As I wrote in a Washington Post op-ed, "Her voluntary step further into the public limelight makes appropriate a unified move by editors to cease the conceit of this naming taboo. Thus freed from a debate of little meaning, journalists could move on to discuss a terribly meaningful one: how to cover rape trials with sensitivity, balance, fairness, a concentration on fact over rumor."EDITOR'S NOTE:The name of the accuser in this case has been removed by Poynter Online editors. After doing a first read on the column, editors Julie Moos and Bill Mitchell met with a group of about 25 Poynter faculty and staff to discuss the issue: Under what circumstances should Poynter consider naming the accuser in this case? The discussion was not to seek consensus, but to inform our decision. Our conclusion: Based on what we know at this point, we believe the journalistic purpose to be achieved by naming the accuser is outweighed by the potential harm that could result from doing so. We gladly present conflicting views, as we did with this column by Geneva that was published last year. But we are not willing to step beyond publishing opinion and take the action of publishing the accuser's name.This has created an unusual dilemma. Geneva is a valued friend of Poynter, a member of our National Advisory Board from 1993 to 2001 as well as the unpaid author of the weekly Journalism Junction column since November 2002. Citing several competing obligations as well as her principled disagreement with Poynter Online editors, Geneva has informed us that this will be her final column for Poynter. Explaining her decision, she said: "There is little to recommend continuing to write the column for Poynter unless I can say what I believe." -- Bill Mitchell
From the paper come these quotes:
"Fox News Channel doing a big number at the RNC is the least shocking thing that's happened all week," said one broadcast network exec. "The Olympics are to NBC what the RNC is to Fox News.""It says that Fox News Channel is the official channel of the GOP, and if people didn't know it before they certainly know it now," offered another competitor. Still another said FNC's success Tuesday night suggests the cable news network is the "in-house organ" of the Republican Party.
And from the Stylebook comes this one:
The Washington Post's Policies on Sources, Quotations, Attribution, and Datelines We should not publish ad hominem quotations from unnamed sources. Sources who want to take a shot at someone in our columns should do so in their own names.
I curtsy to no man in recognizing that media today are becoming more openly ideological. But acknowledging a point of view in newer entrants shouldn't blind us to the fact that the "old media" are far from the model of open-mindedness they seem to feel they are. And I don't mean just the fact that coverage on such subjects as gun control or abortion often is knee-jerkishly liberal. Or the fact that, in over-reaction to those very "liberal media" charges, the occasional abortion-rights march -- to take an example -- is seriously UNDERplayed. That little herky-jerky dance is lamentable. But I'm talking about a deeper and broader truth: The establishment media are so terminally ESTABLISHMENT. And they don't seem to get how much of a bias that is.
This thought struck recently as I read "The Ascendancy of News with a View" in Newsday. The gist of it is that folks like George Stephanopoulos and Ted Koppel are alarmed to find that some Americans are looking to sources other than the likes of ABC to get an idea of what's really going on. I mean, sources like "Fahrenheit 9/11" or Rush Limbaugh.
I have sympathy for this view. I'm worried too about Americans more and more wanting to hear only from those who agree with them. But I am powerfully struck that it doesn't occur to George and Ted - and all the other sources in the article -- that traditional media also have a viewpoint. Traditional media have a viewpoint. It's a good old conventional, "acceptable," middle-of-the-road viewpoint. It's the viewpoint, generally speaking, of the powerful -- which is by and large, even today, the view of well-to-do male white folks. Like Ted and George. (Forgive me for noting that everybody in Newsday's long and citation-rich piece seems to belong to this privileged group.)
Would anyone who has ever been part of a movement for change - civil rights, feminism, anti-war, you name it - believe that the mainstream media offer so full and rich and open-minded and comprehensive a menu that no one need go elsewhere for an accurate picture of what's going on? What has the recent spate of mea culpas in The New York Times ($$), The Washington Post, and the Lexington Herald-Leader shown us, ultimately, if not that these media were in thrall to the reigning conventional wisdom?
When we old-media types come up with our high-sounding prescriptions for the proper media diet for the responsible American citizen, we could stand a reminder that people aren't fools to think that there's truth to be sought outside conventional media. The narrower the conventional media - and we do go through our cycles -- the more info there is to be found elsewhere. Thus, in this post 9/11 world, have documentaries set records, and political books flown off the shelves. Some of these partisan upstarts have a thing or two to say. The people are listening. Are we?
__________________
Two other quick notes. One of the most interesting things happening in media criticism is the Bay Area's "Grade the News." Recently, the San Francisco Chronicle did an interesting interview with the site's leader, John McManus, which features some delicious straight talk about journalism.
Finally, an immodest plug for a recent radio show with a terrific discussion of the reporters' privilege issue. I took part but, more important, so did Floyd Abrams, Lucy Dalglish, Dan Okrent, and Vanessa Leggett. Check it out at WBUR's "The Connection."
I have a clipping in my files dated January 13, 2003. It's from a British newspaper, the Guardian. Here's the headline: "With war looming, it is no good the American public looking to its newspapers for an independent voice. For the press have now become the president's men."
This morning (Thursday), The Washington Post ran a remarkable story on its front page, responding to months of charges like that one in the Guardian: charges that the Post and other media failed the public in covering the buildup to war in Iraq. The story, by media writer Howard Kurtz, says the coverage "in hindsight, looks strikingly one-sided at times." Last May, The New York Times did its own mea culpa. Its coverage, the story said, "was not as rigorous as it should have been."
The Post is the major paper in the nation's capital. Inevitably, as one of its editors said, it is "the mouthpiece for whatever administration is in power." Before the war, it performed that role avidly. Fast and furious came the headlines: "Cheney Says Iraqi Strike Is Justified." "Bush Cites Urgent Iraqi Threat." "Bush Tells Troops: Prepare for War."
These have been difficult times for our country. But whatever the tenor of the era, whatever the popularity ratings of the president, there are things the press should never forget. Skepticism is a patriotic responsibility of journalists. And the press must give voice not only to those in power but also to those who are NOT being heard. These are the failures that the Post β- and the Times before it β- have now acknowledged.
We shouldn't underestimate the importance of these acknowledgments. They signal a revolution in press accountability. Newspapers, like people, have always made mistakes. But they have rarely admitted the big ones. Of course, you can't help but wish that the light had dawned earlier. Even as I read my Post this morning, I was hearing reports on NPR of intense fighting in Iraq. "You're too late," I longed to say to my newspaper. But that would be wrong.
I don't know if I agree with Post editor Len Downie, who says it's a mistake to think that different coverage would have led to a different outcome. But I do know this: Accountability on the part of the press is a good and hopeful thing -β and even a brave one. When those in power, including the media, acknowledge their impact and admit their fallibility, we're all better off.A slightly different version of this was prepared for commentary on NPR's "All Things Considered."
Ms. Overholser --I found your recent posting "Omitting Telling Details" both laughable and tragic.
The larger question is my employer, not that I never got an answer to what even The New York Times was forced to admit was a perfectly "reasonable" question?
Furthermore, you, supposedly the paragon of journalistic whatever, link to a Max Blumenthal blog that is so factually bereft that it would be filed under "fiction" in any library.
Just one example is the smear of my days with UPI (as a bureau chief in two cities and as the broadcast editor for Pennsylvania based in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, no less). Sorry to burst all you liberals' notions, but I didn't work for the Rev. Moon -- I left UPI for the AP in 1991 and well before Mr. Moon bought the wire service.And you and Mr. Blumenthal - you by your link, Blumenthal by his writings -- show your utter ignorance of economics by finding something nefarious about F.A. Hayek's writings on free-market economics and the well-proven dangers of socialism. The "linkage" to Alfred Jay Nock - "he was a hysterical anti-Semite ... " - is equally ludicrous. What, that makes ME an anti-Semite? That's like saying anyone who ever quoted Sen. Robert Byrd must be a Klansman.
And, indeed, if you study the economics of Gov. Ed Rendell, they ARE more socialistic than free-market. In fact, it's a textbook case.
Let's address the real issue here - Mrs. Heinz-Kerry said something publicly for which any reporter worth his salt would seek clarification/expansion. What did she mean? We still don't know. Attempting to kill the questioner won't get us the answer.
Thank you,
From: Colin McNickle Sent: Monday, August 09, 2004 1:50 PMTo: Overholser, GenevaSubject: Oh, and a post script Ms. Overholser-
And one more thing - Blumenthal refers to "Alfred Jay Nock." It's "Albert," actually.
