Journalism's pangs of ethical conscience

And your views on this BBB?

Are Media Using the FOIA Enough to Get Military Info?
Are Media Using the FOIA Enough to Get Military Info?
By E&P Staff
Published: November 24, 2005 8:30 AM ET
NEW YORK

The Associated Press leads news organizations in using the Freedom of Information Act to obtain documents from the Pentagon, according to a log of such requests from 2000 to early 2005 obtained by a San Francisco-based activist.

The AP filed 73 such requests, followed by the Los Angeles Times with 42 and Washington Post with 34. Trailing far behind among major newspapers was the New York Times with 21, USA Today with nine and the Wall Street Journal with six.

The results, which came in response to a FOIA request by blogger Michael Petrelis, are summarized by John Byrne at the Raw Story web site. Byrne finds that this shows relatively little aggressiveness to obtain such information. He calls this a "lack of curiosity," especially since 10,000 requests were made in all.

Petrelis' request was sparked by interest in whether former New York Times reporter Judith Miller had ever made such a FOIA request. He found out she had not.

On the TV side, CBS News led with 32 queries; Fox News followed with 22; and NBC with 21. CNN made just 11 inquiries.

Here is part of Raw Story's breakdown of requests on the print:

"The New York Times requested ?'epidemiology and ecology reports' from Utah, information on Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's holdings, and information for plans on biological attacks on Cuba and mistreatment of prisoners in Iraq.

"The Washington Post went after an ?'ethics agreement' made between Rumsfeld and the Defense Department's ethics group, Rumsfeld's travel records, Clinton's meetings with Indonesian president Suharto, and conversations of erstwhile Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

"The Los Angeles Times sought information regarding defense contractors, alleged Iraq ties to Al-Qaeda, President George W. Bush's National Guard service, payroll information for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, and Defense Department contracts with public relations firms."

It noted that the largest individual requestor was the National Security Archive, an independent non-governmental research institute and library based at George Washington University. The Archive filed 895 requests.

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E&P Staff ([email protected])

The FOIA law still works, but it needs a tune-up
Columbia Journalism Review
FOIA Falters
The law still works, but it needs a tune-up
By Martin E. Halstuk

November 7 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the start of congressional hearings on what at the time was a controversial ?- even radical ?- federal open-records law. It took a decade of political wrangling, 173 hearings, and all the might of the newspaper industry before the Freedom of Information Act finally became law on July 4, 1966.

Over the decades, the FOIA has helped expose waste and fraud in the federal government, and uncover a wide variety of unsafe consumer products, dangerous drugs, and health hazards. But more recently there has been a steady erosion of the freedoms enshrined in both the letter and the spirit of this law. Increasingly, it requires years of appeals and costly litigation to get an indisputably public record that the government simply does not want to release. The judiciary also has erected hurdles to access by broadly interpreting the FOIA's exemptions, especially the executive privilege exemption.

Journalists who use the FOIA regularly say it takes patience and determination to make the law work. "The presumption now is that everything is secret," says Russell Carollo, a Dayton Daily News reporter, who files as many as one hundred FOIA requests each year. In 2003, Carollo and two fellow reporters used documents obtained through the FOIA to reveal how Peace Corps volunteers, mainly women, have been victims of assault, serious health problems, injury, and even death in foreign lands. "We had a terrible time getting information from the Peace Corps," he says. "It was difficult to get them to even acknowledge the request." Until their newspaper sued, that is.

San Francisco Chronicle reporter Seth Rosenfeld successfully sued the FBI to obtain records that revealed that in the 1960s, during the tumultuous free speech movement in Berkeley, the bureau had launched a covert ?- and illegal ?- campaign to fire then University of California President Clark Kerr and conspired with the CIA to pressure the California Board of Regents to force out liberal professors. Rosenfeld filed his request in 1981, while a journalism student at UC-Berkeley. It took three lawsuits and fifteen years before the FBI began releasing the records, which would form the basis of Rosenfeld's 2002 series "Reagan, Hoover and the UC Red Scare." As the court battle played out, the FBI spent $1 million to suppress the documents. To date, Rosenfeld has yet to receive all of the records that the FBI agreed to release, totaling some 17,000 pages. "In my experience, the FBI's reluctance to comply with the FOIA is even greater now, a time when it's collecting more information on citizens that ever before," he said.

One of the government's stall tactics is to require that the question of payment be settled ?- search fees can be costly, though are waived under certain circumstances ?- before processing a request, says Seth Borenstein, an environmental reporter in Knight Ridder's Washington bureau. Borenstein ran into this problem after he sought records about governmental censorship of global warming documents, which he wrote about in 2004. The only way Borenstein was able to get officials at the Environmental Protection Agency to start assembling the documents he requested while the search-fee waiver was still unresolved, he says, was to agree in advance to pay whatever the agency charges if his waiver request was ultimately denied.

Carollo says most reporters file a FOIA request and then give up if they don't get the information in a few months. "You need to appeal, you need to negotiate, you need to threaten litigation, and you need to sue," he says. The problem is the vast majority of reporters don't have the time, and agencies know this.

FOIA still works, but it could work much better. Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle seem to recognize this fact and two bills aimed at reforming FOIA have been introduced since February. The OPEN Government Act of 2005, sponsored by Senator John Cornyn, the Texas Republican, seeks to amend the law and close loopholes that agencies routinely exploit. The Faster FOIA Act of 2005, also sponsored by Cornyn, and co-sponsored by Senate Democrats, including Richard Durbin of Illinois and Patrick Leahy of Vermont, would establish a commission charged with identifying methods to cut down on the processing delays that have become all too common. To date, neither bill has come to a vote. The big question is whether lawmakers can muster the political courage needed to pass them. Some attention from the news media might help. It took a decade to pass the FOIA; let's hope it takes less time than that to fix it.
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Martin E. Halstuk teaches communications law at Pennsylvania State University. He is Senior Fellow for the Pennsylvania Center for the First Amendment.

Working The Fringes
Columbia Journalism Review
Working The Fringes
By Brent Cunningham

After the terrorist attacks of September 11, America and its press vowed to get serious. Remember the end of irony and all that? Well, the new seriousness turned out to be the chimera of editorials calling for a new seriousness. As Lawrence F. Kaplan writes in The New Republic, "According to a mountain of attitudinal and behavioral data collected in the past four years, the post-September 11 mood that former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge dubbed ?'the new normalcy' resembles nothing so much as the old normalcy." In the weeks after Hurricane Katrina humbled the nation in ways that 9/11 could not, the press was again full of revolutionary talk about a new seriousness, especially concerning national awareness of race, poverty, and the environment. Joe Klein admonished readers about that in the September 12 issue of Time: "Having celebrated our individuality to a fault for half a century, we now should pay greater attention to the common weal."

Klein's point is a noble one, but it bears emphasizing that the unsettling facts about the common weal that Katrina exposed will not disappear once the blueprint for a twenty-first century New Orleans has been drafted. It will be largely up to the press to make sure the nation keeps paying attention. Journalists drew praise for speaking truth to officialdom in the wake of Katrina, but as PressThink's Jay Rosen suggests, "The challenge for American journalism is not to recover its reason for being, but to find a stronger and better one."

Extensive coverage of the rebuilding of New Orleans is certainly something readers and viewers deserve, but they also deserve a form of journalism that has always been difficult for the press in the United States to produce: stories grounded in solid reporting about what is possible, rather than simply what is probable; stories that shatter the official zeitgeist; stories that help set the agenda.


This forward-looking journalism shouldn't be exclusively about New Orleans, however, since the nation also faces growing problems elsewhere at home and abroad. In short, we need new ideas for the new century. Brian Urquhart, writing in August in The New York Review of Books, argues that in respect to America's international role, the traditional threat to peace ?- wars between great powers ?- has been "supplanted by a series of global threats to human society ?- nuclear proliferation, global warming, terrorism, poverty, global epidemics, and more. These challenges can only be addressed by collective action, led by determined and imaginative men and women." After World War II, America's leaders spearheaded the creation of crucial institutions (the UN) and ideas ("containment") that proved decisive during the cold war. Despite the parallels that the Bush administration draws between the cold war and its "war on terror," it has failed to undertake such work of imagination, a failing exacerbated by a political system that has grown too partisan, choreographed, and shortsighted to generate effective ideas.

The press has been a willing partner in this intellectual devolution. Cable news roils the nation over the latest missing white woman but remains silent about larger, more troubling matters, such as the fact that in fifteen years, two-thirds of the world's population could be living in countries with a serious shortage of fresh water. That dire forecast was made by the UN during the third annual World Water Forum in March 2003 in Japan, an event that drew scant coverage in the U.S. Like the depletion of the global oil supply ?- or bird flu ?- water shortage is a genuine problem, not a matter of opinion. Smart people within and outside government grapple with such problems in wonky articles; some of their ideas appear on the better op-ed pages but rarely on the front pages of newspapers and almost never on television.


It's time for the press to help broaden the scope of public discourse ?- not just by sounding an alarm, but by exploring possible solutions beyond those offered by government. By "the press" I mean the mass media ?- the newspapers and broadcast outlets that cater to a mass audience, and thus have the most influence over what people know about the world beyond their own experiences. While it's now commonplace to say that the media have become diffuse, most primary journalism is still done by the mainstream media, segments of which strive for intellectual honesty and believe deeply in reporting.

