A Secret the Media Kept

It wasn't until Jan. 29, 1980, that the call came. I was given the details of how the CIA and the Canadians had succeeded in smuggling the six Americans and their Canadian minders out of Iran that very day.

They were all safe. It was a great story we wrote that day, but it was nobody's scoop.

In the following days, the Canadian ambassador in Iran, Kenneth Taylor, became a national hero in the United States, as well as in Canada. He got a tickertape parade up Broadway and a gold medal from Congress. Taylor later became Canada's consul-general in New York and an expert on the Iranian revolution, consulted frequently by news media.

Do I regret not getting my scoop on the hostage story? Not a bit. Over the years, I've run into dozens of reporters who had a piece of the story before it broke, including those who covered the State Department for The Washington Post, and they all felt the same way.

The Canada-hostage story proves that reporters and news organizations can be trusted, en masse, to make the right call on security information they uncover. And neither Iranian officials nor Iranian news media got wind of it.

Do I think that a thousand reporters could be trusted today to make the same call that we did in 1979? I wonder. Even back then, there was the fear that some rogue reporter would ignore the pleas and go with the story. In today's journalism world, I fear that some blogger or counterculture ideologue using journalism as a political tool rather than as a mechanism for dispensing straight information, would make the wrong call. I hope I'm wrong about that.

The writer was U.N. correspondent for the New York Post and The Washington Post for many years. He is an associate professor of journalism emeritus at Boston University.