Reportage Medialog

Murray Waas provides some good commentary in Prospect (and more in his blog) on the Fitzgerald’s Plame Inquiry. He notes how reporting on an investigation about self serving anonymous leaks is now being driven by another series of what seem suspiciously like self serving anonymous leaks.

The unnamed lawyer also told both the Times and the Post that it was Novak who first broached the subject of Plame with Rove, with Novak saying that he had heard that Plame worked for the CIA. Both newspapers quoted the attorney as saying that Rove responded, “I heard that, too.”

The coverage underscores the secrecy surrounding Fitzgerald’s grand-jury investigation. The few leaks that constitute public knowledge of the investigation’s progress have largely come from one side: the defense attorneys’. And what they have to say is oftentimes self-serving, misleading, and in some cases untrue. Their all-too-willing collaborators have been the nation’s leading newspapers.

The fallout from the Plame affair continues, while Judy Miller sits in jail. A good piece in the Washington Post pretty much summarises what is known to date. One interesting piece of the chronology to emerge is how close Bush and Powell got to the event. One day after Karl Rove had a conversation with Robert Novak in which Rove now claims Novak told him about Plame, Bush and Powell set off for Africa.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who was on the trip, carried with him a memo containing information about Plame, as well as other intelligence on the yellowcake claim. It is on this trip that, prosecutors believe, some White House aides might have learned about Plame.

The origin of the Plame information is central to the case. Prosecutors are trying to determine if White House officials shared information about Plame based on the State Department memo, or from conversation with reporters, as Rove has testified, or somewhere else. If it turns out Plame’s identity was learned from the memo, it would undermine the GOP defense that Rove and other administration officials were simply discussing information they had learned from reporters.

While the coincidence of this trip proves nothing concrete, the very coincidence of Powell, Bush, various aides, reporters and confidential documents is certainly interesting. Could it be that Miller is protecting Powell or someone on his staff who has not really come under the gaze of the inquiry?

The other element of the case that is clear from the report is that the court decision over Miller and Cooper, and Time’s collusion with that order, is having an impact on journalism:

The showdown over sources has already impeded at least two major media outlets. The Cleveland Plain Dealer, fearing criminal prosecution, has decided against publishing two investigative pieces not related to the Plame controversy because they were based on anonymous leaks. And Time reporters have said that at least two sources have told them they would no longer provide information because the company turned over documents in the Plame case.

Finally as the article concludes, although there are strict definitional issues of when, where and how that will ultimately determine whether a crime was committed, the clearly evolving story of “the investigation has exposed how an administration that publicly deplores leaking has engaged aggressively in the practice to advance its goals.” This of course is no real surprise, but we rarely get to see it laid out in the legal clarity that the resources of a special prosecutor affords.

Technorati Tags: Plame Affair

While the idea that Judy Miller is employing a redemption through martyrdom strategy is being given short shrift by those close to her many commentators are noting that this case is not about journalism in the abstract it is very much about the current state of journalism

Thomas M. Burton, a Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent in the Chicago bureau of The Wall Street Journal, told the NYT he stood solidly behind Ms. Miller, “particularly at a time when journalists have come under scrutiny about the degree to which they can be believed and their reliance on anonymous sources.”

“The facts are complicated, but I have no doubt whatsoever that she is doing the right thing,” Mr. Burton said. “Like so many of us, she needs to send a message to the public that many of us are willing to stand up and pay the ultimate price to make news reporting possible.”

Howard Kurtz makes the point that this maybe a necessary stand but the circumstances make it very ethically grey:

Journalists, who have watched their public standing plummet in recent years, find themselves defending an abstract principle in a case in which the sources are not the sort of corporate and government whistle-blowers who were among Time’s “Persons of the Year” in 2002 but rather political insiders seemingly bent on partisan mischief.

By upholding the principle of confidentiality, said Time writer Margaret Carlson, “you’re protecting a creep.”

Kurtz also points out another strange set of circumstances:

The jailing of Miller comes during a week when Bob Woodward, once played by Robert Redford, is publishing a book about his relationship with the Watergate source known as Deep Throat. The former FBI official, W. Mark Felt, has reached a book and movie deal in which he could wind up being portrayed by Tom Hanks.

