Sniper May Not Have Wanted Media to Know about Tarot Card
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: Jack is away, Bill is on duty in Maryland, and Leon Harris has taken the big trip north to join us for the next couple of days. Welcome back.</s>LEON HARRIS, CNN ANCHOR: Oh, good to be back. And it'll be even better once I wake up. I'm not used to being, getting up this early anymore.</s>ZAHN: I know. It takes a while to get the body used to the 4:30 a.m. wakeup call.</s>HARRIS: All right, let's get right to the e-mail, all right? We've been talking about, in the last couple of days, about an aspect of the sniper shootings in the last couple of days. Now, yesterday, we saw and we both heard a very angry Maryland police chief rip into the news media for reporting on the Tarot card that was found near one of the attacks.</s>CHIEF CHARLES MOOSE, MONTGOMERY COUNTY POLICE: So I beg of the media, let us do our job. If the community wants you to do it, they will call today and we will have a vote and if it's decided that Channel 9 is going to investigate this case, then so be it.</s>HARRIS: Now, later in the day Chief Moose made a point of thanking the media for helping law enforcement to make people feel safe and to cope with all the stress. So here is our question this morning -- does news reporting get in the way of police investigations? Now, tell us what you think by e-mail this morning. The address here, you should know it by now, is am@cnn.com. And later on this morning we'll be reading your responses and see what you think.</s>ZAHN: And we should make it clear that obviously our challenge as reporters is to balance informing the public and not compromising an investigation. And Bill's standing by to kind of fill us in on exactly what sparked the chief's pique yesterday. And it mainly had to do with the reporting of that Tarot card at the scene, right?</s>BILL HEMMER, CNN ANCHOR: Indeed, yes. The "Washington Post" reporting something rather interesting about that whole topic this morning, Paula. It is saying right now that if the sniper left this Tarot card, he may have also left a note that indicated he did not want the media to know about this, which may have been the trigger that set off the police chief yesterday. Investigators and criminologists who look into this type of matter, what they will say essentially is that perhaps the sniper is trying to establish some sort of relationship with police. But now they think that may be sacrificed, that relationship, because this did go out to reporters. Again, all this is being talked about through the "Washington Post" and a few other media outlets out here. Whether or not there's anything to it is another question. The chief will come out today, again, Paula, in a matter of moments, and we'll see if he has more on this topic. But many times in the past when there were leaks, we know what happens. They come out, like Donald Rumsfeld will come out and scold his own people for leaking that information as opposed to jumping on the media. But it's a story that's still out there again today. We hope to hear more in a matter of moments -- Paula.</s>ZAHN: Well, it's clear in this case the chief has made it, I guess, official that the process has to change because someone in his department leaked this information to the press in the first place.</s>HEMMER: Right.</s>ZAHN: So we're going to debate that throughout the morning. Still to come -- thanks Bill.