But dealing with the cream of the nation’s press corps was something that Earl Saunders was not prepared for. Handling a room full of journalists who had the ethics and manners of starved piranhas was far removed from dealing with local journalists. Leading them was Jan Fields. She had a knack for hammering him or his spokesmen with hard, no-nonsense questions. For a while she had been threatened with revocation of her newly printed press pass and warned that she was in danger of being escorted out of the state. Jan not only laughed in the face of the state trooper who had given her that notice, but turned the event into a major story. “It seems,” she had stated in that piece, “that the freedoms the governor of this state claims he and his people are fighting for are not the same freedoms that other citizens of the United States have come to enjoy and expect. Freedom of speech and freedom of the press in this embattled state has come to mean buy into what GO Thomas believes in or get out of Idaho.”

This sort of reporting left her out of the loop when it came to securing interviews with key state officials. But it also gave her a sort of immunity that she was quick to take advantage of. When she saw that the state officials had abandoned all thought of throwing her out of Idaho for fear of alienating the nation’s media, she dug her spurs in deeper, asking those questions that no one else in the vast media pool had the guts to put forth. Overnight she once more became the darling of the World News Network. It also elevated her to the position of the unofficial leader of the Boise journalists. Inevitably her fellow correspondents would wait to see what issues she would tackle before they committed themselves. Once it was clear what she was after they would pile on like hyenas feasting on a carcass as they asked their own follow-up questions.