The contrast seems to capture a changing mood toward the shadowy dealmaking in which journalists extract information by promising to withhold people’s names — a practice that major news organizations now admit has been overused and abused — and sources use their anonymity to spin, settle scores or expose what they see as wrongdoing

If this is a case that is about the current state of journalism it is also a case about the current state of politics and the collusion that occurs between high level political sources with their own agendas and highly placed journalists who try their best to milk the system but who perhaps more often that not get taken for a ride by their sources - just as Miller was over WMD.

The introduction of national shield laws is not the solution to this wider problem. It may only exacerbate it. What is needed is a thorough rethink about journalism source relationships and a more rigorous attempt to evaluate the potential motive behind their play in the game.

While Judith Miller has spent her first night in jail the media are scratching their collective heads trying to work out exactly what is going on in this case and who talked to whom about what.

Did Robert Novak testify? Novak, the journalist who actually broke the story of Palme’s CIA identity, claiming two senior Bush administration officials as his sources, has refused to say whether he has testified to the Fitzgerald grand jury or not. One can only assume, given he is not facing jail time, that he has.

Was Karl Rove the source? Rove is the guy many people believe to have planted the stories and he pointedly refused to answer any questions about his involvement yesterday. This no-comment, non-denial immediately put him at the top of everyone’s list as the source.

Who was Miller’s source? Fitzgerald claimed in the Miller and Cooper case that the two reporters had at least one common source and that that source had signed a waiver. Neither reporter felt this was good enough reason to talk, presumably assuming that the waiver was general and coerced. However Cooper agreed to testify at the last minute because he was contacted directly by his source and given permission to testify. This would seem to indicate that Miller’s source is different.

Why does Fitzgerald want Miller’s source so desperately? If Fitzgerald has Novak and now Cooper and presumably under oath testimony from administration officials why is Miller’s testimony so crucial? Some have speculated that Fitgerald may need confirmatory testimony, some even that Fitzgerald is now not investigating the original crime of disclosing Palme’s identity but has moved on to trying to nail someone for perjured testimony.

What about Miller’s story? The irony of all this is that Novak and Cooper, who actually wrote stories about Palme, are free while Miller who didn’t write anything is in jail. So what was the story that Miller was working on and why didn’t she put it to print. Could it be that Miller was working on a story about the source of the disclosure rather than the disclosure itself? Altercation (via Hardcopy) even reports on the possibility that Miller told Rove about Palme in the first place!

Why protect a political hack? This is the question that does not seem to be on many journalist’s agenda. The leaking of Palme’s identity was clearly a malicious retaliatory smear campaign designed by a political operative to undermine the credibility of an opponent, an act that may have also broken national security laws. This does not seem like the type of situation under which confidentiality should be given or protected. If there is an argument about journalist/source confidentiality it is about exposing government corruption not assisting it.

Is Miller stage managing the whole thing? In a breath taking piece of cynical commentary the LA Times‘ Rosa Brooks floats the possibility that Miller is staging the whole thing as a way of redeeming herself for her serious ethical lapses on WMD reportage:

If a source with a clear political motivation passes along classified information that has no value for public debate but would endanger the career, and possibly the life, of a covert agent, is a journalist ethically permitted to “out” the no-good sneak? You bet. And if the knowledge that they can’t always hide behind anonymity has a “chilling effect” on political hacks who are eager to manipulate the media in furtherance of their vested interests, that’s OK with me.

But Miller still won’t testify. Even though, ethically, there should be no obligation to go to jail to cover for a sleazeball.

It’s possible (though not likely) that Miller is covering for a genuine whistle-blower who fears retaliation for fingering, gee, Karl Rove, for instance, as the real source of the leak.

But I have another theory. Miller’s no fool; she understood the lesson of the Martha Stewart case: When you find yourself covered with mud, there’s nothing like a brief stint in a minimum-security prison to restore your old luster.

