Nearly a year after The Washington Post reported on sexual misconduct allegations against former United States Senate candidate Roy Moore, two journalists on the publication’s investigative team spoke at Syracuse University about the process that led them to win the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for their work.

More than 50 people attended the talk at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications on Tuesday. Enterprise reporter Stephanie McCrummen and senior producer of digital video Thomas LeGro detailed their roles in the investigation from start to finish, sharing insights with audience members about the importance of tenacity and level-headedness in reporting.

McCrummen emphasized the importance of “old-fashioned journalism” in times when she said numerous people and forces are working to undermine the field. Staying calm, keeping her head down and doing her job are what got her through the process, McCrummen said.

When Moore declared his candidacy for an Alabama Senate seat, people began to come forward with their stories, as well as provide tips and leads on other women, McCrummen said — some of them were “very fishy.” Jaime Phillips, posing as a Roy Moore victim, approached the Post team in 2017 and attempted to trick them into publishing her false testimony.

The team discovered that Phillips was part of a sting operation with Project Veritas, a nonprofit founded in 2010. The organization’s founder, James O’Keefe, has taken aim at organizations like Planned Parenthood as well as other news outlets such as CNN.

Through vetting sources, following hunches and being patient, the team discovered Phillips’ allegations were false. They decided to record video of a conversation between Phillips and McCrummen, in which the reporter confronted Phillips about her alternate motives for coming forward.

McCrummen said the video received more than 2 million views, calling that count “cat video territory.”

“I think it went viral partly because … it showed a reporter at work,” McCrummen said of the nearly 10-minute clip. “I think the public is really hungry right now to understand what it is we do as reporters, so I think the video ended up being an act of transparency.”

LeGro recalled being looped into the investigative process just before Thanksgiving last year. He was one of the reporters that, acting on a hunch, followed Phillips to work one morning and discovered she worked at Veritas.

In his efforts to find a way to discreetly record the conversation between McCrummen and Phillips, which took place in a Virginia restaurant, LeGro unsuccessfully called the International Spy Museum gift shop looking for a spy camera, he said. He and his colleague Dalton Bennett were at a nearby table posing as customers, filming the interview with an app that turned off the phone screen while recording.

McCrummen, who was wearing a wire, informed Phillips multiple times that she was being audio and video recorded. She wasn’t required by Virginia state law to inform Phillips that she was recording. She did so anyway, she said, because she didn’t want the interview to be seen by members of the Moore campaign, or by Project Veritas, as overly secretive.

“We didn’t want for them to have any excuse at all … to say we were being surreptitious,” she said.

Martin Baron, the paper’s editor, has always told team members that they’re not at war, they’re at work, she added.

Once the investigation was published, LeGro said he was surprised how much the story resonated within the journalism community. Other storytellers commended the team for their work, he said.

The talk was opened up for audience questions, and one student asked about the way McCrummen chose to write the story, noting that the style was devoid of emotionally charged language. The more horrifying or outrageous a story is, McCrummen said, the less emotional she believes the writing should be.

“Emotion is not something that belongs in writing, action belongs in writing,” she said. “The story is what’s important. Tell the story and let people feel however they want to feel.”

Published on October 9, 2018 at 11:15 pm

Contact Colleen: cefergus@syr.edu | @ColleenEFergus2