Hess

March 24th, 2004
Transcription by John Gissy

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: So why don't you introduce yourself, and where you work?
PAMELA HESS: I'm Pamela Hess; I'm the Pentagon Correspondent for United Press International. I've been at the Pentagon for UPI since May -- No, I'm sorry -- March of 1999. And I did a brief sojourn at the White House for about six months.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Okay. And can you tell me your routine -- where you get your news from every day?
HESS: Sure. As a Pentagon correspondent, it's my job to sort of cover the day-in, day-out of what's going on at the Pentagon. The most of the last two years has been taken up with almost daily briefings at the Pentagon because of the two wars, Iraq and Afghanistan wars. So they've been doing those with some frequency. So mostly, it starts there and you're sort of driven by the day's events as to where things go. Once in a while, as a beat reporter -- Because you have this sort of daily requirement of what you need to do, which is to capture on the record what it is that they're saying -- sort of that first blush of history -- creating a historical record of "This is what they said on this day about this subject." You have limited amounts of time to do other stuff. But those other things do pop up, which are stories -- we call them "enterprise stories." Stories that you sort of generate on your own, and do on your own. Those are actually more fun, and we all like to do them more. But they're also sort of scary and hard to do because you don't know where they are going to come from, and you don't know where they are going to go. But my bread-and-butter is what's going on at the Pentagon that day. It's definitely not rewriting press releases. And you don't just take verbatim what they say, and say it unless it's in very short sort of news articles -- just saying, "Rumsfeld said 'this' on this day." You definitely run it through filters, and you get people who know things to comment. And you talk to folks on background, which is, you sort of walk around the building and find people that are involved that maybe don't want to have their names appear in print, but are willing to talk to you a little bit to provide some context or some history to what you're doing. And then you put that all together in a story.