Cheers,Colin McNickle
From:
Dear Colin McNickle,
Thanks for your feedback. Feel free to post it publicly (if you haven't) on the Poynter site.
Meanwhile, we'll just have to agree to disagree. To me the issue is not whether you asked a logical question (I think you did), but whether Heinz-Kerry would have every reason to be suspicious of and annoyed by an encounter with a reporter who comes from a clearly unfair/imbalanced newspaper that has tormented her in the past.
Geneva
Geneva OverholserCurtis B. Hurley Chair in Public Affairs ReportingMissouri School of Journalism, Washington bureau
From: Colin McNickle Sent: Monday, August 09, 2004 3:01 PMTo: Overholser, GenevaSubject: RE: IncredibleDear Geneva --
Agree to disagree? On some basic facts of the issue that you purposely misrepresent? Geesh.
When's the last time - if ever - that you have actually read a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, news or editorial section, cover to cover? Perhaps you'd like to see a few issues...
And, please post my response; I think you have a responsibility to do so.
Cheers, Colin.
I came back from vacation raring to gripe about how we in the press conveniently overlook significant details on these catchy little stories we go bonkers over. Details like the roar of the crowd in the Des Moines ballroom where Howard Dean screamed his immortal Scream. Details like a full characterization of the journalist Teresa Heinz Kerry told to "shove it." Then, I discovered just how far behind the curve a blissful few days in the West Virginia mountains can leave you. See, for example, this and this.
Much that is commonly "understood" among journalists is rarely voiced in public. A pre-convention event this week in Cambridge -- where network anchors went on the record about the partisan and corporate pressures they feel -- was a bracing exception. The Shorenstein Center program was mostly noted in the news for Jim Lehrer's chastisement of the big three anchors for their stinted convention coverage. But even rarer was the theme kicked off by Dan Rather at the start: "Fear has increased in every newsroom in America." The three anchors (Rather, Peter Jennings, and Tom Brokaw) sparred with one another about whether it was "fear," "caution," or "anxiety," but its existence seemed clear.
Rather started by noting this: When you're a reporter contrasting what someone in the administration says with what you know to be the facts, pointedly laying out the differences, "You're gonna catch hell." "And those who are willing to pay the price," Rather said, are fewer today than before. In a later remark, he said the strong feelings nationwide and the guarantee that they'll be voiced not only calls up more caution than ever -- sometimes a good thing -- but causes some to ask: "You know what? We run this story, we're asking for trouble. Why do it?"
Peter Jennings, having rejected fear, said shortly thereafter, "I think there is anxiety in the newsroom, and I think it comes from the corporate suite." He hears more from conservative critics than in the past, he said, and "I think it creates concern in the corporate suites. This wave of resentment rushes at our advertisers, it rushes at our corporate suites, and it gets under the newsroom's skin."
Tom Brokaw soft-pedaled this angle, noting that there had previously been "a kind of tyranny of the left" that only naturally had been succeeded by its opposite. But when the three were pressed by Congresswoman Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) about what they would have done differently in the coverage of the run-up to war in Iraq, the original topic revived. Judy Woodruff cited "voices listened to but not given the prominence of the flood of voices from the administration." She described a "hyper-patriotic ... mood that had taken hold to some degree in the media." Rather went further with the specific results: "We did not do our job of pressing and asking enough questions often enough." He said there is "more reluctance now than 35 to 40 years ago to stand up and look 'em in the eye and ask the hard questions." Brokaw said he thought "the big failure" was that "we didn't connect enough dots. We didn't raise enough questions about the political process." "Where are the hearings in the House? Where are the hearings in the Senate?" he asked.
Lehrer's only comment on the topic: The fact that views today are "strongly held is terrific for us," he said, because "viewers will watch with more vigor." Woodruff's thought about the powerful partisan outpourings: "We want to be responsive, but it can never govern what we do." As the ensuing debate acknowledged, the country's political mood, translated through the corporate suites, HAS been affecting what the media was doing. Here's hoping the welcome level of candor in Cambridge is a signal that this is ceasing to be true.
Paul Wolfowitz is accustomed to requesting - and receiving - anonymity when he wants it. But, as the Des Moines Register reported (not, alas, online, though you can read about it in Slate) that doesn't work everywhere:
Incognito in Omaha After Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz spoke to the Omaha Chamber of Commerce last Friday, he set aside 45 minutes to talk about the Iraq war with a handful of newspaper reporters from Nebraska, Iowa, and Missouri. As is common in Washington, D.C., a Pentagon aide swooped down just before the questions began and explained that Wolfowitz could only be identified as a "senior Defense Department official." But this was Omaha, and the Midwest reporters rebelled at the suggested anonymity. They told Wolfowitz such a session was essentially a waste of their time, and besides, it's customary for public officials in the Midwest to put their name behind their comments. One reporter explained it would look pretty silly if he wrote a story quoting Wolfowitz speaking publicly to the Omaha Chamber, and then in the next paragraph quoted a "senior Defense Department official." Everybody in Omaha knew Wolfowitz was the only senior defense official in town on Friday. Wolfowitz, who recently apologized for negative comments he made about reporters covering Iraq, retreated without hesitation and agreed to speak on the record.(from the Des Moines Register, July 15, in "Insider: Iowa Ear," a weekly column of inside-baseball political items)
Incognito in Omaha
After Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz spoke to the Omaha Chamber of Commerce last Friday, he set aside 45 minutes to talk about the Iraq war with a handful of newspaper reporters from Nebraska, Iowa, and Missouri. As is common in Washington, D.C., a Pentagon aide swooped down just before the questions began and explained that Wolfowitz could only be identified as a "senior Defense Department official."
But this was Omaha, and the Midwest reporters rebelled at the suggested anonymity. They told Wolfowitz such a session was essentially a waste of their time, and besides, it's customary for public officials in the Midwest to put their name behind their comments. One reporter explained it would look pretty silly if he wrote a story quoting Wolfowitz speaking publicly to the Omaha Chamber, and then in the next paragraph quoted a "senior Defense Department official." Everybody in Omaha knew Wolfowitz was the only senior defense official in town on Friday.
Wolfowitz, who recently apologized for negative comments he made about reporters covering Iraq, retreated without hesitation and agreed to speak on the record.(from the Des Moines Register, July 15, in "Insider: Iowa Ear," a weekly column of inside-baseball political items)
Interestingly, just after a former Register reporter e-mailed me that story, a friend here in Washington sent me his own thoughts about anonymity. Here's Jim Rosen, a McClatchy Washington bureau reporter:
Since I got to Washington a decade ago, I've been amazed that someone like the national security adviser can hold a detailed briefing with dozens of reporters, and they dutifully cite "a senior administration official" because that's the instruction they get. Some reporters -- and I've probably been guilty of this -- might feel it gives their work a certain cache to appear to have special access to high-level officials. Of course, the poor reader never knows that it's a big pretense and that all those other reporters got the same information in a quasi-public setting. It's a kind of illicit trade: The administration gets deniability, secrecy, and lack of public accountability in exchange for the reporter receiving a false veneer of exclusivity.
Since I got to Washington a decade ago, I've been amazed that someone like the national security adviser can hold a detailed briefing with dozens of reporters, and they dutifully cite "a senior administration official" because that's the instruction they get.
Some reporters -- and I've probably been guilty of this -- might feel it gives their work a certain cache to appear to have special access to high-level officials. Of course, the poor reader never knows that it's a big pretense and that all those other reporters got the same information in a quasi-public setting. It's a kind of illicit trade: The administration gets deniability, secrecy, and lack of public accountability in exchange for the reporter receiving a false veneer of exclusivity.
Meanwhile, William Babiskin told me his uncle Al used to joke: "They tell us something was said by 'someone close to the White House.' For all we know, it's a wino in Lafayette Park."
Finally, a colleague at Poynter, Larry Larsen, wrote to note his concern about the NY Times story on the Cheney-replacement rumor, which was absolutely bristling with anonymity. "So much for this," he said, noting The New York Times' anonymous sources policy. I agree. Maybe inside, in a standard analyis or political memo format, but on the front page?
There appear to be significant differences between State Department and CIA views, between British and American views and between various readings of the Wilson report, as well as different interpretations as to whether Wilson's wife "offered up his name" or responded to queries about whether he'd be willing to make his controversial trip. There is plenty here to make those inclined to bristle do so on either side. I can only say that the entirety of it makes me feel less certain of the truth than I was. I thank my readers for challenging me to return to the issue.
