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122 Chapter Eleven Scoop In addition to the misery that reporters experience when getting a story wrong, one of the worst feelings is to be on the receiving end of a “rocket”—a complaint by your editor or producer that you’ve been beaten by the competition . Many journalists get these rockets, especially in Washington, where the competition for scoops is intense and where the government often favors certain news organizations, such as the Washington Post or New York Times, for its leaks. You’re sitting in the press area of the State Department and suddenly your phone rings, as do the phones of all your colleagues except the smiling reporter who had the scoop, and the voice at the other end of the phone is your boss telling you that you’ve failed to get the top story and you’ve let yourself be beaten by a rival, and you are in deep trouble. I was on the receiving end of rockets more times than I care to remember, but on one happy occasion in Washington I was the reporter who was smiling. It was in 1987. I was covering the State Department for CNN. The Soviet foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, was visiting Washington, and his talks with Secretary of State George Shultz dealt with intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF) in Europe. If Shevardnadze and Shultz could find a way to agree on steps toward reduction of U.S. and Soviet INF missiles, then plans could go ahead for Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to visit Washington for a summit with President Reagan. But we journalists had no way of knowing how the Shultz-Shevardnadze talks were going. All the State Department spokesperson would say each day was that the two had met and that they had had a useful exchange of views. Total secrecy reigned as to whether they were making any progress. We had video of Shevardnadze arriving at the State Department, video of him and Shultz shaking hands, video of them making small talk for the cameras , and video of Shevardnadze leaving the State Department at the end of that day of talks. We had sound bites from interviews with Soviet affairs experts at Scoop 123 think tanks, who didn’t know any more than we did how the talks were going. We had file footage of the missiles in question and a map showing Europe and which countries were in the NATO and Warsaw Pact alliances confronting one another. But what we did not have was the crucial piece of information that many people were waiting to learn: was there any progress in the INF talks, and if so was it enough to clear the way for a summit? I had a list of the participants in the talks. One of the American participants was an expert on arms control issues. It was a long shot, but I decided to call him and see if he would talk. (I will not identify him further, even all these years later, because he agreed to speak to me on background—meaning that I could use general information he gave me but I could not use a direct quote or identify the source. This is one of the ground rules often used for interviews, especially in Washington. Usually the ground rules are worked out after a verbal tussle. Journalists try to win agreement that they can give the source’s name and title, in order to maximize the truth and help the reader see what bias the source might have, but the source tries to win agreement that he or she is not identified by name or title and can speak freely and not be held accountable for his or her words. Once the ground rules are agreed upon, they are strictly adhered to. This makes it possible for journalists to obtain more information, and for government officials to leak their version of reality without fear of retribution by their bosses. Journalists, of course, then have to try for confirmation from other sources and to use common sense to minimize the danger of being manipulated by the source.) I called the office of this official and expected to be given the usual runaround by his gatekeeper, but to my surprise my call was transferred into the official’s office . I decided to play a trick. One of the devices used sometimes by journalists, and also by police interrogators, is to pretend that you know more than you do, so...

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