Chapter 61: On Falling in Love with Sources
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We journalists like to think of ourselves as a hard-boiled breed of men and women, unmoved by sentimentality and all those other foolish impulses that play on the hearts of everyone not like us.
When really we are a bunch of softies who cannot help falling in love again and again, even when everything we have learned tells us not to.
It is our sources for whom we fall. We meet them on our beats, and on stories that necessitate spending time with new people. Against our better judgment, we find ourselves not just liking them, but wanting to believe what they tell us. Why would they lie? Why indeed. An agenda perhaps.
I see this happen every year with students new to journalism. Even as I warn them to safeguard their hearts, to be careful lest they fall so far as to lose any capacity to discern and evaluate the veracity of what they’re being told, they still fall, sometimes hard.
They fall for lawyers to whom they feel eternally grateful for returning their calls and who then tell them things that maybe they shouldn’t be telling them. They fall for the men and women whose missions on behalf of the persecuted and dispossessed makes them admirable to the point of intimidation. How can I doubt the word of someone committed to the homeless? Someone so much better than me?
I have come to accept that no matter how hard I try to warn them against “falling in love” with sources – I do not mean that they do so literally, although I have seen that happen and it is not pretty – the advice carries as much weight as parental advice to a teenager, to which the response is generally along the lines of: You don’t understand dad because you don’t know what it feels like.
Yes, I do.
I can think of two sources in particular for whom I fell hard. One was the most dangerous person I have ever met. The other was perhaps the best.
My first source crush happened when I was young and in graduate school. I was teaching a class at the Missouri State Penitentiary. The men in our small group were for the most part doing time for violent crimes, and none had had a more violent past than Roger. He was serving multiple life sentences for all the murders he had committed as a hired killer. I was unsure whether to believe this until I happened upon a clipping from a magazine with his photograph and the headline: The Face of Fear.
I was new to journalism as well as to the world beyond my sheltered Jewish enclave in Brooklyn. I had never before encountered anyone who had done so many bad things.
Roger had empty eyes and great charisma. He also had the run of the prison. Back then in the 1970s, Missouri allowed anyone with a press pass free access to any of its prisons. This meant I could walk around the prison without a guard and without a pass. I can still recall walking with Roger down an impossibly long tunnel and watching how everyone gave him a wide berth. I had never been in the company of anyone who otherwise menacing men looked on with fear.
Roger was not confined to a cell. He had a room and how this arrangement came to be was the subject of rumor that only burnished his image as someone who was a great danger to others. Over time he would talk about what he had done – the first person he had killed and the innocent bystander whom he could not risk identifying him.
I was rapt. I was thrilled. I had been invited into a world so alien, so far from anything I had ever known: little me from Flatbush, hanging with a very bad man. That was close to fifty years ago and in the decades since I have thought a lot about Roger and what he had done and why, even with that knowledge, I was drawn to his company. It has helped me understand and appreciate why even journalists who have risen far in the profession are susceptible to being smitten.
Consider this story: shortly before his inauguration, George H.W. Bush invited a group of White House correspondents over for a chat. Nothing formal. He just wanted to know what they thought about the world. I do not recall hearing that any of them declined to offer an opinion or five.
Why decline? After all, they were being asked over to the cool kids’ table.
I know almost no journalists who were cool in high school. And as a result, having felt at a vulnerable age condemned to be on the outside looking in, journalists are prone to flattery and access. Spend enough time in Washington and you will know just what I mean – “Condi called to tell me…” Condi. Valerie. Jared. Ron. The names change. The thrill of dropping them never does.
We journalists are a vulnerable lot. We are drawn to people who somehow seem to be more than we are -- be they powerful, rich, famous, or dangerous. We fawn before athletes half our age. We think that when a celebrity gives us his or her cell phone number they want us to call after the story runs. We forget that we exist to serve a purpose to those whose company, whose time, even whose comments we seek: they have agendas, as do we.
But sometimes it is hard to set that aside. Much as journalists would like to adhere to the maxim that the only way reporters should look at a politician is down, it doesn’t always work that way. I have known terrific journalists who counted politicians among their friends. No one thought less of them for it.
And sometimes in our line of work we meet people who really are better than us, who are selfless in ways we, who are forever on the hunt for a story, are not. Which brings me to the other source I fell for.
Her name was Sister Geraldine. Together with her fellow nun, Sister Mary Paul, she ran a social service agency in Brooklyn called the Center for Family Life. Sister Geraldine worked with parents whose children the state had taken, for reasons of neglect, abandonment, or abuse. She had earned a master's degree but her understanding of these parents – most of them mothers – transcended any graduate education. She was wise and caring and demanding, and if the time came to terminate a mother’s parental rights she would advocate for that harsh judgment, even as she understood that it was imperative that the parent remain connected to her child’s life, even in the most attenuated way. An essential insight almost always lost on policy makers and administrations for children’s services.
I wrote about the center and the sisters, first in a magazine story and later in a book. Much as I admired Sister Mary, I felt a connection so strong with Sister Geraldine that when my younger child was ill, I called her from a hospital pay phone to tell her the surgery had gone well. She told me, “We are going to storm heaven for him.”
I cannot write that without choking up at the memory of that moment, or of Sister Geraldine who died three years later when she was only 59. I do not believe she ever told me anything that was not true. And I am enough of a reporter to have determined that all the remarkable things said about her and the center were true. But I lowered my guard with Sister Geraldine, just as I had, all those years earlier with Roger.
I allowed them in. I was drawn to them. I sought their company. I wanted to believe what they told me.
I wish sometimes I were harder edged and in the years between those two meetings, I have sharpened my elbows, and developed a thick layer of cynicism and doubt. I trust and I verify.
And sometimes, I fall.
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