Editor and Publisher summarises the none to glowing early reviews of Bob Woodward’s Deep Throat book, The Secret Man:

One of the leading political writers of today, Ron Brownstein of the Los Angeles Times, declares: “If Bob Woodward were in journalism school, his professor might have handed back his new book, ‘The Secret Man,’ as incomplete.”

And USA Today’s chief book critic, Bob Minzesheimer, today writes: “Woodward’s book is filled with as many questions as answers. It’s more about Woodward than Felt. It’s fascinating and frustrating, revealing and disingenuous, self-critical and self-serving.”

Meanwhile, in a Time magazine item, Alicia Shepard (who is writing a biography of Woodward and Bernstein) takes this shot: “Bob Woodward’s memoir … doesn’t shed much new light on Watergate. But it does tell us a lot about how Woodward, the journalist who helped bring down a President, cowered around his secret source, W. Mark Felt.”

In his review, Ron Brownstein calls it an “intermittently engaging but ultimately slight memoir” and says Woodward “fails to answer the most important question remaining after Felt unveiled his identity in a Vanity Fair story: Why? Why did a career FBI agent who had ascended to the second-ranking position in the bureau, and who didn’t think much of the press, leak such critical information about the scandal to Woodward?

It seems to me that the answer to that question isn’t very difficult to answer. It has to do with thwarted ambition. Felt’s personal ambition to head the FBI was thwarted by Nixon but also Felt obviously thought that Nixon was thwarting the very agency that Felt had helped Hoover create. This is of course different to the traditional whistle blower’s concern for justice because the agency that Felt and Hoover had created had very little to do with justice. Felt himself only avoided jail time via a Reagan pardon over some of his dodgy practices. But for Woodward to admit or speculate about any of this would be to blow the myth of Watergate sky high. Once Felt’s ambition was showing then maybe Woodward’s own ambition would also be more carefully scrutinised.

Just stumbled on this article from the Observer (via Seansblog) which argues that blogging is not another sign of the degenerating public sphere, in fact it will strengthen journalism and make it more accountable. Interestingly, like the article on citizen media from the NYT that I just blogged about, this article is also from the business section. People are finally realising that blogging is not just a pajama game it is emerging as part of a new suite of practices that will be integral to the future of the business of journalism.

What’s happening is a small but significant change in our media ecology. All journalists worth their salt have always known that out there are readers, listeners or viewers who know more about a story than they do. But until recently, there was no effective way for this erudition or scepticism to find public expression. Letters to the editor rarely attract public attention - or impinge on the consciousness of journalists.

Blogging changes all that. Ignorant, biased or lazy journalism is instantly exposed, dissected and flayed in a medium that has global reach. (If you doubt that, ask Dan Rather and CBS.)

Conversely, good reporting and intelligent commentary is passed from blog to blog and spreads like wildfire beyond the jurisdiction in which it was originally published. This can only be good for journalism in the long run, if only because, as my mother used to say, sunlight is the best disinfectant.

Technorati Tags: blogging and journalism

A mainstream North Carolina newspaper, The News and Record, is jumping feet first into the civic journalism according to the New York Times:

A planned overhaul of The News & Record’s Web site that is to begin next week, is a potent symbol of a transformation taking place across the country, where top-down, voice-of-God journalism is being challenged by what is called participatory journalism, or civic or citizen journalism.

Under this model, readers contribute to the newspaper. And they are doing so in many forms, including blogs, photos, audio, video and podcasts. Whether such efforts can revive revenue for newspaper publishers is an open question. But with gloomy financial forecasts and declines in circulation, some papers are starting to see participatory journalism as their hope for reconnecting with their audiences.

The transformation is a slow one and is predicated on an already active community according to the editor John Robinson who is upfront about his motives.

The paper, with a circulation around 100,000 that has not increased significantly for almost two decades, has been open about its audience-participation plans, discussing them with readers and seeking direction from them along the way.

Greensboro, a city of 229,000 in the gently rolling hills of central North Carolina with seven colleges nearby, was fertile territory for the town square idea. “Greensboro had a pretty strong blogosphere before we came on the scene, and we were trying to understand it and fit in,” said John Robinson, the paper’s 52-year-old editor, who has been the engine behind the transformation here.