To make aggressive journalism about the various threats to human society a priority will require a radical reassessment of America's relation to the world as well as the American press's definition of news. Last January in an op-ed in The New York Times, Jared Diamond, the author of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, explained that among the lessons he gleaned from studying the survival of societies is the need for "a willingness to re-examine long-held core values, when conditions change and those values no longer make sense." The press alone can't force this re-examination on the nation, but it could start the conversation.

Remember the Patriot missile, the darling of the first gulf war that protected Israel and Saudi Arabia from Saddam's evil Scuds? The initial declarations from the Pentagon and the White House, trumpeted enthusiastically by the press (which was, to be fair, severely limited in its ability to cover that war) were of the Patriot's virtually flawless performance. Less than a year later, and thanks largely to an MIT whistleblower named Theodore Postol, it was clear that the Patriot's record was actually rather mediocre.

There are many reasons why the press didn't bring more skepticism to its coverage of the Patriot. Or to the success of Enron and other corporate miracle workers. Or, more recently, to the Pentagon's initial explanation of how Pat Tillman, the former NFL star turned Special Forces soldier, was killed in Afghanistan. Or to the notion that all America needs to patch things up with the world is better p.r. Professional conventions such as objectivity discourage speculative coverage, argumentative coverage, and coverage that strays too far from the pack or the news peg. The regimented, relentless, and at times punitive message management executed by public- and private-sector institutions can also inhibit (and intimidate) the press.

But on a more fundamental level, these stories didn't arouse skepticism in the press because they clicked into the well-worn grooves of our national mythology, the narratives that explain our country's purposes and shape what it means to be an American. These myths are commonly subsumed under the heading "American exceptionalism," which is useful shorthand for polemicists but, like "liberal" and "conservative," has become such a loaded term that it can't help us understand how myths limit our ability to imagine what is possible. In Myths America Lives By, Richard T. Hughes, a professor of religion at Pepperdine University, tries to explain those limits. Hughes traces the evolution of what he calls five "foundational myths" ?- the chosen nation, the Christian nation, nature's nation, the millennial nation, and the innocent nation ?- from their common roots in religious faith to their modern-day manifestation in, for example, the lack of debate in the United States about what happened on 9/11, and why. "Americans have by and large refused to face the question of ?'why they hate us' head-on," Hughes told a gathering of Christian scholars in 2004. "Instead, following the lead of their president, they have taken refuge in the venerable myth of American innocence. To claim our enemies hate us because they hate liberty is simply a way of asserting American innocence without coming to grips with the awful truth that our enemies hate us for many clear and definable reasons." (While a handful of genuine attempts to wrestle with this question have appeared in the mass media ?- notably a Newsweek cover story in March 2003 by Fareed Zakaria entitled "The Arrogant Empire" ?- they have been rare.)

These foundational myths have been manipulated to launch wars, support dictators, and lend the aura of unassailability to man-made systems. Consider, for example, the myths of nature's nation and of the chosen nation. The former, Hughes explains, was a construct of the Enlightenment and, when it emerged in the late 1700s, contributed to the belief that America's founders "simply exploited a design they found in nature itself, a design as old as creation, rooted in the mind of God." It lent a timeless, "self-evident" quality to the American experiment, and together with the myth of the chosen nation, which implies a covenant with God, was used by the robber barons of the late nineteenth century to define laissez-faire capitalism as the natural, or self-evident, system for organizing man's economy. In the wake of the Civil War, the victorious North saw the economic prosperity it enjoyed (thanks to industrialization and a humming war-time economy) as a reward for its righteousness on the question of slavery. This "gospel of wealth," as Hughes calls it, was soon applied to individuals by way of Social Darwinism, and America's mythology thereby embraced the notion that the rich are divinely entitled to their wealth and the poor similarly to blame for their want.

Hollywood is the primary wholesaler of American myths, but the press does plenty to perpetuate them and very little to define their shades of gray. For example, although the worst abuses of laissez-faire capitalism have been alleviated, there are echoes of the gospel of wealth in the celebratory coverage routinely bestowed upon the rich, famous, and powerful, while the poor in America ?- when they make the news at all ?- are typically rendered as victims, perpetrators, or the face of failed social policies.

To be sure, commercial pressures are partly to blame for that, but another reason the press is reluctant to lead a persistent discussion of the large, rather abstract problems we face as a nation and as part of an interdependent world is that the substance of that discussion would necessarily involve questions of national identity as much as the peculiarities of our profession. If we are to rethink some of our "core values," as Jared Diamond suggests, then as a country we must first be honest about what needs fixing.

No society, of course, can survive without myths. As the sociologist Robert N. Bellah pointed out to Hughes, "Humans are in some very deep way story-telling animals. So a world without myth would be an inhuman world." But to the extent that an uncritical embrace of myths limits our ability to imagine alternative ways of organizing the world, they are problematic. The difficulty Americans have imagining failure, for example, especially failure brought about by incompetence, arrogance, or anything short of a noble and good-faith effort, is rooted in our national myths. As the writer Lawrence Wright says in his memoir, In the New World: Growing Up with America from the Sixties to the Eighties, "America had a mission ?- we thought it was a divine mission ?- to spread freedom, and freedom meant democracy, and democracy meant capitalism, and all that meant the American way of life." Unwavering belief in this mission underlies the shock people felt about the systemic failure of government ?- from FEMA to the local governments along the Gulf Coast ?- to manage Katrina's aftermath. There is no reason to believe that American journalists, assuming they grew up here, would be less immune to this national blind spot than anyone else. After all, it was reporters' uncontainable shock and outrage at this failure that garnered them the most praise.

The imagination of the press is further constrained by the habit of exploring in any broad and consistent way only those ideas put forth by anointed newsmakers ?- most of whom have a powerful interest in framing the debate to suit their narrow agendas. These stories have a tendency to emphasize the political strategy underpinning an idea. Consider the neoconservative ideology that has guided America's foreign policy these last five years. To the extent that consumers of mass media were exposed to this ideology, it was largely through comparisons to the more cautious, multilateral foreign policy represented by Colin Powell and the State Department. If a reader also knew that neoconservative ideology recognizes the usefulness of the "noble lie," a notion conceived by Plato but articulated by the late University of Chicago philosopher Leo Strauss, the reader probably didn't learn about it from the press. During the past five years, only a handful of major American newspapers and broadcast outlets have highlighted the role of Straussian ideas in neoconservative politics. In light of the collapse of the Bush administration's casus belli in Iraq, a more robust exploration of the intellectual underpinnings of neoconservatism hardly seems irrelevant.

At the end of the cold war, heady talk in the United States about "the end of history" and the triumph of free-market liberalism was followed by a decade in which American society and its press became unhinged by the utopian promise of amazing technological advances and their attendant riches. September 11 reminded us, in horrific fashion, that the flow of history is largely impervious to the hubristic declarations of empires. But partly through a widespread inability to reflect on the country's identity in ways that acknowledge the inadequacies of national myth, that lesson largely escaped us. In his book, Hughes explains how national myths tend to become "absolutized" in times of war, and this was clearly on display in the wake of 9/11. Listen, for example, to Mort Zuckerman, editor in chief of U.S. News & World Report, defend American unilateralism post-9/11 to Lou Dobbs in 2003: "It would be nice to have a much broader array of support . . . but it always makes me remember Gary Cooper in High Noon when he had to defend the town, even when the rest of the town wasn't willing to support him. We are the sheriff in the world, whether we like it or not."


Now, once again we ?- the people and their press ?- have a moment of reckoning. The public is unsettled by the disaster unfolding in Iraq and the vulnerability of life on display along the Gulf Coast. The nation is, more or less, paying attention. How should we engage it?

The big ideas during the last twenty years about saving the news business have generally centered on delivering to the great swath of citizenry possessed of credit cards and investment income the experience of diversion. (A notable exception was civic journalism, which flared up and then dimmed in the 1990s.) The most recent big idea, unpacked in a New York Times Magazine profile of CBS chairman Leslie Moonves, is more of the same. At a time when the three major networks are thinking of ways to rehabilitate their news operations, Moonves wants to make the newsroom into an outlet of primetime vapidity. As Lynn Hirschberg, who profiled Moonves, explains, "News stories are often dark, and Moonves would like to find a way to make them light." America was built on optimism, Moonves says, and Americans like "traditional heroes" and "conflicts that can be solved." This is media reform with an eye on the bottom line, not the common weal. Like Hollywood, Moonves aims to bank on the salability of unquestioned myth.

Moonves's proposal also reeks of the disdain for journalism demonstrated by the Bush administration, which has brazenly vilified and bypassed "the filter" (that is, us) whenever possible. Moreover, it's a proposal that shrewdly avoids trying to compete in a media landscape that is fracturing along the dangerous partisan notion of "you have your facts, I have mine." It's time that the segment of the press that is still committed to intellectually honest journalism ?- a majority, I'm convinced ?- try something other than patronizing the citizens of this country. What have we to lose?

While it's difficult to change the core mission of any large organization, traces of a vital alternative ?- of public-service and idea-based journalism that helps set the agenda for what the nation thinks about ?- still course through our mass media. It has been evident in Katrina's wake in stories about the ways the country has failed those citizens who live in poverty, and the manner in which the nation's singular devotion to commerce and development weakened New Orleans's natural protections against flooding. It's evident, too, more broadly in mainstream journalism ?- in the Ideas section created by The Boston Globe in 2002, in the devastating documentary Frontline aired earlier this year about the viral spread of radical Islam in Europe.

