In the early 70's, I was a wet-behind-the-ears news reporter at a Miami TV station, making roughly the same wage as a municipal garbage collector. At the end of one long day, I got a call from the assignment desk telling me to swing by the home of a young girl who had been missing for several weeks. The girl's body had been discovered earlier that day, and ours was the only local station that didn't have film of the grief-stricken parents in the story on its six o'clock news. The producer wanted me to get an interview with parents for the late news.
Shortly after I'd joined the station, one of my colleagues asked the provocative question: "What would you do for a million dollars?" Answering that question became a regular post-work exercise at the neighborhood bar.
It usually started with someone's complaint about an awful assignment. For instance, one night a diminutive, minority reporter with a swollen eye got us started by describing what happened when he'd carried out an assignment to stage an abduction on a busy street corner to see if anyone would try to help the victim. They did, forcefully. Then the question arose, for a million dollars, would you do that in a redneck neighborhood? Would you do it in a redneck neighborhood naked? And so it would build.
But what created the fascination wasn't the bizarre, imaginary task. It was the fantasy that a person could sell out big once - abandon all pride and principle on just one monstrous occasion - then never have to compromise again. This was profound talk for reporters in a town where cannibalism seemed to be the only act everyone could agree was off limits when chasing a news story, and everyone knew they were just one botched assignment away from unemployment.
To hang onto my job, by age 22 I had already chased a mob enforcer around a parking lot with a camera, climbed onto the roof of a stranger's car in little Havana to film through the window of a factory that assembled "Saturday night special" handguns, driven onto an operating runway at Miami International Airport and ticked off a lot of cops. But I really, really did not want to add knocking on the door of that heartbroken family's house to my resume.
I suppose if standing on principle were easy, the principles worth standing on wouldn't be so damned narrow and slippery, and the turf underneath wouldn't look so inviting.
I knew a woman who was asked, during an interview for a consumer reporter job at a big city TV station, if she would have a problem not reporting on the misdeeds of companies that bought advertising on the station. I don't know if she paused to think about it, but I do know that she said, "No problem." She got the job and was subsequently promoted to co-anchor of two of the station's newscasts. I would like to think she still feels an occasional twinge of guilt, but who's to say? She makes a good living.
On the other hand, a friend of mine - a single mom with two young children - walked away from her job as regional head of a national cable news network after the head office decreed that all stories about a political campaign in her region must begin and end with positive mentions of a specific candidate. She's making less money now, but she says she's happy in her job producing documentaries on issues that she thinks are important.
There is one other story I want to tell before getting back to my own. It caught my attention when it came over the AP Wire more than 30 years ago.
The dispatch began, "Shrimp peelers in Thunderbolt, Georgia, have won an unfair labor practices lawsuit against their employer." The second paragraph reported that the workers had jeopardized their livelihoods to file suit to prevent their employer from forcing them to drop their work and perform a song and dance rendition of The Shrimp Boats Are A'Comin' whenever a tour came through the fish house.
I remember parking a half-block away from the bereaved family's house in South Miami, just as the sun was starting to set. I stared at the house long enough to give my conscience a chance to quiet down, then I told my cameraman to grab his gear. I reached for the handle on the car door; but for the first time I could remember, my inner cowboy refused to mount up. I could not make myself get out of the car. Instead, I called the assignment editor and told him that the parents of the dead girl didn't want to cry on camera for us, so we were coming back empty.
But would I have gone to their door for a million dollars?
As it turns out, that's not the question at all. The odds that anyone who doesn't already have a few million dollars will ever have to make a decision like that are roughly a gazillion to none. But most of us face the prospect of creating a new scrape on our conscience every month, sometimes every day, in exchange for the price of another month of food, clothing, shelter, cell phone, cable TV, high speed Internet, and a few bottles of passable wine.
In the end, did I win a courageous, if minor, victory on principle? Um, no. What I did was turn weasel and lie. And to my annoyance, and its credit, my hyperactive conscience has never cut me any slack for that.
On the other hand those Georgia shrimp peelers probably understood exactly what they were risking to preserve their dignity, and they had the courage to lay it on the line for no money at all.
Power to the peelers.
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