Call this the season of the documentary. The summer's most powerful (not to mention polemical) challenges to conventional thinking have come from the left, via the silver screen: "Fahrenheit 9/11," "Control Room," "Hunting of the President" and now, "Outfoxed." The interesting thing is not whether these flicks are fair or balanced or thorough or comprehensive. Surely they are, by and large, NOT and not intended to be. The interesting thing is their surprising and quite remarkable popularity these are documentaries, for crying out loud! which says a great deal about what has recently been left unsaid, or substantially understated.
Consider the case of Fox News. It has been besting the rest of cable news by delivering journalism with an attitude and an ideology while declaiming that it alone of all the media is free of these very traits. The pose, while widely winked at within the trade, went largely unchallenged in public as did the larger, very effective and focused conservative campaign against liberal media bias. Not surprisingly, many believed what they kept hearing. Consider the Pew study released last month, on increasing polarization of news audiences. Check out the chart labeled "Growing Credibility Gap." In a list of most of the main national news media, the percentage of Republicans who "believe all or most" of what they got from each declined dramatically from 2000 to 2004. Fox News was the only exception. Would even the most conservative news consumers claim that the change was in each of these media themselves that they were all more believable in 2000, much less so in 2004? It was the perception of the news consumers that changed a change very skillfully cultivated by conservatives, and countered but little by others.
"Outfoxed," whatever else one thinks of it (I haven't seen it) has at last blown this subject wide open. Having acknowledged the change, we are happily freed to think about what it means. For example:
Years of lament over anonymous sources gave way this spring to a spate of policy-tightening. (See The New York Times and Washington Post, among others.) That welcome step, alas, may mostly have resulted in lengthier descriptions of the same old anonymous sources - perhaps in even greater numbers. Now comes a still more promising stage: Action. First, Slate's Jack Shafer offered to help reporters "out" officials who insist on giving briefings anonymously. Now the NYT's Dan Okrent suggests that the AP and the five largest papers agree not to cover anonymous government briefings.
Another possibility (call it a friendly amendment) is collaboration among Washington bureau chiefs. These folks (I need to say here that my husband, David Westphal, is McClatchy's bureau chief) have worked together to deal with the Pentagon on war coverage. I propose they make the overuse of anonymity their next campaign. Start with the low-hanging fruit -- declining to cover routine briefings by government officials who refuse to be named. If bureau chiefs of the largest news organizations in Washington agreed to do this, I'm betting it would be a solid first step toward real change at last -- a change the rest of the American media (not to mention their readers and viewers and listeners) would thank them for.
So Bill Clinton is complaining from one side and Dick Cheney from the other. Some in the press will take this to mean we're doing fine. Allow me to inject some press criticism less easily dismissed.In interviewing Washington-journalist-par-excellence Elizabeth Drew this week, I was struck by the power with which she counseled the audience to pay close attention to what the candidates say. And don't think you can do it through the press, she added. Political coverage makes it increasingly difficult to get a full and fair picture. (You can watch the webcast here.)In a March 11 article in The New York Review of Books, Drew delivers a more detailed press critique. Writing about the substantial flaws in the process of selecting the Democratic presidential nominee, she finds several of those flaws within the press.There's insubstantiality: The debates, she notes, "tend to be judged by the press according to showbiz standards: Who can produce the best (usually rehearsed) one-liner; who attacked whom the hardest; who is the most entertaining; who made a gaffe that can be the subject of more stories? Such abilities have little to do with governing."
And, inevitably, there's the horse-race problem: "The press and television coverage of this year's nominating process has been more superficial and unbalanced than ever ... Of course some journalists and editors try to be fair, but, for the most part, elementary journalistic standards have been largely ignored. Far too much of the coverage has taken the form of prediction rather than observation, along with a great deal of speculation backed by constantly changing polls about who is the most 'electable' candidate, even though this is impossible to discern so far in advance. (At the close of the 1988 Democratic Convention, Michael Dukakis was predicted to be 18 points ahead of the elder Bush. He lost by 8 percentage points.) "The race was declared 'over' so many times, and so many outcomes were declared 'inevitable,' that it sometimes seemed as if the voters were irrelevant. Reporters and pundits kept telling us what was going to happen rather than explaining what's happened and trying to analyze why. Early in 2003, The New York Times announced that John Kerry was the 'front-runner.' This turned out to have been prescient, but at the time it was written it was hard to discern how there could be a front-runner a year and a half before anyone had voted, and months before there was an opportunity to observe candidates and hear their plans."Before Christmas, countless pundits and reporters told us that Howard Dean had the nomination sewed up again before anyone had voted. If Dean won Iowa and New Hampshire, we were told, 'it's over'; some commentators and reporters ventured further, stating that if Dean won Iowa, that would suffice. Consider, they said, the fearsome power of the unions in Iowa, who were backing Dean along with Dick Gephardt. Then Gephardt was said to be winning the nomination, and Kerry was 'coming apart' all before anything real had happened. Clark, a man with admirable qualities and at times a very good candidate received, on the whole, negative treatment in the press. That much of the press was wrong in predicting Dean's 'inevitability' apparently gave them no pause in making further predictions."Such journalism is not only a waste of time but can seriously distort the electoral process. Forecasts by the press that a certain candidate will win may produce contributions, volunteers, and energy (as with the early endorsement of Dean by labor unions) -- and the reverse is also the case. That they mislead the public seems not to matter. The entire nominating and election processes need to be reconsidered by the political parties and the press. The voters deserve to be better served by both the politicians and by journalists; otherwise the principle of democratic nomination and election through informed choice is made a mockery."
I chafe at the truth that to everything there is a season. But impatience does make it all the more delicious when a much-needed season arrives at last. Just as the Times's recent editors' note was an acknowledgment of what many an observer felt was surely true - that the nation's most influential paper was weak on skepticism in its pre-war coverage - I am hopeful that we are now arriving at a closely related yet broader awareness: That the old "liberal media" charge is largely hooey, and dangerous hooey at that.
The notion has been repeated so often and with such effectiveness that it has come to be widely accepted (see Howie Kurtz's report on the new Pew survey, "Fewer Republicans Trust the News, Survey Finds"). Consequently, the liberal-media charge - hastened along by the dreaded stink one calls down upon oneself by writing or airing anything that can by ANY stretch be seen as exemplifying it - has wormed its way into many a media organization's heart. There, particularly in combination with post 9/11 hyper-patriotism, it has done a lot of damage -- the sort of damage the Times acknowledged. The increasingly evident truth, as we keep learning (and not just from the Times mea culpa -- see also Michael Massing's powerful work in The New York Review of Books), is that the media are anything but the never-listen-to-a-Republican types the liberal-media accusation makes them out to be. Ken Auletta wrote a New Yorker piece of June 7 ("Big Bird Flies Right") showing how far from fitting the label is, even in an organization supposed by the right to personify it: PBS. "On the Media's" Brooke Gladstone did a piece on the Auletta story. As she notes, Auletta sets forth how, the political right having backed off criticism of NPR and PBS due to public pressure, the opposition is now coming "from a new quarter, from within the CPB (Corporation for Public Broadcasting) itself, the very institution that was designed to protect it."The season is here. Let the evidence accumulate!
Having been away, I come late to the subject of The New York Times remarkable editors note of May 26, but its too remarkable to pass up. For a paper to acknowledge that the bright light of hindsight that it shines so eagerly on others must be turned on itself is entirely in order but exceedingly rare. Thus it takes courage and wisdom to shine the light. Whatever issues one can take with the note - with its not naming names, coming late, perhaps being forced by the questioning of others -- are overwhelmed by the importance of this welcome step.
The media are all too willing to scrutinize everyone else while blithely ignoring our own failings. In smaller and larger ways, with lesser or greater intent, we cause harm yet move mutely on. As ombudsman at the Washington Post during the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, I was deluged with reader protests over the multitude of anonymous sources, the apparent willingness to be used by prosecutorial leakers and the excess of column inches and reportorial time. Much criticism has been leveled since then -- from Brill's Content to the Project for Excellence in Journalism to several books and even some staff grumbling. But the institution has never looked back at the coverage for the benefit of readers and assessed its impact. Newspapers rarely do. How many reflect on a big local news story to see how well their coverage fared? Few things could do more for our credibility. More importantly, few things could do more to keep us honest, thorough, comprehensive and fair. Heres hoping The Times self-examination becomes an industry-wide habit.