But such work is a rivulet in the torrent of journalism that pours forth daily in this country. The vibrant coverage of ideas available in many small-circulation magazines is generally absent from the mass media, a state of affairs that makes the career of Tom Quinn, a reporter at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, all the more instructive.

Quinn began covering environmental and energy topics for the Plain Dealer in the mid-1970s, and since has worked a number of other beats at the paper. He is currently the night police reporter. But through it all he has, as Joan Didion put it, "worked the fringes" ?- taking classes at Cleveland State University, talking to professors, going to the potlucks and hayrides of groups (Green Energy Ohio, the Northeast Ohio Foodshed Network, etc.) that Quinn, sixty-two, describes as part of "the dissent community." For Quinn, working the fringes isn't about advocacy but ideas.


In the late 1990s, Quinn learned about the phenomenon of "peak oil" ?- how world production of crude oil will eventually peak and then trend irreversibly downward. "Peak oil" is a source of considerable disagreement between the geologists who endorse it and the economists who argue that as the price of oil rises, market forces will spur more efficient ways to extract the remaining crude. Neither side, however, disputes that crude will eventually be scarce. Quinn read the books and technical articles. He studied geology, international finance, and Middle East politics. In January 2005, he began to talk to his editors about "peak oil" and the need to publish work in the paper that attempted to, as he put it, "connect the dots" on the future of energy. His editors listened, and in May the paper began a series that is still under way.

But such work is a rivulet in the torrent of journalism that pours forth daily in this country. The vibrant coverage of ideas available in many small-circulation magazines is generally absent from the mass media, a state of affairs that makes the career of Tom Quinn, a reporter at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, all the more instructive.But such work is a rivulet in the torrent of journalism that pours forth daily in this country. The vibrant coverage of ideas available in many small-circulation magazines is generally absent from the mass media, a state of affairs that makes the career of Tom Quinn, a reporter at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, all the more instructive.

It helped that the Plain Dealer could ground the story of energy development in the region the paper covers. John D. Rockefeller launched the oil age when he started what became Standard Oil in Cleveland in 1863, and Charles Brush, a local inventor, harnessed the wind off Lake Erie with the world's first electricity-producing turbine in 1887. From there the series broadens to include the global context of energy, drawing on sources from Canada, Sweden, and elsewhere, as well as explorations of "peak oil," coal, nuclear, and hydrogen power, and stories that move from systemic solutions to practical ways to make readers' lives more energy-efficient.

Even though the price of gas was in the news before Katrina, the Plain Dealer's series wasn't an obvious way for a budget-conscious paper to marshal its resources. Indeed, Doug Clifton, the paper's editor, says, "It doesn't sell many papers. In fact, it may not sell any." But Clifton is quick to stress that "we felt we had an obligation to put these issues before the public." Clifton has also considered ways to counter the "big-project effect" that can plague newspaper series ?- meaning that for a specified number of consecutive days the paper asks readers to digest long articles raising big questions, but then mostly drops the subject until the next big project. Series at the Plain Dealer, including one on regional development that has been under way for four years, are doled out intermittently in small portions rather than in one heaping helping, and are typically accompanied by something of an old-fashioned editorial crusade, reinforcing (and revisiting) lessons from the reporting.

Quinn says he is "perceived as kind of ?'out there' in the city room." And maybe he is. But the nation could use more "out there" journalism. The center has grown too complacent. The trick, of course, is to find creative ways of working the fringes and connecting the dots. That doesn't require that we in the press seek to destroy the myths of America, but rather that we help cultivate an awareness of the ways such myths fuel arrogance and limit American ingenuity. The Plain Dealer series doesn't do this overtly, but the idea underlies the entire project.

In September in The New York Times Magazine, Michael Ignatieff remarked that Katrina's biggest casualty was the destruction of the "contract of citizenship" between Americans and their government. "It is very much too late," he writes, "for senior federal officials, from the president on down, to reknit these ties. It is just too late for the public-relations exercises that pass for leadership these days . . . . The real work of healing will be done by citizens much lower down the chain of command." That is true, too, of the real work of grappling with the many problems America and the world will have to confront in this century. Indeed, an aspect of the mythology of America is the venerated common sense of its citizens. If presented with a challenge and given all the facts, it is said, the American people will make the right decision. They will roll up their sleeves and get to work. It's time for the press to embrace this myth and help the country decide where to begin.
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Brent Cunningham is cjr's managing editor.

Any more long winded articles or would you like to state your viewpoint?

Look, I have no issue as such with you submitting these articles but I think it would be nice for you to at least throw in a few words along with each one, otherwise it's just a bunch of words that you managed to copy over and not worth a plug nickel.

Sturgis


Sturgis, I've often posts my opinion re the Media's betrayal of the American people.

I don't know whom I'm more angry at: The Media, the Congress and the Bush administration, or the voters. Probably, the Media because it has Constitutional protection to protect the rights and freedom of citizens---and, too often, the Media Whores have failed that sacred trust.

BBB

Agreed...with regard to the media. There is a major problem there and sadly I think it all boils down to the dollars and cents with little or no interest in any sense or facts or decency.

As to the voters, I would not tend to be as angry towards them since they/we have been bombarded with whatever the media feeds us. Sure there are other ways of getting more information but it is not an easy task by any means as I am sure you are well aware.
How many times is there a quick mention of a story coming up on CNBC or MSNBC or FOXnews or CNN and then it never materializes or a crawl at the bottom where something is mentioned in passing (literally) and it never appears again.


Disappointment and anger with politicians? Sure. But again, they are only as strong as the media allows them to be. When it comes down to politicos in general I am more angered by long term members of Congress and the Senate who have shirked their responsibilities for far far too long.

While We Were Sleeping
While We Were Sleeping
By Rebecca Dana, Lizzy Ratner

Where Was the Media Between Invasion and Murtha? Networks Gave Vietnam War Twice the Minutes Iraq Gets; Baghdad Bureaus Cut Back; Amanpour: ?'Patronizing'

On the morning of Aug. 3, 1965, a 33-year-old CBS correspondent named Morley Safer, in fatigues and with a bulky recording contraption on his hip, stood in Cam Ne, Vietnam, before a backdrop of burning thatch-roof huts. He clutched a battered metal microphone. Moments earlier, a unit of baby-faced American soldiers had set the huts on fire. Young women ran wailing, cradling babies; an elderly man hobbled toward Mr. Safer, pleading in Vietnamese.

"This is what the war in Vietnam is all about, the old and the very young," Mr. Safer said, turning to face the camera.

Forty years later, the United States is in a desert war, transmitted instantly by satellite and broadband. There are no boundaries on our technical capabilities to cover events.

But there are other limits?-commercial, political, editorial. And they have kept the war in Iraq marginal in the American media, from soon after the initial invasion in the spring of 2003 till last week, when Representative John Murtha hurled it back into the spotlight.

While Vietnam is remembered as the television war, Iraq has been the television-crawl war: a scrolling feed of bad-news bits, pushed to the margins by Brad and Jen, Robert Blake, Jacko and two and a half years of other anesthetizing fare. Americans could go days on end without engaging with the war, on TV or in print.

"There's a dearth of seriousness in the coverage of news," said veteran war correspondent Christiane Amanpour, "at a time when, in my view, it couldn't be more serious."

• Dead troops are invisible. The Bush administration's ban on capturing flag-draped coffins is echoed in the press' overall treatment of American war dead. A May 2005 survey by the Los Angeles Times found that over a six-month span, a set of leading United States newspapers and magazines ran "almost no pictures" of Americans killed in action, and they ran only 44 photos of wounded Westerners.

• Average monthly war coverage on the ABC, NBC and CBS evening newscasts, combined, has been cut in half?-from 388 minutes in 2003, to 274 in 2004, to 166 in 2005.

• Major newspapers have cut back on the size of their Baghdad bureaus, with some closing them or allowing them to go unstaffed for stretches.

• Government regulation has spread over the battlefield, limiting mobility and access. Where Vietnam correspondents could hop a chopper to combat zones at will, Iraq reporters need to sign eight-page sheaves of rules and are pinned to single units. Health-care privacy law is invoked to keep reporters away from the wounded.

• Corporate security restrictions likewise stifle reporting. At CNN, reporters need clearance from the bureau chief to leave the network compound; similar rules apply at other networks.

The danger "really impedes our ability to get around the country to talk to average Iraqis, to get a really good sense of what's going on on a daily basis," said Paul Slavin, a senior vice president for ABC.

Many reporters have done heroic work in Iraq despite the obstacles. But it has failed to add up. There have been no moments like Cam Ne?-in which Mr. Safer, a single Marianas-deep furrow between his brows, summarized the news and, in the process, signaled the birth of a bracing and immediate breed of war coverage: "The day's operation burned down 150 homes, wounded three women, killed one baby, wounded one Marine, and netted … four old men who could not answer questions put to them in English."

That nightly jungle drama, bringing a futile war to American televisions, has no counterpart in today's coverage.