“They were commenting on civic affairs and what the city council did and all the dumb things The News & Record did, and that annoyed me because they were misinformed,” he said. “But they were scooping us. They knew things that were going on that we didn’t, in the schools and other places. There was power in what they were doing.”

Interestingly this is a business oriented project as much as a journalism project and the News and Record are grappling with an appropriate business model.

Robin Saul, president and publisher of The News & Record, said the paper was waiting for more marks of success before putting money into the online project and was likely to put it into the sales staff first. “You don’t invest resources until you’re sure there will be a return,” he said. Ann Morris, the managing editor, acknowledged that the business model is “what we lose sleep over.”

“Advertisers are very conservative,” Ms. Morris said. “And the idea that we’re going to be able to bridge this gap from traditional department store retail advertising to all sorts of different ways of generating revenue online - through e-mail, through selling databases, through things we haven’t even thought of yet - that’s a big bridge.”

It is encouraging to see more companies taking the ideas of participatory journalism seriously but Steve Outing from Poynter makes a useful cautionary comment that reminds us that there is still a lot of work to be done before we really understand how to do civic journalism.

“I don’t think we’re anywhere near figuring this citizen journalism/grass-roots media thing out,” he said in an e-mail message. “I do think that if news organizations think that they’re going to have everybody be amateur (nonpaid) ‘journalists,’ they need to think again.”

He said people were generally intimidated by the idea of writing news articles but, as the reaction to the Asian tsunami demonstrated, they were comfortable sharing their experiences, particularly photographs.

“I think when we figure out a better way to entice people, to make it worth their while to contribute, then citizen media will start to show promise,” he said. “And I think we’ll eventually see some business models come out of this that work.”

There have been civic journalism experiments happening for the last decade or more but a combination of factors - critical mass, widespread internet access, internet activism and blogging, dissatisfaction with traditional media, declining newspaper readerships, and visionaries like Dan Gilmour and Jay Rosen who are developing critical comment and theory - mean that we are now entering a time where the movement can take itself to the next level.

Technorati Tags: citizen media

Steve Lovelady has a good Editor’s note on CJR Daily about Time’s decision. He notes that Time Editor-in-chief is both a lawyer and a journalist:

Time Inc. is a vast enterprise, publishing Time, Fortune, Money, Sports Illustrated, People, Entertainment Weekly and over 100 smaller magazines — yet, for all that, it is but one division of the megalith entertainment company Time Warner. As David Halberstam told the New York Times, Time Inc. “is a strange company and it’s a different company now, and it is really part of an entertainment complex. The journalism part is smaller and smaller. There is a great question out there: is this a journalistic company or an entertainment company?”

Once media companies become part of larger conglomerates like Time Warner, Viacom, Disney, General Electric, those companies and the journalists they employ have sharply diverging obligations. And the top editors among them find themselves with one foot in each camp. Was Pearlstine, for example, acting as a journalist, or as a corporate executive?

This highlights the political context of this decision. It is harder and harder for company’s like Time Warner to maintain a discrete journalistic culture because the commercial and the journalistic are no longer producing a creative tension they have become very unequal partners in the game. Just as I was arguing that the decision sends a “bad message” on a world scale, Lovelady notes the potential ripple effect down the US media chain:

In the meantime, Fordham University communications professor Paul Levinson told USA Today that Pearlstine’s decision sends a “bad message” to the rest of the news media, especially smaller outlets with less editorial clout than Time. “How is some local paper in a rural state going to find the courage to stand up to this kind of thing if Time doesn’t have the courage?” Levinson asked.

This morning’s Sydney Morning Herald carried a very brief report on Time’s capitulation in the Cooper/Miller case. As this is an American political scandal and an American constitutional issue this is understandable news judgment. But this is not just a local issue. Because of the developed body of free speech law in the US, legal decisions there influence the international standards of free speech legal discourse.

There is currently not much movement locally to campaign for better protections but when, perhaps in the context of a rejuvinated bill of rights discussion, it does bubble to the surface again, the inviolate American protections will no longer seem so strong an example.