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"Hell on Heels" •
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Pressed Freedom
By Kevin Cullen
The Boston Globe
Thursday 08 May 2008
Some years ago, when Toni Locy was a reporter for this newspaper, she wrote
stories documenting that some members of the Boston Police Department weren't
doing their jobs very well.
The cops were furious and some put a picket line up outside the Globe. In our
business, that's a compliment. And for all their huffing and puffing, the department
ended up adopting reforms that Locy suggested were needed.
Locy was always a good, tough-nosed journalist, always in high heels and high
spirits. She is now in danger of becoming a very broke and incarcerated journalist.
A federal judge in Washington, D.C., named Reggie Walton wants to bankrupt her
and throw her in jail because she won't give up her sources.
Now, I realize that newspaper reporters are about as popular with the general
public as the tax man. But that doesn't make what Reggie Walton wants to do
to Toni Locy right, and there's plenty that makes it wrong and downright scary.
In 2003, Locy's editors at USA Today, where she was then working, asked her
to do an update on Stephen Hatfill, a former Army scientist and expert on germ
warfare who had been identified by US Attorney General John Ashcroft as a "person
of interest" in the FBI investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks that
left five people dead.
Her story, which quoted unnamed government officials, was not the first written
about Hatfill. It ran inside the paper.
Hatfill sued the Justice Department, saying government leaks had ruined his
reputation. Walton ordered Locy to identify her sources or pay fines of up to
$5,000 a day. He ordered that nobody else can help her pay - not USA Today,
not her family or friends, nobody.
Locy spent 25 years as a reporter, which means she has no money. She is now
a journalism professor, which means she has less.
She was working at the Daily News in Philadelphia years ago when she heard
that Nicky Scarfo was organizing a fund-raiser for his defense fund. Little
Nicky was under indictment because he ran the local franchise of a fraternal
organization known as the Mafia. Little Nicky had hired a Frank Sinatra impersonator
to sing at the fund-raiser, which was a beautiful thing, but he had to call
it off after Locy put his plans in the paper.
"Nicky Scarfo can have a defense fund," Locy said. "Scooter
Libby can have a defense fund. But I can't have a defense fund."
Is this a great country, or what? Scooter Libby can lie for an administration
that had already lied us into a needless war, get a free pass from the guy who
runs that administration, and we're going to throw Locy in jail?
Judge Walton said, from the bench, that he hoped his ruining Locy would make
other government officials less likely to talk to reporters.
That's nice. The last time I checked, the country is a mess not because the
press has too much power, but because the government does.
If Hatfill's reputation was ruined by FBI leaks, it was ruined long before
Locy wrote a single word about the case. She can't remember who told her what
for the story.
"If it was a scoop, I would remember," she said. "But it was
just a routine story."
Her story was skeptical in tone, raising as many questions about the FBI's
behavior as about Hatfill. Not only is this a case of shooting the messenger,
they're shooting the wrong messenger.
The legal fatwa against Toni Locy is arbitrary and Orwellian, and if successful
will make reporters even less likely to fulfill their most important role in
a democracy: keeping an eye on the government.
When she stands before the US Court of Appeals in Washington tomorrow, Locy
will not be wearing sensible shoes because she doesn't own any. That court has
already sensibly stayed the fines against her. It can do another sensible thing
and throw this whole ridiculous thing out.
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Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com
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"Hell on Heels"
By Kevin Rector
American Journalism Review
April/May 2008 Issue
Toni Locy awaits a court decision that
could have monumental consequences for her and her profession. But shaking in
her shoes in the face of danger has never really been her style.
During a newspaper career that spanned two-and-a-half decades, Toni Locy says,
she was never afraid on the job.
Not when she was writing about the mob in Philadelphia, not when she was defending
not-so-flattering police stories to not-so-flattered police officers in Boston,
not when she was portraying the president of the United States as an intern-canoodling
liar in Washington, D.C.
"I was a little uncomfortable at times, but never scared, although I was
in a couple sticky situations," says Locy, the former USA Today reporter
recently found in contempt of court by a federal judge for refusing to name
confidential sources. "I extracted myself quickly. I didn't do anything
stupid, which is probably why I was OK."
An old-school reporter who has worked at numerous publications - among
them the Philadelphia Daily News, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post and
USA Today - Locy, 48, has helped report important news over the years.
She shook the leadership of Boston's police force in the early '90s after writing
in the Globe about its inability to solve serious crime, and was part of the
Washington Post team that covered the Monica Lewinsky story. She reported on
9/11 and its aftermath and the Bush administration's practices at Guantanamo.
She has covered the courts throughout her career.
Unfortunately for her, it's her own court battle that has thrust her into the
news - a battle she hasn't been afraid to fight.
In February, a federal judge ruled Locy would have to pay up to $5,000 a day
out of her own pocket until she identified unnamed sources in stories she wrote
for USA Today in 2003 about Steven J. Hatfill, a former Army scientist who is
suing the federal government for naming him a "person of interest,"
but never charging him, in connection with the post-9/11 anthrax attacks. Although
the U.S. Court of Appeals on March 11 granted Locy a stay on the fines until
her appeal of the contempt charge is heard, the case continues, and she may
still face a steep financial penalty.
