As part of the 21st Annual Fall for the Book festival, the Honors College hosted renowned journalist Peter Copeland for a colloquium event focused on his book Finding the News: Adventures of a Young Reporter.
Copeland’s book narrates pivotal events from his career in order to offer a defense of journalism “done the right way.” Each chapter denotes an important lesson learned on his journey from ‘cub’ reporter to bureau chief of the E. W. Scripps Company. His book is not only relevant to the state of journalism today, but also speaks to challenges faced in academic research.
Audience members intersted in journalism and first year Honors College students in attendance were introduced to the old-school news values of speed, accuracy, and fairness. Copeland's emphasis on finding reliable sources and seeking the context that enables one to evaluate the facts resonates with core emphases in the Honors College curriculum. Copeland also described how journalists seek out and synthesize multiple perspectives.
The interview, moderated by Honors College Dean Zofia Burr and conducted by second year Honors College student Sophia Chapin, covered topics such as learning from mistakes, avoiding bias, and finding the right career path. Other highlights include how journalism has changed with the dawn of technology and the problem of ‘fake news.’ At the end of the interview, Copeland takes questions from aspiring journalists in the audience.
From left to right: Honors College Dean Zofia Burr, Honors College student Sophia Chapin, and renowned journalist Peter Copeland
Zofia Burr: The official title for this panel is the Birth of a Journalist. I kind of like the title of the book that we're going to be talking about a little better, Finding the News: Adventures of a Young Journalist, and Peter Copeland is our young journalist here.
Peter Copeland: Formerly young journalist.
Zofia Burr: Formerly young journalist. Just a few things I want to let you know: at the end of discussion, there's going to be books for sale outside in the lobby and, hopefully, we'll remind about that again, but don't forget. We did solicit questions from the Honors College students, but didn't get any, so we made some up for you. We will see if we'll have a little bit of time at the end.
Journalist, author, and consultant to media companies and news organizations, Peter Copeland started his career as a night police reporter in Chicago, covered Latin America for five years, based in Mexico City, and came to Washington to cover the Pentagon. He covered the US invasion of Panama, the Gulf War, and the intervention in Somalia, and has reported from dozens of countries on five continents.
As the Washington Bureau chief, editor and manager of Scripps Howard News Service, Copeland managed reporters and editors, and helped train hundreds of young reporters and college interns such as yourselves. He worked closely with the Scripps television stations, cable networks, newspapers, digital properties, and global communication business. He has also, in his spare time, written five books. I'm not sure when. He has a degree in political science from Lawrence University, and studied politics at the University of Exeter in England.
Today, he's going to be interviewed by Sophia Chapin. Sophia is a sophomore in the Honors College, junior by credits. She's majoring in environmental science, she's on Mason's rowing team, and is the Multimedia Intern for the Honors College Communications Team.
So, I wanted to say a little about the format: we wanted to have a conversation between Peter and you, the students, so we have two audiences in mind: we know we have a lot of people studying journalism or the historical topics that Peter has covered; we also have a large audience of students in the Honors College colloquium who are here because they are doing research. One of the unique things about this work is that the lessons that it teaches us apply equally to journalism and to research processes. This will be a really good opportunity to hear about how in "the real world" people focus on things like asking real questions, considering multiple perspectives, and analyzing evidence, which all should be very familiar to you. So, without further ado, please welcome Peter and Sophia.
Sophia Chapin: Thank you. In the first chapter of Finding the News, you discuss how you had never considered a career in journalism and, then, suddenly, you change your mind. Why?
Peter Copeland: So, journalism was in my family. Two of my grandparents were reporters, so it was a respected occupation in my family, but I didn't really want to be part of what I considered at the time the bourgeois media, and definitely not the Chicago Tribune, which was my hometown newspaper. I kicked around after college, I studied political science. I was working up in northern Michigan, and met a man who was building a summer home. We used to argue a lot about politics. Basically, he didn't agree with anything I said, and I didn't agree with anything he said, but he said, "The things that you're talking about? That's what journalists do. If you're talking about justice, equality, and economic fairness, the environment — those are things that we're talking about in the news, and if you want to try it, I could probably help you."
So, it turned out, this man who I honestly did not know, he was the publisher of the Chicago Tribune, so I managed to swallow my feelings about the paper and said, "Well, yeah, I'd be willing to try it," and I'm imagining this big corner office, and I could write about politics, but since I had no experience and I was barely out of college, they sent me to be a night police reporter. That's how I started.
