As Tallahassee Bureau Chief and Associate Editor of the St. Petersburg Times, Lucy Morgan knows everyone who knows anything. With nearly four decades of reporting experience and a Pulitzer Prize to her credit, she couldn't be better equipped to keep a vigilant eye on government officials. As a journalist who has faced jail time for protecting a source, she values both the trust and the burden that come with freedom of the press.
These days, it takes a Lucy Morgan to liberate facts from those who guard public records as if they were, well, state secrets.
"I think we are in a world where it is very hard to get past the public information people," Morgan said recently. "At the same time, these people are not former reporters who are hired to dispense information, but ideologues" For some years, maybe the last decade, there has been a higher premium placed on what information is given out, whether by a Democrat or a Republican."
"In many cases, while the information may technically be public, you are dealing with a state employee who is going to risk their own job by talking to a journalist." A career's worth of contacts helps Morgan zero in on what she needs, and where it can likely be found. "When it's me calling, a lot of the time I know who has that information, but I have to agree not to say where I got it."
Morgan knows both the value and the cost of protecting sources. In 1973, when she was a young reporter for the Pasco/Hernando bureau of the Times, a court ruled against her for refusing to name a confidential source. On the way to get her sons at their Police Athletic League practice, she worried about how to explain what might happen next.
By the time she reached the ball field, they already knew. "Mom, is it true? You're going to jail?" Far from traumatized, her boys were excited. The attitude my children had toward it was never fear, Morgan says. I think part of it was that they had been brought up in a journalism family. There was no other option that we would have considered. Morgan's husband, Richard, retired in 1991 after 30 years with the Times.
Another lifeline was the overwhelming community support that greeted the young reporter. "The reaction of the average citizen was phenomenal. Beginning the very next morning, people began coming into the office with cakes with files baked in them," Morgan recalled with the wry humor that has helped her to keep perspective through all the years of covering crime and government. "People really got into the spirit of the thing."
On her regular rounds as a reporter, she checked in with county law enforcement shortly after the unfavorable ruling. ?The sheriff looked up and said, "It ain't much, but the best I have is yours."
Morgan was never obliged to accept his hospitality. Her sentence was overturned by the Florida Supreme Court, and reporters gained limited but vital power to protect their sources as a result.
Morgan described Gene Patterson as "extraordinary" in his role as editor during the three long years it took to win her landmark case. Jail time was not likely, Patterson assured her, backing his words with full legal support. He also promised that the paper would "help take care of my kids" if it really came to that?all she had to do was write a daily column from the jail. Morgan relished the idea, and she also bought the complete works of Tennyson to fill idle hours in her cell. "Some of them I still haven't read," she notes with a laugh.
Sadly, Morgan doesn't find the public as quick to rally around a reporter whose freedom is challenged today. Instead, she says, the response varies according to the nature of the story. "Perhaps it reflects the polarization of the political process," she explained. "I think nowadays, questions are more likely to get caught up in that polarization."
Many citizens don't know enough to make informed decisions and stick with them, Morgan said. "You see these rapid swings in public opinion. A lot of these people don't have deeply held beliefs. They are not well read on a subject. They don't know the issues well They are getting 30 minutes of news a night They are getting the headlines The minute something else happens to that person, they have changed horses.?
Morgan is also concerned that Americans are not well informed about their constitutional rights. "I don't sense a lot of average-citizen uproar about the Patriot Act. People are more willing than I would have expected to surrender some liberty. And that's alarming to me."
--- Maria D. Vesperi
