Some readers have written to ask whether it is ethical to take a published story and write your own version of it. In the news business this is called the “follow on,” and we’ve written about it at length before. The short answer is that it is perfectly ethical; the long answer is that it is ethical but it is karmically fraught.
The reason readers are asking about this today is because the Newspaper of the Twin Cities yesterday published what appears to be a different, contradicting version of our cover story this month. This was clearly a follow-on that was inspired by our story, and probably leveraged by our story, and that’s just fine by us. In fact, the Star Tribune’s alternative version added some very interesting elements to the dramatic narrative of how the folks at Pan Am flight school nailed Moussaoui.
A little background: Reporters have been trying to talk to someone inside Pan Am ever since September 11th, and the school has been under water-tight lock-down. When we first launched The Rake (we literally decided to go for it on September 10, 2001, then had a rocky six months making it happen), we fantasized about getting the inside story. Even though we are not primarily a news organization, this was the kind of investigative journalism we wished to practice, whenever the opportunity presented itself. As it turned out, one very resourceful, intrepid writer did get the story that no one else could get, and he came to us with it.
Once the cat was out of the bag, of course, we started fielding calls from all over the country—including local TV stations, CNN, and the folks at “Sixty Minutes.” It was a great story, and most interested parties asked if we would give them access to our main souce, flight instructor Clancy Prevost. For reasons of his own, Prevost wished not to speak with anyone other than our reporter. That was undoubtedly frustrating for journalists wishing to do follow-on stories. All we could offer them was our story, our reporter, our cover and inside images. Many in TV felt this was compelling enough, and our writer has been making the rounds. Newpapers, in contrast, ignored the story—until the Strib was able to publish their version six days after we’d published ours.
By the way, our main problem with the Strib’s version is that it was positioned by their editors to contradict our story as directly as possible, almost to the point of dishonesty—the implication being that Prevost was not the guy who caught Moussaoui, Nelson and Sims were. The Strib muddied Prevost’s role, and focused on Nelson and Sims, the managers who ultimately made the call to the FBI after his instructor (Prevost) had got his first troubling impressions of Moussaoui. The Strib’s story at first attempts to make Prevost look like an unskeptical rube willing to teach any old customer how to fly a 747, but then it relies on Prevost quotes from our piece to paint the opposite picture. Nelson, in particular, seems to want to discredit Prevost in an effort to get some credit himself—he claims to have pulled Moussaoui’s file before he even arrived in Minnesota—and the Strib obliges him in this. It is possible that all three men had independently come to the conclusion that the Moroccan was up to no good. But both our story and the Strib’s suggest that there was some resistance from folks higher in the organization—Strib sources not very convincingly say that unnamed people at Pan Am’s national headquarters in Miami resisted. Our story, which names a lot of names, suggests that it was the local management that at first didn’t see any danger in Moussaoui—and we confirmed it with those managers. Again, it is possible that both accounts are true. People are certainly entitled to their own recollection of the events of a few days in August, 2001, and there is surely enough glory to go around. We didn’t wish to get into the nitty-gritty of the differences in the two stories, but we felt slightly tempted to swing back, when the Strib damned us with faint contradiction. It is not clear why it is important to discredit Prevost to tell this story, nor why both stories can’t in some meaningful sense be valid. It would not be the first time management wished to take the credit of labor, nor the first time a major newspaper did not credit the work of a petty little independent competitor.
We want to be clear that the Strib’s story was quite good as newspaper stories go, and it revealed more of the story for anyone interested in how Moussaoui was initially caught in Eagan. Also, it is not in the Strib’s interest to promote our magazine (though they have done that in the past, for which we are grateful). In this case, the follow-on reporter, Greg Gordon, did an impressive job of finding and approaching two more sources with key, inside knowledge and their own compelling perspective. (It makes it easier to get others to speak on the record for the first time when you can show them that someone else has done so, and, y’know, don’t you want to set the story straight and give your side of it?)
Anyway, we say congratulations to the Star Tribune. Also, we both recognize and appreciate the backhanded gesture of credit offered deep into page A-4—so thanks, fellows.
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