"The problem is that people aren't publishing the work," said Stefan Zaklin of the European Pressphoto agency. Mr. Zaklin recalled taking a picture of a fallen U.S. Army captain during the November 2004 assault on Falluja. The soldiers, he said, "were O.K. with me taking that picture," and it ran in Paris Match, the Bangkok Post, and on page 1 of Germany's Bild-Zeitung, Europe's highest-circulation newspaper. Its only exposure in the U.S., he said, was a two-hour spin on MSNBC.

LONG ARTICLE CONTINUED:
http://www.observer.com/pageone_coverstory1.asp

Media feared being cut off from big stories by Bush adm.
"one high-ranking editor back at The Times' West 43rd Street headquarters at the time of the meeting?-remembered the criticism was worrying. Would the Washington bureau be frozen out of the big stories emanating from the White House?"

Times Confronted
By Ms. Rice In 2002
But Held Ground
By Gabriel Sherman

In late August of 2002, David Sanger, White House correspondent for The New York Times, found himself in the far west wing of the West Wing: at President George W. Bush's ranch in Crawford, Tex.

There, in what must have been a fairly routine meeting with then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, he was told in no uncertain terms what the White House had thought of much of The Times' reporting on the President's Iraq policy that summer. They were not happy.

LONG ARTICLE CONTINUED:
http://www.observer.com/pageone_offtherec.asp

BBB reports, we decide

Thank you BBB - not just for these readings but for the many others from sources I either wouldn't consider or I'm ignorant of. However, I have now so many bookmarks my browser is complaining.

Michael Isikoff -- The Fred Astaire of Stenographic Reportin
Michael Isikoff -- The Fred Astaire of Stenographic Reporting
John Amato
11.28.2005

After I read Jane's wonderful piece entitled "Let's Tell Mikey; He'll print anything," on Oct. 30th, I had to ask myself what kind of journalist would print a story so full of spoonfed propaganda that I instantly got a bad case of acid reflux. Here's a key passage that caught my eye:

"Rove remains in some jeopardy, but the consensus view of lawyers close to the case is that he has probably dodged the bullet."

Jane Hamsher wonders: "Consensus view of who? Luskin and his team of lawyers?"

Yes, Jane, that's the view Mikey is most comfortable with. Just ask yourself this question. Since most of the newspapers were printing stories based on "lawyers close to the case" before Fitzgerald's press conference, why was Newsweek the only publication to print the dribble contained in Isikoff's article? The word on K Street is that the Washington Post and the NY Times wouldn't have anything to do with these obvious, self-serving talking points that Rove's attorney was peddling. One can surmise that if a certain someone is looking for a reporter who can be led around by the nose-then Mikey is your man.

Not to be outdone by his earlier piece, Isikoff writes an article for the Nov. 28th issue of Newsweek, which tries to portray Rove and Libby as poor little, helpless victims being drained of all their funds by the wicked Fitzgerald. Here's the headline, "Leak Investigation: For Libby and Rove, Legal Woes?-And Bills." It would appear that Karl was forced to take out a loan of 100,000 to help with his escalating legal fees. According to the Center for Public Integrity, the average net worth of the individual members of the Bush cabinet, including the President and Vice President, was between $9.3 and $27.3 million in 2002. I'm supposed to feel sorry for a couple of millionaire political ideologues who outed a CIA agent in order to smear a man who exposed an administration lie. To make Karl Rove into a sympathetic character is no small order, but Mikey is up to the task. This article reminded me of the gig Karen Hughes is getting paid for. Spreading propaganda is her job after all. For Isikoff, it's promoting whatever his new dance partner tells him. Then again this type of reporting is nothing new to Mikey. That man likes to boogie and can he dance!

I began to look into Mike Isikoff's reporting in the past so I could better understand why his articles read like facsimiles that came directly from the bowels of Robert Luskin's office. I have to say that I instantly became perplexed about Mikey's role in Monica-Gate. That's a bad choice of words, what I meant to say was that I was outraged. Going back to my title of the post, one of the keys to being a really dynamite hoofer is to have the perfect partner to gyrate with, and Mikey has been blessed with more than one Ginger Rogers in his time. Remember that dancing alone is no fun at all. (Except, of course, if dropping a few of tabs of acid while twirling in a circle at a Grateful Dead concert counts as dancing.)

Let's take a quick glance back in our google time machine.

Columbia Journalism Review May/June 1999

"He was so entrenched in the Paula Jones case that we can see early on that Isikoff was determined not to report, but to contribute. If we go back to 1994, Mikey, while working for the Washington Post was not getting the attention he thought he deserved over the Paula Jones case and got himself suspended for insubordination, resigned in a huff and in May 1994, moved on to Newsweek."

Ken Starr was lucky to have him. He must have felt just like the Los Angeles Lakers did when they signed Shaquille O'Neal to a long term contract and immediately became world champions, but I digress.

Next we have this from 1998, called Pressgate, which was published in the inaugural issue of the magazine Brill's Content. It provides a detailed account of the behind-the-scenes collaboration between right-wing opponents of Bill Clinton, news reporters and Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr that resulted in the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal.

Read the report here, but check out this very important sentence.

"One thing emerges clearly from Brill's account: without the active intervention and guidance of Newsweek magazine, the Monica Lewinsky scandal would never have come to pass."

Just let that sink in for a while.
Is it sinking?
I'll skip a space
Still sinking?

It gets worse for that Deney Terrio, dance fever wannabe. He actually got sued by one of his sources.

"A reporter who suddenly became famous for probing the president's sex life is now being sued by one of his sources. Steele says she talked with Isikoff only because the reporter "explicitly and verbally agreed that Ms. Steele's statements about Willey's accusations were 'off the record,'" meaning "confidential and anonymous."

To make matters worse for Mikey, she says she lied to Isikoff about her knowledge of the Willey incident in January 1997 at her friend's request, and then recanted the story to Isikoff when she learned that the reporter was about to publish it last summer. He broke one of the highest standards a reporter can have. He didn't keep her conversations with him confidential. Steele crucified Mikey's technique of coaching her as a witness too, but hey-he needed the story, right? What's a stenographer to do?

Let's make a little room for Ken Starr, the man who turned the word "leak" into a Borkism. Here's a report given by a limo driver who said on January 15, that he overheard Newsweek's Michael Isikoff place a backseat phone call saying Starr had just played the Tripp tapes for him. They both denied it, but why would the driver make that accusation?
Maybe he was promised a nice golf vacation in Saipan.

As we dig deeper, some of the most damning words that can be said about Isikoff were actually said by Mikey himself in his own book. "Uncovering Clinton: A Reporter's Story"

Columbia Journalism Review

It was at this point, he writes, that he realized with more clarity than he had in the past that he "was in the middle of a plot to get the president.

Why did he allow himself to be used this way? He says that he became convinced that the president treated women badly and therefore needed to be exposed. The man was supposed to report a conspiracy, not be part of it, but hey-it kept his tap shoes clean and polished.

Now we approach the present. Look no further than "The Daily Show," the Comedy Central hit starring Jon Stewart. Isikoff appeared on the show July 14th, and had this to say:

"Pat Fitzgerald better have a serious criminal case here to bring and not because I'm saying anybody in particular should be indicted or not, but there's one reporter Judy Miller, who's sitting in jail right now-ahhh- because she wouldn't disclose her confidential sources to Fitzgerald and there's another reporter Matt Cooper, a fine man, very funny by the way- former college of mine who came this close to going to jail and I would hate to think that umm-ahhh-journalists are going to be thrown in jail for some rinky-dinky case. You know, I mean if this isn't a serious matter, if this isn't you know, something that really does involve national security- umm-then we're in pretty bad shape if for every run of the mill case or even not even a case at all reporters are going to get thrown in jail."

Digby, an LA based writer and blogger noted:

"Michael Isikoff was practically Ken Starr's right hand man in the media. He performed at only a slightly less partisan level than Drudge or Steno Sue Schmidt. He didn't seem to think that throwing a duly elected president from office for lying about a private matter was overzealous in the least. He was on that bandwagon from the very beginning and one of the guys who drove it."

For a pirouetting marionette of a man to attack Patrick Fitzgerald for possibly being overzealous is unconscionable. I understand that he is defending the new pin-up girl of political operatives, Judy Miller, and they do have a lot in common, but didn't he learn anything in all this time? There's a thing called the "internets" now. We can actually look up what you reported in days gone by. I find it surreal that Mikey was so enamored with extramarital sex in the Clinton years to become this pit-bull advocate against him, but the outing of a covert CIA agent during a time of war doesn't so much as register a sigh from his chinny chin chin.

As I peer into the future, you can be sure that in the months leading up to Scooter Libby's trial, there will be more of this note taking, lap dog stenographic reporting coming out of Michael Isikoff's mouth. Remember, we have not one, but two dance troupes competing for the services of the River Dance King--the newest player being Scooter Libby. Ted Wells, his new lawyer, will need that wonderfully smooth tango danseuse master at his beck and call if he is going to bail out his client. I do hope that Isikoff takes the high road this time around and reports instead of repeats. There's still time for him to save his own soul from the route Bob Woodward has taken. I doubt that will be the case though, so when he continues on his current path Newsweek should re-title itself "The King of Swing" for the duration. Mickey will be bunny hoping all over their pages to the pulsating beat of Vicki Sue Robinson's disco classic, only he'll be singing, "Turn the Leak Around."

