Journalism's pangs of ethical conscience

And your views on this BBB?

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.

Media feared being cut off from big stories by Bush adm.


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.

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.