{news} Fw: [GPUS-PAX] Teen Journo Draws Fire After Army Sting

[Justine McCabe]

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000991306
Teen Journo Draws Fire After Army Sting
By Graham Webster
Published: July 25, 2005 4:23 PM ET

NEW YORK David McSwane had seen the military recruiters around town. He had 
seen them at the high school. And he knew that with recruitment rates down 
due to the Iraq war, they were working hard to attract new cadets. And it 
gave him an idea.

"I wanted to see how far they'd go to get another soldier," says McSwane, a 
reporter for the Westwind at Arvada West High School in Arvada, Colo. So he 
set up a sting investigation, posing as a high school dropout with a 
marijuana habit and went down to his local Colorado Army recruitment station 
to enlist.

McSwane, 17, knew he would have to document his conversations with the 
recruiters, so he taped the telephone conversations, enlisted his sister to 
pose as a proud sibling so she could photograph parts of the process, and 
asked a friend to operate a video camera across from a local head shop.

But how did McSwane get an recruiter to visit a head shop with him? Simple. 
The honor student, pretending to have a ganja habit he couldn't kick, went 
there to score a detoxifying kit the Army office claimed had helped two 
previous recruits pass drug tests, according to a taped phone conversation 
broadcast on local TV. McSwane told his recruiter he didn't know what the 
detox formula looked like, so the man agreed to go to the store with him.

Aside from his drug problem, McSwane said he had no high school diploma - 
which at that time was true, as he graduated about two months later - and 
that he had dropped out of high school. No problem, the recruiters told him. 
There are Web sites where anyone can order a diploma from a school they make 
up. "It can be like Faith Hill Baptist School or whatever you choose," one 
recruiter can be heard saying on one of the taped exchanges.

After the fruits of his investigation ran in the Westwind, there was a brief 
lull.

Then a Denver TV station picked up the story and ran with it, first airing 
McSwane's findings on April 28. Within a few days the boy's sting had made 
national headlines, and the U.S. Army froze recruiting operations nationwide 
for a day. (His two would-be recruiters were suspended.)

"It's been kind of cool to see a reaction from the Pentagon on a story done 
in a high school paper," the teen reporter says. He has appeared on local 
and national TV, and articles on his investigation have appeared in the 
Rocky Mountain News in Denver and The New York Times. One could understand 
if the school was a bit unaccustomed to all the media attention.

Rick Kaufman, a spokesman for Jefferson County Public Schools, said that 
after the initial report ran in Westwind, "the principal was very clear with 
David that the articles could not go any further into his undercover 
actions." Because the school paper is produced as part of a class, the 
principal reviews the paper prior to publication and has the power to spike 
any story.

McSwane says his scrupulous documentation has for the most part prevented 
naysayers from calling his investigation false. Still, he says, some have 
questioned the ethics involved in a deceptive operation like the one he 
orchestrated: "Any undercover investigation, you're going in there as a lie. 
And a lot of people don't like it."

In the fall McSwane plans to start on a journalism degree at Colorado State 
University in Fort Collins. But he's not taking it easy in the meantime. "I 
work retail graveyard shifts right now, because I've got to make money for 
college," he says, upon waking in the mid-afternoon. On his days off, he 
interns at the Arvada (Colo.) Press.

Like any good romance, McSwane's love of journalism started with something 
of an accident. "I guess I've always had a knack for writing," he says. "One 
day one of my English teachers just put me in newspaper class without my 
permission."



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