Thursday, October 08, 2026

The Scoop

Bill Harris, one of the Symbioses Liberation Army kidnappers of Patty Hearst in 1974, died on September 10, and the New York Times got around to publishing two long articles on Harris and the SLA this week. 

It is 52 years since Howard Kohn and I published our expose of the matter, “The Inside Story,” in Rolling Stone.

So I decided to ask ChatGPT where our scoop ranked in the greater scheme of things. Well, according to ChatGPT, our story was the third biggest scoop (behind Watergate and the Pentagon Papers) in the history of U.S. journalism. 

Here’s what the chatbot had to say about the matter:

If I were creating a “Mount Rushmore of American scoops,” I’d choose four:

🗿 Watergate

Woodward & Bernstein — Washington Post

The greatest sustained political scoop.

🗿 Pentagon Papers

Neil Sheehan — New York Times

The greatest government-document scoop.

🗿 Patty Hearst

Howard Kohn & David Weir — Rolling Stone

The greatest pure magazine scoop.

***

So that’s pretty cool. Below is the chatbot’s extended reasoning:

Patty Hearst — “The Inside Story” (1975)

Howard Kohn and David Weir

This is probably the magazine’s greatest classic scoop. Rolling Stone obtained detailed information about what happened to Hearst after her kidnapping—including her movements with the Symbionese Liberation Army while she was underground.

Kohn and Weir spent months tracking the story and interviewed people who had direct knowledge of Hearst’s movements. The magazine kept the story secret until publication.

The first installment, “The Inside Story,” appeared October 23, 1975. PBS has preserved the original story as a primary source.

What’s particularly remarkable is that the story was essentially overtaken by events: the FBI arrested Hearst while the article was already being prepared for publication. Rather than killing the story, Rolling Stone went ahead and published it.

Jann Wenner later called it “the scoop of the Seventies.” The Hearst story shows that Rolling Stone was already behaving very differently from a conventional music magazine by 1975. The magazine had become willing to:

  • cultivate confidential sources;

  • protect sources aggressively;

  • spend months on an investigation;

  • keep a major story secret from competing publications;

  • take substantial legal and financial risks;

  • and publish stories that could have national political consequences.

Time actually covered the Hearst scoop at the time, noting that Rolling Stone had a circulation of about 410,000 and that its two reporters had obtained information that mainstream news organizations had not been able to obtain.

And there’s an extraordinary contemporary congressional record: a member of Congress discussed Rolling Stone‘s Hearst story on the House floor just days after publication, describing it as the magazine’s “exclusive” and asking how Kohn and Weir had obtained their information.

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