Sophia Chapin: When discussing becoming a journalist, you talk about and tell the story in your book about finding a passion and then following it. So, for those of us who don't know yet what we're going to do with our lives, do you have any advice about how to figure this out?
Peter Copeland: I feel bad for everybody who's told "Go follow your passion. Find your dream and then pursue that, and the money will follow." That's just not very good advice, honestly, because I didn't have that — well, I should say: if you have a passion, that's great. Then, you're 90% there. Just speaking from my own experience, I was not passionate about journalism. I was not one of those kids that walked around with a strainer and interviewed everybody. I didn't have a passion for anything, really. It was only until I actually did the work that I realized that I had a passion for it, and there were two things that I liked. This is how I came up with the title of the book, Finding the News. What I liked was going out and hunting down the stories. What we'd say is you'd go out, leave the office, kill something, and drag its bloody carcass back to the office.
That was fun, but also, it was important, and it was meaningful, and so finding the news for me was finding stories, but I also found a purpose and a mission in my life in the news.
Sophia Chapin: How did you keep that curiosity and passion throughout this whole career up until now?
Peter Copeland: That's a great question because what's fun for me was learning new things, seeing new things, and — Our job, basically, as journalists is you go out in the world, meet new people, discover new things, write about it, and share it with everybody else, and they pay us. I could never get over that. So, I covered all kinds of different beats. I covered cops, transportation, the courts, and at each point, you are new and you don't know anything, and so you ask a lot of questions, you try to keep your ears open and learn. The more you learn, then, the better your stories are.
At least for me, after a couple of years, I would get bored with a topic and, thankfully, in journalism, you would move around, so I would go and be assigned another beat, or go to this other country. Then, you'd have to start the learning curve all over again. So, the fun point for me was when I knew enough to not make a stupid mistake and be embarrassed because you don't know, but I didn't know so much that I was an expert because, when you're an expert, then you're writing for other experts and you're not writing for your average audience. So, that sweet spot was somewhere in between.
I would keep my mom in mind. She was the daughter of newspaper people. She was a big reader, and she read the newspaper every day, but she was not a news nerd or anything, like I became. So, if she asked me a question, I would consider that a question that other people had, and I would go pursue that. I considered her my one true barometer of public opinion.
Sophia Chapin: Could you talk about the things you experienced as a journalist, be they earthquakes in Mexico City, street riots in Panama, troops in the Gulf War, or camels in Somalia, that especially challenged your worldview?
Peter Copeland: The hardest — Well, I covered Latin America for five years, and that was a good example of, you know — when I went and first set up an office there, I was petrified. I really kind of fudged about how much Spanish I spoke with my bosses. I spoke more than they did, but I was not fluent, by any means, but I figured I would learn as I went. After a couple of years, my Spanish was good enough that — how many people speak a second language or third language? [many hands raised in audience] Wow, a lot. Good. So, you know that there's the learning of the language, when you get the words and everything, but it's a while before you can tell if someone's lying to you in another language, or if there's some story behind the story that they're telling. Those are subtleties that take a while to get.
So, after a couple of years working in Spanish, I felt good there, but when I went to another country like the Middle East or — Somalia, I think, was the hardest place that I worked. 1992, the country had broken down in civil war. There were clans, basically, factions that were fighting each other. Everybody had weapons, even kids 12 and 13 years old had automatic weapons, and they were driving around in these cut-down Jeeps that had machine guns mounted on them. It was very dangerous and, also, I had never been there before. I didn't know the players. I didn't speak any of the local languages. I didn't know a noun from a verb. I felt like the place could blow up at any time, and I was helpless, really.
Has anyone seen the movie or read the book, Black Hawk Down? That was at that time. The movie, it shows what it was like for us, for outsiders, going there. I mean, it was very scary for Somalis, also, but it was a difficult place to cover.
Sophia Chapin: Would you say that experience there was the scariest point in your journalism career?
