I have always wanted to ask this question in a national forum to see if I can make sense of it. I may not be as articulate as some of you reading this so I apologize if my openness comes across wrong but I want to see if I can understand something.

Why is it that journalists feel they need to be the first to bring a news story to the public? Even if it is not accurate, the need to be ‘first’ appears to be a driving force that sometimes clouds the delivery or the authenticity of what is being delivered.

What causes me to pose this question is something that has stayed with me since it happened…..Daniel Pearl

Here is a man that was so driven to put together a story that he would leave his wife and child, go into the unknown, being lead by people that didn’t care about his safety, or that he was a father, or anything about him, to get a story that would be soon forgotten by the readership. Laying his life on the line, for what? To talk with a terrorist? Did he actually think he would get an honest story? Did he think the values we share about human life would be understood by faceless names in the night, shuffling him around an unforgiving country.

The sad part is we know Daniel more for the choices he made to put ‘the story’ in front of something much more important, himself, and his family. I don’t know Daniel and I’m sure he was an amazing and articulate guy to be associated with the Wall Street Journal.  I try to put myself in his place, standing on a darkened street corner, waiting for ‘someone’ to pick me up and bring me to an even more dangerous place. I would stand there thinking about my children, my wife. I would balance that against what I was about to do and how scared I would be and something in my mind would kick in, self preservation, I don’t know, but it would kick in and I would have such clarity as to what is meaningful in life and I would have been back on a plane so fast.

Lets say he did get the story. The only thing that would be forgotten faster than the story would be the person who wrote it. How many stories we read in the newspaper that we know or even remember who wrote it?

We can ‘come to terms’ with the wacko people out there doing stupid horrible things. We chalk them up to unstable thoughts, psychotic thinking, and disturbed people. But when a normal man, highly respected in his field, makes such a horrid decision, the ‘why’ stays with me much longer than the horrific event on the

I can only think the mental driver from within the person that puts a profession above life itself is so powerful that it can be destructive.

Can someone in the ‘business’ reconcile this for ‘lay’ people not plugged into the media.