we know it — the story of a needless raid, of draconian lawmen, of propagandists and hacks: a story about how the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms raised its flag in victory over the embers of Mt. Carmel, as if it had taken Iwo Jima from the Japanese. I had never turned down an opportunity to talk to a public forum about Waco, and I didn’t think that I ever would. But in Denver, I decided to shun the press.
Reporters had camped under canopies outside the federal courthouse. Photographers roamed the block and sometimes kept surveillance outside the defense team’s offices and hotel. They wanted eye candy, scenes to be used as a backdrop for voice-overs. They wanted us to walk down their runway, like models in an Oscar de la Renta show. They wanted to turn McVeigh’s lawyers, relatives and friends — and me — into visual props.
Some of them chased and shouted at furtive witnesses. Poor Bill McVeigh, the defendant’s father, for example. He’d been pestered for weeks; CNN was showing footage of him riding his lawn mower at home. He and other kinfolk went to court in a van with covered windows, entering the building from a protected delivery bay. I went in the same vehicle because I saw no reason to throw myself to visual wolves.
Before I testified, Stephen Jones, McVeigh’s lead attorney, asked me to allow a camera crew to film our preparation, and I had acceded to his request. But when the crew turned on its recording devices, I saw that my testimony would not review television reportage of the Mt. Carmel events, because that “coverage” had been too inaccurate and superficial to be of use. After I took the stand, a radio and a television network called. I turned down their interviews.
Though my decision to snub and upbraid my former peers was made in Denver, my attitude antedated the trial. It had taken root in the years surrounding the reign of Carlos Salinas, when I wrote extensively, and against the grain, about Mexico. Salinas, the press told us time and again, was Mexico’s savior. I knew most of the nation’s Mexico correspondents, and I don’t believe that any of them ever really bought that line: editors and investors authored it in offices far from the scene. If I can’t prove that charge, still, the facts speak for themselves. The press got Mexico wrong — that is discreetly conceded today — and yet heads did not roll in the newsrooms. Is that because Mexico was inscrutable, or because editors and publishers were partisan to the Salinas myth?
My Mexico suspicions were reinforced by what I learned about Waco in the easiest and simplest way. In 1994, in the basement of a lawyer’s office, I found 14,000 pages of documents, transcripts of telephone conversations between Mt. Carmel’s residents and the FBI — a virtual book of stuff. These transcripts told a story that was unreported, a story that did not reflect kindly on the handling of the Mt. Carmel standoff by the ATF, the FBI, or the press. I freely told other journalists that I had these documents in hand, but nobody wanted to look at them. For most of those who had “covered” the standoff, Mt. Carmel had ceased to be a story when it burned to the ground — as if the story had been only a visual event.
During the 1995 Waco House hearings, a staged event, the press once again glanced at the Waco scenario. One afternoon an ATF commander testified that he had never heard the phrase “element of surprise” in a Mt. Carmel context until after the February 28 assault. His testimony flew in the face of his agency’s evaluation of that bloody raid. It pointed to a cover-up of some kind. When his report was pursued — as it ultimately was, inside the bureaucracy, and by the House, but not in the press — at least one agency executive was censured for lying and eased out of his job. What the commander had told Congress was news: it was important and nobody had heard anything like it before.
But the dailies focused their stories on that day’s testimony from a teenager who said that David Koresh had raped her. Keri Jewell’s tale had nothing to do with what the Congress was investigating, namely, the abuse of federal power. (The federal government, suffice it to say, has no jurisdiction over child abuse.) The following morning I asked a reporter for a prestigious daily why she had failed to mention the commander’s testimony with even a single word. “Well, Kiri Jewell’s testimony was more dramatic,” she said. “What is your business, drama or journalism?” I’d demanded. She turned her back and walked away, and I learned my lesson: even among reporters, turning one’s back to the press is now a breech of etiquette, but not a breech of ethics.
Had I spoken to the press at Denver, I know what I’d have been asked. The key question would have been: “Do you think that what happened in Waco mitigates the murder of 168 people?” The television network whose interview I declined wanted me to talk about whether McVeigh’s death sentence was justified. Those topics involve moralizing, speculating — gossiping. When I was a reporter, my job was to get the facts straight. If the rest of the press had done its job at Waco, there would have been no point in writing my book, no courtroom appearance by me — and, I suspect, no bomb at Oklahoma City. That little bit of speculation and that little bit of moralizing is not what my beseechers wanted to air. After all, it was McVeigh and not the press who was on trial.