The Press: The Enemy Within - part 1
The Press: The Enemy Within
By Michael Massing
The New York Review of Books
15 December 2005 Edition

The past few months have witnessed a striking change in the fortunes of two well-known journalists: Anderson Cooper and Judith Miller. CNN's Cooper, the one-time host of the entertainment show The Mole, who was known mostly for his pin-up good looks, hip outfits, and showy sentimentality, suddenly emerged during Hurricane Katrina as a tribune for the dispossessed and a scourge of do-nothing officials. He sought out poor blacks who were stranded in New Orleans, expressed anger over bodies rotting in the street, and rudely interrupted Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu when she began thanking federal officials for their efforts. When people "listen to politicians thanking one another and complimenting each other," he told her, "you know, I got to tell you, there are a lot of people here who are very upset, and very angry, and very frustrated." After receiving much praise, Cooper in early November was named to replace Aaron Brown as the host of CNN's NewsNight.

By then, Judith Miller was trying to salvage her reputation. After eighty-five days in jail for refusing to testify to the grand jury in the Valerie Plame leak case, she was greeted not with widespread appreciation for her sacrifice in protecting her source but with angry questions about her relations with Lewis Libby and her dealings with her editors, one of whom, Bill Keller, said he regretted he "had not sat her down for a thorough debriefing" after she was subpoenaed as a witness. The controversy revived the simmering resentment among her fellow reporters, and many Times readers, over her reporting on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. In the Times's account, published on October 16, Miller acknowledged for the first time that "WMD - I got it totally wrong." Bill Keller said that after becoming the paper's executive editor in 2003, he had told Miller that she could no longer cover Iraq and weapons issues, but that "she kept drifting on her own back into the national security realm." For her part, Miller insisted that she had "cooperated with editorial decisions" and expressed regret that she was not allowed to do follow-up reporting on why the intelligence on WMD had been so wrong; on November 8, she agreed to leave the Times after twenty-eight years at the paper. [1]

These contrasting tales suggest something about the changing state of American journalism. For many reporters, the bold coverage of the effects of the hurricane, and of the administration's glaring failure to respond effectively, has helped to begin making up for their timid reporting on the existence of WMD. Among some journalists I've spoken with, shame has given way to pride, and there is much talk about the need to get back to the basic responsibility of reporters, to expose wrongdoing and the failures of the political system. In recent weeks, journalists have been asking more pointed questions at press conferences, attempting to investigate cronyism and corruption in the White House and Congress, and doing more to document the plight of people without jobs or a place to live.

Will such changes prove lasting? In a previous article, I described many of the external pressures besetting journalists today, including a hostile White House, aggressive conservative critics, and greedy corporate owners. [2] Here, I will concentrate on the press's internal problems - not on its many ethical and professional lapses, which have been extensively discussed elsewhere, but rather on the structural problems that keep the press from fulfilling its responsibilities to serve as a witness to injustice and a watchdog over the powerful. To some extent, these problems consist of professional practices and proclivities that inhibit reporting - a reliance on "access," an excessive striving for "balance," an uncritical fascination with celebrities. Equally important is the increasing isolation of much of the profession from disadvantaged Americans and the difficulties they face. Finally, and most significantly, there's the political climate in which journalists work. Today's political pressures too often breed in journalists a tendency toward self-censorship, toward shying away from the pursuit of truths that might prove unpopular, whether with official authorities or the public.

The Press: The Enemy Within - part 2
The Press: The Enemy Within - part 2
By Michael Massing
The New York Review of Books
15 December 2005 Edition

On August 30 - the same day the waters of Lake Pontchartrain inundated New Orleans - the Census Bureau released its annual report on the nation's economic well-being. It showed that the poverty rate had increased to 12.7 percent in 2004 from 12.5 percent in the previous year. In New York City, where so many national news organizations have their headquarters, the rate rose from 19 percent in 2003 to 20.3 percent in 2004, meaning that one in every five New Yorkers is poor. On the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where I - and many editors of The New York Times - live, the number of homeless people has visibly grown. Yet somehow they rarely appear in the pages of the press.

In 1998, Jason DeParle, after covering the debate in Washington over the 1996 Welfare Reform Act as well as its initial implementation, convinced his editors at The New York Times to let him live part-time in Milwaukee so that he could see Wisconsin's experimental approach up close. They agreed, and over the next year DeParle's reporting helped keep the welfare issue in the public eye. In 2000, he took a leave to write a book about the subject, [4] and the Times did not name anyone to replace him on the national poverty beat. And it still hasn't. Earlier this year, the Times ran a monumental series on class, and, in its day-to-day coverage of immigration, Medicaid, and foster care, it does examine the problems of the poor, but certainly the stark deprivation afflicting the nation's urban cores deserves more systematic attention.

In March, Time magazine featured on its cover a story headlined "How to End Poverty," which was about poverty in the developing world. Concerning poverty in this country, the magazine ran very, very little in the first eight months of the year, before Hurricane Katrina. Here are some of the covers Time chose to run in that period: "Meet the Twixters: They Just Won't Grow Up"; "The 25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America"; "The Right (and Wrong) Way to Treat Pain"; "Hail, Mary" (the Virgin Mary); "Ms. Right" (Anne Coulter); "The Last Star Wars"; "A Female Midlife Crisis?"; "Inside Bill's New X-Box" (Bill Gates's latest video game machine); "Lose That Spare Tire!" (weight-loss tips); "Being 13"; "The 25 Most Influential Hispanics in America"; "Hip Hop's Class Act"; and "How to Stop a Heart Attack."

The magazine's editors put special energy into their April 18 cover, "The Time 100." Now in its second year, this annual feature salutes the hundred "most influential" people in the world, including most recently NBA forward Lebron James, country singer Melissa Etheridge, filmmaker Quentin Tarantino, Ann Coulter (again!), journalist Malcolm Gladwell, and evangelical best-selling author Rick Warren. Time enlisted additional celebrities to write profiles of some of the chosen one hundred - Tom Brokaw on Jon Stewart, Bono on Jeffrey Sachs, Donald Trump on Martha Stewart, and Henry Kissinger on Condoleezza Rice (she's handling the challenges facing her "with panache and conviction" and is enjoying "a nearly unprecedented level of authority"). To celebrate, Time invited the influentials and their chroniclers to a black-tie gala at Jazz at Lincoln Center in the Time-Warner Building.

A staff member of Time's business department told me that the "100" issue is highly valued because of the amount of advertising it generates. In 2004, for instance, when Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina was named a "Builder and Titan," her company bought a two-page spread in the issue. Because Time's parent company, Time Warner, must post strong quarterly earnings to please Wall Street, the pressure to turn out such moneymakers remains intense. By contrast, there's little advertising to be had from writing about inner-city mothers, so the magazine seems unlikely to alter its coverage in any significant way.

Time's "100" gala is only one of the many glitzy events on the journalists' social calendar. The most popular is the White House Correspondents' Dinner. This year, hundreds of the nation's top journalists showed up at the Washington Hilton to mix with White House officials, military brass, Cabinet chiefs, diplomats, and actors. Laura Bush's naughty Desperate Housewives routine, in which she teased her husband for his early-to-bed habits and his attempt to milk a male horse, was shown over and over on the TV news; what wasn't shown was journalists jumping to their feet and applauding wildly. Afterward, many of the journalists and their guests went to the hot post-dinner party, hosted by Bloomberg News. On his blog, The Nation's David Corn described arriving with Newsweek's Mike Isikoff, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, and Times editor Jill Abramson. Seeing the long line, Corn feared he wouldn't get in, but suddenly Arianna Huffington showed up and "whisked me into her entourage." Huffington, he noted, asked everyone she encountered - Wesley Clark, John Podesta - if they'd like to participate in her new celebrity-rich mega-blog.

It was left to Jon Stewart on The Daily Show to imagine what the journalists and politicos at the dinner were saying to one another: "Deep down, we're both entrenched oligarchies with a stake in maintaining the status quo - enjoy your scrod."

A ruthlessly self-revealing look at journalists' obsession with celebrity was provided earlier this year by Bernard Weinraub. Writing in The New York Times about his experience covering Hollywood for the paper between 1991 and 2005, he told of becoming friendly with Jeffrey Katzenberg (when he was head of Walt Disney Studios), of being dazzled by the ranch-style house of producer Dawn Steel, of resenting the huge financial gulf between him and the people he was covering. He recalled:

Waiting for a valet at the Bel-Air Hotel to bring my company-leased Ford, I once stood beside a journalist turned producer who said, "I used to drive a car like that." Though I'm ashamed to say it, I was soon hunting for parking spots near Orso or the Peninsula Hotel to avoid the discomfort of having a valet drive up my leased two-year-old Buick in front of some luncheon companion with a Mercedes.
During the 1990s, the Times reporters, Weinraub among them, breathlessly recorded every move of the agent Michael Ovitz. Today, it does the same for Harvey Weinstein. The paper's coverage of movies, TV, pop music, and video games concentrates heavily on ratings, box-office receipts, moguls, boardroom struggles, media strategists, power agents, who's up and who's down. The paper pays comparatively little attention to the social or political effects of pop culture, including how middle Americans regard the often sensational and violent entertainment that nightly invades their homes. As in the case of factory shutdowns, journalists at the elite papers are not in touch with such people and so rarely write about them. [5]

The Press: The Enemy Within - part 3
The Press: The Enemy Within - part 3

All of the problems affecting newspapers appear in even more acute form when it comes to TV. The loss of all three of the famous anchors of the broadcast networks has led to much anxiety about the future, and CBS's decision to name Sean McManus, the president of its sports division, as its new news chief has done little to allay it. Yet even under Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw, and Dan Rather, the network news divisions had become stale and predictable. After September 11, there was much talk about how the networks had to recover their traditional mission and educate Americans about the rest of the world, yet one need only watch the evening news for a night or two to see how absurd were such expectations. On November 4, for instance, CBS's Bob Schieffer spent a few fleeting moments commenting on some footage of the recent rioting by young Muslims in France before introducing a much longer segment on stolen cell phones and the anxiety they cause their owners. ABC's World News Tonight's most frequent feature, "Medicine on the Cutting Edge," seems directed mainly at offering tips to its aging viewers about how they might hold out for a few more years - and at providing the drug companies a regular ad platform. In 2004, the three networks together devoted 1,174 minutes - nearly twenty full hours - to missing women, all of them white.

