The Waco Watch

Bob Lott, the fifty-one-year-old editor of the Waco Tribune-Herald, was settling into his chair for yet another interview with an out-of-town journalist when a voice over the newsroom loudspeaker announced that the water in the Tribune-Herald would be off for an hour. On the street below Lott's second-floor office, workmen could be seen jackhammering into the pavement.

"CIA or FBI?" the editor wondered aloud, chuckling.

Lott had reason to feel besieged. Since the last weekend in February, when the Tribune-Herald launched its extraordinary seven-part series about a secretive, little-known religious cult that calls itself Branch Davidian, he and his colleagues have been buffeted by an avalanche of letters, faxes, phone calls, and around-the-world requests for interviews and information. Suddenly, they find themselves in the uncomfortable glare of publicity and scrutiny that comes with being caught up in a major news story.

It was an unfamiliar role for what Lott calls "a small-town paper" in an unprepossessing Texas town whose chief claims to fame had been as the home of Baylor University and as the birthplace of Dr Pepper and Steve Martin. In the 100-year history of the Tribune-Herald, only a 1953 tornado that swept away Waco's downtown and claimed 114 lives rivals the impact of the Branch Davidian story.

Like that powerful tornado, the story spiraled outward, drawing the Tribune-Herald and other media outlets into ethical and legal turmoil that will last far longer than the standoff between cult members and law-enforcement authorities. Nearly three weeks into the siege, the Tribune-Herald and its parent companies, Cox Enterprises and Cox Texas Publications, were sued by John T. Risenhoover, one of the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agents wounded in the February 28 raid on Mount Carmel, the Branch Davidian compound. And the Texas Rangers, the investigative arm of the Texas Department of Public Safety, acknowledged an ongoing investigation into whether employees of the Tribune-Herald or of KWTX-TV, Waco's CBS affiliate, tipped off cult members that a raid was imminent. For her part, a cult member who decided to leave the compound says the tip came, not from the media, but from another cult member who called in from outside.

The legal challenges and the saturation coverage of the Branch Davidian standoff raised fundamental questions about the way journalists do their jobs. The questions center on the responsibilities that come into play as a result of the instantaneous nature of contemporary news coverage and of what seems to be an increasing tendency for reporters and broadcasters to become, however inadvertently, part of the stories they cover. It happened almost immediately in Waco:

* On the Sunday morning of the raid, five reporters, two photographers, and an editor from the Tribune-Herald, and a reporter and a photographer from KWTX-TV were in the vicinity of the seventy-seven-acre compound as ATF agents arrived. Almost before the last echo of weapons fire drifted away that evening, family members of some of the ATF agents and some law-enforcement officers were accusing the Tribune-Herald of alerting cult members to a possible raid -- either indirectly, by starting the series before the raid took place, or directly, by a phone call to the compound. Both the paper and the station strongly deny the accusations.

* As the gun battle settled into a psychological chess match between trained government negotiators and a wily, Rasputin-like cult leader, both sides probed for ways to use the media to advantage. FBI and ATF spokespersons acknowledged that they were using tightly controlled daily news briefings, not only to inform several hundred journalists who had converged on Waco, but also to communicate directly with cult leader David Koresh; on several occasions during the standoff, Koresh issued a call for more press coverage. For both sides, the media were mere conduit.

* At the urging of federal authorities early in the standoff, radio station KRLD-AM, an all-news station in Dallas, broadcast two messages from Koresh. After the messages were aired, the cult leader released pairs of children who had been living in the compound. Koresh then promised to surrender if KRLD played another of his messages. Again at the request of federal authorities, KRLD and the Christian Broadcasting Network played a rambling fifty-eight minute message from Koresh, unedited, but the cult leader reneged on his promise, saying that God had told him to remain in the compound.

* A talk show host with another Dallas radio station, KGBS-AM, broadcast a request for the Branch Davidians to fly a banner if they were listening. When sect members ran a banner up a flagpole, federal authorities criticized the radio station for undermining their negotiating strategy, which included isolation. KGBS program director Jim Long told the Dallas Morning News that his station's message to the cult members might have opened up negotiations.

Charlie Seraphin, vice-president and station manager for KRLD, told reporters he expected second-guessing about his willingness to run the Koresh tape. He emphasized to the Morning News that his station was "not trying to thrust itself into the story" but was acting at the urging of federal officials. He added that KRLD did not have a "blanket policy" about cooperating with authorities. "I really believe that if there's anything we still can do to save lives and prevent bloodshed, we'll do it," Seraphin told the paper.

Sara Stone, an associate professor of journalism at Baylor University, found no fault with Seraphin's decision to honor the authorities' request. "I think you deal as a human being first," she says. "You have the same responsibility as any other citizen has. But I was amazed that they [the ATF] even asked to begin with."

The "long-range consequences" worry Stone; she wonders if we run the risk of establishing some kind of worrisome precedent. "What if," she asks, "a gunman walks into a kindergarten classroom, takes a bunch of kids hostage, and says he's going to start shooting them one by one if he's not allowed to read his message over the air?"

On Monday, March 1, the day after the deadly gun battle, KWTX-TV news director Rick Bradfield seemed pleased with the work of his news crew, the only TV reporters to witness the mid-morning raid. Bradfield told the Dallas Morning News that the articles in the Saturday Tribune-Herald had put him and others on the alert.

