jschool05

USA Today's Pentagon Reporter Resigns Under Pressure

2005-05-05T18:45:00.000-04:00

WashPost:

A USA Today Pentagon correspondent, Tom Squitieri, resigned under pressure today after the paper learned he had lifted quotes from another newspaper for a front-page story and used several other quotes, without attribution, that were cut during the editing process.

In a March 28 piece on the Army falling behind in ordering armored Humvees for Iraq, Squitieri quoted Brian Hart of Bedford, Mass., whose son was killed in the war. The same quote appeared, word for word, in the Indianapolis Star in May 2004:

"My son called me the week before he was killed. He said they were getting shot at all the time. They were in unarmored Humvees and were out there exposed to the fire. He was concerned they were going to get hit. He was literally whispering this into the phone to me. He was right. That's how he died."

Squitieri also used a three-sentence quote from Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) -- about the Pentagon having "consistently underestimated" the need for more armored Humvees -- that had appeared in the same piece in the Star, which like USA Today is a Gannett paper.

Print Insists It's Here to Stay

2005-05-02T14:41:00.000-04:00

NYT:

These faux futuristic covers are part of a $40-million, three-year campaign by the magazine industry to win advertisers and try to convince them that magazines, which have existed in the United States for nearly 250 years, are likely to be here for the next 250, come what may. At the same time, the newspaper industry has begun a multimillion-dollar, three-year campaign to make over its image in the eyes of advertisers.

The Newspaper Association of America has hired the Martin Agency of Richmond, Va. - whose clients include United Parcel Service, Geico and Miller beer - to help change the perception of newspapers from stodgy to contemporary.

The Magazine Publishers of America hired HotSpring, a brand development company in New York, for ideas on how the industry could reposition itself and the ad agency Fallon New York to reach the advertising industry. This is the first time that magazines have joined together in a large-scale marketing effort.

It is no secret: Print feels threatened as never before. Newspapers and magazines may have complained when radio and television came along. But they seem to be in full panic mode now as readers and advertisers flock to the Internet.

With their advertising campaigns, poor old print is declaring that it's not going to take it anymore.

"Enough!" John Kimball, chief marketing officer for the Newspaper Association of America, said in an interview. "You read things that the industry is dead, that the Internet is eating our lunch, that everyone is watching television, that national advertising is declining in the major metros."

"But the medium is very strong," Mr. Kimball said. "There are lots of ads in the papers, and not because those people think they're making a charitable contribution. They're investing in the medium because it's delivering results."

Newspapers are generally profitable but they leave Wall Street unenthusiastic. A Goldman, Sachs report last week warned investors that "lackluster ad revenue growth, weak circulation revenues" and "a downward trend in earnings estimates" reinforced its "negative view" of the newspaper industry. And recent disclosures of inflated circulation figures have soured the climate for some advertisers.

Words to Live By

2005-04-23T22:52:00.000-04:00

"It's only a newspaper. It eventually comes to this: Journalism itself is inadequate to tell this story. Like recorded music, which is only a facsimile of music, journalism is a substitute, a stand-in. It's what we call on when we can't know something firsthand. It's not reality, but a version of reality, and both daily deadlines and limited space make even the best journalism a reductionist version of reality."

-- Daniel Okrent, Public Editor
"The Hottest Button: How The Times Covers Israel and Palestine"
The New York Times
April 24, 2005

Symposium

2005-04-12T10:04:00.000-04:00

Congrats to Sam on putting together a great symposium on Journalism and the Law yesterday.

In other news:

CJR: Columbia Spectator 1, NYT 0

2005 Pulitzers Announced

2005-04-04T17:35:00.000-04:00

Pulitzer winners for journalism

The main Pulitzer site is down. That doesn't look good, fellas.

New on the Wire: AP to Offer Two Leads for Some Stories

2005-03-17T03:14:00.000-05:00

E&P: (via TechDirt)

NEW YORK Attention Associated Press members, prepare to get more for your money: Now available, two leads for the price of one.

In a break with tradition at the 156-year-old news cooperative, the AP will now offer two different leads for many of its news stories, the organization confirmed Wednesday.

"The concept is simple: On major spot stories -- especially when events happen early in the day -- we will provide you with two versions to choose between," the AP said in an advisory to members. "One will be the traditional 'straight lead' that leads with the main facts of what took place. The other will be the 'optional,' an alternative approach that attempts to draw in the reader through imagery, narrative devices, perspective or other creative means."

The advisory added that the change is an attempt to "enhance the value of the AP news report to your newspaper." The AP serves about 1,700 members.

. . .

An example of the differing leads:

Traditional

MOSUL, Iraq (AP) A suicide attacker set off a bomb that tore through a funeral tent jammed with Shiite mourners Thursday, splattering blood and body parts over rows of overturned white plastic chairs. The attack, which killed 47 and wounded more than 100, came as Shiite and Kurdish politicians in Baghdad said they overcame a major stumbling block to forming a new coalition government.

