• The government's search warrant for Rosen's email account says the reporter was "an aider and abettor and/or co-conspirator," Ryan Lizza notes. "[I]t is unprecedented for the government, in an official court document, to accuse a reporter of breaking the law for conducting the routine business of reporting on government secrets."
The Associated Press held its story about a foiled underwear bombing for five days, Carol D. Leonnig and Julie Tate report in The Washington Post. But on Monday, May 7, "CIA officials reported that the national security concerns were 'no longer an issue,'" they write. Then the government began jostling with AP over who would get to break the story.
When the journalists rejected a plea to hold off longer, the CIA then offered a compromise. Would they wait a day if AP could have the story exclusively for an hour, with no government officials confirming it for that time?
Then an administration official called, saying, "AP could have the story exclusively for five minutes before the White House made its own announcement. AP then rejected the request to postpone publication any longer."
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• Justice Department policy "provides that we should issue subpoenas for phone records associated with media organizations only in certain circumstances," Deputy Attorney General James M. Cole wrote in a letter to AP CEO Gary Pruitt Tuesday.
"We are required to negotiate with the media organization in advance of issuing the subpoenas unless doing so would pose a substantial threat to the integrity of the investigation." Justice, he wrote, "undertook a comprehensive investigation, including, among other investigative steps, conducting over 550 interviews and reviewing tens of thousands of documents, before seeking the toll records at issue." (more...)
• Authorities don't need a warrant to request records of phone numbers called; they need only a subpoena. (Here's a handy guide from ProPublica on what data the government can seize and how.) Watergate-era reforms require authorities to seek “alternative sources before considering issuing a subpoena to a member of the news media" unless "such negotiations would not pose a substantial threat to the integrity of the investigation in connection with which the records are sought." Attorney David Schulz, who is representing the AP, "got the notice from the Justice Department last Friday," Erik Wemple writes.
Another lawyer at his firm attempted to reach out to an assistant U.S. attorney to get more details on the matter, but the prosecutor wouldn’t go beyond the information in the Justice Department’s letter to the AP.
A Huffington Post headline Tuesday.
• “Is there statutory justification for it? Yes, probably,” Carl Bernstein said Tuesday about the incursion. “Is there justification for it in terms of recognizing what the right to a free press is and what a free press means in this country? This is intimidation. It’s wrong. The president of the United States should’ve long ago put a stop to this.”
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In a clip that accompanies the DVD release of "Citizen Hearst," Houston Chronicle Executive Editor and Executive Vice President Jeff Cohen introduces Sylvia Wood, who was at the time an editor on the Hearst-owned paper's breaking-news "Go Team" (she left the paper in September and now works for the Houston Independent School District). "Our goal every day is to be fast, first and accurate," Wood says in the clip, which was filmed last summer, describing her work:
We look at the TV broadcasts, we look at the TV websites. We're looking at Twitter. Often AP is behind the game when it comes to breaking news; we can get it faster from a lot of other sources. So besides covering the news landscape we're also looking at what kinds of stories people are talking about. We can do a lot of aggregations on buzzy viral topics that are gonna engage readers with the website. So besides the breaking news, we're also looking at, What is it that people want to talk about today? What are they going to click on that they want to talk with their friends about?
The clip is part of a special feature called "The State of News," which looks at just that and features interviews with journalists within and without the Hearst corporation.
Correction: This post originally failed to mention Wood had left the Chronicle since the clip was filmed last year.
As the Associated Press’ new interactive editor, Troy Thibodeaux brings to the role the varied experience you’d expect of a former travel writer, English teacher and member of the NOLA.com and Times-Picayune team that won a Pulitzer for Hurricane Katrina … Read more
Why, Lehrer, asked, did he end up reporting news from the AP that turned out to be wrong, like the claim one of the suspects was a second-year medical student? "How much were you struggling with what was worthy to print and how quickly?" Lehrer asked.
