COLUMN: Wire taps are tempting, but most journalists resist

Journalists ranked 298th in the most recent poll of professionals people trusted the most, just ahead of lawyers, politicians and three-day-old pond scum, but a good bit behind all the rest.

This doesn’t seem fair — pond scum really isn’t that bad — but some days there’s just not much you can say.

For journalists, these are some of those days, thanks to Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World, a British tabloid who’s reporters allegedly used wire tapping, bribes and other things not taught (at most) journalism schools to get juicer stories.

Papers like New of the World have been around for along time. They line the checkout stalls at supermarkets around the world and generally fall into two classes. One group is the aliens-meet-with-president-Bill-Clinton crowd. The other is the why-Brad-and-Jenn-broke-up bunch. The first is silly, the second salacious. But, standing there with a cart full of Cheez-Its and granola cereal, it’s hard not to peek. There is an undeniable appeal to these papers — it’s not unlike looking at a car wreck -- which is why, when the News closed this week, it’s circulation was around 2 million. That’s just slightly more than circulation of the Sunday Morning News.

For the “alien” papers, the deal is all about creativity. For the true “tabloids” (the term actually refers to the paper’s shape and size) nothing matters except the unending string of “scoops.” That beast requires constant feeding, and in a cutthroat world, sometimes food is hard to find.

Tabloid papers have been sorting through people’s trash, paying for stories and chasing celebrities with cameras for a long time. The spy/private detective work done by the News of the World folks is a natural outgrowth of that. What cash, fraud and dumpster diving couldn’t turn up, bugging just might.

And for the journalist, tabloid or otherwise, the lure is understandable. There is no worse feeling in this business than getting beat on a story, no better high than feeling like you have inside information ahead of the crowd. A personal fantasy — never acted upon, I swear — was having a bug inside the offices of elected officials, coaches or athletic directors that I covered. In less coherent states, like being asleep, I dreamt of the powerful of invisibility. How useful to a journalist that would be. “A source close to the mayor, but who couldn’t be seen by him, reports that ….”

Out in the real world, however, you do what you can do and hope that honesty, intelligence and perseverance will pay off. If you do it long enough it usually does, but along the way there are tricks of the trade that can help you along. I have eavesdropped on conversation through heating pipes, listened to closed door meetings through keyholes or paper thin doors (not my job to make sure secret meetings are secret) and “borrowed” a list of coaching candidates from the desk of major college athletic department functionary. Actually, I never touched the list. I just read the names upside down while he finished a phone call. Upside down reading is a useful skill — not quite as good as invisibility, but close — and it made for a nice scoop.

None of that approaches illegality and, in my mind, violates no code of ethics either. Other tempting ideas I’ve run across do.

One acquaintance stole a firefighter’s turnout coat from the back of a waiting truck and used it to work his way inside the security line of a major plane crash. Another friend – he was in my wedding -- almost talked a congressional aide into sending him some classified information by posing as a writer for an official Pentagon publication.

I’m not sure I could or would pull that off.

I’m positive I wouldn’t tap any phone lines, even if I knew how, nor offer any bribes, even if I had access to the needed cash.

Most people I know and have worked with in this business are like that, too.

We are actually pretty clean and ethical.

Yeah, yeah, I know what you’re going to say. That’s what the pond scum says, too.

Tucker Mitchell is Regional Editor of the Morning News. Contact him at (843) 317-7250 or by email at cmitchell@florencenews.com