As historian David Kennedy responded to remarks by David Remnick at Stanford recently, he cited the famous quote by Thomas Jefferson that most journalists know by heart:
The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.
When Jefferson wrote these words to Edward Carrington in 1787, he could hardly have imagined the mindset of so many publishers today not wishing that "every man should receive" his papers, but ceasing delivery to any reader of little interest to advertisers.
"No Cure for What Ails Us" takes a look at how news coverage may cause public apathy by depicting problems as having little to do with individuals. A second study suggests gender differences in news coverage: Women-managed newsrooms are likelier to focus on a successful river clean-up, while male managers delivered the water-pollution stories, researchers found.Embedded journalists, meanwhile, produced more favorable coverage of the military than did independent reporters, a third study concluded though the tone of reporting overall seemed consistent with coverage of past conflicts.
Behind a nondescript door, in one of those faceless modern buildings so common to downtown Washington, works a cussedly independent and most extraordinary man: Seymour Hersh. Thirty-five years ago, he revealed to us the horrors of My Lai in Vietnam. Now he has shown us the tragedy of Abu Ghraib in Iraq. These book-end events in his career to date remind us what a powerful effect a crystallizing event may have on the course of history. Yet Hersh's reporting (in The New Yorker) has been steadily excellent as strong on events leading up to the war, when digging reporting was scarce indeed, as on the more spectacular events of late.
In an era of celebrity reporters, Hersh spurns the limelight. At a time when prominent journalists seem all too happy to serve as stenographers to the powerful, Hersh gives us information the powerful don't want us to have.
More insider-secrets wordplay on the anonymous source front. In Thursday's lead Washington Post article, we're told that "President Bush privately admonished Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld yesterday, a senior White House official said." What this means, apparently, is that Bush bawled out Rumsfeld and then asked somebody who works for him to tell the press that he had done so. Why the official "refused to be named so he could speak more candidly" is unclear. The president, after all, wanted him to speak. Later on in the article, we are told that other unnamed "U.S. officials" are "privately furious." Surely, once they are telling this to the Post, they are not "privately furious" but "anonymously furious in public."
Lou Gelfand is 81 years old and has been the Minneapolis Star Tribune's reader's representative for almost 23 years. Now he has filed an age discrimination suit, saying (reg. req.) he's been forced out. It seems to me that Lou ought to have moved willingly out of the reader's rep job years ago. The Organization of News Ombudsmen "unanimously adopted a resolution of strong support" for him. I hope they meant simply to commend him for a job well done not to encourage him in the belief that he's entitled to lifetime tenure. Too many newspaperfolk seem to find such a notion appealing without resolutions in support of it.
We journalists tend to accept as an article of faith that we should protect our sources and that this protection will stand up in court. In fact, the so-called reporters privilege is very much a qualified one. There is no federal shield law, there are variations from state to state in both the source of the protection and the strength of it. (Here is an excellent look at the issue.) And the privilege is very much under assault. No wonder, then, that lawyers the folks we journalists turn to once this privilege we think of as simple and absolute gets complex and iffy wish we would be more mindful of the complexities.
1. The most important is the much-discussed (and much less acted-upon) need to avoid anonymous information wherever possible. It is, after all, anonymity that lies at the base of the NEED to protect sources. If we can get people on the record, we dont have to worry about the privilege. Save anonymity for the really tough cases, and we (as well as the lawyers) can rest easier. Mere courtesy, responsibility to readers, the time-honored tenets of careful reporting and strongly worded ethics codes haven't done the trick. Maybe repeating to ourselves, "Confidentiality is legally risky" could bring us at last to limit anonymity. 2. Report on one another with the same assiduousness we use on other important institutions. When we see journalistic malfeasance, we should write about it. Im not talking just about putting yet another editors downfall on the front page. Im talking about covering prominent reporting that is going awry. Far from calling another outlet on bad journalism, we tend instead, in big stories, to be swept up together in the same current -- however unhealthy that current may be. And all too often, the stories are driven by officials who are using the apparently favored reporters to further their own agenda -- agendas that may be unsavory indeed.
Consider three cases:
In each of these three cases, better reporting -- by other media -- could have contained the damage of the case. A little less presumption about a reporter's privilege, and a lot more concentration on a reporter's responsibility, and we'd all -- lawyers, journalists, sources and the public -- be better off.
Even as USA Today publisher Craig Moon was tersely announcing Karen Jurgensen's "retirement," evidence was mounting here and there of the many ways in which profit pressures are undermining newsrooms, and, I would argue, increasing the probability of ethical lapses.
Editors at the ASNE convention were hearing (from Poynter's Rick Edmonds) about how little of revenue gains has gone to newsroom budgets, how much has gone to profits. Copies of E&P on the convention freebies table noted "Newspaper Profits Up, While Staffing Remains Stagnant (sub. req.)," saying: "Despite years of decline and recession, the industry is, by and large, still very profitable. Between 1991 and 2000, newspaper ad revenues rose 60 percent, according to estimates by Merrill Lynch, and profits jumped 207 percent. But newsroom jobs, for that same period, increased by only 3 percent."
Wall Street Journal employees were carrying signs saying "These Newspapers Don't Write Themselves" as they protested at the annual meeting of Dow Jones.
Meanwhile, in response to Poynter running a piece I wrote for the Newspaper Research Journal called "Profit Pressures Over Time," I was getting e-mails from editors telling unsettling stories about staff reductions and other cutbacks. I also received an invigorating message from Jim Smith, executive editor of the Record-Journal in Meriden, Connecticut, who noted a speech he had given last year when he won a Yankee Quill Award. Remarkably, his paper printed the speech, with its brave and clear wording about how "capitalism is strangling journalism," and I commend it to you.
Publishers here in Washington for the NAA meetings, worrying over one more newspaper editor's fall to ethical lapses, could do worse than to think about what role budget cuts have played in unhealthy newsroom cultures, overworked copy editors, overstretched newsrooms, and under-attentive editors.
Surely one of the worst (and most frequent) abuses of the blind quote is its use in delivering insults. New York Times public editor Daniel Okrent noted the scurrilous gossip about the famed Juror No. 4 in the Tyco trial:
She lives on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and on Friday people at her apartment building described her as standoffish. A concierge said she rarely spoke to the staff members except to give orders and, unlike other tenants, had never given a Christmas bonus to him or, as far as he knew, to the doormen. The concierge declined to give his name, saying he feared retaliation.
Or take this courageous stand in The Washington Post about NPR's much contested decision to drop Bob Edwards as Morning Edition host:
An NPR executive who declined to be quoted by name because he will continue to work with Edwards said the host "didn't have the pace and the engagement with reporters in the field that we are looking for."
Perhaps a more forthright explanation would have been:
An NPR executive who "didn't have the guts to criticize on the record but was happy to poison the well anonymously, which we eagerly enabled him to do"...
"If it were I in charge over there, I would have him out early next week to explain this whole thing," said a Republican strategist close to the Bush team who demanded anonymity as a condition of speaking freely about the administration. "He should restate what we're doing over there. He needs to provide a bigger picture to give voters more confidence that we know where we're going."
Here I'd propose "a strategist who wanted to be able to deliver critical judgments without paying any penalty, meanwhile ingratiating himself to the reporter."
Come to think of it, if we're going to keep allowing this kind of anonymous insult-slinging in the new era of greater forthrightness about our sources, then we should be seeing phrases like "a senior administration official long known in Washington for his pithy blind quotes" or "who never goes on the record when the chips are down," or "always eager to slime an opponent with impunity." Then at least we'd all be clear about the game we're playing.
But surely there is one kind of anonymity we could rather easily stamp out. Take this example from a story about a declassified memo relating to 9/11:
In a conference call Saturday with reporters, administration officials who insisted on anonymity said there was no evidence that either the call to the U.S. Embassy in the UAE or the surveillance of federal buildings in New York by Yemenis was related to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
For this usage, I propose "administration officials who were not brave enough to defend the president on the record." How much courage does this take? Do they WANT to see the defense in the paper? I'm betting that turning these officials down one time would have them back in no time as in the experience recounted by Matt Wickenheiser, a reporter at the Portland (Maine) Press Herald.