Newsworthy in its own right, her story has also caught attention for being
what many call a compelling example for why the U.S. Senate should approve a
federal shield law for journalists, which has been pending there since October.
The House has passed similar legislation. The measure would protect journalists
from being coerced into giving up confidential sources, and would retroactively
protect Locy as well. Media organizations around the country have rallied behind
her in support.
For Locy, now a professor at West Virginia University, her current situation
is a reminder of her days as a reporter, when people weren't always happy with
how she wrote a story or with how she responded to their complaints.
"People's instincts are to shoot the messenger," she says. "It's
not uncommon for people to lash out at the person who's delivering the bad news."
For former editors and colleagues, Locy's stoic stance and stalwart refusal
to name her sources isn't surprising. Throughout her career, Locy has never
backed down from people railing against her.
"She's one of those reporters who loves getting in people's faces. It's
one of the things that make her a great reporter," says Walter Robinson,
Locy's editor at the Boston Globe. "There's no question she won't ask,
there's no one she won't confront or whose face she won't get in to get an answer
to a question."
"She certainly wasn't a shrinking violet," says Michael Days, a fellow
reporter of Locy's at the Philadelphia Daily News and now the paper's editor.
"She's extremely strong. She's very much a fighter."
Despite the prospect of facing financial ruin - something many observers
fear is in Locy's future if the fines aren't overturned - Locy still conveys
a thick skin and a certain tenacity. She was in the business too long, she says,
to cower. She learned early in her career how to handle adversity without backing
down.
"As a young reporter you were taught to be sassy and to talk back and
to raise hell, and I did," Locy says. "I was taught to question authority
everywhere, even in the newsroom."
Says Robinson: "If a reporter lies down for an editor, you worry about
how tough she is on the reporting end. [Locy is] a handful, but the best reporters
are, and they're worth it, and she certainly was."
"This probably isn't politically correct, but she's a tough broad with
a heart of gold," says Days.
Locy began her journalism career at the Pittsburgh Press after graduating from
the West Virginia University's School of Journalism in 1981. She worked general
assignment at night. Around that time, the city's steel industry began to collapse,
and Locy suddenly found herself "writing stories about five, six, seven
thousand people getting fired at one time" early in her career.
The experience was profound, she says. "This part of the country has never
been the same because of what happened to the steel industry. It was an economic
and cultural change for the southwest part of Pennsylvania," which is where
Locy grew up. "It was incredible to be writing about the transformation
of an entire region and industry."
After the Press, Locy went to the Daily News in 1986, where she says she joined
one of the most eclectic staffs she's ever been a part of. The freewheeling
atmosphere of newsrooms like that one, Locy says, was one of her favorite aspects
of the news business.
"It used to be that there were as many characters in newsrooms as there
are in life," she says. "You had oddballs and interesting people,
so it was never dull."
Asked if she was one of those characters, she said: "Probably."
Days' response to the same question: "Absolutely."
The Daily News' conference room has a "wall of distinguished characters"
who at one time worked for the paper, says Days, and Locy's picture is up there.
She was known around the newsroom for being extremely tough but also for being
extremely well pulled together, he says.
"Journalists aren't the most well-dressed group on the planet, but she
always was," Days says. "We called her 'Heels' because she always
wore stiletto heels, even on the toughest of stories."
(It seems the nickname followed her: Robinson says Locy was called "Hell
on Heels" in the Globe newsroom. Beverley Lumpkin, a former ABC News reporter
who covered federal courts in Washington, D.C., alongside Locy in the mid- to
late-'90s, remembers her amazement at Locy's ability to traverse the granite
halls of the courthouse all day long in high heels.)
Fashion aside, though, it was Locy's style as a reporter - and her presence
in the newsroom - that people most remember. "In any room full of
100-watt bulbs, she's 150 watts," says Robinson. "Great presence,
great personality. She sort of made up in her own way for the fact that the
newsroom no longer had clattering typewriters."
According to Lumpkin, who had covered federal courts in Washington for eight
years when Locy came onto the beat for the Washington Post in 1994, Locy was
a reporter who immediately left a mark.
"When you're a reporter you can tell when somebody else knows what's going
on, you can tell when someone's read the entire brief instead of the summary
or when somebody's been talking to people you know - or worse, someone
you don't know. So it doesn't take long for reporters to size each other up
and decide who's the potential competition," Lumpkin says.
Locy was clearly competition, Lumpkin says.
"She's a straight-shooter, thorough and doesn't take chances," said
Joan Biskupic, a fellow courts reporter who first met Locy at the Washington
Post in the mid-'90s and later worked alongside her at USA Today, in an e-mail
interview. "Overall, she was very good with documents, a thorough reader.
She wasn't looking for shortcuts. She has a natural sense of fairness and automatically
gave both sides of any dispute a fair shake."
