Media silent when administration targets news sources

Posted on May 8, 2012 | 1 Comment

When President Obama addressed the American Society of News Editors convention last month, the real news was what didn’t happen. The watchdogs didn’t bark. No discouraging word from the gathering of 1,000 of the country’s top news people, facing a president whose administration has led a vigorous attack on journalism’s most indispensable asset—its sources.

Obama took office pledging tolerance and even support for whistleblowers, but instead is prosecuting them with a zeal that’s historically unprecedented. His Justice Department has conducted six prosecutions over leaks of classified information to reporters. Five involve the Espionage Act, a powerful law that had previously been used only four times since it was enacted in 1917 to prosecute spies.

Some spies. We’re no longer in the era of Aldrich Ames, Robert Hanssen or Kim Philby, infamous Cold War turncoats.

Instead, there’s Thomas Drake, a career official of the National Security Agency, who faced 35 years in prison for telling a Baltimore Sun reporter about what The New York Times called “a potential billion-dollar computer boondoggle.” At stake was bureaucratic embarrassment, not national security. (The case against Drake collapsed last summer.)

Then there’s Shamai Leibowitz, a translator for the FBI, who believed he had intercepted evidence of illegal influence-peddling by the Israeli embassy. When his boss wouldn’t act, he leaked transcripts to a blogger. He got 20 months.

Ex-CIA agent John Kiriakou was indicted in January for allegedly identifying a Guantanamo interrogator (who was not working undercover;) Stephen Kim, a State Department analyst, allegedly told a reporter for Fox News—wait for it—that the U.S. was worried North Korea might respond to new UN sanctions by testing another A-bomb; and Jeffrey Sterling, who allegedly disclosed a botched CIA operation in Iran that was described in a 2006 book by a Times reporter.

And there’s the biggest case, the court martial of Bradley Manning, the Army private accused of engineering the mammoth dumps of U.S. military and diplomatic data that Wikileaks, the online whistleblower network, turned over to leading newspapers in 2010 and 2011.

The administration seems undeterred by the scanty evidence that any of these defendants was out to hurt the country, a mainstay ingredient of espionage, and the Manning judge has even warned prosecutors they must show he believed he was “aiding the enemy” or she would toss the most serious charge against him. Continue reading →

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Cruelty and truth-telling in the NFL

Posted on April 23, 2012 | 4 Comments

Inside the nasty question of whether gratuitous mayhem is a strategic element of pro football is a question of a different kind. It involves former New Orleans Saints standout Steve Gleason and a film-maker named Sean Pamphilon, who’s making a documentary about Gleason’s struggle with the degenerative disease that is slowly taking his life.

This raises issues of trust and discretion, of the obligations the person who chronicles a life has to the person who’s living it. It’s also about the often brittle reception given to anybody who sees wrongs that need exposing, takes a deep breath, and blows the whistle.

For the past year Pamphilon, who previously made a well-received film about ex-Miami Dolphin Ricky Williams, has been working closely with Gleason on a feature-length documentary. Gleason was diagnosed with amytrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) in early 2011. He last played for the Saints in 2006 but has maintained warm ties to the organization. He has access to Saints facilities, he’s invited to watch games from choice seats, and he even received a Super Bowl ring, although he left before their 2010 championship.

So it wasn’t surprising that Gleason—and the film-maker—were in the Saints’ locker room in January when defensive coordinator Gregg Williams delivered the fierce pre-game speech that later cost Williams his job and became powerful evidence in the National Football League’s investigation into whether players were instructed, and even paid, to mangle opponents.

Williams literally targeted specific San Francisco 49ers his defense would face in the next day’s playoff. He identified physical vulnerabilities for his boys go after: an ankle here, a knee there and, especially, heads—a particularly choice comment at a time when the NFL was finally acknowledging the horrific toll of serial concussions.

Pamphilon, the film-maker, recorded Williams’ clubhouse exhortations. Earlier this month he posted the audio on his website, and it was clear the tape would play a role in the league’s two-month-old investigation.

Still, the release hasn’t been universally applauded.  