Decrying the decline of network news has long been a popular pastime. The movie Good Night, and Good Luck features a famous jeremiad that Edward R. Murrow delivered at a meeting of the Radio and TV News Directors Association in 1958, in which he assailed the broadcast industry for being "fat, comfortable, and complacent." In 1988, the journalist Peter Boyer published a book titled Who Killed CBS? (The answer: CBS News President Van Gordon Sauter.) Tom Fenton's more recent Bad News: The Decline of Reporting, the Business of News, and the Danger to Us All, is especially revealing, drawing as it does on extensive firsthand experience. In 1970, when Fenton went to work for CBS, in Rome, the bureau there had three correspondents - part of a global network that included fourteen major foreign bureaus, ten mini-bureaus, and stringers in forty-four countries. Today, CBS has eight foreign correspondents and three bureaus. Four of the correspondents are based in London, where they are kept busy doing voice-overs for video feeds from the Associated Press and Reuters - the form that most international news on the networks now takes.

During his years at CBS, Fenton writes, he took pride in finding important stories:

That was my job, my fun, my life - until the mega-corporations that have taken over the major American television news companies squeezed the life out of foreign news reporting.

Of the many people in the business he spoke with while researching his book, he writes, "almost everyone" agreed that the networks "are doing an inadequate job reporting world news." Among the exceptions were Brokaw, Jennings, and Rather, none of whom, he writes, "seemed to share my intensity of concern at the lack of foreign news and context on their shows." Fenton writes angrily about the immense sums the anchors were pulling down while their bureaus were being shuttered. Noting Tom Brokaw's plans to retire as anchor and do more investigative reporting, he asks, "What was stopping him from sending his correspondents out to do that for the last fifteen years or so?" (The answer is hinted at in Fenton's brief acknowledgment that foreign stories cost twice as much to produce as domestic ones.)

In Fenton's view, the press has grown so lax that "anyone with the merest enterprise can have a field day cherry-picking gigantic unreported stories." He quotes Seymour Hersh as saying he couldn't believe all the overlooked stories he was able to report on simply because The New Yorker allowed him to write what he wanted. Fenton lists some major stories that remain neglected, including the influence of Saudi money on US policies toward the Middle East, the links between the big oil companies and the White House, and the largely ignored dark side of Kurdish activities in Iraq.

"Nowhere has the news media's ignorant performance been more egregious than in its handling of the Kurds," he writes, "a catalogue of sorry incompetence and dangerous misinformation that continues to this day." He mentions the murderous feuds between the two Kurdish strongmen Jalal Talabani and Massoud Barzani, and the "tribulations and suffering" of minorities like the Turcomans and Assyrian Christians living under the "strong arm of Kurdish rule." The Kurds have always been cast as good guys, and no American news organization, he writes, "wants to burden us with such complex and challenging details. You never know what might happen - viewers might switch to another channel."

The Press: The Enemy With - part 4
The Press: The Enemy With - part 4

Iraq remains by far the most important story for the US press, showing its strengths as well as its many weaknesses - especially the way in which political realities shape, define, and ultimately limit what Americans see and read. The nation's principal news organizations deserve praise for remaining committed to covering the war in the face of lethal risks, huge costs, and public apathy. Normally The Washington Post has four correspondents in the country, backed by more than two dozen Iraqis, as well as three armored cars costing $100,000. The New York Times bureau costs $1.5 million a year to maintain. And many excellent reports have resulted. In June, for instance, The Wall Street Journal ran a revealing front-page story by Farnaz Fassihi about how the violence between Muslim groups in Iraq had destroyed a longtime friendship between two Baghdad neighbors, one Sunni and the other Shiite. In October, in The Washington Post, Steven Fainaru described how Kurdish political parties were repatriating thousands of Kurds in the northern oil city of Kirkuk, setting off fighting between Kurdish settlers and local Arabs. And in The New York Times, Sabrina Tavernise described how the growing chaos in Iraq was eroding the living standards of middle-class Iraqis, turning their frustration "into hopelessness."

Just a few months before, at the start of the year, however, the tone of the coverage was very different. President Bush, fresh from his reelection, was enjoying broad public support, and he was making the most of Iraq's January 30 election, which was widely proclaimed a success. The anti-Syria demonstrations in Lebanon and the election of Mahmoud Abbas as the president of the Palestinian Authority only added to the impression of the growing success of Bush's foreign policy. Journalists rushed to praise his leadership and sagacity. "What Bush Got Right," Newsweek declared on its March 14 cover. Recent developments in Iraq, Lebanon, and elsewhere in the Middle East had "vindicated" the President, the magazine declared. "Across New York, Los Angeles and Chicago - and probably Europe and Asia as well - people are nervously asking themselves a question: 'Could he possibly have been right?' The short answer is yes." Another article, headlined "Condi's Clout Offensive," hailed the new secretary of state, noting how she "has rushed onto the world stage with force and style, and with the fair wind of the Arab Democratic Spring at her back." Rounding out the package was "To the Front," a look at US soldiers who, having lost limbs in Iraq and Afghanistan, "are doing the unthinkable: Going back into battle."

On CNN, Wolf Blitzer was daily celebrating Iraq's strides toward democracy. On April 6, for instance, after the Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani was selected as Iraq's new president, Blitzer asked Robin Wright of The Washington Post and Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution about him and his two deputies. Blitzer, addressing Wright, said, "They're all pretty moderate and they're pretty pro-American, is that fair?"

"Absolutely," said Wright. "These are people who have been educated in the West, have had contacts with Western countries, particularly in the United States...."

Blitzer: Your sense is this is about as good, Ken Pollack, as the US, as the Bush administration, as the American public could have hoped for, at least as a start for this new Iraqi democracy.
Pollack: Absolutely. I think the Bush administration has to be pleased with the personnel.
Such leading questions provide a good example of Blitzer's interviewing style, which seems designed to make sure his guests say nothing remotely spontaneous; the exchange also makes clear the deference that CNN, and the press as a whole, showed President Bush just after his reelection, during the first months of the year. Throughout this period, violence continued to plague Iraq, but stories about it were mostly consigned to the inside pages. US soldiers continued to die, but this news was mostly relegated to the "crawl" along the bottom of the cable news shows.

Then, in April, insurgent attacks began to increase, and Bush's popularity began to slide. As oil prices rose and the Plame leak investigation got more attention, political space for tougher reporting began to open up. The stories about assassinations and ambushes that had earlier been buried began appearing on the front page, and Wolf Blitzer, newly emboldened, began questioning his guests about US exit strategies.

By late October, when the two-thousandth US serviceman died, the news was splashed across the nation's front pages. "2,000 Dead: As Iraq Tours Stretch On, a Grim Mark," declared The New York Times. As the Times's Katharine Seelye pointed out a few days later, this milestone received far more press attention than had the earlier one of one thousand, in April 2004.

The Press: The Enemy Within - part 5
The Press: The Enemy Within - part 5

Still, there remained firm limits on what could be reported out of Iraq. Especially taboo were frank accounts of the actions of US troops in the field - particularly when those actions resulted in the deaths of Iraqi civilians.

On the same day The Times ran its front-page story about the two thousand war dead, for instance, it ran another piece on page A12 about the rising toll of Iraqi civilians. Since the US military does not issue figures on this subject, Sabrina Tavernise relied on Iraq Body Count, a nonprofit Web site that keeps a record of casualty figures from news accounts. The site, she wrote, placed the number of dead civilians since the start of the US invasion at between 26,690 and 30,051. (Even the higher number was probably too low, the article noted, since many deaths do not find their way into news reports.) The Times deserves credit simply for running this story - for acknowledging that, as high a price as American soldiers have paid in the war, the one paid by Iraqi civilians has been much higher. Remarkably, though, in discussing the cause of those deaths, the article mentioned only insurgents. Not once did it raise the possibility that some of those deaths might have come at the hands of the "Coalition."

