Читать книгу That Wasn’t the Plan - Reg Sherren - Страница 19

Early in 1987, I told one of my last stories for CBC Calgary, and it was a blockbuster.

It happened because I answered the phone. The call had been transferred from the main switchboard to the newsroom, and I was the one who pushed the glowing plastic button at the bottom of the phone and answered.

George (not his real name) spoke in a hesitant, soft voice, saying perhaps calling wasn’t such a good idea after all. I suggested that he must be concerned about something important, and maybe I could help. Then he admitted he had been worried about it for some time and needed to clear his conscience. What he said next floored me.

George had been working as a bisexual prostitute in the Calgary escort business for several years. Now he was dying of AIDS, but he was still seeing clients—as many as a dozen a day—and having unprotected sex. George’s employers knew some clients did not like condoms, so they frowned on it. He also knew of several others in the same situation.

Immediately I knew this story was huge, perhaps the biggest scoop of my career, but it would have to be handled carefully.

I asked for an interview with the chief of police to discuss the issue of the escort business in Calgary, without mentioning George. During the interview, he as much as admitted that as far as the police were concerned, escort agencies were doing nothing more than legalized prostitution behind closed doors. In Calgary at the time, the city licensed escort agencies. It was as if they were licensing prostitution and now it was making people sick, potentially infecting them with a deadly virus.

When I asked George to grant me an interview, he declined, saying his life wouldn’t be worth five cents. I offered to shoot a silhouette interview and alter his voice. He could look at it afterward to reassure himself that he would not be identified. He agreed.

While chain-smoking cigarettes, he told the whole sordid tale. He talked about how he’d struggled in the business, how his bosses only cared about money, about how he’d become sicker and about the others he knew.

It was Monday morning. I knew the licensing committee at city hall was meeting at one o’clock; after that it would be a week before they met again. That was the dilemma of the scoop. Should I let that meeting pass without telling anyone what I knew so I could deliver an exclusive story during the big 6:00 p.m. newscast, the one with the highest audience? If I waited until six to reveal George’s story, it could be days or even a week before anything was done about it. In the meantime, more clients could potentially become infected by sick escorts.

I couldn’t do it.

Instead, I phoned the city councillor who was the chairperson of the licensing committee. I told him he needed to come to the CBC that morning to watch an interview I was going to air later that night on the Calgary Newshour. He came in and watched George’s interview. He went very pale. The one o’clock licensing committee meeting became an emergency session. He told them what he’d seen. They decided to suspend the escort licences until they could get a handle on the situation; I suspected visions of potential liability were playing in their heads. Other reporters also got the story, but they did not have the interview with George.

Some said I was crazy for blowing my own scoop. The way I saw it, it wasn’t about getting a “scoop”; it was about doing my part in helping people to be safer, or at least informed, as quickly as I could. My own conscience wouldn’t let me wait. As it turned out, some news agencies gave CBC credit for the story anyway.

The escort agencies knew they had to do something about what, until now, they had resisted. They went to AIDS Calgary, asking for help in distributing condoms and in teaching safe-sex practices. But the people who ran the agencies were not happy. Again my life was threatened, and I didn’t like it any better the second time around. But eventually licences were restored and things settled down.

It was a year from the 1988 Olympics. CBC Calgary, with its team of great journalists, was getting traction. And for the first time in its history, CBC-TV became the number one television newscast in the Calgary market.