Lessons for media still echo from Waco
Soul-searching after siege led to proposals for disaster coverage.
As the gunfire began at the Branch Davidian compound 25 years ago, kicking off what would become a 51-day siege, a group of journalists found themselves smack in the middle of it.
Tommy Witherspoon, along with several colleagues from the Waco Tribune-Herald, spent nearly three hours stretched flat in a ditch across the street from the compound. A few yards away, a crew from KWTX, a local TV station, captured footage of the deadly shootout.
“You could hear the bullets whizzing over our heads,” remembered Witherspoon. “At one point I was looking through the window of the car on the driver’s side. A bullet hit the side of the car where I had been seconds before.”
The deadly Waco standoff pitted an army of federal forces — the ATF and the FBI — against a
heavily armed religious group that had come under investigation for suspicion of sexual abuse and arms trafficking.
But a third party was present, not just at the beginning of the botched raid, but throughout the six-week siege: the media. Journalists played a significant role in the unfolding disaster, and, in the days, weeks and years that followed, took blame for sparking it.
The Waco siege led to lost journalism careers and lawsuits against media companies, bitter accusations and ultimately an era of soul-searching among members of the media that echoes to this day.
Months after the siege ended in a fiery mass killing of Branch Davidians on April 19, 1993, the Society of Professional Journalists would call for a new way to cover huge, breaking stories. The group called not just for a more confrontational stance against law enforcement agencies seeking to control the coverage, but greater cooperation among outlets and a more humane approach to covering communities that suddenly find themselves in the media glare.
A generation later, similar suggestions emerged in the aftermath of the deadly church shootings at Sutherland Springs, 200 miles south of Mount Carmel, demonstrating that disaster coverage continues to pose ethical challenges for media outlets.
For many journalists who covered the Waco siege, the episode represented a low point in their professional lives: corralled into press pens far from the scene and fed information during daily press briefings, many reported feeling used and exploited.
After the fire that killed sect leader David Koresh and dozens of his followers, a government report would confirm that federal officials lied to the media for weeks as they tried to cover up their own failings in the botched raid.
Said one reporter who still works in Texas and asked not to be identified: Waco was “the most frustrating, unsettling and saddest assignment of my life.”
Tragic misunderstandings and bad luck
When Witherspoon and his colleagues returned to the Waco Tribune-Herald newsroom after the Feb. 28, 1993, shootout, which left several ATF agents and Branch Davidians dead, they were greeted by distraught editors who had feared the worst. “One editor started bawling,” he remembered. “But then they turned right around and in the same breath said someone still needs to get back out there.”
As the shaken journalists transitioned back to work mode, the media’s role, and especially the local Waco media’s role, was about to emerge as a major issue that would linger throughout the siege.
In some ways, the finger-pointing was the result of tragic misunderstandings and poor luck that snared several journalists.
The day before the raid, the Waco newspaper had published the first part of an investigative series into the Branch Davidians titled “The Sinful Messiah” that went on to become a Pulitzer Prize finalist.
The newspaper had haggled with the ATF over the timing of the series’ publication; the ATF repeatedly asked the newspaper to delay publication of the series, which was ready to go in January, according to accounts from current and former staffers. The agency worried the series would compromise its impending raid, but it could not say when it might be safe to run the series.
After a series of meetings with federal agents, Waco editors decided to publish on Saturday, Feb. 27, choosing a time when there would be few staffers at the newspaper in case the Branch Davidians retaliated for the hard-hitting exposé, which accused leader David Koresh of sexual abuse and stockpiling guns, based on interviews with former members and complaints to law enforcement.
Worried that Koresh would begin planning for a government attack after the story, the ATF decided to conduct the raid the next day.
That Sunday morning, an undercover ATF agent, who had cultivated a relationship with the Branch Davidians in the weeks before the raid, had gone to the compound to take Koresh’s temperature after the Waco series.
The agent, Rodriguez, overheard someone tell Koresh he had a call from England. While a later investigation would show Koresh was told he had a call from the land of England, the exchange fueled rumors that the call was from reporter Mark England, one of the authors of the Sinful Messiah series, and that the reporter was alerting Koresh about the raid. “It was just the worst coincidence possible for Mark,” said Witherspoon, who added that the rumor was eventually debunked. “We were able to prove it, but he took it hard.”
England was named in a lawsuit against members of the media by a wounded ATF agent, which also alleged the newspaper broke a deal with the agency to hold off on its series until the ATF’s investigation into the Branch Davidians was completed. Newspaper leaders denied any such arrangement existed.
England called the lawsuit against him offensive and preposterous. “My intent — and that of the newspaper — was to warn the community about Vernon Howell (Koresh’s given name), and not vice versa,” England said at the time. “It defies reason for anyone to state otherwise.” England was eventually dropped from the suit.
Ultimately, the lawsuit was settled by media companies including Cox Enterprises, the former parent company of the Waco Tribune-Herald and American-Statesman, for $15 million, despite the vigorous protests of local journalists.
England remained at the Waco Tribune-Herald until 2000, but eventually left newspaper journalism. Now an editor with an outdoors magazine in the Dallas area, England did not respond to requests for comment.
England’s former editor told the Waco Tribune-Herald recently that the event changed the star reporter. “I think he felt the blackness of it more than the rest of us,” said Brian Blansett, the former city editor. “That was a terrible thing that happened, but he felt the magnitude of it.”
That wasn’t the only unusual event that led to people blaming the press for the botched raid.
Several journalists, including Witherspoon and the news crew at KWTX in Waco, received tips about the Sunday morning raid and were at Mount Carmel even before the bullets started flying.
