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Watchdog Conferencethe day, he said, ‘You have to talk to the rapists.’ I found thisastonishing at the time. ‘Talk to the rapists! They’re going toadmit their crimes? These crimes that they weren’t chargedwith? Why would they admit their jail rapes to me?’“He said, ‘Oh, they’ll say something. They’ll say they werebeaten. Otherwise, people might think the victims are lying.’”[After six weeks of initial reporting on the story, Tofaniwrote a memo to her editors mapping out the major pointsthat would later appear in the series.] “I developed thememo and brought it one morning to the Assistant MarylandEditor, who I hadn’t had a great track record with. This wasan editor who was mostly interested in suburban zoningdisputes and seemed to me to lack guts and passion. But Ijust hoped for the best, and I made my best case. I told himit was really important, and he just wasn’t interested. Hesaid, ‘Let’s put it on the back burner.’ I protested, ‘Look,what else is so important? This is what we’re here for.’ Hesaid, ‘No, let’s put it on the back burner.’“I couldn’t accept that, and I think this is also part of the[reporting] equation: In the newsroom there are obstacles,too, it’s not just sources. There are times when it’s necessaryto find the next editor. And it’s uncomfortable because youhave to work with the lower editor, but sometimes there aretimes when you need to do that…so I went to the MetropolitanEditor, who was Bob Woodward, and made my caseagain, and he said ‘yes,’ of course. And he told the AssistantMaryland Editor to give me some time to do the story, not fulltime, but he had to spring me sometimes from the dailycoverage when I asked.“Woodward then wrote me a memo. I still have it. He said,‘The judges can really blow the lid off jail rapes.’ …but thiswasn’t really what I had in mind. I wanted a story that ofcourse quoted the officials but also had the human textureto it, the human dimension of what was going to be the effectof the jail rapes. How were these policies really affectinghuman beings? I really imagined a lot of interviews with thevictims.”“Looking back, I sometimes think it was a miracle that thestory was published, both because of problems with sourcesand problems also in the newsroom, because the editorssimply weren’t interested. So I think any sense that we haveof reporters having to maintain some independence in termsof their sources, they also need to maintain independence inthe newsroom to get the job done…. It’s all about maintainingindependence both outside the newsroom and alsoinside…. The series also could have been derailed manytimes by well-meaning editors whose instincts or values orsensibilities were somewhat different than mine…the key toovercoming such problems is to maintain one’s independencemainly by developing more sources and more friendsin the newsroom.”Murrey Marder: “The best stories that you look at areones in which the reporter, most of the time, was responsiblefor pushing editors, publishers, make-up men, intogreater focus on a story.”Roy Gutman: [He faced the dilemma of how to interesthis New York editors in the story of Serb atrocities in theBalkans, at a time when neither the U.S. government norNATO was concerned about what was happening there.]“How do you get the interest of your editors in somethingyou feel is really central, that you get obsessed with? In thecase of the Balkan wars, what got to me the most were a fewexperiences early on in the war in Croatia. I became awareof a slaughter of policemen that had taken place in a town ineastern Croatia by Serbian paramilitary troops…. The securityestablishment had no interest in the story, and yet Ithought, crimes are happening right in front of me. I figuredout that there was one way I could attract the attention of myeditors and the public and maybe even the East Coastestablishment, and that was by reporting the crimes. Thecrimes were something that people could and would relateto, even if the Balkans, as Bismarck once said, were a placewhere nobody wants to sacrifice a single Pomeranian grenadier….“When I started writing stories early in the Bosnia conflict,I failed, we all failed, all of us reporters who covered Croatiafailed to attract the attention of the world to the war crimesthat were going on there. When Bosnia began, I think manyof us were fairly depressed that there was yet another war,one that had been predicted.”Susanne M. Schafer: “I recall several years ago we wenton a trip with Defense Secretary Perry to about 10 Balkan andEastern European nations in about eight days…. He was thefirst U.S. Secretary of Defense to get into Albania, and Iremember I did a story about one officer there who hadtrained with special forces in the United States and wascoming back and training 600 Albanians in being able to usetactics that special forces did in the United States…. It was anamazing chance to take a look at what was going on in thatpart of the world. And, of course, very few people wereinterested in the story, let alone printing such a thing.‘Albania? Who cares?’“We ran into that periodically. One of the points that Perryhad made was trying to formulate a grouping of Balkandefense leaders and to try to get them to understand how theUnited States worked and what the idea of a civilian-runmilitary was all about because, of course, that was foreign tothem, totally.“Even when you had the chance to go on a trip with theSecretary of Defense, where you could go to a meeting ofthese defense ministers and talk to people there who weretrying to learn those things, many times the editors wouldn’teven pay for you to go. ‘Why? I mean that’s just an inconspicuous,silly part of the world. It means nothing.’22 Nieman Reports / Fall 1999