Peter Copeland: Yeah, it actually ended my experience as a foreign correspondent because I had been to 30 countries, probably, at that point, covering stories but, also, along the way, I fell in love, I got married, and we had a baby. So, that winter, my wife and the baby and I were with my mom in Chicago for Christmas when the office called and said, "You have to go to Somalia." So, I missed her baptism and her first Christmas. I remember flying in a helicopter in Somalia, and I always liked flying in a helicopter. In a military helicopter, it's even better than the regular one because they fly super fast and low to the ground, but I remembered thinking that this is not what a new dad should be doing, that I'm here for my own personal benefit. The story was important but, really, I wanted to be there, and it was my job, but I thought, "If something happens to me here, I'm going to be punished for eternity." I went home and I told my boss, the editor, that I didn't want to go to anymore conflict zones, and he got mad. He said, "What do you mean? You finally figure out something you're halfway good at and you don't want to do it anymore?" He had four kids and, eventually, he understood.
Then, as punishment, really, he was still mad about it, so he put me on the desk which, at a newspaper, that means you become an editor rather than a reporter. I considered that punishment, like going to jail, basically, that I was going to be sitting with my hand handcuffed to a computer all day, but surprisingly, I liked it, and I took pleasure, pride, and joy not only in the story that I was working on but we had a couple hundred reporters around the world that were sending in stories that we were editing and then sending, and we would send out about 100 stories a day. I took pride in all of that, felt responsibility for it, and felt like I had an even bigger role. So, it was a career move that I didn't want, look forward to, or expect, but it turned out to be a great move for me.
Sophia Chapin: Jumping off that, when you were working as an editor and talking about bias and reporting — how do you check bias when you're interviewing, when you're reporting, and when you're editing others' work? How would you overcome obstacles to the truth, and what were they like?
Peter Copeland: I like that you ask about bias instead of balance, for example, or being objective, because everybody has bias. There are things that we think — Like, when I first became a police reporter, my idea of the police was that they were sort of enforcing a corrupt and unjust system, and they were sort of the armed police of the ruling class. When I actually got out and spent time with real police officers, it just wasn't like that. I mean, there were some of them who were bad, but a lot of them were really there to try to serve, so I had to overcome my own bias. Not so much that — This is another reason why we change beats: some police reporters, they spend too much time on it and start to identify with the police. They basically become a spokesperson for the police, or for any organization — I covered the military — you could end up becoming a spokesperson for them. You don't want to do that if you're a journalist. You're trying to understand and be empathetic without — going native is the term that we use.
Sophia Chapin: You mentioned in your answer about being fair and being objective. Early in your book, you describe how a story you wrote that was factually correct but not sufficiently contextualized was misused. You said, "It wasn't enough to mention both sides of the story and pretend I was being fair. There are many more ways to look at an issue." Can you tell us what you mean by being fair, and perhaps tell us a story in which you succeeded in being fair, or one where you didn't succeed in being fair?
Peter Copeland: There are a lot of examples of not being fair. One of the good and bad things about journalism is that you never have enough time to report the story and you never have enough space or time to report and share the story. You never have enough time to get the information and never enough time to express it. So, I don't think there's any story I ever did that I couldn't go back and do better now, if I had more time, but the story I think you're talking about, from El Paso, in that case, or Panama?
Sophia Chapin: Yes.
Peter Copeland: — Which one?
Sophia Chapin: I think the one in which you were talking about what was happening in the 80s?
Peter Copeland: Oh, right. Well, there's two in El Paso. The story that I remember was — this was an early research project that Dean Burr will appreciate. I was trying to figure out how the court in El Paso was defending people who were accused of crimes but couldn't afford a lawyer. So, there was no public defenders office. Instead, the judge would assign a lawyer in town and say "You have to do this case," basically, "for a small fee. You're not going to be a lawyer for hire, the county is paying this fee."
So, I was curious about how the system worked. This was before computers, but the records were all public, so I went down to the courthouse, I got all the records of all the judges, who they were assigning these cases to, and then I got a list of the lawyers who were receiving the money. I basically just made two long sheets of paper and I tallied it all up. I found the judge who gave out the most money and the lawyer who received the most money. I went, I talked to them both, and everybody knew them in town, so I wrote this story about how they basically had this operation where the judge was funneling money to the lawyer, and the lawyer, then, was working as a defense attorney for people who were accused, but couldn't afford a lawyer.