Optional

MOSUL, Iraq (AP) Yet again, almost as if scripted, a day of hope for a new, democratic Iraq turned into a day of tears as a bloody insurgent attack undercut a political step forward.

On Thursday, just as Shiite and Kurdish politicians in Baghdad were telling reporters that they overcame a major stumbling block to forming a new coalition government, a suicide attacker set off a bomb that tore through a funeral tent jammed with Shiite mourners in the northern city of Mosul.

Frank Rich, That's Who!

2005-03-11T15:15:00.000-05:00

Frank Rich (with a little help from Pinch and Bill Keller and Ms. Collins) steps up to the plate and says, "You know what, you motherf*ckers? It's time to bring the pain down on your ass!" In much more eloquent prose, of course.

But seriously folks, you've got to hand it to Mr. Rich. Here's a guy who clearly feels he needs to bring a level of game that would shame "the Game." This is sweet. The Jeff Gannons of the world better duck.

When people start complaining about, Ohhhhh, Frank Rich is so liberal, Ohhhhhh, "Frank Rich's rantings have now become embarrassing both to him and to The Times," I just want to say, well, "Who's got a 1500 word weekly column in the Paper of Record, and who's got a trashy, cynical, screamfest tv show an Pretenda-News Network?"

This is going to get good.
--
""In his time at The Times," Mr. Keller and Ms. Collins said in a note to the staff, "Frank Rich has repeatedly set milestones in the world of critical journalism. As a theater critic, he took his assignment beyond play-reviewing to become a ferocious and influential champion of what is good and original in the art form. As an Op-Ed columnist he pioneered a longer form of essay, which he performed while simultaneously writing in even greater depth for the magazine.

"At Arts & Leisure he developed his own brand of social criticism, in a column that combined intensive reporting, immersion in the popular culture and a unique gift for seeing connections between culture and public life."

Mr. Rich's column will be essay length, about twice the wordage of a typical Op-Ed column. It will "continue to mine the fertile field of popular culture, but with Op-Ed's greater license" for opinion writing, The Times said. In addition to his column, the expanded opinion pages will now include two other regular columnists each Sunday, as well as a guest columnist and the Public Editor column, moving from Page 2 of the Week in Review.

Mr. Keller and Ms. Collins said Mr. Rich would have offices in both the Op-Ed department and the arts section, where he will be the senior adviser to the culture editor. As he has for the last two years, they said, he will monitor trends in the cultural worlds and recruit and develop talent. Mr. Rich's final Arts & Leisure column will appear on March 27. His Op-Ed column will begin on April 10."
--

Who is a journalist?

2005-03-10T17:06:00.000-05:00

Slate tackles the issue.

Win One For CJR

2005-03-09T13:49:00.000-05:00

This, rock fans, is what I'm talking about. I challenge anyone to produce a better account of this whole messed up debacle/constitutional crisis/future-of-western civ-at-stake/kind of dorky-I-suppose subject which we now find ourselves obsessed with.
--
Columbia Journalism Review
Attack At The Source
Why the Plame case is so scary

By Douglas McCollam

In November 1969 Paul Branzburg, a twenty-eight-year-old reporter with the Louisville Courier-Journal, spent a few days hanging out with two local men for a story about how they planned to clear $5,000 making and selling a batch of hashish. The resulting article, THE HASH THEY MAKE ISN'T TO EAT, ran in the paper’s November 15 edition. In it Branzburg, a graduate of Harvard Law School and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, revealed that he had changed the men’s names to protect their identity. The article was meant, Branzburg’s lawyer would later say, to inform readers about the views of “hippies and dissidents” who were becoming an increasingly influential presence in American life. For their part, “Larry” and “Jack” said the main reason they let Branzburg do the story was to “make the narcs mad.”

Mission accomplished. Shortly after the story ran, Branzburg was subpoenaed by the Jefferson County district attorney to appear before a state grand jury investigating the local drug trade. He was asked twice to name the men he had observed in possession of marijuana. He refused to answer and was held in contempt of court. Undaunted, Branzburg later wrote another exposé, this time detailing pot use in Frankfort, Kentucky’s capital city. He was again hauled before a grand jury and asked about the criminal acts he had observed. He again refused to testify.

During the next two years Branzburg’s appeal wound its way up to the United States Supreme Court and became the lead case in a series of disputes concerning what was then called the “newsman’s” privilege: the right of reporters not to reveal the sources for their stories, even if those sources were observed engaging in criminal conduct. It was the first time the Court had squarely faced the issue, and in vigorous questioning of Branzburg’s lawyer, Edgar Zingman, the justices struggled to outline the scope of the privilege they were being asked to recognize. Wasn’t Branzburg asking for the right to exist above the law? Justice Potter Stewart wondered. And, if the privilege was based on the First Amendment’s free speech guarantee, couldn’t any citizen claim the same right to refuse to testify? Who qualified for the privilege? wondered Chief Justice Warren Burger. Would it cover a private citizen who investigated a crime and then wrote a letter to the editor about it? How about pamphleteers? Would the authors of the Federalist Papers have qualified as “newsmen”?