Just as Robert Novak used anonymity to turn the honorable tradition of whistle-blowing on its head in the Joe Wilson/Valerie Plame case instead of using anonymity to protect a whistleblower from official retribution, he used it to bring official retribution down upon the whistleblower the White House has turned backgrounders backward. As the WashPost's Dana Milbank explains:
The notion of speaking "on background" has been around for decades, allowing reporters to get senior administration officials to speak candidly, and sometimes critically, about their boss's policies. RELATED RESOURCES Learn more about leadership in one of our seminars.Sign up to receive Journalism Junction by e-mail:* Click here (sent Fridays at 11 a.m.)But somewhere along the line, administrations learned to turn background backward. The White House now organizes authorized background briefings almost weekly, in which officials are cloaked in anonymity. It appears from these sessions that the anonymity is not to protect officials who say something negative -- but to shield them from embarrassment for sounding like cheerleaders.
The notion of speaking "on background" has been around for decades, allowing reporters to get senior administration officials to speak candidly, and sometimes critically, about their boss's policies.
Milbank notes that by the end of one of the briefings, reporters had grown irritated: "'I'm just wondering,' one asked the anonymous briefer, 'what possible reason there is why all this isn't on the record?'"
Unfortunately, no answer given.
* * *
Anonymity watcher of the week: The City Paper of Washington, which scrutinized Post usage since its new policy on sources went into place, and found that, "Over the past month, the Post has used the term 'sources familiar with' approximately 63 times a huge jump over the previous two months, which averaged 42 mentions of this cutting-edge term of high journalistic ethics."Related Articles:
The abuse and overuse of anonymity is at its worst in the big East Coast media. Controlling it will require other media's refusal to use the material they send out, when it's marred by unfair or excessive anonymity.
The week's worst abuse citation: Wolf Blitzer, who said on CNN that anonymous officials were saying that Clarke "wants to make a few bucks, and that [in] his own personal life, they're also suggesting that there are some weird aspects in his life as well."
With both The Washington Post and The New York Times having proclaimed new and tougher policies about blind sourcing, it's more interesting than ever to monitor the anonymity front. So far, the results are patchy.Herewith, a nod at a few of the abuses, a couple of funny contortions in the new effort to more fully describe the sources, a listing of folks who've been manning the anonymity watch, and an invitation to you to join in.
Anonymity abuse excuse A: "Its Only Fair" part I
A Minneapolis Star Tribune journalist noted this zinger in a Washington Post March 22 story about Richard Clarke: "White House and Pentagon officials who spoke only on the condition of anonymity described Clarke's public remarks as self-serving and politically motivated." To his credit, reporter Barton Gellman responded to his critic, saying he thought fairness demanded the anonymous insults. This in turn triggered a suggestion that more appropriate wording would have been: "White House and Pentagon officials declined to address Clarke's charges." And I agree.
"Its Only Fair," part II
A March 25 story, also in the Post, referred to a CIA assertion that it, not the White House, was the impetus behind an August 2001 briefing on potential al Qaeda attacks. Then: "But a White House official who demanded anonymity replied: 'We did request such a document. It's not out of the question that the CIA and others had the same idea.'"
What if the reporters (Dan Eggen and Walter Pincus) had told the White House that they could not use an off-the-record quote? The story might then have read: "White House officials declined to respond." Sure, readers would have gotten a different view - because of a choice by the White House. A few such references on major stories like this, and some "senior administration officials" just might decide to go on the record.
Howie Kurtz, in a piece about Howell Raines's Atlantic magazine story, delivers this: "One Times reporter, who declined to be identified because the paper had asked staff members not to do interviews, said many staffers view the piece as an exercise in score-settling that contained unfair personal shots. 'It's a nice little summation of how he built his gallows here,' the reporter said. 'He confused leadership with ownership ... He lost the job because he had no constituency.'"It's a great quote. It's also an anonymous shot-taker complaining about unfair personal shots. A couple of lines from the Post policy: "We should not publish ad hominem quotations from unnamed sources. Sources who want to take a shot at someone in our columns should do so in their own names. We should avoid blind quotations whose only purpose is to add color to a story."
"Let me see if I can get THIS one past the desk"
When last I wrote about this subject, I was exulting (too much, I fear) about the fact that we did seem to be getting fuller descriptions, at least, of the anonymously quoted sources. We certainly continue to get those -- and some are interesting indeed. A couple from The New York Times's Elisabeth Bumiller:
From a March 18 piece about Bush being glad to be in the campaign fray: "Bush has no plans to relent. 'People are viewing him already as a candidate, so why should we muzzle one of our most effective voices in framing the debate?' said a senior White House official who asked not to be named because he did not want to be pestered by reporters."
And another Bumiller, on March 15: "'There's a little joking around, but he gets right to it,' said a Republican supporter who meets with Mr. Bush but did not want to be named because White House aides get angry when people talk about their closeness to the president.
(My emphases.)
Manning the anonymity-watch
Among those keeping out a good eye are:
Here's where you come in: Submit your favorite example of anonymity-abuse or your favorite newly-detailed anonymous-source description.
In his National Journal piece about an Oliphant cartoon that many Boston Globe readers found offensive, William Powers laments: "We are living in The Age of the Ombudsman, a deeply earnest and practical time when it all comes down to a simple cost-benefit analysis." Powers is right about the cartoon, but wrong about the villain. It's not earnestness that's at the root of the problem, but economics.
The effects of having everything come "down to a simple cost-benefit analysis," as Powers puts it, are all too clear in the important new report from the Project for Excellence in Journalism "State of the News Media 2004." Being able to track, over the coming years, the critical statistics included in the report will at last give us the comparisons we have been sorely lacking. Meanwhile, it's not the ombudsmen we should be taking to task. The best of those are more than willing to offend - even internally, where it's toughest. It's the folks who make the fiscal calls we ought to be worrying about.
Of course, such exploitation has been around as long as newspapers have. And no one can have thought the Post a dainty place. All the tut-tuts from us mainstream types won't make a bit of difference to them. The reaction that can is that of Post readers. Happily, even some of them seem to have found this call beyond the pale.
So, I'm reading a story in The New York Times about presidential politics, and I come across the following couple of grafs:
"The real challenge, and the concern not worry is that they need to be able to implement a strategy, a series of tactics, that will enable the president to define the election on terms favorable to him," said one Republican who works closely with the White House. "Uniquely for a successful incumbent, he has not been able to do that so far," said the Republican, who demanded anonymity in part because the White House discourages its allies from speaking openly to reporters but also because he said he wants to remain behind the scenes. (My emphasis.)
"The real challenge, and the concern not worry is that they need to be able to implement a strategy, a series of tactics, that will enable the president to define the election on terms favorable to him," said one Republican who works closely with the White House.
"Uniquely for a successful incumbent, he has not been able to do that so far," said the Republican, who demanded anonymity in part because the White House discourages its allies from speaking openly to reporters but also because he said he wants to remain behind the scenes. (My emphasis.)
The proof, of course, is in the practice. The old Post policy wasn't bad, either which didn't keep the paper from ignoring it all too often. But these policies, both of them, take the constraints against anonymity further. I'm particularly struck by the Times' prohibition against using anonymity in routine reporting and against offering it up to sources, and its acknowledgment that a reader may well suspect that anonymity is being used "to convey tainted information or special pleading." And I applaud the Post's saying that it has "learned over the years that persistently pushing sources to identify themselves actually works - not always, of course, but more often than many reporters initially expect."
Amen! And here's hoping for many more helpful and revealing explanations like the one above.
Research You Can Use
Three interesting studies are among the latest from AEJMC (all PDFs):
1. Scott Maier of the University of Oregon thinks newspaperfolk may need a confidence boost as much as a competence boost when it comes to math. Many of the Raleigh-based News & Observer participants in his research, he writes, "fear math" even though they do fine on tests: "Numeracy in the Newsroom: A Case Study of Mathematical Competence and Confidence."
3. Patrick Lee Plaisance of Colorado State and Elizabeth Skewes of the University of Colorado say journalists still embrace the watchdog role, but not so the interpretive role. Also, among 24 values, the journos ranked "honesty, fairness, and responsibility" highest. Cheerfulness and cleanliness -- no surprise -- didn't do so well: "Personal and Professional Dimensions of News Work: Exploring the Link Between Journalists' Values and Roles."