I mentioned in the story that the judge was the nephew of the lawyer, the lawyer was the uncle of the other man. In Texas — I didn't know this — that's illegal. So, when the story hit, it exploded, and the judge and the lawyer got in a lot of trouble. I had pointed to this what looked to me like a financial issue when, in fact, it was a legal issue, and they both were in danger of losing their jobs and maybe going to jail. I felt sick about it. My editors were happy, and all my colleagues were giving me high-fives, I was like a minor celebrity for a minute, but the reason I felt bad about it was the judge was assigning most of the cases to this one particular lawyer, but the lawyer was, everybody told me, the best criminal defense lawyer on the board, and he was rich. He didn't need the money from the county. In fact, every time he took a case that the judge assigned him, he lost money because he was getting, like, $20 an hour compared to $500 an hour that he normally charged.
So, this was technically illegal, what they were doing, but the criminal defendants were getting the best attorney possible, and the county was saving money and the taxpayers were saving money, so I just felt bad about it. I felt like I was absolutely accurate in my story. Everything was 100% solid. Nobody ever challenged any of the facts or even my math, which is not very good. Everything was fine, but there was this whole backstory that I felt outweighed the facts, almost.
Sophia Chapin: That relates to something that happened when you interviewed for a job in Seattle. You were asked, "What is the worst mistake you've ever made?" Do you know how you would approach that question if you were asked it today?
Peter Copeland: So, this, it's like a classic interview trick question. "What's the worst mistake you ever made?" I wasn't expecting that question. This is one of my first job interviews. I wasn't expecting it at all because I had been trained in my first job in journalism that you don't make mistakes, that it's all about not making mistakes. So, then, you try to think "Okay, well, what's a mistake I made that's somewhere between jaywalking and a felony?" A teachable moment. Some people say "Oh, my only mistake was I worked too hard and I didn't leave enough free time." That's not really a mistake.
So, in this case, what had happened was I had covered the mayor of Chicago, Jane Byrne. She and her husband, a guy named Jay McMullen, who was a former newspaper reporter, they called our office one Saturday night and I happened to answer the phone. They were super upset at the Chicago Tribune, which was not unusual, they were often upset at the Chicago Tribune, but they were frothing, ranting, and raving. The mayor said she was going to ban the Tribune from City Hall, and that it was city property, therefore, her property — and so, kicked the Tribune out of — which is not true, right? — [kicked the] Tribune out of City Hall, and then no access for the Tribune to city records, no city officials were going to be able to talk to them. The Tribune cut off, completely, and they hung up.
So, I wrote up a story, and I knew it was a pretty good story, but it just blew up, and the next day, every news outlet in town came to City Hall to see if the Chicago Tribune reporter would actually defy the mayor and be there, and he did. Then, the Tribune had this big headline about defying the mayor and the freedom of the press, and they got really self-righteous about it. It was a big story. So, the mayor then has a press conference and she says "Okay, well, I was mad at the Tribune, but I never said that we were going to ban them," or "I never said we were going to cut off their access," and she said, "I don't know where you got that," and I was thinking, "From me." I went back, looked at all my notes, and I hadn't recorded the call, but I had typed up all my notes as we were talking. It had only been two days, so I could hear her voice in the background.
Now, I know that it was Saturday night, they were probably drinking, and they got mad. Some leaders of big organizations, they get mad and then they immediately want to lash out at the media. So, she basically accused me of lying and making up the story. Fake news. My organization backed me up. The papers in town, they ran the transcript of our conversation. It was a big story in Chicago. So, in my packet of clips that I sent out to my job interview in Seattle, I included that story, but when the editor tripped me up on that question, "What was your biggest mistake," I said, "Well, I don't think I handled it properly this time with the mayor." I feel like I didn't honestly know what my mistake was, since she was the one calling me a liar and I was not lying, but you shouldn't become the center of the story, and it's uncomfortable when people question your integrity. So, I felt like I had done something.
So, I told them about it, and so then he takes the piece of paper and he goes "Well, if that was such a mistake, why did you include that story in your clips?" I never could explain that. I never got a job offer in Seattle. Probably never will.
Sophia Chapin: So, if it comes up in an interview for me, what's the kind of approach to take with that question?
Peter Copeland: Well, again, you have to find something that you did. It's a terrible question, that's why people keep asking it. It's not even what you say, it's how you say it and how you deal with it. You can't say "Oh, I'm a perfectionist," because that's not really a bad thing, either. So, that's a good one. I don't know. Anybody have a good idea for that one? Not sure there is one.
Audience Member: No comment?
Peter Copeland: Right. Maybe that's the safe reply.
Sophia Chapin: So, towards the end of the book, and with context from the book, you talk about journalism has changed. What can you say to that?