Zingman bobbed and weaved, arguing for a broad privilege unless there was cause to believe the reporter had specific information about ongoing threats to national security, or a person’s life or liberty, and there was no other way to obtain the information. The Court rejected the argument. In a 5-4 decision, the Court found that there was no constitutional basis for a reporter to refuse to answer questions before a grand jury about sources, provided the investigation was in good faith. “From the beginning of our country the press has operated without constitutional protection for press informants,” Justice Byron “Whizzer” White wrote for the majority, “and the press has flourished.”

I thought about White’s conclusion as I sat on a wooden bench in federal court last December, rereading the decision and waiting for arguments to begin in what many consider to be the most important test case on press freedoms since Branzburg was handed down more than thirty years ago.

Was the press still flourishing? Just a few feet away Judith Miller, of The New York Times, and Matthew Cooper, of Time magazine, stood nervously chatting with small knots of supporters in a courtroom well stocked with Washington’s fabled media elite — many of whom appeared almost as antsy as Miller and Cooper. Both reporters were appealing prison sentences of up to eighteen months for refusing to testify before a federal grand jury investigating who in the Bush administration revealed the identity of the CIA agent Valerie Plame to the press, presumably in violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. (Conspicuously absent was Robert Novak, the syndicated columnist who actually outed Plame in print.) Though Miller’s and Cooper’s cases have drawn the most attention, they are hardly the only reporters recently to run afoul of the law.

* In Rhode Island the investigative reporter James Taricani is serving six months of house arrest for refusing to say who gave him an incriminating videotape made in connection with a corruption investigation.
* In Washington a federal judge is holding five reporters in contempt for refusing to name their sources in stories about Wen Ho Lee, the nuclear scientist named by the press as suspected of passing secrets to the Chinese.
* In California FBI agents raided the home of Victor Conte, not to gather evidence for the government’s case against Conte’s BALCO labs, the company alleged to have provided designer steroids to star athletes, but to discover who leaked grand jury testimony from the case to the San Francisco Chronicle.
* In addition to leading the investigation into the Plame case, Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald is also seeking the phone records of Miller and her fellow Times reporter Philip Shenon in an investigation into an Islamic charity suspected of being tied to terrorism.
* The Justice Department has also been asked to launch an investigation into who leaked details of a secret satellite program, code-named “Misty,” to The Washington Post.

When those cases are viewed together, many see them as constituting a moment of peril for journalism. Reporters have never been popular, but there has long been a sense that most Americans understood, in the words of Justice Stewart, that though the press could be “abusive, untruthful, arrogant, and hypocritical,” it was nonetheless necessary to the health of the republic. No more. The reason given for this attitudinal shift depends largely on where a person stands on the ideological spectrum. Liberals see the change as an inevitable result of the reactionary acid drip that has been eroding public esteem for the press since at least the civil rights movement. Conservatives view the switch as an overdue comeuppance for a smug bunch of elitists who appointed themselves as a praetorian guard of American civic life. A more neutral perspective may chalk up the change to a predictable backlash to the proliferation of invasive media in the information age. Whatever the reason, all sides agree that public regard for journalism is at a low ebb. As Ken Auletta recently put it in a piece in The New Yorker about how the White House views the media, the press is now seen as “simply another interest group, and, moreover, an interest group that’s not nearly as powerful as it was.”

Part of the frustration for critics of the press has historically been its thick insulation from liability. First Amendment guarantees make libel actions costly and difficult to win, particularly for public figures. But as Branzburg made clear, those First Amendment protections may guard the final product but don’t necessarily extend to newsgathering. In the 1990s, corporations began exploiting that vulnerability, challenging journalists not so much on the truth of what they wrote or broadcast, but over how they obtained their information. Thus reporters might find themselves accused of “tortious interference with contract” for “inducing” an employee to breach a confidentiality agreement, or sued for fraud if they lied on job applications to go to work for a company undercover. These claims were not slam-dunk winners in court, but for a press that increasingly was a small appendage of a corporate conglomerate, the danger of having to record large judgments on a balance sheet had the desired chilling effect. The key to the threat, of course, was the conviction that the public (read jurors) hated the media even more than it hated big corporations.

In the new century, government and private lawyers seem to have taken their cue from corporations, and begun their own attacks on newsgathering. In particular, they have homed in on the right of reporters to keep sources confidential. “This is by far the most activity I’ve ever seen attacking journalists’ sources,” says Nathan Siegel, a Washington lawyer who represents several media companies. “If you’d told me five years ago I’d be spending the majority of my time fighting over whether reporters could keep sources confidential, you could have knocked me over with a feather.”

