ROLE
MODELS
interviews
with Neil Hickey
BOB
WOODWARD
"There
are a lot of people I admire. Lincoln Steffens. I was aware of
the history of what Steffens and his colleagues had done in the
early part of the twentieth century. And then of course there
was Vietnam, before Watergate. I was in the Navy from 1965 to
1970 and saw it up close, and read the reporting on it. Of course,
there was David Halberstam's book. I guess if there's a role model,
it's him."
Bob
Woodward has been a reporter and editor at The Washington
Post since 1971.
KATHERINE
BOO
"I
once was researching a nothing little story at the reading room
of the FBI, which was empty except for me and a man who was hunched
over, amid these enormous piles of papers. I recognized him as
Taylor Branch, although I'd never met him. Just seeing him fascinated
me. What was he doing? What makes it worth it -- this lonely,
difficult process of going through tens of thousands of documents?
What's it for? He was researching his book Parting the Waters,
a wonderful telling of the civil rights movement, a labor of love
and passion. Just seeing him there in the reading room made a
big impression on me.
"Jason
DeParle of The New York Times also influenced me because
he has devoted his career to writing about poverty in America
in original, non-ideological ways, getting deeper in his pieces
than the usual stereotypes. John Hersey was a reporter who could
take something as ineffable and difficult as the atomic bomb and
cover it from a point of view that let the reader see what it
really meant. What interests me is not necessarily the person
who does one good investigative piece, but the people who do it
over and over again. Bob Woodward, for example, finds it in himself
to keep alive that intellectual curiosity, and to do the backbreaking
labor."
Katherine
Boo is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter for The
Washington Post.
SYDNEY
SCHANBERG
"My
role models at the start of my career were not investigative reporters
because that phrase was never used. All good reporting is investigative
to some degree. There were people like Homer Bigart, who were
meticulous in their reporting. He was the digger; he stayed late
at night to get it right. Also, Edith Evans Asbury. She's over
90 now, and is retired from The New York Times. The paper
didn't have an investigative team back then, but she'd go out
on court cases and dig things up. She was tenacious. She would
get her teeth into somebody's ankle and wouldn't let go. I learned
from people like that; they didn't care whose ox was being gored
or what sacred cow was mooing into the publisher's ear.
"If
I were to tell you that there's one person whose investigative
stuff I respect most, whom I personally know, it would be Sy Hersh.
But there were others I never met, like George Seldes, who was
writing about the cigarette industry long before anybody wanted
to print his stuff. Newspapers weren't interested because they
were running tobacco advertising. I consider him to be a very
brave man and a hero because he was shunned by the mainstream
press, and even at his death barely got any recognition. I wouldn't
say he got everything right; nobody ever does. Investigative reporting,
really, is shoe-leather reporting. You go out, ring doorbells,
talk to people. You don't sit on your duff in the office. You
go to people's houses and have the door slammed in your face."
Sydney
Schanberg won a Pulitzer in 1976 for his coverage of Cambodia
in The New York Times.
MIKE
WALLACE
"Influences?
Of course Edward R. Murrow and his producer, Fred Friendly. They
were separated at birth. The things Murrow did, when you think
about it! The Senator Joseph McCarthy documentary. 'Harvest of
Shame.' There were so many. Everybody had such respect for their
work, and one felt, damn it, if I could do that kind of story
. . . . Talk about hitching your wagon to a star. It was really
that for all of us, particularly here at CBS. Back then, there
were no TV newsmagazines. No Nightline. When we first started
60 Minutes, we had no idea exactly what direction it would
take. Harry Reasoner and I were doing the show by ourselves, and
then Harry left. 'What are we going to do?' He was the top banana.
So we sat down and said, 'What can we do that isn't being done
elsewhere?' Investigations. We hired quality people like producers
Barry Lando and Marion Goldin. Back in those days, there was no
pressure on us to go for ratings. We were on the air every other
week. There was no competition, there was nothing of the same
nature on at all. So as a result, we had time to develop stories,
and if they didn't get an audience, what the hell, we were a loss
leader anyway. CBS was riding high. When we asked [CBS News executive]
Bill Leonard what he expected of us, he said simply: 'Make us
proud.' Not 'Make us money.' 'Make us proud.'"
Mike
Wallace, born in 1918, began his television interviewing career
in 1957.
PAM ZEKMAN "My
role models are two reporters at the Chicago Tribune when
I was on the investigative task force there before coming to WBBM:
Bill Jones and George Bliss, both Pulitzer Prize winners. I learned
from both of them. They had a real commitment to doing the kinds
of stories that really affect people. They both had a tremendous
social conscience and a low outrage threshold, an eye for creative
ideas, for how to get difficult stories done. Also, incredible
energy and patience to work on these stories over the long haul.
