This Is What I [Did]

"Shattering the Quiet"
Susannah Meadows, for Newsweek 1/1/07


"I was one of the reporters who converged on the peaceful Pennsylvania
countryside after the shooting of 10 Amish girls. When there's a
tragedy, journalists struggle to report what happened while still
respecting the feelings of a grieving family. But as a hundred news
trucks choked the small roads, the contest between public interest and
privacy was thrown into high relief.

"The Amish boarded up the schoolhouse windows to keep our greedy eyes
from the space where their children had been lost. Reporters from
across the nation stood in a row for their stand-ups with the school
behind them, providing a nice backdrop for the evening news.

"The Amish desire to live simply, apart from modern society, has always
had real integrity. It's not as if they courted media attention and
then complained, like Tom and Katie, when the scrutiny got to be too
much. They build the windows in their schools high enough to keep
tourists from taking pictures. So throughout that week, I had to fight
an unfamiliar instinct for a reporter: to leave these people alone. I
settled on a method of going through a third person - a volunteer who
worked with Amish people at the local fire station, for example - to
see if any Amish wanted to talk (an approach that is usually more
effective anyway).

"I heard that one reporter walked into a house while an Amish family
was eating dinner. As revolted as I was by such a tactic, I wondered
if perhaps she was a better journalist than I, willing to do anything
to break news."

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Comments welcome.

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