Not everyone is clanging the alarm. Jack Shafer, the media critic for Slate, thinks the current run of cases are significant but have received inflated coverage because they involve a lot of prominent Washington reporters. “There is a little bit of hysterical nonsense going on here,” says Shafer. “The fact is, prosecutors demand sources all the time.” Geoffrey Stone, a law professor at the University of Chicago, says that by not testifying about an illegal leak Miller and Cooper are trying to put themselves beyond the reach of the law. “There is no legitimate interest in shielding criminal conduct,” says Stone. “It’s an awkward case to be asserting a privilege on.” Bob Woodward, perhaps the preeminent investigative reporter of his time, believes in supporting journalists who are protecting sources. Yet he sees the use of confidentiality in this case — to hide the sources who identified Valerie Plame — as a weak reed to lean on. “I use confidential sources more than most anyone,” Woodward concedes, “but it has to be worth the risk involved. I don’t think outing Plame was worth the risk.”

To Judith Miller, however, focusing on the significance of the Plame leak misses the larger issue of whether the government should be able to compel a reporter’s testimony about sources. “I’ve always been the same reporter,” Miller told me. “I’m fanatical about protecting sources because I think they are crucial to reporting and investigative reporting in particular.” In this she has the clear backing of the Times brass. “We didn’t choose this fight, but we’ve got a reporter who feels honor bound and there is a risk she could go to jail,” says Bill Keller, the Times’s executive editor. “That’s not something we can stand by and watch.” Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. is even more adamant, placing the Plame case alongside other landmark legal stands the paper has taken on freedom of the press. “We know Washington works on the basis of confidential sources,” Sulzberger says. “If we can’t protect those people we’ll be filling our paper with press releases and agency reports.”

OUT OF AFRICA
Of the current cases winding through the justice system, it is Plame that poses the most immediate threat to journalism. To understand why, a quick review of the background of the case is useful. On July 6, 2003, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson (Valerie Plame’s husband) wrote a long op-ed piece for The New York Times critical of the Bush administration. In February 2002 Wilson had been sent to Africa by the CIA to check out information that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy enriched uranium from Niger to help make a nuclear bomb. The charge had been central to the administration’s case for a preemptive invasion of Iraq. But in his piece, “What I Didn’t Find in Africa,” Wilson largely debunked the story and essentially accused the administration of manipulating the evidence to help justify the invasion.

A week later the syndicated columnist Robert Novak, thought to have close ties to the administration, outed Plame in a column titled “The Mission to Niger.” The piece, which claimed that Plame had chosen her husband for the mission, was widely seen as payback by the administration against Wilson. (The column actually said several laudatory things about Wilson.) Figuring out what Novak has or has not told the grand jury about his sources on the story, identified in his piece only as “two senior administration officials,” is the Washington press corps’ favorite new parlor game. Novak has refused to speak on the matter and turned down my request for an interview, as did his lawyer, James Hamilton.

In the days following Novak’s column, a cry went up that not only had the Bush administration shivved a legitimate critic, but it had broken the law to do it. Under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, a person who learns the identity of a covert agent like Plame from classified information can get ten years in jail for intentionally disclosing the agent’s identity. The law specifies that the leaker must have had access to classified information about the agent and knew that the agent was a covert operative. Despite those caveats a drumbeat began for a criminal investigation and the appointment of a special prosecutor. Among those baying the loudest for blood, it should be noted, were many of the very news organizations now at odds with the investigation.

On December 30, 2003, the Justice Department appointed Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney in Chicago, as special counsel to investigate the Plame leak. Fitzgerald, forty-three, spent thirteen years in the U.S. attorney’s office in New York, prosecuting primarily organized-crime and terrorism cases. At the time of his appointment in Plame, Fitzgerald was already locked in a dispute with the Times over whether Philip Shenon, one of its reporters, had tipped off a Chicago-based Islamic charity in December 2001 about an impending FBI raid while reporting on a story. In September 2004, Fitzgerald told the Times he was seeking Shenon’s phone records in connection with that investigation as well those of Judith Miller on a related matter. “It’s really curious, if not suspicious, that the same prosecutor is going after confidential sources in a case that was dormant for two years until Plame perked up,” says George Freeman, the Times’s assistant general counsel.

In the months following his appointment in Plame, Fitzgerald conducted a series of interviews with top executive branch officials, including Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Karl Rove, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, and ultimately the president and vice president. He also employed an unusual tactic: he had government officials sign waivers of confidentiality regarding conversations they might have had with reporters regarding Plame. In the spring and summer of 2004, Fitzgerald issued grand jury subpoenas to at least four journalists who had reported on various aspects of the Plame leak: Miller, Cooper, Walter Pincus of The Washington Post, and Tim Russert of NBC News. A fifth reporter, Glenn Kessler of the Post, was not formally subpoenaed, but was asked to talk with Fitzgerald regarding Plame. Novak will not confirm or deny receiving a subpoena.

To those involved in the investigation it became clear that Fitzgerald was focused on Scooter Libby, Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, as a likely source for the Plame leak. In an apparent effort to remove the crosshairs from his back, Libby released several reporters from their pledges of confidentiality. Russert and Kessler then agreed to give limited testimony to Fitzgerald, simply confirming that they had not discussed Plame in certain phone calls with Libby in July. Pincus also gave testimony exonerating Libby, after a different source on Plame okayed his talking with Fitzgerald. Matt Cooper talked with Fitzgerald at Libby’s urging, but balked at providing additional evidence about other sources when he was served with a second subpoena. Judith Miller, who had reported on the Plame leak but had never written a story, refused to give any testimony at all. In October, citing Miller’s and Cooper’s refusals, U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Hogan found both reporters in contempt and sentenced them to up to eighteen months in jail unless they complied with the subpoenas.

