Two Months After The Storm ...
The story was originally broken by John McArdle of the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call, but the journalist who immediately skyrocketed to the top of every TV booker's "get" list was Idaho Statesman political columnist Dan Popkey – who had been covering Craig for years and also conducting his own background investigation regarding allegations of sexual misconduct by the Senator. You couldn't turn around without seeing Popkey being interviewed about the story.
This weekend marks the two-month mark since the story took over America's watercoolers and dinner table conversations – and late-night monologues, of course – so I tracked down Popkey to gauge his thoughts of the experience, now that the media frenzy is in the rear-view mirror.
Matthew Felling: You were invited onto every major news show. What surprised you about the media frenzy?
Dan Popkey: The intensity of it was something I wasn't prepared for. The urgency of the requests for interviews was surprising – they initially asked for me, but we started using other people from the paper, like the editorial page editor and the managing editor. This is Idaho, we're not accustomed to network vans coming here and staying for days.
Another thing? More often than I would have thought, people working for major news organizations didn't do their homework. For example, they'd call me for comment on a story not having read the 3,800-word piece that we published the day after the arrest and conviction became known.
Matthew Felling: I think I already know the answer to this, but did people mistake you for the person who actually broke the story?
Dan Popkey: Yes. In one of the first interviews I did with some guy, I forget his name – I don't watch much cable TV. Oh, it was Chris Matthews. He said "You broke this story!" And I had to respond, "No, actually, Roll Call broke the story." He wasn't the only one, though; there were several organizations that associated the story with us first.
Matthew Felling: Did any producers give you the hard sell during the process behind the scenes?
Dan Popkey: They'd say things like "You're only doing our program, right?" Or "You're not doing anything else in this hour, are you?" The craziest example was 'The Today Show' which we originally turned down...
Oh, but here's another story first. The first day when Senator Craig went on national television, there was this press conference in downtown Boise. I had agreed beforehand to talk with Fox News and Chris Matthews.
What I didn't know at that time – because it was so nuts down at the public plaza -- was that my bosses had been trying to call me after the Senator blamed his bad decision, the guilty plea, on us. There was my phone, rumbling in my pocket on silent without me knowing. And what my editors wanted to tell me was "Shut up!"
Well, not quite that bad, really. It was more along the lines of "we should talk about this before we agree to do interviews."
But like I said, the strangest thing had to do with the "Today Show." As the second week was beginning – after Craig's 'intend to resign' speech over Labor Day Weekend – a "Today Show" producer calls me, desperate, and says he really needs me for that Monday morning. I check with my bosses and they say it's okay.
To make it easy on me, the producer offers to send his satellite truck to my neighborhood. At five in the morning. On Labor Day. I live in this neighborhood with no sidewalks and lots of big trees. And I said "No, I don't think my neighbors would appreciate that on Labor Day."
Then I also got to realize how quickly the story gets old. I didn't hear back from "Today." About six hours later, I sent the producer an e-mail saying 'What's up? I haven't heard where I'm going to meet you?'
The producer e-mailed back 'There's been a change. I tried to save the segment, but I wasn't able to. So we don't need you."
So the fame lasted less than fifteen minutes. I think I'm still owed three or four.
Matthew Felling: What was the weirdest question?
Dan Popkey: You mean aside from 'shall we send a satellite truck to your house on a holiday?' There was a guy who asked a question with a pejorative tone – it was a Fox News Channel guy – something like 'So, the Senator showed up at this interview with your newspaper trailing his wife. Boy, that sure was an unmanly thing.' Or something like that.
I basically said "Whoa whoa whoa, wait a second. She was there to support her husband. She wasn't there under duress. Don't disrespect the guy's wife." I thought it was rude.
Matthew Felling: You took a lot of hell for doing hundreds of interviews into the Craig allegations. People said you were on something of a journalistic fishing expedition. Why so many?
Dan Popkey: I did over 300 real interviews. And there were scores, maybe hundreds more, calls I made to track down people.
It took a long time. We made the decision that we had to follow every legitimate lead about this story to see if we could prove or disprove the allegations about the Senator. And, you know, we did it in the context of not publishing anything at the time of the blogger's original report last October, as some of our brother media made a different call on that.
I found people who'd gone to college with Craig and taught him when he was a student in junior high – that's as far back as I went, talking to a woman who was his piano teacher early on. Going back that far, there was a lot of legwork involved finding the people who knew the Senator in his early years. These weren't interviews, so much as they were collecting string to get me to the people that I did need to talk to.
Matthew Felling: Is there anything you make of the Senator's change of mind about his departure date?
Dan Popkey: I was less surprised about that than most, because I've known him for twenty years. He is the toughest person in terms of emotional skin thickness I've ever known. Remember, he's been living with these allegations for over 25 years. I just think he has a rhinoceros' skin.
It's in keeping with who he's been as a public figure all along. And I started to hear rumblings from people who know what's going on, telling me the way his mind was developing, after his initial decision.
I wrote a column four or five days before his official statement, saying "He's staying. He's not going anywhere." So I knew and had time to adjust to it in a way the normal news consumer didn't who said "what the heck?"
Matthew Felling: When they were putting my earpiece in before you and I were on "Reliable Sources" together – when the scandal was at a fever pitch – I recall hearing, as you got wired up in Idaho, you tell a colleague about "I shouldn't be doing this." What was that about?
Dan Popkey: I was really starting to doubt whether I was capable of representing the newspaper well. A story like this doesn't come along very often for a regional newspaper, and so I was really conscious of representing the paper in a professional way.
And also I was starting to feel overexposed, like, the story is not about me. And the story is not about the Idaho Statesman, as much as the Senator would like it to be that way. The story is about conduct that we decided was newsworthy based on his guilty plea.
Even now, I'm not sure that I'm the best person to be representing the Idaho Statesman to CBS News.
This story is a very big deal, but not only on a political level. I think it has enormous cultural consequences. And I hope that there will be some positive change because of it. I think that some people who may have had closed minds about whether a gay person can serve well in a high office … they might have their minds opened as a result of this.
I've talked to many people about this, and maybe I'm being naïve. But I think the stakes are awfully high here. Not just for the Senator. Not just for his family. Not just for Idaho. But for the whole culture when it comes to how we think about what qualifies or disqualifies people from serving in office, people who otherwise are capable of serving. And I don't want to screw this up.