This is typical. A survey of the Times's coverage of Iraq in the month of October shows that, while regularly reporting civilian deaths caused by the insurgents, it rarely mentioned those inflicted by Americans; when it did, it was usually deep inside the paper, and heavily qualified. Thus, on October 18 the Times ran a brief article at the bottom of page A11 headlined "Scores Are Killed by American Air-strikes in Sunni Insurgent Stronghold West of Baghdad." Citing military sources, the article noted in its lead that the air strikes had been launched "against insurgents" in the embattled city of Ramadi, "killing as many as 70 people." A US Army colonel was cited as saying that a group of insurgents in four cars had been spotted "trying to roll artillery shells into a large crater in eastern Ramadi that had been caused when a roadside bomb exploded the day before, killing five US and two Iraqi soldiers." At that point, according to the Times, "an F-15 fighter plane dropped a guided bomb on the area, killing all 20 men on the ground." The Times went on to report the colonel's claim that "no civilians had been killed in the strikes." In one sentence, the article noted that Reuters, "citing hospital officials in Ramadi," had reported "that civilians had been killed." It did not elaborate. Instead, it went on to mention other incidents in Ramadi in which US helicopters and fighter planes had killed "insurgents."

The AP told a very different story. The "group of insurgents" that the military claimed had been hit by the F-15 was actually "a group of around two dozen Iraqis gathered around the wreckage of the US military vehicle" that had been attacked the previous day, the AP reported.

The military said in a statement that the crowd was setting another roadside bomb in the location of the blast that killed the Americans. F-15 warplanes hit them with a precision-guided bomb, killing 20 people, described by the statement as "terrorists."
But several witnesses and one local leader said the people were civilians who had gathered to gawk at the wreckage of the US vehicle or pick pieces off of it - as often occurs after an American vehicle is hit.
The air-strike hit the crowd, killing 25 people, said Chiad Saad, a tribal leader, and several witnesses who refused to give their names....
Readers of the Times learned none of these details.

This is not an isolated case. Regularly reading the paper's Iraq coverage during the last few months, I have found very little mention of civilians dying at the hands of US forces. No doubt the violence on Iraq's streets keeps reporters from going to these sites to interview witnesses, but Times stories seldom notify readers that its reporters were unable to question witnesses to civilian casualties because of the danger they would face in going to the site of the attack. Yet the paper regularly publishes official military claims about dead insurgents without any independent confirmation. After both General Tommy Franks and Donald Rumsfeld declared in 2003 that "we don't do body counts," the US military has quietly begun doing just that. And the Times generally relays those counts without questioning them.

In any discussion of civilian casualties, it is important to distinguish between the insurgents, who deliberately target civilians, and the US military, which does not - which, in fact, goes out of its way to avoid them. [6] Nonetheless, all indications point to a very high toll at the hands of the US. As seems to have been the case in Ramadi, many of the deaths have resulted from aerial bombardment. Since the start of the invasion, the United States has dropped 50,000 bombs on Iraq. [7] About 30,000 were dropped during the five weeks of the war proper. Though most of the 50,000 bombs have been aimed at military targets, they have undoubtedly caused much "collateral damage," and claimed an untold number of civilian lives.

But according to Marc Garlasco of Human Rights Watch, the toll from ground actions is probably much higher. Garlasco speaks with special authority; before he joined Human Rights Watch, in mid-April 2003, he worked for the Pentagon, helping to select targets for the air war in Iraq. During the ground war, he says, the military's use of cluster bombs was especially lethal. In just a few days of fighting in the city of Hilla, south of Baghdad, Human Rights Watch found that cluster bombs killed or injured more than five hundred civilians.

Since the end of the ground war, Garlasco says, many civilians have been killed in crossfire between US and insurgent forces. Others have been shot by US military convoys; soldiers in Humvees, seeking to avoid being hit by suicide bombers, not infrequently fire on cars that get too close, and many turn out to have civilians inside. According to Garlasco, private security contractors kill many civilians; they tend to be "loosey-goosey" in their approach, he says, "opening fire if people don't get out of the way quickly enough."

Probably the biggest source of civilian casualties, though, is Coalition checkpoints. These can go up anywhere at any time, and though they are supposed to be well marked, they are in practice often hard to detect, especially at night, and US soldiers - understandably wary of suicide bombers - often shoot first and ask questions later. Many innocent Iraqis have died in the process. [8]

Such killings came into public view in March, when the car carrying Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena, rushing to the Baghdad airport after her release from captivity, was fired on by US troops; she was badly wounded and the Italian intelligence officer accompanying her was killed. Three days after the incident, The New York Times ran a revealing front-page story headlined "US Checkpoints Raise Ire in Iraq." Next to the prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib, John Burns wrote,

no other aspect of the American military presence in Iraq has caused such widespread dismay and anger among Iraqis, judging by their frequent outbursts on the subject. Daily reports compiled by Western security companies chronicle many incidents in which Iraqis with no apparent connection to the insurgency are killed or wounded by American troops who have opened fire on suspicion that the Iraqis were engaged in a terrorist attack.
US and Iraqi officials said they had no figures on such casualties, Burns reported,

but any Westerner working in Iraq comes across numerous accounts of apparently innocent deaths and injuries among drivers and passengers who drew American fire, often in circumstances that have left the Iraqis puzzled, wondering what, if anything, they did wrong.
Many, he said, "tell of being fired on with little or no warning."

Burns's account showed that it was possible to write such stories despite the pervasive violence, and despite the lack of official figures. While few such stories have appeared in this country, they are common abroad. "If you go to the Middle East, that's all you hear about - the US killing civilians," Marc Garlasco observes. "It's on the news all the time."

In this country, one can catch glimpses of this reality in documentaries like the recently released Occupation: Dreamland, in which directors Garrett Scott and Ian Olds, drawing on the six weeks they spent with an Army unit stationed outside Fallujah, show how the best-intentioned soldiers, faced with a hostile population speaking a strange language and worshiping an alien God, can routinely resort to actions designed to intimidate and humiliate. One can also find glimpses in The New York Times Magazine, which has been much bolder than the daily New York Times. In May, Peter Maass, writing in the Times Magazine, described how Iraqi commando units, trained by US counterinsurgency experts, are fighting a "dirty war" in which beatings, torture, and even executions are routine. And in October, Dexter Filkins, also in the Times Magazine, described the sobering case of Lieutenant Colonel Nathan Sassaman, a West Point graduate who, under constant attacks in a volatile Sunni area, approved rough tactics against the local population, including forcing local Iraqi men to jump into a canal as punishment. One died as a result.

Only by reading and watching such accounts is it possible to fathom the depths of Iraqi hatred for the United States. It's not the simple fact of occupation that's at work, but the way that occupation is being carried out, and the daily indignities, humiliations, and deaths that accompany it. If reports of such actions appeared more frequently in the press, they could help raise questions about the strategy the US is pursuing in Iraq and encourage discussion of whether there's a better way to deploy US troops.

Why are such reports so rare? The simple lack of language skills is one reason. Captain Zachary Miller, who commanded a company of US troops in eastern Baghdad in 2004 and who is now studying at the Kennedy School of Government, told me that of the fifty or so Western journalists who went out on patrol with his troops, hardly any spoke Arabic, and few bothered to bring interpreters. As a result, they were totally dependent on Miller and his fellow soldiers. "Normally, the reporters didn't ask questions of the Iraqis," he said. "They asked me."

In addition, many US journalists feel queasy about quoting eyewitnesses who offer information that runs counter to statements put out by the US military. Journalists don't like writing stories in which an Iraqi civilian's word is pitted against that of a US officer, regardless of how much evidence there is to back up the civilian's claims. The many tough pieces in the press about abuses at Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, and secret detention facilities usually have official US sources and so are less open to challenge.

Even more important, though, I believe, are political realities. The abuses that US troops routinely commit in the field, and their responsibility for the deaths of many thousands of innocent Iraqis, are viewed by the American press as too sensitive for most Americans to see or read about. When NBC cameraman Kevin Sites filmed a US soldier fatally shooting a wounded Iraqi man in Fallujah, he was harassed, denounced as an antiwar activist, and sent death threats. Such incidents feed the deep-seated fear that many US journalists have of being accused of being anti-American, of not supporting the troops in the field. These subjects remain off-limits.

Of course, if the situation in Iraq were further to unravel, or if President Bush were to become more unpopular, the boundaries of the acceptable might expand further, and subjects such as these might begin appearing on our front pages. It's regrettable, though, that editors and reporters have to wait for such developments. Of all the internal problems confronting the press, the reluctance to venture into politically sensitive matters, to report disturbing truths that might unsettle and provoke, remains by far the most troubling.

On November 8, I turned on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 to see how the host was doing in his new job. It was Election Day, and I was hoping to find some analysis of the results. Instead, I found Cooper leading a discussion on a new sex survey conducted by Men's Fitness and Shape magazines. I learned that 82 percent of men think they're good or excellent in bed, and that New Yorkers report they have more sex than the residents of any other state. At that moment, New Orleans and Katrina seemed to be in a galaxy far, far away.



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Notes
[1] Her comments on her case are available at JudithMiller.org.

[2] See "The End of News?," The New York Review, December 1, 2005.

[3] See the discussion of conservative new commentators in "The End of News?"

[4] American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation's Drive to End Welfare (Viking, 2004); see the review by Christopher Jencks in this issue of The New York Review.

[5] For more on this subject, see my article "Off Course," Columbia Journalism Review, July/August 2005.

[6] See, for example, Human Rights Watch, "A Face and a Name: Civilian Victims of Insurgent Groups in Iraq," October 3, 2005.

[7] See the NPR show This American Life, "What's in a Number?" October 28, 2005.

[8] Human Rights Watch has issued many reports about the civilian victims of US military actions, including "Civilian Deaths/Checkpoints," October 2003, in which it observed that "the individual cases of civilian deaths documented in this report reveal a pattern by US forces of over-aggressive tactics, indiscriminate shooting in residential areas and a quick reliance on lethal force."

