The Public Eye Chat With ... Phil Hirschkorn and Armen Keteyian
Matthew Felling: You've covered terror plots in the past: 9/11, the London transit bombings.
Phil Hirschkorn: Past terrorism trials teach us the difference between a real Al Qaeda plot and something else. And most of the post-9/11 cases are usually something else. With the JFK plot, you're trying to determine whether this is the real deal against the real enemy, Al Qaeda, or something else. The first question I can ask is "Who are these guys and are they tied to Al Qaeda?" Once the answer is no, and it usually is no, your blood pressure goes down a notch because it's not that it makes the story less serious, but it makes it slightly less spectacular or less imminent.
Matthew Felling: How much do you balance how you report on terrorism against the fact that terrorists, some think, are aiming at a wider audience more than the actual victims? Does that concern ever enter your reporting?
Armen Keteyian: Absolutely yes. That's the first question I've learned to ask are "How does this fit into the bigger picture?" and "Beyond the drama of the moment and the breaking news on the cables, what does this mean?" and "Who are these people?" There's a lot of agendas working here. There is certainly the news of the day and the reality of the moment. Then there's the agenda of law enformecent and anti-terror efforts and political funding for those efforts to how much does that play into public news conferences and public displays of terror suspects. Then there's the other side, the public's right to know and to calm fears. And then there's another side, the political motivations of the terror groups themselves. All of that is being judged, often in real time under pressure to put something on the air that evening. So words and language and choosing sound are all factored into the equation, as far as the tone and temperament of the piece.
Phil Hirschkorn: Since 9/11, the government very much wants to show us that they're doing something to prevent another 9/11. And while we sometimes diminish in our commentary these post-9/11 plots when they're thwarted, the government is quick to say "If we told you we'd rounded up the 15 muscle hijackers – not the brains of the 9/11 plot – and told you that they were gonna hijack planes with box cutters and fly them into the World Trade Center, we might've all had a laugh before 9/11." And so when we sometimes snicker with thin cases since 9/11, we need to keep in mind that it's important to the government, both the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security to show that it is making progress in stopping would-be terrorists. The other thing I would mention is that the government doesn't tell us every investigation it's working on, and it's gotten pretty good at keeping a lid on the cases that are developing. For example, they'd been working the JFK plot for 16 months. But not every investigation rises to the point of a prosecutable case.
In terms of the media, I think we do a very good job of reporting on arrests and indictments, but we could probably do a better job of following through on how those cases end up. In many instances, the convictions that are obtained are less than they announce at the beginning.
Matthew Felling: There have been some reports saying this was not as large a threat as reported. Did any red flares pop up in the news conference?
Phil Hirschkorn: A red flag that was apparent was that the alleged ring leader was 63 years old and, from what we could gather, was a couple steps removed from homelessness, living here in New York City. Not exactly the profile of a typical terror cell ringleader. Then on Sunday we learned that his conspirators were in their mid-fifties – again, that's significantly older than your typical suicidal, homicidal terrorist. That's not to say they weren't dangerous; they were just ususual. What wasn't unusual was that they didn't have any connections to Al Qaeda. They didn't have funds. They didn't have weapons or explosives. And overall, the plot – as far as the government knew about it – was informant-involved. I stop short of saying informant-driven, because that's what defense attorneys say when they cry entrapment in these cases. But even when these plots seemto be more plot than action, talking still constitutes a conspiracy. And that's what the charge is: a terrorism conspiracy.
Matthew Felling: Taking a look at your recent work – you've done the college student loan scandal, you've done terror plots, you've done electronic ballots. Does the variety keep you fresh or stress you out, as you have to be an ad hoc expert on everything?
Armen Keteyian: It's extraordinarily energizing and at times frightening at 10 in the morning that at 6 at night millions of people are going to be looking and listening to what you have to say on a particular subject. To me, it's one of the real thrills of the job and the draws of the job -- it's so different from day to day. For example, in a piece that didn't even run on Monday. It was going to be a second day "bounce" piece, a follow-up piece, to the JFK story. Phil and I became instant experts on the whole issue of pipelines and chemical plants and oil refineries as other potential targets for terrorism. I didn't know at the beginning of the day that there were 212,000 miles of interstate pipelines in this country. Nor did I know that there were 1,300 fuel farms, or that there were as many oil refineries as there are. And there was a half a dozen other things, too. I didn't know that JFK airport pumped 30 billion dollars into the New York economy. Those are the things you learn in the course of your day from 10 to 4, when you begin writing a script.
That's the exciting part of the job, but it's also the most stressful part of the job.
Phil Hirschkorn: I think everyone on our team has their own topics of interest. With the focus of the Evening News, you try not to get bogged down in the day-in/day-out minutae of a story because that's generally not what's going to get on the broadcast. The broadcast is waiting for the big picture or significant new developments in the story. With the student loan story, we got our first story on-air at the beginning of what Andrew Cuomo was doing, but you have to keep up with it. You have to stay current. But unlike the 24-hour cable channels, there's not that urgency to get every incremental step on the air. One of the other things, going back earlier in the conversation, about the Right To Know, balancing our responsibility to inform the public versus not wanting to give bad guys ideas. One thing we learned in that follow-up piece is that there is a website – I'm not going to tell you the address, and we wouldn't publish it either – that allows the public to view maps of pipeline and other critical energy infrastructure pretty much anywhere in the country, county-by-county. So a lot of the information that could, in a sense, be used against us is available, easily, not through the media but from the government or other places.