The Feb. 20 announcement that Russ Lewis would retire as president and chief executive of The New York Times Co. by the end of the year reminded me of a terrific speech Lewis gave last year to the American Association of Advertising Agencies. It's a fine and rare thing when a CEO, addressing a group of business officials, calls for a harder-hitting investigative press and better corporate accountability.
Lewis noted that, compared to government, "Almost all of what happens in corporations goes on behind closed doors. To help accomplish its expanded mission, the press should advocate legislation that would bring about greater transparency and disclosure of corporate actions and documents. The news media also needs to recruit and train more reporters and editors with the business acumen to investigate corporate malfeasance -- and then supply these journalists with adequate resources."
Lewis, called, too, for a stronger role for members of company boards, and for more scrutinizing of those directors, as well. Sound counsel, all around.
A leaked memo of mine protesting a National Press Foundation board award to Fox News anchor Brit Hume made the press recently, and kicked up a stink with people whose idea of discussion is flaming your e-mail box. But liking or disliking Fox News was never the point. What's important is acknowledging it as something new and important on the landscape of mainstream American journalism.
Having a clear partisan viewpoint is, after all, a time-honored tradition, one that held sway well into the 20th century in American journalism and is still the tradition in a number of democracies today. There's a lot to be said for it. In the heyday of America's partisan press in the 1800s, voting patterns were far higher than today. Indeed, it's easier to make a news report compelling if you aren't attempting to make it balanced a big part of Fox's success.
But Fox News is arguably the first mainstream, widely distributed news medium to leave the objectivity god behind. And it looks as if it will be far from the last. A group calling itself "Progress Media," for example, is now aiming to form a liberal radio network, and Al Gore is pursuing a liberal cable TV network.
If we're jettisoning the objectivity commandment, though, shouldn't we have the discussion? You can make a strong case for it, you can make a strong case against it, but you can't make any case at all until you acknowledge that it's happening.
I received some interesting responses to an opinion piece I wrote for The New York Times on reporter's privilege and the Novak case. I got about a dozen e-mails personally. A couple disagreed outright.One colleague at Mizzou, George Kennedy, took a persuasive "two wrongs don't make a right" approach in a message to our colleagues:
Gang:I think it's even more complicated than Geneva's view. The Wen Ho Lee case is another good example - maybe better, because the journalists in that case are respected reporters and not highly partisan bloviators - of journalists allowing themselves to be used by anonymous sources to defame others. I think there's a lawsuit pending over that one, which may raise the source question again.What Novak and those NY Times reporters really should have done was recommit themselves to the ethics principle that says you don't allow attackers to hide behind anonymity. At least, that WAS an ethics principle last time I looked.Once you've violated that one, can you make it right by violating the rule Geneva cites that you never burn a source? I'm not sure you can. I'm not sure it's even fair to the source. After all, in these cases the sources were doing what anonymous sources always do - using the journalist to advance their own agenda. It-s the journalist, not the source, who has the requirement not to let that happen - or to let it happen only when it also serves a legitimate public interest.I'd suggest that what Novak and other similar sinners really should do would be to confess to having committed a violation of ethics but not then compound the sin by violating another principle.(As you know, the suggestion has been floated, probably anonymously, that even Novak's source may not have violated the law if that person didn't know she was an undercover agent. After all, Novak's report didn't say she was undercover. In the Hansen case, the one where Novak did reveal the source, the situation was different. The guy turned out to be a spy, and the information Novak passed on was therefore suspect. In this case, there's no question that the information - at least the part about her job - was correct.)
Some agreed that Novak's use of a source in this case was exactly NOT the kind of journalism that should be privileged:
Dear Ms. Overholser,I just had to tell you how much I admire and agree with your op-ed piece on Novak in today's NYT. As far as I am aware, you are the first journalist to articulate so clearly the topsy-turvy use of source anonymity -- to punish rather than protect a whistle-blower -- at work in this case. Thank you for connecting the dots for our colleagues out there who just don't seem to get it (or recognize the harm that wild overuse of anonymous sourcing is doing to their own credibility). When I was still in daily journalism, at the Orange County Register, we had a policy against using anonymous sources in all but the most extraordinary cases -- it was allowed only once in the five years I worked there. I believe this policy worked well, and made us work harder. During my tenure there, when competition with the L.A. Times was much hotter than it is today, not a single major story was killed because we couldn't find an on-the-record source for confirmation. Our feeling was that 90 percent of anonymous sourcing was simply a labor-saving device. Of course, Novak's case may be a poor one for taking an ethical stand on sourcing, as it is not one in which a journalist was duped or lied to by a source -- the most likely scenario for revoking promised anonymity. Novak knew he was outing a CIA agent when he wrote his piece; he became a willing agent for the leaker, whose information was, after all, accurate. Expecting Novak to act ethically now, voluntarily, as opposed to awaiting for a legal and compulsory reason to reveal his sources, is probably expecting way too much. Ed Humes
One (copying me on a letter he sent to the newspaper) pointed out that the Times had (in a lift-out quote) used some key language I did not use.
RELATED RESOURCES Learn more about leadership in one of our seminars.Sign up to receive Journalism Junction by e-mail:* Click here (sent Fridays at 11 a.m.)Dear Ms. Collins: On the Op-Ed page today (2/6/04) the article "The Journalist and the Whistleblower" by Geneva Overholser is accompanied by a mid-article summary that states: "Robert Novak should name HIS WHITE HOUSE SOURCES." [Emphasis added] This is not what Ms. Overholser says in her article. She says that Mr. Novak should reveal the "two senior administrative offiicials" that he cited as his sources. Mr. Novak has never said that his sources work in the White House, although the NY Times has repeatedly implied that they do, in fact, work there. I'm reasonably certain that the mid-article summary did not originate with Ms. Overholser and that she would not have approved of its wording had she been consulted. Does the NY Times already know that Mr. Novak's sources work in the White and who they are? If so, why are they withholding this information from the public? If not, the mid-article summary is biased by design in implying that it is a fact and not a supposition that Mr. Novak's sources are in the White House. Properly written, the summary should have said that "Robert Novak should name his sources." This was the point of the article and would not have been diminished if the summary added by the NY Times' editorialists had been more accurate and less biased. Mr. Okrent, I've copied you to illustrate that the misuse of mid-article summaries to spin the facts in articles in the NY Times is a rampant epidemic that takes place in both the news and the editorial pages. If you are investigating bias at the NY Times in the sense that facts are distorted to support a particular viewpoint, the editorial and Op-Ed pages should not be off-limits. Editorial opinion is one thing, but distorting the facts is quite different. Cordlially, Thornton G. SandersCharlottesville, VA 22901
On the Op-Ed page today (2/6/04) the article "The Journalist and the Whistleblower" by Geneva Overholser is accompanied by a mid-article summary that states: "Robert Novak should name HIS WHITE HOUSE SOURCES." [Emphasis added]
This is not what Ms. Overholser says in her article. She says that Mr. Novak should reveal the "two senior administrative offiicials" that he cited as his sources. Mr. Novak has never said that his sources work in the White House, although the NY Times has repeatedly implied that they do, in fact, work there. I'm reasonably certain that the mid-article summary did not originate with Ms. Overholser and that she would not have approved of its wording had she been consulted.
Does the NY Times already know that Mr. Novak's sources work in the White and who they are? If so, why are they withholding this information from the public?
If not, the mid-article summary is biased by design in implying that it is a fact and not a supposition that Mr. Novak's sources are in the White House. Properly written, the summary should have said that "Robert Novak should name his sources." This was the point of the article and would not have been diminished if the summary added by the NY Times' editorialists had been more accurate and less biased.
Mr. Okrent, I've copied you to illustrate that the misuse of mid-article summaries to spin the facts in articles in the NY Times is a rampant epidemic that takes place in both the news and the editorial pages. If you are investigating bias at the NY Times in the sense that facts are distorted to support a particular viewpoint, the editorial and Op-Ed pages should not be off-limits. Editorial opinion is one thing, but distorting the facts is quite different.