A News Revolution Has Begun
A News Revolution Has Begun
By John Pilger
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Friday 25 November 2005

The Indian writer Vandana Shiva has called for an "insurrection of subjugated knowledge." The insurrection is well under way. In trying to make sense of a dangerous world, millions of people are turning away from the traditional sources of news and information and toward the world wide web, convinced that mainstream journalism is the voice of rampant power. The great scandal of Iraq has accelerated this. In the United States, several senior broadcasters have confessed that had they challenged and exposed the lies told about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, instead of amplifying and justifying them, the invasion might not have happened.

Such honesty has yet to cross the Atlantic. Since it was founded in 1922, the BBC has served to protect every British establishment during war and civil unrest. "We" never traduce and never commit great crimes. So the omission of shocking events in Iraq - the destruction of cities, the slaughter of innocent people and the farce of a puppet government - is routinely applied. A study by the Cardiff School of Journalism found that 90 per cent of the BBC's references to Saddam Hussein's WMDs suggested he possessed them and that "spin from the British and US governments was successful in framing the coverage." The same "spin" has ensured, until now, that the use of banned weapons by the Americans and British in Iraq has been suppressed as news.

An admission by the US State Department on 10 November that its forces had used white phosphorus in Fallujah followed "rumours on the internet," according to the BBC's Newsnight. There were no rumours. There was first-class investigative work that ought to shame well-paid journalists. Mark Kraft of insomnia.livejournal.com found the evidence in the March-April 2005 issue of Field Artillery magazine and other sources. He was supported by the work of film-maker Gabriele Zamparini, founder of the excellent site, thecatsdream.com.

Last May, David Edwards and David Cromwell of medialens.org posted a revealing correspondence with Helen Boaden, the BBC's director of news. They had asked her why the BBC had remained silent on known atrocities committed by the Americans in Fallujah. She replied, "Our correspondent in Fallujah at the time [of the US attack], Paul Wood, did not report any of these things because he did not see any of these things." It is a statement to savour. Wood was "embedded" with the Americans. He interviewed none of the victims of American atrocities nor un-embedded journalists. He not only missed the Americans' use of white phosphorus, which they now admit, he reported nothing of the use of another banned weapon, napalm. Thus, BBC viewers were unaware of the fine words of Colonel James Alles, commander of the US Marine Air Group II. "We napalmed both those bridge approaches," he said. "Unfortunately, there were people there ... you could see them in the cockpit video ... It's no great way to die. The generals love napalm. It has a big psychological effect."

Once the unacknowledged work of Mark Kraft and Gabriele Zamparini had appeared in the Guardian and Independent and forced the Americans to come clean about white phosphorous, Wood was on Newsnight describing their admission as "a public relations disaster for the US." This echoed Menzies Campbell of the Liberal-Democrats, perhaps the most quoted politician since Gladstone, who said, "The use of this weapon may technically have been legal, but its effects are such that it will hand a propaganda victory to the insurgency."

The BBC and most of the British political and media establishment invariably cast such a horror as a public relations problem while minimizing the crushing of a city the size of Leeds, the killing and maiming of countless men, women and children, the expulsion of thousands and the denial of medical supplies, food and water - a major war crime.

The evidence is voluminous, provided by refugees, doctors, human rights groups and a few courageous foreigners whose work appears only on the internet. In April last year, Jo Wilding, a young British law student, filed a series of extraordinary eye-witness reports from inside the city. So fine are they that I have included one of her pieces in an anthology of the best investigative journalism.* Her film, "A Letter to the Prime Minister," made inside Fallujah with Julia Guest, has not been shown on British television. In addition, Dahr Jamail, an independent Lebanese-American journalist who has produced some of the best frontline reporting I have read, described all the "things" the BBC failed to "see." His interviews with doctors, local officials and families are on the internet, together with the work of those who have exposed the widespread use of uranium-tipped shells, another banned weapon, and cluster bombs, which Campbell would say are "technically legal." Try these web sites: dahrjamail.com, zmag.org, antiwar.com, truthout.org, indymedia.org.uk, internationalclearinghouse.info, counterpunch.org, voicesuk.org. There are many more.

"Each word," wrote Jean-Paul Sartre, "has an echo. So does each silence."
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Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and Its Triumphs, edited by John Pilger, is published by Vintage.
This article originally appeared in the Daily Standard.

AP Unveils New Values and Ethics Policy
AP Unveils New Values and Ethics Policy
By Miki Johnson
Published: November 30, 2005 1:20 PM ET
NEW YORK

The Associated Press released an updated "statement of news values and principles" today in a move AP Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll said was meant to provide for more transparency.

The policy, which is posted on the AP's Web site, combines information about reporter conduct from different AP manuals under a new preamble designed to enunciate the wire service's ethical standards.

"We really wanted to express a higher purpose we all feel about what we do," Carroll explained.

The preamble enumerates practices that constitute "ethical behavior," advising staff to strive to identify sources, not plagiarize, not misidentify themselves to get information, and quickly deal with any questions of abuse.

Although certain phrases in the anonymous source section such as call to mind recent sourcing scandals -- "The description of a source must never be altered without consulting the reporter" -- Carroll said a combination of issues raised in the past five years had prompted the detailed look at anonymous sourcing.

The statement is intended as a resource for new AP employees, pulling together information from all formats, but Carroll acknowledges it is also a step toward the transparency the statement lists as "critical to our credibility with the public and our subscribers."
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Miki Johnson ([email protected]) is a reporter at E&P.

With Newspaper Cuts Come New Libel Concerns
With Newspaper Cuts Come New Libel Concerns
By Randall Bezanson and Gilbert Cranberg
November 30, 2005

In the not-too-distant future, plaintiffs in libel cases may realize they have been aiming at the wrong targets in going after reporters and editors. In shorthanded newsrooms where reporters must scramble to fill space and editors don't have sufficient time to verify their work, blame for flawed stories might just reside with corporate management.

The sequence and scenario are increasingly familiar at newspapers from Los Angeles to New York. The script: newspaper revenue lags and the stock price dips, so expenses -- travel, training, newsprint and people -- are cut. All of these belt-tightening measures exact a toll on a newspaper's quality, but none more so than reduced staff.

The observation by veteran editor Gene Roberts that he had heard of papers that improved with fewer people, but has yet to see one, is a reminder of the central role played by creative people -- copy editors, reporters, editors -- in producing the daily news report.

Yet, because newspapers are labor-intensive, payroll is where the big savings are, and corporate executives looking to shore up stock prices and to keep investors satisfied inevitably fix their attention on eliminating staff by buyouts, attrition, and/or layoffs. In our judgment, editorial staff is a legally risky place for a news corporation to economize.

It would not be surprising if, in the not-too-distant future, plaintiff lawyers in libel cases realize they have been aiming at the wrong targets by going after reporters and editors instead of the actions by corporate management.

Reporters and editors are the focus of attention in libel actions because they are seen as immediately responsible for the errors that rile plaintiffs. Reporters and editors, however, do not create the conditions under which they work. As my partners and I have written, those conditions "are often major contributing factors to, if not chiefly responsible for, errant reporting and editing." If reporters in a shorthanded newsroom must scramble to fill space so that they have insufficient time to verify their work, or if overloaded editors cannot adequately supervise newsroom staff, and under-trained or overwhelmed copy desks fail to ride herd on error, blame for the flawed story that appears in print cannot in fairness rest solely on those in the newsroom who handled the story.

Nevertheless, it's the hapless reporters and editors who are grilled in depositions, whose every step is scrutinized and who are considered at fault for defamatory falsehoods. Seldom, if ever, are CEOs and publishers interrogated about their role in the editorial process. They should be. After all, the budgets they impose are central to a newspaper's quality, including its ability to produce accurate and reliable journalism.

The press has undergone a sea change in recent decades, marked by consolidation and the rise of publicly traded newspaper companies. A few of these companies have managed to co-exist with Wall Street with minimum inroads in their public-service mission. Too-often for comfort, however, newspaper companies nowadays look and behave like any other business bent on maximizing profits, with the world of stock options and bonuses tied mainly to meeting financial objectives intruded even in newsrooms.

So when newspaper company executives, perhaps mindful how stock analysts will regard the next quarterly results, set budgets that create serious risk of shoddy journalism, victims of that journalism deserve an opportunity to fix the blame where it belongs. By not focusing libel suits on corporate decisions, looking instead only at the reporter's actions, the law is perversely freeing corporate executives to knowingly diminish news and its commitment to truth as long as it is done in corporate offices, not in the newsrooms. And the corporate executives seem to be taking full advantage of this newfound, and unwelcome, freedom.
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About the Authors: Randall Bezanson is professor of law at the University of Iowa. Gilbert Cranberg is former editor of the Des Moines Register's opinion pages. They co-authored, with John Soloski, "Libel Law and the Press: Myth and Reality" and "Taking Stock: Journalism and the Publicly Traded Newspaper Company." Their Iowa Law Review article, "Institutional Reckless Disregard for Truth in Public Defamation Actions Against the Press" (90 Iowa Law Review 887, 2005), was selected for the 2005-2006 edition of the First Amendment Law Handbook (Thomson/West,) a collection of notable essays on First Amendment issues.