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Topic: Letters Sent to Romenesko
Date/Time: 11/14/2006 8:35:05 AM
Title: Subject: Why Dean Baquet matters
Posted By: Jim Romenesko
 
From TERRY McDERMOTT, Los Angeles Times: Subject -- Why the Dean Baquets of the world matter. A week or so after Sept. 11, 2001, Dean Baquet, my boss at the time, approached me in the Los Angeles Times newsroom and asked me if I would accept an assignment to do a profile of Mohamed Atta, who had been identified as one of the ringleaders of the attacks against the United States. Many news organizations, including ours, had already done quick profiles of Atta. Unfortunately, they didn’t contain much information.

The Mongol Horde of the world media had galloped through the known places and people associated with Atta – mainly his native Egypt, and Germany, where he attended graduate school and, as a founding member of the Hamburg Cell, was presumed to have plotted the attacks.

The early stories produced a narrative that placed Atta’s hatred of modernity in general and America in particular at the center of his psyche. He was a religious fanatic. He was an architect. He hated skyscrapers. He drank vodka doubles at Florida strip clubs. He was a perfectionist who demanded flawless discipline from his followers. It was a great story. Very little of it would turn out to be true.

Baquet intuited this. Everybody’s on this story, he said. But pretty soon they’ll give up and go home. We’ll stay.

“Go wherever you need to go and stay as long as you need to stay.”

I think Baquet figured that might mean weeks, maybe months. It turned out to be three years and 20 countries. Much of that time was spent in utter futility. As often as not, the reporting went backwards. We lost rather than gained information. Not once - not even when I was screaming and cursing at him for some presumed newsroom incompetence I had spotted from ten thousand miles away - did Baquet question my abilities or the enterprise. Instead, he would call me up wherever I might be and ask how he could help, what he could do. Tell me something cool, he’d say. What did you learn today?

Early on, as you might imagine, this was a hotly competitive story. I crossed tracks with reporters from all the world’s great journalistic giants and many of its midgets, too. After the first six months or so, I found fewer and fewer signs of competitors. When we finally began to gather real information, people would ask, Why us? Why are we and nobody else finding this information? The answer was that they had by and large gone home./CONTINUED BELOW

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