"Toni was all over the courthouse. It was totally her turf," says
Lumpkin. "She knew every judge and every clerk and she always knew what
was going on."
Locy says she was just doing her job - and having fun: "When you
cover a good trial, there's nothing else like it. It's so much fun," she
says.
But aside from having fun, Locy was also networking. As she moved from the
Post to U.S. News & World Report in 1999 and then to USA Today in 2000,
she continued to make connections with high-ranking government officials, many
of whom spoke to her confidentially. Such connections were necessary for her
beat, and they helped her become a top reporter.
"Inferentially, I think [sources around the courthouse] held her in pretty
high regard, just for the fact that she would get stuff out of them -
stuff no one else could get," says Lumpkin.
Then 9/11 happened.
"I just remember we were working at least six days a week, 10 to 12 hours
a day or more, and we went from trying to figure out who the hijackers were
right into the anthrax attacks, and I think we went through the rest of that
year and into 2002 before any of us thought to catch our breath," Locy
says. "The stakes were so high for everyone - for the FBI, for government,
for journalism. We were chasing every little snippet of information."
It was during that whirlwind time that Locy wrote the two stories involving
Hatfill - the stories that drew her court subpoena and stories that do
not stick out in her mind at all, she says.
"I wrote thousands of stories in my career and these two were routine
- painfully routine. They were not scoops, they were not on the front
page, and as a result they don't stand out in my memory at all," Locy says.
"Everywhere I worked I usually was one of the most productive members of
the staff, so I cranked it out. I did. So I apologize that I can't remember
every single line in every single story I wrote, but I wrote a lot of stories."
Locy says she can't remember which FBI or Justice Department source told her
about Hatfill because she regularly spoke to more than a dozen such sources
about anthrax and other terrorism issues, often confidentially. She refuses
to name all of them because of something one of them may have told her, she
says.
As she moved on in her career, leaving USA Today and going to the Associated
Press in 2005, Locy continued to write a lot of stories. But after two decades
as a reporter, she started itching to put down her notepad. She never wanted
to be "an old lady reporter," she says, and the business had changed
for her.
She had wanted to be a reporter since she was 8 years old in 1968, watching
Walter Cronkite announce the news and seeing student protests of Vietnam. "I
grew up at a time [when] there was so much political turbulence, and I wanted
to be a reporter," she says. "I was struck by everything that was
going on in the country at the time, even though I was a little kid."
Some 40-odd years later though, she found herself in a different situation.
"You start out as a kid and you think, 'Am I ever going to get this?' And
then you wake up one day and you say, 'I actually do know what I'm doing, and
nobody wants to hear it, so it's time to move on and do something else.'
"I promised myself that when journalism stopped being fun I would get
out, and it stopped being fun," Locy says. "I wanted to do something
different while I was still young enough to do something different and enjoy
it."
Locy says she has always had a great appreciation for the law - an irony
that she doesn't miss, saying "I love the law, which is interesting because
I'm caught up in this legal mess" - and in thinking about getting
out of journalism, she was immediately drawn to the prospect of legal studies.
She'd also thought about teaching, but needed a master's degree to do so.
In 2006, she plotted her next move. She left the AP to attend the University
of Pittsburgh's School of Law, where she earned a master's degree in constitutional
and criminal law in 2007. Although legal studies are notoriously arduous, Locy
said her time at the law school was relaxing compared to her years as a reporter.
"It was nice to be able to sit back and read and think about cases,"
she says, adding that it was sometimes a "weird experience" because
she had covered and reported on many of the cases that she and her law school
peers were studying.
After finishing her master's degree, Locy started as a professor at West Virginia
University, her alma mater, where she currently serves as the Schott Chair of
Journalism. It was a transition that Locy accredits to perfect timing: "For
once in my life the planets lined up."
In her new role, Locy teaches media law and public affairs reporting. She says
she still reverts back to her days as a reporter to provide real-life examples
of things that occur to journalists in the field.
"Something will pop into my head, I'll remember something and I'll try
to use that as an example so I can bring it alive for them," Locy says.
"I don't want to just stand up there and be a professor who tells war stories,
but I'm trying to make it relevant to what I'm teaching them, so I use stories
I've written or situations I've been in as a reporter to illustrate the point
I'm trying to make."
Her current plight is one of those illustrative experiences. Locy says she
has brought it up with her students as an example of what can happen to a reporter
in the court system, and they are worried for her. At the same time, though,
Locy says she is worried for them, the future journalists of the world. She
worries her case will stand as a precedent for future reporters.
"I've told my students, 'If you really do want to be a reporter, and if
you want to cover courts and law enforcement and the kinds of things I did,
you need to have a long, serious talk with yourself about whether you are willing
to work in the environment that we live in right now,'" Locy says. "'It
is very, very difficult right now to be that kind of reporter, and you have
to make a decision whether you really want to do that kind of reporting and
to take the risks personally that you apparently have to take now.'"
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Rector is an AJR editorial assistant.
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