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Opinion
 

Staff Editorial

                        Robyn Morrow             Chris Elliott                        Mark Suarez
                                               John Arterbury       Caitlin Cuppernull

Reporters must stick to standards

Get the interview by all means necessary. 

For most members of the media, that phrase serves as a guideline to maintaining a secure job and making a successful career. 

It involves bombarding potential sources with phone calls, e-mails and house visits pleading for an interview. But that's usually as far as it goes when it comes to the average reporter.

Well, Michael Devlin, the Missouri man accused of kidnapping two boys and holding them captive in his apartment for four years, experienced firsthand that a reporter with enough motivation will get the story by any means necessary.

Devlin's lawyers are demanding that Susannah Cahalan, a freelance reporter, turn over her notes to the trial's defense and be prohibited from writing anything concerning the interviews she obtained from Devlin while posing as an interested college student.

Technically, Cahalan was a college student at the time she interviewed Devlin -- and still is. However, what the Washington University journalist failed to mention to the suspected kidnapper was that she was a correspondent for the New York Post.

An article by Cahalan ran Sunday, depicting Devlin as a "kidnap creep" who is still too scared to tell his mom and dad about what he's done. 

There are two ways to look at this: Cahalan did what she was being paid to do. The article that ran in the New York Post had no actual quotes pertaining to the trial, as Devlin declined to talk about it. It was, in essence, a profile of the 6-foot-4-inch, 300-pound pizza guy who had a thing for Final Fantasy video games.

Cahalan gained the interview through deception. When it comes to journalism, one must be persistent, motivated and, no matter how juicy the story is, ethical.