Maybe it was because he
escaped from a pointed gun
to his head, has chatted with
Mafiosos or was a finalist for
the Pulitzer Prize for a 60-
part series on the Ohio mafia,
but Bill Moushey, one of
three panelists at the ninth
annual Media Day at Bucks,
captivated an array of students
on Wednesday, April
23.
Alongside him was J.D.
Mullane, a columnist for the
Bucks County Courier Times,
and Erin O’Hearn, a reporter
for Channel 6 Action News.
They all spoke to their experiences
for this year’s theme –
covering the police beat.
“You know what’s great
about journalism,” said
Moushey, “is that you get to
do what you want-and to
me it’s dear to my heart-
bad guys. You are covering
the worst human beings on
the face of the earth, and
there certainly are plenty of
bad guys to go around.”
Moushey has been an investigative
reporter for the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette since
1985. His stories have included
a series revealing abuses
within the federal witness
protection program, uncovering
corruption on the
Supreme Court of
Pennsylvania and revealing
dreadful health care conditions
in the state prison system.
His Post-Gazette reports
have won numerous national
and local awards. His 1996
series “Protected Witness”
was a finalist for the Pulitzer
Prize. He was awarded the
National Press Club’s
Freedom of Information
Award. He also received honorable
mention for The
Newspaper Guild’s
Heywood Broun Award for
reporting about society’s
underprivileged.
“Journalism doesn’t pay
very well, but we certainly
give each other a lot of
awards,” reflected Moushey
of his near-achieved Pulitzer
Prize.
Instead, the winner was a
reporter who was dying of
AIDS and chronicled the final
stages of his life. “My editor
said to me, ‘Now you know
what to do to win,'” said
Moushey.
Mullane agreed with
Moushey-journalism wasn’t
the highest paying job, but its
rewards far outweighed any
financial downsides.
Mullane, a columnist for the
Bucks County Courier Times
and a blogger for
Phillyburbs.com, was nominated
for a Pulitzer Prize for
his crime series that examined
the 1962 rape and murder
of a 9-year-old girl in a
Bristol Borough church.
He is the only reporter to
interview bank robber
William Alston, who shot a
Bristol Township sergeant
and then escaped to Africa,
where he lived for a decade
as a clean-cut, soft-spoken
university professor.
“Will Austin was a bank
robber in 1972. He was cornered
right in front of the
police department, where he
then pointed his gun at an
officer, killed him, was apprehended
and pled guilty,”
recalled Mullane. “[Austin]
escaped and vanished. Years
later they found him, living in
Tunisia. He had gone to college
and carved out a new
identify for himself as a highly
educated college professor
teaching French to the children
of a British ambassador.”
O’Hearn got her start differently,
but her insight to the
criminal mind was more personalized.
She showed a short TV
report she had done that documented
the fear of
Philadelphia children living
among daily shootings, murders
and drug wars.
According to her bio,
O’Hearn joined the Action
News Team as a general
assignment reporter in
January of 2006. She has a
background covering politics,
as she began her broadcasting
career at Capital News 9 in
her hometown of Albany,
New York.
She discussed how it feels
to walk up to a mourning
family who just lost a family
member. “They don’t owe me
anything. And there are some
people that don’t talk, other
people who embrace you. It is
therapeutic, because there is a
bad guy out there and they’ll
talk because they don’t want
their friends to lose a child,”
said O’Hearn.
“Then,” she added, “you
realize you are doing a service.”
Media Day, presented by
Bucks’ journalism program
and the Centurion, is an
annual forum emceed by
journalism Professor Tony
Rogers and the Centurion
editor-in-chief.
This year, several high
school classes and a junior
high school newspaper
attended along with the
Bucks journalism students.
Several films were shown
that gave insight into the
journalism and communications
majors at Bucks.
And The Centurion presented
a film that showed the
production of the paper from
start to finish.
Aside from the invaluable
career advice from Moushey,
Mullane and O’Hearn, Media
Day encouraged potential
reporters, according to
Rogers, to pursue not just a
cublicle but a career.