Cordlially,
Thornton G. SandersCharlottesville, VA 22901
And some agreed Novak should reveal his source, but suggested other reasons:
Geneva... Fine piece in the Times today, and I very much agree with you on Bob Novak's responsibility here. But it seems to me there's another, and possibly more clear-cut, reason why he should reveal his source. The same reason should persuade other Washington journalists who were approached by the same source, and told him to get stuffed, to publicly name that source.When we agree to receive information on a promise of anonymity, we do it in hopes that we will uncover wrongdoing, even perhaps a crime. But the receiving of this information is not itself a crime. That's what shield laws are all about -- a public statement that such transactions between reporters and sources are not a crime. In addition, the reporter accepts this information because it's the only way he will know about the crime, since he wasn't there to see the crime committed: presumably, if he saw the crime committed, he would have both a journalistic and civic duty to publicize it immediately. However, in this case, Novak committed a crime and the other reporters were there when a crime was committed. The crime, of course, is the leaking of the name of an undercover CIA employee. When Rove or whoever approached the other reporters, he committed a crime by revealing the employee's name. The reporters, then, became firsthand witnesses to the crime. When Novak accepted the leak and used it, he became party to the crime: the source and Novak worked together to reveal Plame's name.This seems to me to put the issue on a whole different plane from the usual dispute over a reporter's right to protect sources. Of course, we have a right to protect sources. But we do not have a right to shelter criminals. Often, prosecutors try to get reporters to talk to save themselves the trouble of getting the information from other sources. In this case, there are no other -- or certainly no better -- sources. To refuse to reveal the source strikes me as a perversion of the tradition of protecting sources. Any reporter who knows firsthand who the leaker is should tell it immediately -- preferably in a front-page story -- with an absolutely clear journalistic conscience. Richard C. Longworth (ex-Chicago Tribune, Nieman '69)Executive Director The Global Chicago Center The Chicago Council on Foreign Relations
There were also interesting folo-up discussion on the NYT website forum, including one critic who takes me to task for stating no general principle - exactly as my good friend and mentor Gil Cranberg, former editor of the editorial page of the Des Moines Register, did in a personal e-mail. So there's the next challenge. I welcome all assistance.
Finally, speaking of Des Moines, here is Michael Gartner (an editor of the paper before me) responding in The New York Times letters column.
Readers' editor Ian Mayes of The Guardian describes the "social, ethical, and environmental audit" that resulted in the company's disclosing to readers all kinds of information that media normally hold exceptionally close to the chest - even as they try to pry it out of other businesses' hands. Information like staffers' discontent over lack of advancement opportunities, or failures in addressing the paper's environmental impact.
The audit was taken, as Mayes notes, to see whether The Guardian practices what it preaches. Hmmm. What an idea.
My case in point, of course, is Bob Novak. Consider: Shield laws grew up in recognition of the need to protect, say, whistleblower X from punishment by government official Y, whose wrongdoing X has exposed. Here, however, Novak is PROTECTING wrongdoer Y, who sought, through scurrilous and illegal means, to punish the "whistleblower," Joe Wilson, for his op-ed piece exposing the Niger yellowcake-uranium story.
The government officials Novak is protecting appear to be guilty of a felony. Has this no impact on the bond of trust? Novak, meanwhile, broke all kinds of ethical restraints against the use of anonymous sources - from the responsibility not to use them to deliver negative opinions to the responsibility to use them only if the information is substantial. (The tale of Wilson getting his overseas assignment only through a push from wife Valerie Plame, the CIA operative Novak "outed," flunks handily.)
We hide an awful lot of sins behind this particular cloak of virtue.I stand firmly on the side of resisting court-ordered divulgence of sources. But I stand just as firmly FOR the notion that journalists ought to acknowledge the unethical thing that took place here, and call for Novak to disclose his sources himself. The sources ill-served him. Novak ill-served his readers. And the whole episode powerfully ill-serves journalism.
As for how to do it, Novak knows. Two years ago, he made the decision to divulge his past reliance on former FBI agent Robert Hanssen, after Hanssen was arrested for spying. Why? Because, Novak wrote, "To be honest to my readers, I must reveal it."
Here, too, he must, and journalists should stand shoulder to shoulder in calling for it - right after we all make a fervent vow never to forget just how dangerous is this alluring notion we call confidentiality.
I've never met Denise Palmer, the publisher of the Baltimore Sun who recently fired her editor, Bill Marimow. I believe, as Marimow said, that publishers have the right to name their editors. I also believe in candor - especially about something as important as a newspaper's fate.
I wrote last June, in the midst of the Sun's tense guild fight, about the very different views of Marimow and Dennis FitzSimons, CEO of Tribune, which bought the Sun from Times Mirror in 2000. "Since owning The Times Mirror properties, Tribune has done a pretty aggressive job of trying to find costs to take out as well as revenue enhancements," analyst Lauren Rich Fine said at that time.
Now, just six months later, the publisher has fired the editor, citing "personality" and "fit." Is something wrong with saying she wants the Sun to become more of a Tribune paper -- use more Tribune materials -- than Marimow did? Is something wrong with saying she wants the Sun to produce more profits? Everybody seems to understand these things to be true. Why can't she tell the truth? Is it too awful?
As the Maryland Business Journal notes, "the Tribune Co. is doing well financially. Its stock was recently trading near its 52-week high of about $51 per share. Revenues for the third quarter ending Sep. 30, 2003, were $1.38 billion, up slightly from $1.34 billion the same period the previous year. Net income slipped 23 percent, from $236 million to $182 million in 2003. In the company's most recent SEC filing, Orlando is cited as one of the cities where its newspaper is gaining advertising revenues, while Baltimore is noted for sagging ad sales."
Tribune wants less sagging out of Baltimore - if not in journalism, then in "personality" (corporate culture?) and "fit" (meeting profit expectations?). And, shrouded as all this is in evasion, everyone can hope we're not seeing another great newspaper being cut down to size.
Tony Ridder, move over. Dennis FitzSimons is coming on.
Ombudsmanship is a different creature in the era of Romenesko, as the recent exchange at The Washington Post reminds us. Michael Getler wrote about reader response to a Style story. Style editor Gene Robinson fired back (boy, did he!) in a memo to his staff. And Getler responded to him in turn.
Numerous such exchanges occurred in my Post ombud years. (Readers never lack for criticism. Ombudsmen pass it along. And newspeople, as Edward R. Murrow put it, don't have thin skins; they have NO skins.) But here's the difference: The rest of the world didn't read about it.
It's untidy, for sure. And I admit to being glad I was a newspaper editor BEFORE the era when internal newsroom memos could instantly richochet from coast-to-coast. But when it comes to ombudsmanship, I'd call this new development one of the Web's victories. Sunlight IS a good disinfectant. When newsroom disputes get more of it, more enlightenment occurs.
My top two nominees for "stories we missed" are:
1. The FCC ownership rules changes. WOEFULLY undercovered by virtually everybody but public broadcasting. Impossible not to see a connection between corporate support for the changes, and newsroom failure to cover them. And what does this bode for the future? Fewer and fewer topics covered by more and more media outlets, all looking over one another's shoulders? Happily, the public got word of this issue despite the media, and Congress responded. So much for the idea that nobody cares about such an arcane Washington-regulatory issue.
2. The questions begging to be asked BEFORE the U.S. went to war in Iraq. We've heard a lot in the last several months about these matters. But where was the press when we badly needed to have answers to such questions as: What was the evidence regarding Iraqi WMD? Where were the links between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein? What did the rest of the world think of our chances to prevail quickly in Iraq and then to enable the flowering of democracy in short order?
Other nominees come quickly to mind:
What would you nominate? And what should we be sure we DO cover in 2004? Meanwhile, here's wishing happy holidays and a wonderful New Year to you all. See you again on January 9.
What was with all the complaints about the secrecy surrounding the Thanksgiving Day trip to Baghdad? Not that there aren't plenty of good reasons to lament the weakness of reporting on the Bush White House, but was this really one of them?
Sure, you have to regret the deceptive briefing by a White House press aide. Though she later said she was unaware of the trip herself at the time of the briefing, it's hard not to sympathize with folks like CBS correspondent Mark Knoller, reduced to "filing radio reports that amounted to fiction." You have to ask whether the pool that went on the trip was purposely skewed (toward Fox News and away from CNN). And you have to wonder about that delicious -- and ever-so-slippery -- little British Airways tidbit.But the idea that no self-respecting journalist could go along with the secret? That's a strange one. Journalists withhold information all the time - especially in wartime, but at other times, too. White House reporters regularly have information about presidential travels that they don't share. Protecting a president's security on a trip into a war zone is hardly a preposterous notion. Nor, after all, was the trip kept a secret. Thirteen pool correspondents, including Terence Hunt of the AP, Mike Allen of The Washington Post, Richard Keil of Bloomberg News, a Reuters reporter, and several photographers came along.
