Handing A Scoop to the Competition   

For a local television reporter, there is no worse feeling than seeing your story on a competing station's newscast first. Except, maybe, if you inadvertently handed it the story yourself.

That's what happened to Scott Hanson, a veteran reporter with WESH, NBC's affiliate in Orlando, Florida.

When Hanson saw a grainy videotape of a local preacher at a strip club on a rival station's 6 p.m. newscast last February, he took his office keys off his keyring, sat by the phone and waited to be fired.

"As soon as I saw the story on there I knew I was a dead man walking," he says.

Hanson, an Emmy award-winning investigative reporter, had shot the hidden-camera video himself as part of a six-month investigation into allegations that the preacher was seducing women attending his marriage counseling sessions and leading a secret life as a regular patron of strip clubs.

When his station canned the story weeks before it was to be broadcast, deeming it too sleazy, Hanson turned the raw video over to his source, one of the preacher's alleged victims, who begged to be able to show the proof to church leaders. Despite her assurances that the tape would never leave her hands, a copy quickly found its way to the local ABC and CBS affiliates, both of which aired it within a week without knowing where it had originated.

The ensuing scandal and the minister's eventual arrest on assault and kidnapping charges led to weeks of salacious stories on the preacher's secret life. Meanwhile, the revelation of where the tape came from and news of Hanson's eventual firing rocked the local television news market in a central Florida version of "Sex, Lies and Videotape."

"It was just the wildest thing I've ever been involved in," says Jane Watrel, an investigative reporter with ABC affiliate WFTV, who was handed the tape by a source and did a week's worth of stories with it before finding out a competitor had shot the footage. "It was the buzz of central Florida. It was amazing."

The story began last July when Hanson received a call from a local woman claiming that the Rev. Charles Evans of the Trinity Assembly of God congregation in Deltona had seduced her and at least two other women who came to him for counseling. She provided details of a man who preached on Sundays and spent Mondays frequenting local topless bars using the name Chad, but her allegations were dismissed by church officials.

"I said, 'I'm not going to take down a 20-year preacher without proof.' So I put out a six-month dragnet," Hanson says. With his news director's permission, Hanson went to local strip clubs with a photo of the preacher and asked the dancers to call if they saw him.

After about 10 stakeouts, Hanson and his cameraman, Ron Peoples, finally caught Evans and a girlfriend on videotape as they walked into Daytona Beach's Shark Lounge. Hanson then followed them inside, wearing a hidden camera in his shirt pocket, and got the proof he had been waiting for.

Exuberant, Hanson and Peoples began preparing the story to air on the February 10 evening newscasts, a date chosen by station officials. They were on the way to get footage of Evans preaching to wrap up the story when they got the news that the piece wouldn't be aired.

Hanson said his editors gave a series of reasons for killing the story: It was too sleazy. There was no news in what a preacher does in his free time. Only one woman had come forward to make the allegations. A vice president of the station's parent company, Pulitzer Broadcasting, had just come to town to replace the outgoing general manager. "The station was trying to clean up its image," Hanson says.

Hanson tried to shop the story around to other sources, including "Dateline NBC," but had no luck. He says his source's pleas to give her a tape to show to church officials eventually got to him.

"I was literally losing sleep over the thought that this guy was abusing women," Hanson says.

According to news accounts, the day the tape aired a local man recognized Evans as the man who had tied him to a chair one night and had pistol-whipped him in an effort to collect drug money. The man went to the authorities, and the minister was arrested. (Charges against the minister are still pending.)

Hanson says the preacher wouldn't have been arrested if the tape hadn't been leaked. He calls his decision to turn over the video to his source "conscience meeting journalism." But his boss, WESH News Director Russ Kilgore, calls it a blatant violation of one of the cardinal rules of investigative reporting: Never let the raw video leave the building.

WESH officials eventually told Hanson that he could either quit and sign a gag order or be fired, according to Hanson. Feeling he needed to be able to assure church officials that the tape was not doctored, Hanson says he chose to be fired.

Station managers say they cannot discuss the circumstances surrounding Hanson's dismissal, citing company personnel rules. They defend WESH's decision to keep the videotape off the air.

"We determined it was not a story," says Kilgore. "The story was rejected on its own merits... Anybody who came into my office said they felt we were doing the right thing."

Though the minister's story led competing newscasts for a week, WESH has never aired the hidden-camera video or told viewers about its part in bringing down the minister. Kilgore says the only story the station did on the scandal was a brief mention of the minister the day he was arrested.

Hal Boedeker, the Orlando Sentinel's television writer, says controversy over the use of the tape triggered debates in newsrooms around Orlando, but did little to change the way local news operates.

"The pictures overwhelmed everything," Boedeker says. "This was sort of a tawdry chapter in local news here. It doesn't speak well for the journalistic process."

For his part, Hanson, 36, says he has moved on, leaving the "local news merry-go-round" to do freelance reporting and producing. He received an award from the state attorney's office in Orlando for his dedication to victims' rights in pursuing the preacher story.

"It's one of the best stories I never did," he says.