EVERY MAN’S EVIDENCE
Two months later at their appeal, Miller and Cooper were both represented by Floyd Abrams, the New York attorney widely viewed as the dean of the First Amendment bar. But on this day Abrams wasn’t accorded much respect by the three-judge panel hearing the appeal. In particular, Judge David Sentelle repeatedly challenged Abrams to distinguish Miller’s and Cooper’s refusals to testify before the grand jury from Paul Branzburg’s similar refusal thirty-five years earlier. Abrams attempted to parry the challenge, noting that there had been significant developments in the reporter’s privilege since Branzburg. Sentelle appeared unimpressed. Judge David Tatel was less overtly hostile, but like Justice Burger in Branzburg, seemed to struggle with the question of who would qualify for a reporter’s privilege. If an Internet blogger was illegally leaked nuclear secrets and posted it on her Web site, would she be entitled to refuse to testify about her source? the judges wondered. Abrams soft-shoed a bit before conceding that, under the privilege he was seeking, she would. A collective flinch rippled through the establishment media in the gallery.

In Branzburg, the central question was whether the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of the press could be extended to protect the identity of those who give the press information. The answer was no. But a brief concurrence written by Justice Lewis Powell, the crucial fifth vote in the case, held out the hope that future developments in the law might give rise to a court-recognized privilege. And First Amendment advocates contend that the “developments” Powell foresaw have come to pass. In 1972 when Branzburg was decided, only seventeen states had reporter “shield laws,” protecting reporters from being forced to out their sources. Now thirty-one do, plus the District of Columbia. Eighteen other states have controlling cases that recognize some form of the reporter’s privilege (Wyoming is the lone holdout).

Moreover, during the past three decades, courts have proven willing to recognize that certain kinds of communication should be shielded from discovery. The most recent example came in 1996 when the Supreme Court ruled that communications between a patient and a therapist or social worker were privileged under federal law. Some see that as directly analogous to the reporter-source privilege.

But as a general rule courts believe they have the right to “hear every man’s evidence,” and privileges against testifying are not favored in the law. Over time only a few such exemptions have been endorsed, including the attorney-client privilege, the doctor-patient privilege, the priest-penitent privilege, the spousal privilege, and, most recently, the therapist privilege. The Constitution also forbids compelling people to testify against themselves.

In Plame, Miller and Cooper argue that the reporter’s privilege should now be added to that list, but fashioning a reporter’s privilege presents special challenges. Perhaps the most obvious model is the attorney-client privilege. But this privilege had a long pedigree before being formally recognized in law. In addition, the attorney-client privilege belongs exclusively to the client. If he or she waives the privilege, the attorney can be compelled to testify. In the Plame investigation, government lawyers sought to nullify the reporter’s privilege claim by getting preemptive waivers signed by potential sources. The reporters (quite rightly) viewed these form waivers as bogus and coerced — Who wouldn’t sign a waiver with a prosecutor breathing down his neck? — but Miller and Cooper are arguing that as a legal matter, a waiver by the source doesn’t really matter, that the privilege belongs to the reporter.

This position, which squares with many reporters’ idea of the privilege, would seem to make the reporter’s privilege more akin to the husband-wife privilege. There the right of confidentiality also resides with both parties to the information, and is grounded more in respect for privacy rights and the institution of marriage. It seems unlikely the federal courts will grant reporters and sources similar deference. All the other recognized privileges involve inherently private information given to members of accredited professions. Journalism, by comparison, trades in public information and is less a profession than an activity in which anyone can engage. As the courts in both Branzburg and Plame have asked, Who qualifies as a “journalist” for purposes of the privilege? Some First Amendment lawyers I spoke with see the issue as a red herring. “It’s a much simpler issue than people make it out to be,” says Ted Boutrous, a Los Angeles lawyer who represents ABC News and other media clients. “For years state legislatures have been developing this privilege and it’s never turned into a big problem.” Judith Miller agrees: “It’s an issue that courts and legislatures can decide. It shouldn’t negate the privilege just because people may disagree about it. That’s looking at the tail as opposed to the animal.”

Nonetheless, the difficulty in crafting the reporter’s privilege has led most states to grant only qualified protection to reporter-source communications. In general, all the privileges have certain exceptions, but a qualified privilege more closely resembles a straight balancing test — between the privilege and the state’s or a citizen’s interest in obtaining information — than a firm exemption. It would be as if a court could say, in effect, “Hey, we believe in the attorney-client privilege, but this was a really heinous crime, so I’m afraid your lawyer is going to have to testify against you.” Floyd Abrams argues that a qualified privilege is an arbitrary privilege, and thus isn’t enough. He asked the court to recognize an unqualified privilege, one vested with reporters, not with sources. This led Judge Sentelle to observe that Abrams was trying to give journalists a kind of superprivilege, stronger even than those afforded to lawyers, doctors, priests, or therapists. Many reporters and First Amendment advocates feel the chance of a court’s recognizing that kind of privilege is nil. “I’m not totally opposed to a reporter’s privilege,” says Michael Kinsley of the Los Angeles Times. “What upsets me is the absolutist position the New York Times people take. Arthur and Bill deny they are absolutist, but I’ve never seen any suggestion from them of what circumstances they could imagine the privilege not being granted.”