“Sean Pamphilon is a coward and should be ashamed for taking advantage of Steve Gleason!” Saints safety Malcolm Jenkins tweeted. Continue reading →

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Lessons of Watergate for the new media age

Posted on April 9, 2012 | 4 Comments

The shadow of Watergate falls only lightly across the U.S. political landscape. Instead, the epic scandal is discernible mainly in the absence of the evils that engendered it. Even during the panicky post-9/11 era, when the temptation to ignore the law at times overwhelmed good judgment, never were even the most zealous of Bush-Cheney toadies accused of using the machinery of state to punish partisan adversaries.

No, that was a uniquely Nixonian response to political challenge: Shadowy operatives with national security credentials tapped phones of columnists; dissidents were burgled and bullied; critics had their taxes audited; black bag operations were authorized at cabinet level and above.

That was Watergate, and since it cost Richard Nixon his presidency it seems now to have been banished from the political sphere, an absence that is rarely noticed. So Watergate touches the political culture only faintly.

But for journalists it’s quite a different matter: For them, Watergate remains the defining event of the past half-century. It was a towering moment of heroism, an episode of legendary stature in which journalism’s foundational purposes were triumphantly validated and a drift toward despotism was stopped, all thanks to a single-minded dedication to the craft of determined reporting.

And it has been a powerful inspiration for the two generations of journalists that came since. “We’re all the sons and daughters of Watergate,” as Jeff Leen, investigations editor of The Washington Post, told a gathering at the American Society of News Editors annual conference in Washington last week.

Leen’s comment came during a remarkable panel marking the 40th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, when burglars hired by the Nixon re-election campaign were busted while trying to plant listening devices at Democratic Party headquarters. (The anniversary isn’t until June, but nobody seemed to care.)

The ASNE panel included both reporting stars of The Post’s historic investigation, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. No less important, in the front row of the audience were their then-editor, Ben Bradlee, now 90, and Donald Graham, CEO of the Post organization, whose late mother Katherine, then publisher, stood firm before the fierce counterattack of the Nixon cabal.

The panel’s ostensible topic was how the media would handle that affair today, in a radically different informational world. Now, with cascading opportunities for news to come to light and for informants to go public at dizzying speed, and with a burgeoning corps of amateur and semi-pro sleuths and commentators, wouldn’t the secrets of the vast conspiracy have surfaced months sooner, with no need for two reporters to place calls, ring doorbells and trudge along with notebooks and questions?

Surely nowadays an election-season break-in at opposition headquarters would trigger an informational avalanche, and the mystery would unravel in days, rather than the nearly two years of courthouse and congressional hearings that it took to eviscerate Nixon’s administration and force him out.

But the panel was skeptical, and it was hard not to wonder whether, paradoxically, exposing a conspiracy of that scope might actually be harder Continue reading →

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Flawed pleas for overlooked causes

Posted on March 26, 2012 | 1 Comment

In the news have been two unusual stories, both of them exposing outrageous abuse of innocents abroad, neither one broken by what we normally consider the news media. Instead they were launched by zealous outsiders from the edges of the informational ecosystem, and were fiercely embraced, until their claims were scrutinized and found wanting.

That flight path—from fringe to mainstream and from acclaim to skepticism–is worth looking at. It says something about the way various media play together and, at times, slap each other around. And for traditionalists, it’s also reassurance that the arduous work of getting the story right remains irreplaceable, no matter how polished the message and how compelling the cause.

The first story originated with the release this month, online, of a half-hour film, “Kony 2012,” from a nonprofit organization called Invisible Children. The movie, an energetic piece of agit-prop from a group with strong evangelical moorings, is the centerpiece of a PR campaign to bring to justice a Central African warlord named Joseph Kony. For years, his brutal insurgency conscripted little boys as killers and little girls as sex slaves.

Although he has been at it since the 1980s and was indicted by the International Criminal Court in 2005, the success of “Kony 2012” gave him unparalleled notoriety. Downloaded some 100 million times, it has drawn a gush of celebrity support.

The second story was the public radio broadcast of a powerful expose by a Chicago monologuist named Mike Daisey on working conditions in some of the vast Chinese sweatshops that assemble Apple Inc.’s coolest toys. Daisey had Continue reading →

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Blunder on the right

Posted on March 12, 2012 | 10 Comments

Watershed moments don’t announce themselves, and they’re not easy to spot in the flickering news of the day. But I think in recent weeks something of historic importance has been happening to the U.S. right-wing media establishment: It’s in trouble.