Both had a great ability to see the big picture and then figure
out how to illustrate it with examples. Bill Jones had an extraordinary
writing ability and a talent for pulling massive amounts of information
together in ways that made it interesting. I started out at the
City News Bureau in Chicago and went to the Tribune at
a time when they were forming their first task force. I was at
the right place at the right time because they wanted a woman
on the team. I've basically been doing that kind of team reporting
ever since -- ten years in newspapers and twenty years here at
WBBM. Every story brings some new challenge."
Pam
Zekman has won two Peabodys, ten local Emmys, and two duPont-Columbia
awards at WBBM, and shared two Pulitzers for investigative work
in print.
BRIAN ROSS "I
grew up in suburban Chicago. The fifties and sixties were my formative
years. What interested me were the aggressive reporters then on
the Chicago Daily News and the Sun-Times -- that
Chicago school of no-holds-barred journalism that made me feel
this would really be exciting to do. Sandy Smith was a reporter
on the Sun-Times who went after mob figures and others,
and later was a reporter at Time. I was steeped in that
style of reporting. To grow up as a teenager interested in journalism
and to read those papers every day, and to learn how they did
what they were doing -- it was an exciting time for me."
Brian
Ross is chief investigative correspondent for ABC News.
BILL
MOYERS
"I've
admired Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele for a long time.
They were at The Philadelphia Inquirer for many years,
and did major takeouts that kept the best tradition of journalism
alive. They're at Time now [since 1997]. Like I. F. Stone,
they got their material from the documents; they learned how to
connect the dots. I admired Stone even though, when I was [in
President Johnson's administration], he was always writing about
us. He was finding out things that even I, as press secretary
in the White House, couldn't find out."
Bill
Moyers's most recent investigation was the March 26 "Trade
Secrets," an expos of the chemical industry.
SEYMOUR
HERSH
"I.F.
Stone was an influence for a lot of people who came along in the
sixties because he took published documents and made something
out of them. If there's any message he taught me, it's: you can't
write before you read. You've got to read the documents, the transcripts
of hearings, and so forth. Stone is somewhat tainted now in some
people's minds. They like to think of him as some crazy lefty,
but he wasn't. He was certainly a liberal. He took press statements
that the government put out and read every one of them. I remember
in 1966 or thereabouts, the U.S. forces in Vietnam announced a
three-day cease fire; the U.S. would shut down its operations
in Vietnam for three days, and so would the other side. What I.F.
Stone discovered by reading all of the logistical reports was
that in those three days, we quadrupled the amount of military
supplies flowing into the Saigon airport. So instead of having
forty flights a day, we had hundreds with supplies and arms. So
in effect, we cheated very significantly. Stone got that by reading
all the logistical reports. The net effect was that it raised
questions about our integrity. The Vietnam war itself was a big
influence. It was in your face. We do not remember how accepted
that war was. Before Watergate, going after a president, a presidential
policy, just wasn't done. Every war was assumed to be a just war.
"Harrison
Salisbury was a role model. Homer Bigart was a role model. David
Halberstam was a role model. In the early 60s when those guys
were pounding away in Saigon, I was a kid reporter in Chicago.
The New York Times wasn't so easy to get. I had to walk
to the sole downtown newspaper kiosk, on Randolph Street, that
sold it. I'd walk a mile out of my way to get a Times early
in the morning. So I was very influenced by the early Vietnam
correspondents, most of them at the Times. They were a
very powerful influence on me."
Seymour
Hersh's eighth book, Against All Enemies, is an investigation
of gulf war syndrome.
LAURA
WASHINGTON
"A
role model of mine is Pam Zekman, with whom I worked when I was
I was at WBBM. At that time in my career, she taught me just about
everything I know about investigative reporting. I think she's
the best in the country. She came from print into broadcasting,
and has operated fabulously in both arenas. One time, she and
a partner posed as husband and wife and opened a bar in downtown
Chicago, and then waited for inspectors to come around and put
out their hands for money. It was wonderful. They got great stuff.
"Another
role model for me was the late Leanita McClain, an African-American
editorial board member of the Chicago Tribune. She was
a superb, spectacular writer, and although she wasn't specifically
an investigative reporter, she became a role model for me in terms
of making your writing sing, and being eloquent and powerful.
"Investigative
reporting has interested me because it has impact and gets results.
I got into this business because I grew up on the south side of
Chicago in a low-income community and saw a lot of injustices
being done to African-Americans in particular, and I felt that
investigative journalism would be a way to right a lot of those
wrongs -- to challenge the system, to ask questions. Is the system
working for everyone -- for people of color and the poor, as well
as it is for everyone else? That has been my mission professionally."
Laura
Washington is editor and publisher of The Chicago Reporter.