Peter Copeland: The origin of the book was I was going to talk to journalism students in Florida, college-level students, and I was with my son, who was about 10, 12 years old, and I said, "What should I talk to them about? Should I talk about how to do an interview, what the lead of a story is, or journalism ethics?" He said, "No, no, no. Just tell them stories." So, I originally just wrote a book of stories: the stories behind the stories that I covered. Then, I wanted the stories to have a moral lesson to them, and so I kind of choose the stories where I learned something about myself, about journalism, or about the world.
Then, when I put them all together, I boiled it down. I wanted to find out "Okay, in 40 years, what did I learn about journalism?" This is simplified, but I boiled it down to speed, accuracy, and fairness. Speed, because journalism is competitive, and the more journalists covering a story, the more news organizations on the story, the better, because you could think, well, why don't we just do the electric company or the water company, where you just have one, it supplies everybody with the same stuff, and people pay. Why not have just one news organization? Because, to me, that would be a disaster. The more competition, it pushes the other orgs to do better and to keep jumping over the other people. So, speed, I believe, will always be important. It's easier and faster now.
Accuracy is the second quality, and, to me, that is the minimal requirement of journalism: you have to be accurate. Unfortunately, speed and accuracy are in tension so, sometimes, there's a temptation to do first and not right and, sometimes, getting it right takes a little bit longer, and you lose speed.
The third one is the hardest one, and that's fairness. I went back and forth about whether I wanted to talk about balance or telling both sides of the story. What was the biggest possible umbrella? I came to fairness because any two-year old knows what's fair. You've all heard a kid say, "That's not fair!" We know. Humans just have an instinctual idea of fairness. It's the hardest one of those three things, and it encompasses a lot, but that, to me, was always the goal.
I feel that those three things are still valid now, even though the technology is completely different than from when I started, and journalism has changed just in the last few years, but those core values are the same.
Sophia Chapin: Following onto that, you talk about that in your book: how you kind of envision a golden age of journalism that might occur if we stick to those values that you talked about. With that, can you also talk about, because this is a controversial issue right now, ‘fake news?’
Peter Copeland: So, you have to separate the business of news and the actual reporting of news. There is the craft of journalism, and then there's the business of journalism. The new technology, starting with the Internet and, now, social media, has disrupted the business of journalism. We made all of our money from advertising because a newspaper, for example, was the only place you could advertise. If you wanted to sell a bicycle, you had to take out a want ad in the newspaper to sell a bicycle until this guy named Craig Newmark started a list that he would send to his friends about bikes for sale or apartments for rent, and that became Craigslist. It destroyed one of the main pillars of newspaper economics by taking classified revenue out of business. The thing that was frustrating to people inside the business like me was that he didn't even want the money, he just was trying to help his friends. He never really took the money, what the newspapers said is he destroyed value. Actually, he made it much more easy and convenient to get a bike.
So, that part of business has been destroyed by the technology. The reporting part, though — When I was starting, I had to carry dimes for a pay phone. Now, you basically have a computer in your hand when you're out reporting, and you can gather information and report it live from wherever you want. So, in that sense, everyone is enabled as a reporter. So, you have the two things. The business part is broken, the journalism part is, potentially, enhanced and made easier and better. To me, it's just a question of how do we overcome that business problem? So, any business majors, I need you on that. The cool thing is, if you want to be a journalist now, you probably will work for a news organization that doesn't exist now, and you might be the one that invents that news organization. So, that to me, makes it an exciting time.
I do think, though, that the core values are going to matter the most, no matter what the technology is, but it's still going to all be about speed, accuracy, and fairness. You will have fake news, which — Fake news, to me, it's not a story that's wrong, it's not a story that you disagree with or that you think is wrong, it's not even a story that's actually wrong, because people make mistakes and they get stories wrong, and then, a responsible news organization corrects the mistake. So, that's not fake news. Fake news is when you deliberately mislead someone, either for money, for political gain, or for just some perverse desire to spread wrong information. That exists, but it's always existed, it just had a harder time getting into the mainstream media because, even though I say that our values have not changed, we don't always live up to them, and social media is a big enabler of cheating on our values. It doesn't cause you to cheat on your values, but it makes it way easier. Reporters used to know a lot more than they ever published. We knew secrets about the President, the members of Congress, or the mayor, depending on where you were, that you just didn't write about, for whatever reason. Some reasons were good, and some were bad.
