In an earlier post, I mentioned the perils of being an independent reporter. With no big-name organization to back you up or fight your battles for you, falling afoul of powerful people, even without intending to, can lead you into a professional – and personal quagmire. Here’s the story of one of the most chilling vendettas against an independent journalist too curious for her own good:

“The life of a freelance writer can inspire paranoia even at the best of times. Story assignments inexplicably fall through, editors change
their minds. But the surreal campaign of dirty tricks endlessly played on Jan Pottker by Ringling Bros. chief Ken Feld and his minions would
be enough to persuade even the most stoic freelancer that their career path was being plotted by Franz Kafka.

The excruciating details of Pottker’s travails are annotated in almost 10,000 pages of pretrial complaints, motions, affidavits and
depositions filed in the bowels of Superior Court for the District of Columbia. The evidence gathered so far evokes other unfortunate
milestones in the annals of corporate espionage, going back to General Motors’ infamous campaign against the young activist Ralph Nader 40
years ago through the mysterious death of Karen Silkwood on an dark Oklahoma highway in 1974.

Pottker’s personal tormentor was an obscure, innocuous-looking,36-year-old freelance writer and sometime publisher with uncommonly
close ties to high-ranking former officials of the CIA. His name was Robert Eringer….”

 More at “Send In the Clowns,” Jeff Stein,  Salon, August 31, 2001 

Comment:

I have ambiguous feelings about this. On the one hand, I empathize with Pottker, obviously.  On the other hand, reporters also have to draw a line – which they don’t any more – between investigative work essential to a story that has public value (i.e., there has to be a “public interest” element strong enough to justify the disclosures) and “dishing the dirt” about people who have lots of money or are famous but whose activities really have no strong bearing on public policy or the citizenry. That is, reporters have to be able to tell the difference between acting like a responsible Fourth Estate and simply being a nasty purveyor of  other people’s dirty laundry. After all, if the private lives of everyone in the public eye is fair game, why shouldn’t the private lives of journalists be, as well? And where’s the end to that?

Here’s an example: Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, in so far as it was conducted on the White House premises and might have made him vulnerable to blackmail, was within bounds (although the manner in which it was covered showed pretty bad judgment and taste, in my opinion).  However, retailing gossip about Ms. Clinton or Chelsea strike me as being off-limits. Pottker’s case makes the cut, but I have to wonder why she needed to have brought in the family’s sexual secrets into it.

Everyone needs a portion of their souls left to themselves, even criminals..

In my opinion, one of the reasons journalists get tempted by this stuff is their inability to make “big picture” sense of the stories they cover. Rather than connect the dots economically, or historically, or culturally, or intellectually, so much easier to splash on the prurient detail,  with the comforting assurance that nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the public…..