Consider first the continuing scandal enveloping the Rupert Murdoch dynasty. Their giant News Corp. owns two key conservative organs: The Wall Street Journal—whose editorialists are among the most influential ideological forces on the right—and Fox News, which pioneered the reinvention of cable news as a partisan mosh pit.

Second is the broad outrage over some unusually vile utterances by the movement’s biggest media star, Rush Limbaugh, which is shaking his unrivaled, decade-long dominance of talk radio.

And third is the passing of Andrew Breitbart, 43, who in his brief career as an online provocateur had become a leading right-wing media celebrity, but whose death notices couldn’t help but recall that his notoriety rested on stunts that were deceitful and cruel, when not downright fraudulent. Continue reading →

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Threat to online privacy starts with the way the Internet makes money

Posted on February 27, 2012 | Leave a comment

There’s something quaint about the ruling last week from an appeals court in Indiana concerning an anonymous comment posted on The Indianapolis Star’s website. The 2009 posting suggested a local notable had embezzled money from a troubled project, and he wanted to sue for defamation.

Trouble is, he didn’t know whom to sue because the author of the posting used a make-believe name. The newspaper wouldn’t help because it believed the writer deserved protection as a confidential news source. The court ruled, essentially, that if presented with compelling evidence that the posting was false and damaging, the trial court could order the author identified.

It’s not the wisdom of decision that interests me. It’s the way that courts, when they address the nettlesome question of Internet privacy, do so with care, transparency, and precision.

That’s what is so quaint. Because those same values have almost no role in the way the big, sweeping contours of Internet privacy are taking shape in the new millennium.

Instead, they’re emerging from a corporate-government kabuki that is as transparent as the online Terms of Service Agreements we users thoughtlessly sign: Giant Internet companies introduce glittering services that lubricate the invisible process of appropriating and sharing information about their customers; then, once outraged users get wise to what’s happening, the companies launch new measures to protect privacy; next, those safeguards are exposed as ineffectual, the government gets annoyed, the Internet companies circle back and try again, settlements are reached, checks are written.

And the corporate search goes on, unstoppably, for clever new ways to flush out, capture and make money from user data. Continue reading →

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Sex, lies, and the pregnancy that never was

Posted on February 13, 2012 | 4 Comments

Gaby Rodriguez was a 17-year-old high school honor student in Yakima, Wash., when she hit upon an imaginative senior project on teen pregnancy. She would declare she was pregnant. In the months that followed, as she bulked up with a home-made prosthesis, she would log the comments of friends, family and classmates to her condition.

Rodriguez got approval from her teacher and principal, even the schools superintendent. Only her mother, boyfriend and one or two intimates were in on the ruse. In April, after six and a half months, she came clean during a school assembly, where she passed out index cards on which she had recorded remarks she had overheard and had students read them aloud.

Then she pulled the pregnancy bump from beneath her pullover. “I’m fighting against those stereotypes and rumors,” she said, “because the reality is I’m not pregnant.” She was warmly applauded by her fellow students, and lavishly praised by her teachers.

After the local paper, the Yakima Herald-Republic, broke the story, it became a minor sensation, and was widely reported here and abroad. Rodriguez did celebrity turns on ABC’s Good Morning America and NBC’s Today Show. She’s writing a book. By the time she formally presented the results of her experiment in May, she was no longer speaking to reporters, on instructions of her literary agent. A Lifetime Channel movie, “The Pregnancy Project,” starring Alexa Vega as Rodriguez, debuted last month.

I had missed this affair until I got an e-mail from a former colleague, Harris Meyer, an award-winning journalist and ex-city editor at the Yakima paper. Meyer was alarmed by the generally uncritical way in which the media had embraced and extolled Rodriguez’s project which, he noted, rested on a sweeping deception. It was “a case of unethical human experimentation,” he wrote, “ill-conceived and potentially dangerous.”

The media did swoon. “I admire her so much,” her principal said on Good Morning America. “Her courage, her creativity, her strength.” The segment ended: “Gaby plans to present her findings to community leaders to help young Continue reading →

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