Local TV reporter shares story
News 4's Brian Maass discusses his career, how to get interviews
by Lindsay Sandham
The Metropolitan.
 Sarah
Mahana / The Metropolitan
Brian Maass, one of channel 4’s investigative reporters, speaks
to students Nov. 12 in the Tivoli. He discussed his career as a journalist
and how he managed to get an exclusive interview with Pfc. Lynndie England
of the Abu Ghraib prison scandals, before any other reporters.
News 4 investigative reporter Brian Maass spoke to Auraria students Nov.
12 about his career in journalism and how he got the first interview with
Pfc. Lynndie England, a focus of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq.
In early April, some photos of American soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners
in the Abu Ghraib prison facility were leaked to the media. The photos
dated back as early as August, 2003. England was one of the soldiers featured
in many of the photos, and became known as the “leash girl,”
because she was holding a naked Iraqi prisoner on a leash in one of the
photos.
Maass was able to get an interview with England before any of the major
stations or big-time news anchors, and she hasn’t done many interviews
since.
“This is an interview that Diane Sawyer was trying to get, Katie
Couric was trying to get, Dan Rather was trying to get,” Maass said.
“This is the girl everybody wanted to talk to. So how did some dope
in Denver get this?”
Maass explained the importance of strong working relationships within
the journalism industry and said it was because of his professionalism
in work he had done on a previous story that landed him the interview.
“I got a call about five days before that interview happened from
an attorney who I had worked with before on a story,” he said. “A
very inconsequential story we had done a few months earlier.”
The attorney’s name was Rose Mary Zapor and Maass said he had spoken
with her 20 or 30 times while working on that story. He also said they
spent quite a bit of time on that piece, which, according to him, was
a very “ordinary” story.
Zapor called Maass and told him there was a strong possibility that she
and some other Denver attorneys would be representing England because
their firm had some military expertise. Military justice is quite different
from civilian justice, he said.
“She said to me ‘you know, you treated us so fairly and you
were so responsible with that story that you did previously,’”
Maass said. She said she felt comfortable working with him and that should
her firm get the case, they would want England to talk and she wanted
Maass to be the first one to know.
“Believe me, I didn’t really think I was gonna get to interview
Lynndie England,” he said.
Zapor called Maass back a couple days later to let him know her firm had
been assigned to the case. He told her the fact that a group of Denver
attorneys representing England was a story in itself, but he wanted to
interview England, regardless.
He said that it was a hectic couple of days between the time Zapor agreed
to let him do the interview and the time he actually interviewed England
in Fayetteville, N.C., where she was stationed at the Ft. Bragg military
base.
The attorney who was going to Fayetteville was an unusual guy, Maass
said. He was “all over the place,” very hard to reach and
never answered his cell phone.
“We got in there (Raleigh-Durham Airport) around midnight, it was
about a two-hour drive. We spent a lot of time talking in the car and
kind of getting to know each other,” Maass said. “And still,
it just kept getting stranger and stranger.”
Maass, the News 4 cameraman who went with him and the attorney all checked
into the hotel and then the attorney disappeared up to his room, without
ever formulating a plan for the following day.
So Maass and the cameraman sat around the hotel the whole next day, until
the lawyer finally showed up with England.
“And then it kept getting stranger and stranger, he (England’s
attorney) actually left me alone with her,” he said. “Then
we went shopping for a dress with her.”
Maass finally interviewed England on camera around 6 p.m. that evening
and had about two hours to edit the piece and send it off in time for
the nine ‘o clock news.
Although only a few small clips from the hour-long interview aired that
evening, Maass said eventually every piece of tape was used.
“We used everything, frankly, that she ever said,” Maass
said.
He went on to say that the whole experience was very surreal and every
once in a while he would stop and realize that he was doing the biggest
interview in the country at that time.
A general fear as a reporter is whether or not you ask all the right
questions, he said.
“This is an interview where I really felt like I asked the right
questions,” Maass said.
He also said England was difficult to interview because it was apparent
she did not have much experience with the media and didn’t go in-depth
with many of her responses.
During the News 4 interview, England told Maass she was only doing what
her higher-ups told her to do and basically her and the six other soldiers
who were charged were scapegoats for the U.S. military.
“She seemed like the kind of person to me who could be manipulated
pretty easily. She’s a pretty simple person,” Maass said.
“I mean until she joined the army—I think she was from West
Virginia—she had never been further from her home than, I think
she said she had to go to St. Louis to sign up or get processed to get
into the army.”
England is an unworldly kind of person, he said.
“But having said that I mean, I’ve wondered to myself if
there might have been some manipulation and if she might have been used,
but at the same time, you know, she’s an adult. You can say no.
You can say that’s not right or I’m not going to take part
in that,” he said.
Maass said he believes her story for the most part and a lot of soldiers
have come out since then and supported her story. He also said she is
someone who hadn’t had a very dramatic or exciting life, and she
probably never had a lot of control over things.
“Now all of a sudden, she’s in a foreign country—she’d
never been out of the U.S.,” Maass said. “She’s in a
foreign country, she’s in charge of all these guys. I mean you got
this amazing power all of a sudden. And I think that can make you a little
bit crazy too.”
He also said he is unsure what would have happened to her if she didn’t
follow orders.
“I don’t think anybody ever said put the guy on a leash necessarily
or anything like that but I think they were then encouraged,” he
said. “What would have happened to her career? I have no idea. She
couldn’t get a lot lower.”
|