"The photographer had a feeling that something might come of it," Bradfield told the Morning News. "We also heard some police scanner traffic that sounded a little out of the ordinary. It was just some intuition and a little bit of a Sunday-morning gamble. It could have been a wasted two hours on a rural road, but I guess it paid dividends."

By Wednesday, Bradfield's pride was mixed with feelings of bitterness toward fellow journalists. The night before, Houston Chronicle reporter Kathy Fair, interviewed on ABC News Nightline, had told Ted Koppel that some law enforcement officers were blaming the media for tipping off the Branch Davidians.

"My sources have told me they think they were set up by at least one reporter and perhaps one local law enforcement official," Fair said. "Set up," she explained to Koppel, meant that reporters had tipped off the sect in return for permission to be on the compound grounds when the raid began.

Her sources, she went on to say, pointed to "the fact that both the newspaper and the local television station . . . were already at the compound" and that "reporters for, I believe, the TV station, allegedly were already hiding in the trees when the federal agents arrived. And that was the first indication that many of them had that they had been set up."

The next day, KWTX president Thomas G. Pears fired off a letter to Koppel, demanding a retraction and a public apology. "No reporter or photographer from local media was on the compound grounds prior to the raid," Pears wrote. "KWTX-TV was not on the compound property at any time prior to the raid and was definitely not, as she [Fair] said, hiding in the trees. Our news vehicle followed the ATF caravan by some 200 yards and did not arrive in the compound until the gun battle was in full storm."

Pears went on to point out that a KWTX-TV reporter ran through gunfire to make a radio request for ambulances and that the same reporter used the KWTX-TV news unit to remove three of the injured officers from the compound.

Later that week, with investigations pending and lawsuits looming, news director Bradfield was no longer talking to reporters. "My media colleagues have done enough damage," he told this reporter.

For Tribune-Herald editor Lott, questions about the Branch Davidians began last spring, when the paper's reporters started to investigate rumors of a massive weapons cache at Mount Carmel. Then, in the summer, he started hearing bizarre tales of polygamy and child sexual abuse involving Koresh.

"The molestation of young girls in the name of religion, the apparent brutal physical and sexual abuse of young children -- all of those concerns grew larger in our mind than the weapons," Lott says. Although the Tribune-Herald is, in Lott's words, "a gun control paper" (contrary to the Texas stereotype), it was the disturbing stories of eight-month-old babies being whipped until they bled, of Koresh's fifteen so-called wives, and of his alleged sexual molestation of girls as young as twelve that lent urgency to the paper's investigation. Lott hoped that the series would prompt local authorities to act.

According to Lott, the series was wrapped up in early February, but the ATF officials asked the paper to hold off, citing their own investigation. The newspaper decided to hold the story, but not solely because of the ATF's request. "We were considering their concerns," Lott explains. "The major other concern was security for ourselves -- this newspaper and its employees -- and routine things, legal questions and the like."

A few days before the series ran, the Tribune-Herald met with the ATF a second time. Again, the law enforcement officials requested that the series not run. If the paper chose not to honor that request, the officials said, they would at least like to be told when it would run. Asked specifically if the piece would run "within one to seven days," Lott said yes.

"After that meeting, a group of us sat down and discussed a good while what we had heard," Lott says. "We decided we had heard nothing that would mess up what the ATF was planning. I have always believed you should weigh the consequences of publication, but after listening to the final presentation from them, we decided we had heard nothing that would convince us of the harm to society by publication."

Lott says he still did not know when the ATF planned to conduct its operation, although he had heard rumors of Monday, March 1. On Friday, February 26, he alerted the ATF that the series was about to begin.

"At about 3:30 on Friday before the Saturday it started, we notified the ATF through an intermediary that we were going to begin publication Saturday morning," Lott says. "We told the ATF what time our presses began turning, which was 12:15 A.M. We told them they could pick up a copy off the loading dock if they wanted to. We believe they had a copy of the story between thirty and thirty-six hours before the raid."

Part one of "The Sinful Messiah" ran on Saturday, February 27. The front page above the fold was devoted to stories about the history of the Branch Davidians, the sect's beliefs, and the power that its leader seemed to exert over more than a hundred people who lived at Mount Carmel. The stories jumped to two full pages on the inside. A lead editorial titled "That's Law and Order?" chided local officials for not acting on allegations about the cult.

Sometime that Saturday morning, Lott says, a person at the paper -- he declines to say who -- received a confidential tip that the ATF was planning to raid the compound the next morning. Acting on that tip, Tribune-Herald reporters were outside the compound by nine A.M. Thirty minutes later, while Wacoans had their morning coffee over part two of "The Sinful Messiah," the gun battle began. By sundown, four ATF agents were dead, sixteen injured.

Looking at the media army, with its vans and satellite trucks, its barbecue pits and pup tents, camped on a country road a couple of miles from the Branch Davidian compound, a reporter who had been on the scene from the second day wondered how Koresh would respond if he and his media colleagues packed up their cameras and notebooks, if the TV crews climbed into their satellite trucks and pulled down their dishes, and the eyes and ears of the world simply went away.

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