Don't get me wrong. We've got good reason to worry about the Bush family reputation for punishing reporters who don't go along. And good reason to worry about this White House's propensity for withholding information it would prefer others not focus on. We've got reason to ask The New York Times for better accounting of its gullibility before and during the war on Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction. And good reason to ask the Washington Post for better accounting of its gullibility in the original Jessica Lynch story.
But complaining about short-term secrecy, for security-based reasons, on a presidential trip into a war zone, on which he was accompanied by a press pool? I can't see it.
The rap against journalism is all about political leanings. What bugs me is what captives we are of the status quo, how tenaciously we fix our gaze on what's already getting attention. There was little debate among politicians before the war so there was little debate in the press. The politicians aren't asking hard questions so neither were the journalists.
Where is this vaunted independence of the press?
I know, I know. There's a lot more to a campaign than an early public-opinion poll. There's money, staff, organization, strategy. But still. Public opinion counts for something, right? How exactly does someone get classed as "not electable?" And doesn't the very classification play a determinative role in who is, well, elected? As the print-copy hed on a Howie Kurtz story in the Post the day after that Moseley Braun piece put it: "Howard Dean's Media Landside: Pundits Call a Winner, A Bit Prematurely."
I want to add my voice of sorrow at the loss of a truly terrific newspaper guy Richard "Noodle" Pearson, the WashPost obit writer extraordinaire, who died too young last week. Noodle's obits made all the current talk of local news and the demand for stories about "people like myself" seem like dry meal to his delectably tasty entrιe. When I was ombudsman of the Post, I did a column on Pearson called "The Last Word."
Noodle, I wrote, was "a man full of gusto for life and newspapering who writes about death." And he loved the job. "It's wonderful," says Pearson, "because you never know what will happen. On a day when everybody else is writing about the snowstorm, we're writing about a city council member, the king of Burma, a junior high geography teacher, a Nobel physicist, a jazz drummer, a baseball player. As I tell people sometimes, God is my assignment editor."
I recounted a favorite Pearson tale:
When England's King George V was on his deathbed, his doctor gave him a lethal injection so that the story of his death would be carried in the morning papers rather than in the trashy evening ones. (Thereby, Pearson adds, giving a whole new meaning to the word deadline.)
The column ended:
Pearson remains confident he has the best job in the newsroom. And perhaps the only one that holds real sway over the much-vaunted independence of the ombudsman. "You may criticize my work if you want," said the jovial Pearson at the end of our interview, "but just remember: Your obit will then tell of the death of "the discredited media critic" "A fine fellow, Pearson."
A fine fellow, indeed.
America leads the world. But do we KNOW anything about it?
This fall, I sat in several meetings of advisory boards of organizations concerned about U.S. foreign policy. I heard people worry over America's huge effect on the world and most Americans' tiny foreign-news and foreign-policy knowledge. They talked about the gap between public opinion and foreign policy that is, between what Americans say they believe, and the policies that are carried out in their names. For an example, see the Aspen Institute's "From Values to Advocacy." At these meetings, people would turn to me, wondering: "Why is foreign news decreasing in U.S. media?" "How can we get better reporting on foreign policy?" "What can we do to encourage the media to help Americans understand the world around them - and their role in it?" "What's the problem here?" And I'd think to myself: "Five little words: Local news is the franchise."
This local-is-everything motto is heard in newsrooms across the land, and has been for the last several years. So I wonder: As newspapers redirect their energies (and most broadcast news programs do so even more dramatically), who is going to worry about whether the American public gets a reasonable diet of news about the rest of the world -- not to mention about our own country? Every now and then, I read that Americans get their foreign news from other sources, which is why newspapers shouldn't try to give it to them. I'm eager to know where. Is there hope out there? Where does it lie? If you know, please advise.
Meanwhile, I'm intrigued that, while America's media owners see so little promise in the franchise of anything-beyond-local, serving Americans' international-news needs seems to hold more appeal for our UK brethren. The Economist's circulation is soaring in the U.S., the Guardian is thinking about an American weekly, and the BBC and the Financial Times push ever deeper into the U.S. market.
[ If you ran the newsroom, how would you address this issue? ]
Every journalism debate I've seen on the Kobe Bryant case throws a lot of disparate subjects into one troubling pot. Let's separate out a few strands:
As a feminist, I care deeply about the social questions. While I recognize the good intentions of those who seek to protect rape victims, I believe that much of the effort has had contrary results -- and that there is little evidence that it has helped rape victims or furthered societal understanding. But these views of mine - and the views of others - on these questions are fundamentally beside the point journalistically.When it comes to asking whether to use people's names, the journalistic ethic is clear: We name names. We do this for reasons of credibility and fairness. When we make exceptions to this ethic, we must be very careful indeed. To my mind, protecting children is a valid exception. Beyond that, we are on very thin ice. Of all the people who have valid reasons to prefer their names not be in the paper, how can we be wise enough to choose among them?
Looking at the issue this way, it becomes much clearer just how erroneous is the choice we have made NOT to name those who bring the charge of rape. Ours is, thankfully, an open criminal-justice system, and one in which we are to presume innocence until the courts decide otherwise. How is it that journalists can decide before that decision is made that one party deserves our protection and the other does not? In this light, it seems evident that we cannot -- and should not. Yet, because this particular crime comes burdened with years of cruel unfairness, we feel we are being merciful - and fail to see the further damage we cause by our unfairness in making a choice that isn't appropriate for us to make.
Happily for those of us who believe that openness is the best cure for ignorance, the porous nature of communications today seems about to render this naming issue moot.
The Times has named a public editor. Daniel Okrent starts Dec. 1, and Times readers can be glad about this advance toward greater openness and accountability.
As Journalism Junction readers know, I've written about this before. I'm pleased now to see that some of the first thoughts about how the Times would design the job have been amended. The one-year term has been expanded a bit (to 18 months). The notion of having the position report to the executive editor morphed into an evidently more independent one: "The public editor will work outside of the reporting and editing structure of the Times." And the original vagueness about writing has firmed up, with the date of the first column (Dec. 8) noted, and a general notion asserted of at least a twice-monthly appearance.
I have always found it interesting that the assumption, upon examining the Jayson Blair fiasco, was that readers just didn't care enough to call in with corrections about Blair's many fabrications and goofs. As the Siegal committee report put it, the readers "did not think it worthwhile to alert us to errors." (Thanks to Jay Rosen for the report's reappearance on the NYT site.)
Like every mortal ever caught in the endless coil of modern human-free telephone communications, I've always thought it likelier that some, at least, had tried - and given up in frustration. So I thought I'd see how hard it is to get through Timesian armor.I had mixed results. An e-mail won a live response in commendably short order. My telephone pursuit was less successful. When I called (at 10 a.m. Wednesday) the number suggested on the NYT website, I got a polite recording thanking me for calling the reader comment line, and assuring me that a responsible editor would get back to me promptly if I left a message. But then the tone sounded. "This user's mailbox," said the automated voice, is full.
Okrent says he is "writing to the public." "Now if the people at the Times want to read it for their own purposes, that's fine. But I'm writing to the public. I think I'm in it for the readers I'm their representative." Now if the readers he so admirably seeks to represent can only reach him...
If you live in France, you can read Le Monde, and you know to expect a leftist perspective. You can read Le Figaro and know you'll get a rightist perspective. It's all respectably out in the open -- the viewpoints forthrightly acknowledged, the media choices made accordingly.
I say it's time we had a good hard discussion of objectivity - its merits and demerits - and then studied up on ways to judge, as fairly as possible, who is staying true to the commitment and who isn't. You can make a powerful case for or against the objectivity model of journalism. You can make a powerful case for or against the ideologically-aligned model of journalism. What you can't make a case for is hypocrisy.
President Bush, joining the ranks of media critics lately, brings his own unique take to the sticky question of what constitutes fair and comprehensive journalism. At his Oct. 5 news conference, he took the press to task for dwelling on the negative: "Listen, we're making good progress in Iraq. Sometimes it's hard to tell it when you listen to the filter." He said much the same thing soon thereafter, at a Kentucky fundraiser: "We're making great progress -- I don't care what you read about." And this week, he expanded on the theme: "There's a sense that people in America aren't getting the truth. I'm mindful of the filter through which some news travels, and sometimes you just have to go over the heads of the filter and speak directly to the people."
As with most of us media critics, Bush's idea of objectivity is very personal. What I'm not so clear about is his definition of "filter."
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