A year ago I became a full-time student. I miss being a reporter, and I don’t want to offend anyone who means well — but what I miss, I think, has already died . The business of today’s press, in real terms, is not investigation, and it is not reporting. It is not making the miserable more comfortable or the comfortable more ill at ease. It is not the analysis of daily life, or anything as droll as that. Instead, by and large, the business of the press is creating Salinas-like fairy tales and Koreshian monster stories. Even the print media have become an adjunct of Disney, in more ways than one.
I can’t explain what I think without concocting clunky terms. What’s happening is that the print media are being “audio-visualized” and “profitized .” We talk about “tabloid TV,” as if television picked up its vices from print, and maybe it did. But today, influence flows in the other direction. Newspapers and magazines are aping Geraldo and Oprah.
As the abandonment of Waco after the burning of Mt. Carmel shows, the print media, trying to hold their own, are adopting the logic of the tube. In a recent “Readings” column in Harper’s, former newspaper reporter Gabriel Garda Marquez tells it like it is: “Journalists have lost sight of, or given up on, their most critical and demanding objectives — the detailed and truthful reconstruction of an event.” Newspaper and magazine stories today, Garcia says, are too often built around interviews, too rarely around legwork.
News is coming less from the street and more from the power lunch, the press conference, the exclusive interview. Our sources have gone upscale. The change gives reporters better lunches, it is true-but its downside is that our readerships are going upscale, too: print is becoming an elite rather than mass media. Print provides detail to fill-in and confirm the broad-brush stories told by television. It gives its readers more information than television — but not information of a different kind, origin, or point of view. The reporter for the print media finds himself, for example, writing down the words whose spoken form television and radio record, rather than leafing through the pages of documents that would be dead on arrival as audio or visual elements. Celebrities dominate magazine content and covers, nobody wants to create a stir. Less often do reporters find and develop a story on their own; more often, they attend the events where that story is spun. The sovereign, solitary and sometimes idiosyncratic reporter has been replaced by the pack Teamwork and consensus — pack virtues — are today’s bywords, originality, doggedness and passion are passe.
Trade organs talk about the deleterious effects of media mergers and takeovers by non-news companies, but only infrequently do they name the real consequences. Like doctors whose hospitals have been purchased by HMO’s, journalists are being deprofessionalized: not our conscience, not our instincts, not our curiosity, not our civic concern — none of these can now be our guides. Medicine is becoming the servant of the insurance business, journalism, an adjunct to the entertainment industry. Workers in both fields are beholden to a common master, abstract capital, lines in a quarterly stockholder’s report. No wonder that we have become as standardized, homogenous — accepted and doubted — as the dollar bill.
Our contemporary role is demeaning. It calls for us to amplify scandal and to exemplify hypocrisy. We must cry loudly for punishment when soldiers and sexual shenanigans are linked, or when athletes trample a sport’s ideals. But the script does not require us to clean our own house when the standards of journalism aren’t met — so long as those of entertainment are satisfied. Like greenbacks in an inflationary period, if it’s true that nobody can live without us, it’s also true that everyone doubts what we represent. Even the tradition by which reporters quit their jobs when their stories were spiked — and in so doing, enhanced the value of our trade — has been laid aside; inner-office confrontation is kitsch today. Like the public figures they trail, reporters are losing credibility with every performance. But that’s beside the point. In journalism, wrestling and Hollywood, it’s now drama and not credibility that builds box office receipts.
If what journalists do is less and less in good taste, it is also less and less benign. The difference between Timothy McVeigh and the press is not only the difference between intellectual misdeeds, like the fables of Salinas and Waco, and material crimes. Nor is it that one party takes the stand, while the other exploits his rights: both confess their offenses only in an oblique way. But the Oklahoma bomber has been held accountable. When I went to Denver, justice was in the works for him. Speaking for Timothy McVeigh in court was not dishonorable. Speaking to or for an unrepentant press may be.