http://wgbh.org/article?item_id=2735678&parent_id=2735237 Transcript of of Conversation with Maria Hinojosa
Coming up on Conversations with Ilan Stavans, award-winning journalist, Maria Hinojosa, on power, money, and television news.
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ILAN STAVAS: Talk to me more about ethics. I've heard that you left CNN because you had stories to tell, particularly about Iraq, that the newsroom would not air at the speed-- Or maybe not air altogether --
MARIA HINOJOSA: It made it very difficult. You know, I started in public radio, and then I got a call to go work at CNN. And at that time, it was 1997, and CNN was the ?Little Network that could', it was an independent network that was doing 24 hours of news coverage, a lot of it international. And I jumped at the chance to do it. And we did phenomenal journalism, we did stories that a lot of places weren't doing. And CNN was then bought up by Time Warner, and it becomes part of a huge corporate culture that I witnessed; I lived it.
It was still a lot of fun, but I think for me what I ended up seeing was that-- And it's not just CNN, it's all of the news networks across the board. Is it really journalism that they're after, or is it really the business? And if decisions are being made about what to put on the air because it's going to draw in viewers, but not because it's a good story or an important story, journalistically, then that raises issues for me.
ILAN STAVAS: The story in particular, if I have it right, Maria, was about conscientious objectors in Iraq, people refusing to go on. And I can't think of a more important story, I mean, wherever you stand on the political spectrum, this is a story about being there and not wanting to continue in this endeavor. But it was stopped.
MARIA HINOJOSA: Well, here's what happened. And I had actually been reporting about resisters from the very beginning, when I first started hearing about this. And in fact, Camilo Mejia, who was the first resistor, who actually served time, we were the first ones to put him on television without revealing his face. Why? Because I like to see a story from all different angles. When I heard that there were young men who were refusing to go serve in Iraq, and were leaving to go to Canada, the thing that happened to me was, "Oh my God, I remember hearing these stories when I was a kid, growing up in Chicago."
And soldiers were trying to get away from the war in Vietnam, and they were going to Canada. It was part of my reality. And then I thought, "I'm raising my kids, and they're hearing these stories, too." And when I first asked CNN, told them that I wanted to do this story, they were not interested. 60 Minutes ended up doing the story. Six months later, they did show interest; I went to Canada. I spent some time-- An exclusive-- I got an exclusive report.
And we came back all pumped up, put together a great piece on this group of resisters, who refused to go back to Iraq. And it sat on the shelf, what we called ?The Shelf', for almost three months. And I didn't understand why, and when I asked one of my executives what was going on, he said basically, "You know what? Iraq isn't on anyone's radar anymore." And that was the wooden stake being driven in my journalist's heart. And I just said, "Oh, my God. How is it possible that at this network, somebody is saying something like that?"
ILAN STAVAS: Is this because the politicians and the people in the newsroom are too close, and it might be dangerous to have stories like that?
MARIA HINOJOSA: I don't know if it's because the politicians and the executives at the newsrooms-- I think that it's because executives at newsrooms are making decisions about what they think people want to watch, what they think people are interested in. And the problem is that when you have a news network like a CNN that's supposed to be independent, that is not supposed to care, really, about what they think-- you're just doing journalism-- when that shifts, then for me as a journalist, it shifted.
I do want to say that there are extraordinary journalists at CNN fighting the good fight, trying to do the best that they can. And I think that hopefully in the end, places like CNN and other news media will come back to doing what we do best, which is breaking stories, doing complex reporting, showing it from all different sides, and making us better Americans as a result.
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