PRIVATE ACTS, PUBLIC CONSEQUENCES
One concern about Plame I heard often was that it represents a breakdown of a tacit post-Branzburg truce between prosecutors and reporters that the government wouldn’t go after reporters’ sources. There is concern that the tactics used by Fitzgerald will be replicated by lawyers in other cases. That’s already happened in at least one instance. In October Thomas Connolly, a Washington lawyer representing the former army scientist Steven Hatfill, struck an unusual deal with the Department of Justice. Connolly submitted a list of about 160 news stories concerning the government’s investigation of Hatfill in connection with the anthrax letter attacks of 2001 and asked that waivers of confidentiality be given to potential sources for the stories. The waivers were reportedly circulated to more than a hundred people in the FBI and elsewhere. “I worry that if those kinds of waivers become commonplace tools of the government or employers it could potentially be a serious impediment for getting people inside large institutions to talk,” says Bill Keller of the Times. For his part, Connolly says he’s not after the reporters, but adds that he thinks reporters in recent years have far too often served as adjuncts to government power instead of acting as a check upon it. “In some regards the press is as bloated and arrogant as the institutions they are covering,” says Connolly. The lawyer says he plans to subpoena about a dozen reporters to testify about their sources in the Hatfill investigation.

Hatfill’s case against the government was brought under the Privacy Act, a 1974 law meant to prevent government agencies from releasing personal data about private citizens. Though the Plame leak has had more publicity, some First Amendment specialists and reporters think the Privacy Act cases pose a more meaningful long-term threat to newsgathering. In addition to Hatfill’s suit, the Privacy Act is being used by Wen Ho Lee to sue the government. In that case five journalists have been found in contempt for refusing to divulge their sources. Walter Pincus of The Washington Post, who has been served subpoenas in both the Plame and Wen Ho Lee matters, says the Privacy Act is being used improperly as an alternative for those who can’t win libel actions. Wen Ho Lee “was not libeled, and what we printed was accurate and he’s pleaded guilty,” says Pincus. (Lee pleaded guilty to a single count of illegally copying nuclear data.)

Brian Sun, Lee’s lawyer, says that despite the guilty plea, many allegations made against Lee, reported principally in stories written by Jeff Gerth and James Risen in The New York Times, were inaccurate. (In 2000 the Times ran a lengthy “Editors’ Note” saying aspects of its Wen Ho Lee coverage were flawed.) Like Connolly, Sun says he’s not really after the reporters, just the people who gave them information. But also like Connolly, Sun thinks the press was irresponsible regarding his client.

Needless to say, reporters see matters differently. Bob Drogin of the Los Angeles Times, one of the reporters held in contempt in the Lee case, thinks the way the law is being used in the Hatfill and Wen Ho Lee matters raises troubling questions. “Using the Privacy Act to get reporters to reveal their sources is a very insidious assault on the First Amendment,” Drogin says. “It’s not what Congress intended.” Drogin believes that if Wen Ho Lee’s suit succeeds, it could impact every police reporter who wants a suspect’s information. “It wouldn’t be a ‘chilling effect,’” Drogin says, “It would be a blizzard.”

THE ARMY YOU'VE GOT
Though the Privacy Act cases will grind on for years, the Plame case should come to a head much sooner. On February 15, a three-judge panel of the D.C. circuit court rejected Miller’s and Cooper’s appeals. They were poised to ask for a rehearing from the full court of appeals and, failing that, to try to take the case to the Supreme Court (four justices must agree to take the case). That’s a prospect many in journalism view with alarm.

In fact, among the more than two dozen reporters, lawyers, and editors I talked to for this article there was a real concern that, far from enhancing the reporter’s privilege, the Plame case could put a stake through its heart. In part this stems from the seedy particulars of the story itself. Like the porno king who must be transformed into a First Amendment martyr, there is a sense that the Plame outing through Novak by his sources was the kind of sleazy Beltway maneuver that represents the worst use of confidential information. Moreover, as in Branzburg, any reporters getting the leaks may have directly witnessed a crime being committed, the hardest situation in which to assert a privilege. Nonetheless, with Miller and Cooper losing their appeal and facing a year and a half in jail, their publishers are forced to defend them. “It’s not like we’d have a lot of alternatives,” the Times’s counsel George Freeman told me before the appeals court decision was handed down.

