Veteran Boise reporter attempts to answer, ‘What’s the biggest story you’ve covered?’

What’s the biggest story you’ve ever covered?

As a journalist, I’ve been asked that question often, especially as I recently retired after 23 years covering the news for KBOI-TV in Boise. I’ve worked in journalism all my life and honestly I’m not sure what the answer is.

Maybe the biggest story is right now — with the world gripped by an unprecedented pandemic and America torn over how to respond: masks or no masks, vaccine or no vaccine, shutdowns or no shutdowns. The loss of life is staggering. Emotions are raw, openly exposed. No end in sight.

And it’s a story I’ve covered mostly working from home via virtual press conferences, Zoom interviews, computers and…well, you know. You’ve probably been working from home as well. We’ve never seen anything like this.

But what about Jan. 6, 2021 — the assault on the Capitol of the United States of America by a large, violent mob of mostly Donald Trump supporters who wanted to stop Congress’ constitutional mandate to validate the presidential election which Joe Biden clearly won.

We’ve never seen anything like that either in modern times, not even during the bitter years of protest in the 1960s over civil rights and the Vietnam War. One has to harken back to the War of 1812, when invading British troops marched into Washington and set fire to the U.S. Capitol in 1814.

The select committee looking into the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol calls it one of the “darkest days” for American democracy. No argument here. And it’s part of a bigger story about the fraying threads of the great American experiment.

And then there’s 9/11. More Americans were killed on Sept. 11, 2001, than on D-Day, June 6, 1944.

Even if we weren’t in New York City on 9/11, at the Pentagon or in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, 9/11 was a day that changed our lives forever. It led to the longest war in U.S. history (and the controversial American withdrawal from Afghanistan). It’s a story that continues to impact our lives to this day.

I don’t know. Maybe as I search for an answer to the question about the biggest story I’ve ever covered, I should just stick to local new stories.

A school bus crash in deep South Texas in 1989. A Coca Cola delivery truck T-boned the school bus with 61 students on board and knocked it into a water-filled gravel pit. Twenty-one students were killed. I was one of the first reporters on scene and I wish I could unsee what I saw. But I cannot. As far as I know, it remains the worst school bus crash in Texas history.

Also in 1989 South Texas, where I worked as a reporter for eight years, a drug-smuggling cult practicing a form of Black Magic operated between Brownsville, Texas, and Matamoros, Mexico.

Their leader told his followers as long as they sacrificed human beings, they would have special powers, including invisibility. Most of their victims were unknowns, abducted from the teeming slums surrounding Matamoros.

But then the cult leader had his minions kidnap an American, a University of Texas student who was part of a group enjoying spring break on South Padre Island. Mark Kilroy simply disappeared. I interviewed Mark’s parents as they came to the Rio Grande Valley from Austin to search for Mark.

The story broke wide open about a month later when cult members in a truck (believing they were invisible) blew through a federal police checkpoint near Matamoros. The police simply followed and discovered the unspeakable at an isolated ranch. They found Mark’s body: His heart had been cut out and placed in a cauldron. There were dozens of shallow graves of other victims.

“This great evil, where’s it come from?” wondered the novelist James Jones. “How’d it steal into the world? What seed, what root did it grow from?”

Not all the stories are so grim, although it’s a big part of journalism, unfortunately.

One magnificent story is about an Idaho schoolteacher who realized her dream to fly into space in the face of many setbacks. Barbara Morgan of McCall launched to the international space station aboard the shuttle Endeavor in 2007.

But as the end of the page approaches, the question still stands. What’s the biggest story you’ve ever covered?

I reckon the truthful answer is: all of them. Every single one.

Scott Logan grew up in Boise. He got his first job in journalism at age 17 as a copy boy for the Idaho Statesman in 1971. He’s worked as a foreign correspondent for newspapers, magazines and television, reporting from three different continents. Logan recently retired from KBOI-TV after 23 years as a reporter for the Boise station.