Capturing the News: Three Decades of Reporting Crisis and Conflict

Chapter Three: The Pope Has VD

40 Chapter Three The Pope Has VD The phone rang in our Rome bureau. I recognized the musical voice of a producer in Atlanta. This producer was famous for odd story assignments, so I braced for this one. “Is that Tony?” Here it comes, I thought. “Yes. Hi. How are you?” “There’s a story we want you to work on.” Uh-oh. “OK,” I said, a feeling of dread beginning to grow. “We understand from our sources that the Pope has VD. We want you to check it out and do a story.” (VD, or venereal disease, is what people in those days called sexually transmitted disease.) “What?!” Of all the conversations I had with the producer, this one was by far the most bizarre. I should have pretended that there was interference on the transatlantic phone line. I should have pretended I couldn’t hear. I should have hung up and run like hell. But instead I continued this conversation. “Is this an April Fool’s joke?” I asked, although it was not April. It was June 1981, my third month at CNN. “Our sources are strong on this one. We’re going to do it.” “There’s no way this could be true,” I said in desperation. “We feel good about our sources.” “In Atlanta? The Pope is here.” “You heard me.” The lilt was gone from the voice, and now there was a tough edge. The producer was determined to get the story. Normally this would be an admirable quality in an executive of a news organization. It helps provide the momentum to make sure all obstacles are overcome so that the news is covered and The Pope Has VD 41 your organization beats the competition. But the obstacles to this particular story seemed to me at this moment to be overwhelming, starting with the fact that it couldn’t possibly be true. If you wrote the most fanciful novel and included such a notion, no publisher would publish it. An even greater obstacle was that if CNN did run such a preposterous, blasphemous, and indecent story , the Vatican would never again provide us access to St. Peter’s or return our phone calls or have any dealings with us of any kind whatsoever. It was only two months since the Pope had been wounded by a gunshot from a wouldbe assassin. Waves of sympathy had been pouring in as he lay recuperating in Gemelli Hospital in Rome. At a time like this, if we ran a story claiming that the Holy Father had a sexually transmitted disease, hundreds of millions of Catholics around the world would be outraged, and many probably would boycott CNN and its advertisers. You couldn’t possibly achieve any greater disaster. “OK,” I said.“Let me see if there’s anything to it.” I hung up. Unbelievable, I thought. This can’t be happening. I racked my brains trying to think of a way out of this nightmarish assignment . The fact that I was in such a predicament made me wonder if I had made the right career move, joining this network. I had thought that two of my previous employers, the AP and Newsweek, were sensationalistic at times, but they paled in comparison with CNN. There was the time Jim Miklaszew‑ ski in the CNN Dallas bureau had illustrated a heat-wave story by doing a standup in which he fell backward into a tub of chopped ice. There was the time CNN owner Ted Turner did an on-air editorial in which he claimed that the people who should be put on trial for the 1981 attempted assassination of President Reagan were not John Hinckley, the man charged with the shooting , but the producers of the film Taxi Driver because Hinckley had said he did it to impress Jodie Foster, one of the stars of that movie. (Ted himself, our founding father, came to Rome on a visit that first year, accompanied by a young woman who was not his wife. She later was given her own show on our network. Over dinner with her and me and my wife at a restaurant, Ted read aloud clippings from Fortune and other magazines about the one subject apparently dearest to his heart—himself. I was amazed at his cheerful egotism.) Even I became caught up in the silliness of CNN. One time the crew and I went on location to the Italian health spa of Saturnia where we showed people...