Though reluctant to come right out and say so publicly, it is clear that many reporters and press advocates are upset that the Times has allowed Plame to develop into a potential seminal test of the reporter’s privilege. (Cooper and Time get a pass, because he initially tried to work with Fitzgerald.) The desire to avoid this outcome seems to have played a role, for example, in how The Washington Post dealt with the Plame investigation. Though neither Walter Pincus nor Glenn Kessler were prepared to testify about confidential communications, the paper worked to defuse the impasse with the special prosecutor and was willing to be somewhat flexible in its approach to answering the subpoenas. For example, after his source on Plame (not Libby) authorized him to talk to Fitzgerald, Pincus agreed to give a deposition in which he confirmed the time, date, and length of his conversation with the source but would not reveal the source’s identity. In general, Pincus says, privilege or no privilege, reporters should calibrate carefully before making promises of confidentiality. “I feel very strongly that we ought to distinguish between information that is meant to embarrass someone and is not attributed, and important classified information that could lose your sources their jobs or get them prosecuted,” says Pincus. Woodward, an assistant managing editor at the Post, agrees that confidential sources should be used only for important matters and clearly thinks the Plame matter didn’t meet that test. “This is not the Pentagon Papers,” Woodward dryly observes. “It’s not the case you’d choose to make law on.”

By contrast, in our interview Arthur Sulzberger directly invoked the Pentagon Papers case in justifying the Times’s hard stand in Plame. And if others are put out with Miller and the Times, it’s just as clear that Miller and the Times are less than thrilled with the tepid support they received from the Post, NBC — and Novak, who has refused any public comment on the case. “Every journalist has to live with his own conscience on this issue,” Miller says. “I don’t think it is helpful to divide the media at this point by criticizing others . . . . I’m not going to discuss what other people have decided to do.” Her lawyer is a bit more blunt: “People are right to be worried, but if they’re vexed, I’m vexed a bit by all the journalists who won’t stand with us,” Floyd Abrams says. “We’d have a lot stronger case right now if we had six in the dock instead of two.”

Sulzberger declined to “point fingers” at other media organizations, but said fear of losing the case was not a good reason not to fight it. “If you don’t stand for what you believe in, don’t risk a decision because you think you might lose, I think, quite frankly, that is a short-sighted approach.” For his part, Bill Keller says he’s not an absolutist on the reporter’s privilege and concedes that the facts in Plame aren’t ideal, but cops a line from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to explain the paper’s position: “Hey, you go to war with the army you’ve got,” Keller says.

While among First Amendment lawyers there is a lack of enthusiasm for Plame as a test case, there is also a divide over whether it will necessarily go to the Supreme Court and be precedent-setting. With the Court of Appeals reaffirming that there is no reporter’s privilege, the Supreme Court might be happy to take a pass, as it has done on several other post-Branzburg privilege cases. Since, however, the appeals court also split over the question of whether a common-law privilege has developed in the last thirty years, the Supreme Court may feel more obligated to clean up the discrepancies in the lower courts. If that happens, most lawyers think that the current Court, with its concern over privacy issues, would squarely come down on the side of the narrow reading of Branzburg. “It’s a dangerous time to take a privilege case to the Supreme Court,” says Charles Tobin, a Washington media lawyer who spent eight years as in-house counsel for Gannett Company. “I’m not optimistic. Federal courts increasingly see the administration of justice as the ultimate end that trumps all other interests.”

Several lawyers I spoke with point to a July 2003 decision by Judge Richard Posner as a potential harbinger for Plame. In that case Posner, chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, in Chicago, who has been called the most influential jurist in America, handed down a decision that many think unnecessarily gut-shot the reporter’s privilege. The case stemmed from the prosecution, in Ireland, of Michael McKevitt, a member of a violent splinter faction of the Irish Republican Army. He asked a federal court in Chicago to subpoena tape recordings made by some journalists working on a biography of a state witness in his prosecution, and the court agreed. The journalists asked the appeals court to block the trial court’s order, but the request was denied and the tapes were turned over. Then a month later Posner issued an opinion elaborating on the court’s reasoning. Posner wrote that “rather surprisingly” a large number of federal courts after Branzburg had decided that there was a reporter’s privilege, a conclusion Posner found “audacious.” Posner was dismissive of the notion that a reporter would have any basis to keep information confidential when the source did not object to its disclosure. Likewise, Posner found that courts that granted reporters a privilege on nonconfidential sources, in order to guard them from harassment or keep them from becoming an investigative adjunct to the government, were “skating on thin ice.” Rather, Posner thought, Branzburg indicated that subpoenas of journalists should be treated the same as subpoenas issued to anyone else.

Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporter’s Committee on Freedom of the Press, was among several people I spoke to who found Posner’s decision gratuitous. “For thirty years things looked pretty rosy. Then Posner writes this opinion — no briefs, no oral argument — just him reading Branzburg to say the whole idea of a reporter’s privilege is ludicrous, there is no such thing.” Dalglish thinks Posner’s opinion was an ignition switch for subsequent attacks on the reporter’s privilege. Others give the case less importance, but no one doubts Posner’s towering influence and many fear McKevitt could serve as a preview to what the Supreme Court could do with Plame.