Now, reporters, I think, are much quicker to share information that they haven't checked out. For example, a lot of people on their Twitter feed say a retweet is not an endorsement. Well, then, what is it, exactly? You're passing along information that you don't know about. I don't like doing that because I follow certain journalists because I value their judgment. I don't want them just passing along something that might or might not be true. Where I started, the motto of the city news bureau was "If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out." My mom always hated that, but you get the idea.
Sophia Chapin: So, if each one of individually can do something to help support quality journalism, what would it be?
Peter Copeland: Pay for the news. I mean, we got into this idea that the news should be free and, just like we got into the idea that music should be free or movies should be free. They're not free to make. They cost money, and if we want to keep quality, you have to pay. So, I think the journalists of my generation, we stupidly stumbled into giving away the news and thinking we would get enough audience that we could monetize that we would be okay with sticking to the same advertising model, but it clearly did not work, and I don't know what'll work. So, people are moving more towards a subscription model, where you pay for the New York Times or you pay for the Washington Post. I'm hoping that we'll find a third way or a new way of supporting quality journalism, but it's going to be about money.
Then, also, I tell people that you should try to broaden your news diet. Like, how do you get it?
Sophia Chapin: I generally get it off social media, but I follow certain news organizations, ones that I personally believe reliable.
Peter Copeland: How do you find news stories?
Sophia Chapin: A lot of it's through — I get recommendations that are catered to me by my phone. I'm sure everybody has those. Some of it's totally not relevant to what you want to read. And then, otherwise, as a student trying to do research, I generally just run into new things, but mostly related to what I want to be reading in my field.
Peter Copeland: That's the thing I like about social media, because there are things that I never would've thought to search for or that are in a traditional newspaper, so I think that's a benefit. The other thing you were asking about, how to support media is to — I believe that you should broaden your menu and try to consume media from different sources. The more you get, the better. I just wouldn't, in this day and age, depend on any single source.
Sophia Chapin: When we're looking on social media at news, is there any habit that you can recommend to make sure that the news we're reading is based on the principles that you were talking about, or to make sure that we share news responsibly?
Peter Copeland: Do you share stories?
Sophia Chapin: Not usually. I write some stories based on things that I've read and researched, and I share some stories, but they're mostly ones that check out with me looking at other sources and the broader context.
Peter Copeland: Thank you for doing that. So, I'll follow you. I mean, you just have to be extra careful. I remember people saying you have to be careful what you read, but things like photographs were regarded as proof. "Well, here's the photo," or "Here's a video about it." Now, even that is suspect and easily manipulated. So, I think you have a harder job sorting through information, and your parents', grandparents' generation, they just had fewer sources, and mostly, they were dependable, within limits, but now, there's so much information that it's sometimes difficult to sort through, but it's also — I think it's so great, because if you're wondering about what's happening in India, for example, you can just go to an Indian newspaper or go to YouTube and watch video from India. To me, that's so enabling and freeing to everybody.
Zofia Burr: I think we have a few minutes for questions from the audience.
Audience: Thank you so much for all that you have contributed to journalism. So, one question I do have is that it was mentioned — thank you — that you did cover the Gulf War. So, how was your experience during that time, and what were your biggest takeaways from it?
Peter Copeland: I was — well, really we have go back in time to 1990. Saddam Hussein is in Iraq. He invades Kuwait next door because he wants the oil in Kuwait. The whole world said that "No, you cannot have Kuwait's oil and, most importantly, we need the uninterrupted flow of oil." So, the United Nations voted that he had to leave Kuwait. The United States was the main enforcer of this. Built up hundreds of thousands of troops inside Saudi Arabia hoping that Saddam would take the hint and leave Kuwait. He did not.
So, when the US Army was going to attack, I went and joined up with an artillery brigade. I was the only reporter in about four thousand soldiers, and the colonel who was in charge, he said, "Well, there's two ways we could do it. We could either brief you at the end of the day, 'Here's what we did, here's the operation,' or I can read you into the plan and I'll basically tell you all of the battle plan, what we're going to do, and how it's going to work." I'm thinking, "Well, I want door number two," and he said, "Well, the downside is you'll have to stay for the duration, because you'll know too much information and, if you left, were captured, or you decided to write about it, you could reveal the battle plan and endanger everyone." So, I decided, still, that I had to be there. If I had a chance to be a fly on the wall with an artillery brigade at war, I was going to do that.