But KWTX camera operator Jim Peeler found himself lost on the desolate roads near the compound and asked a passing mailman for directions. During their brief conversation, Peeler apparently revealed that a law enforcement operation was underway.
Unbeknownst to Peeler, the mail carrier, David Jones, was a member of the Branch Davidians, and he promptly raced to the compound to tell Koresh the news.
But while federal agents blamed the media for tipping off the Branch Davidians, critics have said the ATF’s presence in Waco that weekend was hardly a secret.
“The entire community had been inadvertently placed on alert,” wrote journalist James Moore in a 2007 Huffington Post article. “Ambulance drivers, local police and fire departments, and rescue teams had all been placed on twenty four hour call . ... If the Branch Davidians did not know the BATF was coming, they were the only souls in a five-county region who did not.”
Ample evidence emerged later that federal agents knew that their raid was compromised before going in. Rodriguez, the undercover agent who was with Koresh that morning, frantically warned his superiors not to go in because the element of surprise had been lost, according to his later congressional testimony. He was ignored.
Still, Peeler, and other KWTX employees, took the blame hard. “You ever see that movie? ‘The Sixth Sense’? I’m like that guy in the movie,” Peeler would tell reporters a few years after the raid. “He’s dead but he just doesn’t know it yet. That’s me. I’m dead. My body’s alive and everything, sure. But otherwise, I’m just as dead as they were.”
In an exhaustive review of the Waco incident, the Treasury Department, which then oversaw the ATF, found that it would be unfair to scapegoat Peeler and took the ATF to task for not securing the area around the compound. In addition to Peeler’s encounter with the mailman, reporters repeatedly drove up and down the road in front of the compound and knocked on the door of a house across the street from the Branch Davidians that had been occupied by undercover ATF agents.
“Media activity in the vicinity of the Compound was not the immediate cause of the casualties suffered by ATF agents on February 28. These were inflicted by Koresh and his followers, and could have been avoided had ATF’s raid commanders called off the operation once they recognized that they had lost the advantage of surprise,” the report found. “But the media’s conduct posed a substantial danger not only to the security of ATF’s operation but also to the lives of agents and civilians alike. While it is not the purpose of this report to suggest what the media might do to minimize such dangers in the future, the media should further examine its conduct near Waco on February 28.”
ATF officials lied to media
Media self-examination would become a calling card after the siege, when local and national media found themselves penned into a corral about 2 miles from the Branch Davidian compound, with daily briefings from federal agents as the only source of information for the vast majority of reporters.
“For 51 days, all they got was the government’s evaluation of this thing,” said Dick Reavis, a former reporter and journalism professor who wrote a book about the standoff and testified at congressional hearings into the siege. “The media didn’t give an accurate picture of who the Branch Davidians were. When your information only comes from one side, you’re always going to get it wrong.”
The Treasury Department report confirms that agents lied for weeks about knowing the raid was compromised and going ahead with it anyway.
The media’s coverage also came under fire from religion experts, who blasted the Sinful Messiah series and most early coverage for perpetuating the “cult” stereotype and “discounting or denying outright the seriousness and even religiousness of the Branch Davidians,” according to leading religion scholar James Tabor.
The Society of Professional Journalists acknowledged the difficult position the media was in with little access to the Branch Davidians, but concluded that journalists should have been more aggressive in demanding documents and government information during the siege.
“Journalists were timid in addressing these issues of freedom of information and access at Waco,” the report found. “Court appearances were held secretly. Hearings were closed to the press. Key documents ranging from motions to government responses to arrest and search warrants were sealed. In case after case there was no meaningful protest from the news media to this serious threat to the free flow of information.”
Meanwhile, the association called for more cooperative coverage, and the creation of pools, which it said could have potentially gotten access to front lines and would have been less overwhelming for the local residents.
“Competition is a healthy element of the media,” the report stated. “However, in some situations — and Waco was one of them — cooperation is a stronger value that better serves the public interest.”
In the aftermath of the Sutherland Springs shooting in November, a number of media members and associations made similar suggestions in an effort to make disaster reporting more effective and less intrusive on residents.
“As journalists, our role as observers and investigators in times of tragedy is important,” wrote Dallas Morning News reporter Lauren McGaughy. “But so is our empathy and our humanity. As a profession, we must have a conversation about how best to chronicle horrors like this. We can do better.”
‘We were doing our job’
On the 51st morning of the Branch Davidian siege, government tanks ripped holes into the compound and sprayed flammable tear gas into the structure. At some point, the building erupted into flames that tore through the compound and left nearly 80 Branch Davidians dead, including 21 children.
Kimberly Garcia, a former American-Statesman reporter, remembers being in the media corral when the fire broke out. “The media pod was so far from the compound, you just saw it off in the distance,” she said. “You couldn’t see those human details of what was happening. It was a strange experience, an emotional disconnect for me.”
She said it wasn’t until she saw a Time Magazine article with the photos of all those who had died inside that the magnitude of the disaster hit her: “I just lost it, because I had just watched them burn. It felt terrible.”
Yet Garcia doesn’t fixate on the event. “It was human nature run amok,” she said. “But it doesn’t haunt me. As journalists, we know mankind is horrible sometimes, and that was one of the demonstrations of that. The whole thing was just so sad.”
Witherspoon said he also doesn’t think too much about the siege, except on anniversaries when he is approached for interviews. “You try to distance yourself, and I guess that’s what I’ve done,” he said. “You basically move on to the next story. You can’t let it get to you or you can’t do your job.”
Witherspoon said he feels exonerated by the Treasury Department report that concluded journalists weren’t the cause of the botched raid. “We were doing our job,” he said. “If we weren’t out there, they would have been able to tell so many more lies than they did.”