But, it meant that I had to decide "Which side am I on?" Because it meant I was going to have to agree not to reveal this secret information. So, that meant I had to decide "Am I an American right now, or am I a reporter?" I chose to be American, at that point: that I was going to protect the US secrets. If I had gotten the Iraqi battle plan, for example, I would've published it. I had never thought about it before. It had never been an issue before. I never thought of myself as an enemy of the armed forces, and not an enemy of the people, but that was a time where I actually had to choose. Some journalists — we still argue about it, especially when, then, the danger of that is you become close to the people that you're covering. I always worried that "What if they do something bad? What if they commit an atrocity or a war crime? Then, I'd have to betray them and tell the story, or I betray my readers and keep it secret." So, you get into a moral thicket. Thank you, good question.
Zofia Burr: Another question?
Audience: Thank you, first of all, for coming to talk about all this because I think journalism in the way that you describe it is really important, because we don't really see as much of it anymore. With that, I was wondering your views on the shift towards click bait in journalism articles, and how that could affect the future landscape of what journalism even means?
Peter Copeland: "You won't believe what this woman did to lose 20 pounds and have a better sex life!" The scariest thing I see is you go into a newsroom and they have the stories that the paper's covering that day, or the TV station's covering, the website is covering, that day, and they're ranking by traffic. Some of the reporters are paid by that: the more traffic you get, the more money you get. I mean, it's good to know what your audience is interested in, but it is also very dangerous, in terms of how you're shaping the news, so I'm against that -- what you are talking about.
It's interesting, the way you phrased your question, because a lot of what's on TV or online, it's not really news. It’s people talking about the news. It's what they think about the news or, worse, how they feel about the news. It's louder and louder, more contentious, and not really that illuminating. I'm not sure how we dial it back, though. Maybe social media is making that part of it worse because it seems, on Facebook and Twitter, the people who are the most emotional or volatile, including the President of the United States, they get more traffic, and they get more attention. I'm not sure if that's the medium itself or if that's how we're using it, and so it's on you guys to sort that out.
Audience: What's your opinion on Hong Kong?
Peter Copeland: So, Hong Kong used to be a part of China and, then, it was a part of the British Empire. Britain sort of made a transition plan to return it to China, but it's a separate culture, separate economy. I've been to Hong Kong and China, and they're similar, but not similar. So, now, it's a question of "Is China going to take full control of Hong Kong," and people are protesting that. It's heartbreaking to see it. So, my opinion is, I wish — I can't say it would go back to the way it was. I wish that there could be some accord where you could have a separate entity, but China's not going to go for that. I think they're just going to keep fighting until it's fully part of China. So, then, the question will be "What's going to happen to China and all of its pieces?"
Are you involved with that, or do you have a view?
Audience: My current opinion is that there's a lot of human rights violations that are happening, along with a lot of American and other businesses that are supporting China and supporting the violation of human rights.
Peter Copeland: Yes. Okay, we agree on that.
Audience: I'm an aspiring political journalist, and I'm concerned about the future of my career options because between the political climate the rise of social media, I'm concerned that, by the time I graduate and enter the workforce, that my options are going to be very limited. What are some options for a political journalist and people in political communications right now?
Peter Copeland: That's a great question. If you're thinking about journalism that it might be fun, but you're also thinking about law school, you're thinking about med school, or you're thinking about being a rocket scientist, I would do any of those other things. If you get up every morning and you check the news and all you want to do is find out new things about the news, and all you can imagine doing is covering the news, then you should go for it. You're at a time where it's going to be uncertain, and you're going to probably work for a bunch of different organizations. I worked for the same company for 32 years. I'm pretty sure that will not happen with you. It wasn't always necessarily good, but it was stable, comfortable, and I could raise a family.
Definitely, it's going to be uncertain, but I believe it's going to survive because it's so important. It's important to individual people, and it's important to our society and our democracy. So, I'm just convinced that we're going to figure it out. I think, if you were 40 now — so, you're at 40, you're a journalist, and it's too old to start something new, and you've already invested this much, but it's really uncertain, that would be the tough part. You, just starting out, there's been an explosion, and you're picking through the rubble, but there is rebuilding going on. There are really exciting things happening. So, it may be a perfect time to get into journalism, but come back in 20 years and tell me. I hope I was right.
Original reporting and interview by Sophia Chapin