RAISING THE SHIELD
For that reason several media companies and First Amendment advocacy groups are looking to head off a Court ruling through legislative action. A bill based on the Justice Department’s guidelines for subpoenaing a reporter’s records was introduced in the House of Representatives by Michael Pence of Indiana, a Republican, and Rick Boucher of Virginia, a Democrat. Richard Lugar, a Republican from Indiana, introduced the Senate version. Earlier, Christopher Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, introduced a federal reporter’s shield law drafted with input from the Media Law Resource Center, the Reporters Committee, and in-house lawyers for several large media companies.

Dalglish and others say the media are united as never before in seeking to get a shield law through Congress. “One thing we have going for us is that there isn’t a single pol up there who hasn’t been a confidential source,” says Dalglish, who is actively lobbying for the bill. “They have a better understanding of what’s at stake than most citizens do.”

Of course, this isn’t the first time the idea of a federal shield law has been raised. In Branzburg the Court held that Congress was free to fashion a newsman’s privilege “as narrow or broad as deemed necessary.” After the decision many lawmakers attempted to do just that. By the following winter The Washington Post reported that ninety-one representatives and seventeen senators had either introduced or cosponsored press shield laws. Hearings were held, and reporters, lawyers, and publishers testified about the need for the law. But even with a heavily Democratic Congress, locked in its own Watergate-era battles with the Nixon administration, the bills failed to pass. So it may be fairly asked what chance does a shield law have three decades later with a ruling majority not noted for its regard for the press?

Much like Plame, Branzburg arrived during a time of peril for the press. During the first two years of the Nixon administration CBS and NBC alone were served more than fifty subpoenas by the government. This magazine warned at the time that a “subpoena epidemic” was overtaking American journalism, threatening to turn reporters into a “de-facto arm of the Attorney General’s office.” Though the Justice Department adopted stricter guidelines in 1970 on subpoenaing reporters, Branzburg seemed to accelerate the trend for a time. Lawyers for Vice President Spiro Agnew, a vociferous press critic, hit eight reporters with subpoenas over leaks in the government’s criminal investigation of his financial dealings (Agnew would resign in October of 1973 in a bribery scandal). So many reporters were either in jail or facing the prospect of going there for defying subpoenas that one editor quipped to The New York Times that a hacksaw was becoming a standard issue item in the modern journalist’s tool kit.

But it is also worth noting that Branzburg was handed down just twelve days before the break-in at the Watergate Hotel in 1972 that lead to the resignation of a president and perhaps the most triumphant moment in the history of the American press. And despite all the dire predictions after Branzburg, the decision did little to impede the reporting that Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, and others did for the story. When the Committee To Re-Elect the President (CREEP) sought to pry Watergate materials from the Post, the Times, and Time magazine, a federal judge quashed the subpoena, citing the “possible chilling effect the enforcement of these subpoenas would have on the flow of information to the press and, thus, the public.”

As for Paul Branzburg, after losing at the Supreme Court he was sentenced to six months in jail. He had moved on to Michigan to work for The Detroit Free Press, but Wendell Ford, Kentucky’s governor, personally lobbied Governor William Milliken of Michigan to extradite the reporter back to the Bluegrass state for sentencing. Milliken refused and Branzburg never returned to Kentucky or served a day in jail.

Journalists are hoping for a similar outcome in the Plame case. One of the ironies of the privilege debate is that whenever freedom of the press collides with criminal investigations, both reporters and lawyers invoke the “public’s right to know” as a justification for their stand. Judith Miller and the Times have done so often and loudly in the Plame case, and though Special Counsel Fitzgerald has refrained from making public comments, the words of the prosecutor seeking to jail Peter Bridge in New Jersey in the 1970s for refusing to testify before a grand jury, may sum up his feelings: “To deter grand jury investigation would prevent the body from properly performing its public duty and would subvert the very values which defendant purports to protect.”

Part of the clash between lawyers and journalists can be attributed to their shared populist bent. As Stephen Bates, a former prosecutor for Kenneth Starr in the Whitewater investigation and literary editor of The Wilson Quarterly, notes, both reporters and prosecutors are “professional snoops — curious, analytical, skeptical. Both pursue truth and . . . both believe that their work serves society, a belief (however justified) that sometimes engenders self-righteousness, obstinacy and hypersensitivity.”

Of course, there are some major differences as well. Prosecutors have the power to put people in jail, journalists don’t, at least not directly. The resurgence in willingness of the judicial and executive branches to attack the Fourth Estate at the source is as troubling now as it was three decades ago. And back then the decision in Branzburg was greeted with calls for increased press protections from the public and politicians of both parties. Would anyone expect a similar public outcry of support today for journalists if Judith Miller and Matt Cooper go to jail?

Didn’t think so.
--
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© 2005 Columbia Journalism Review at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism

Keeping Up The Pressure!

2005-03-03T17:50:00.000-05:00

Threat to jail reporters is over the top
New York Daily News - http://www.nydailynews.com
Threat to jail reporters is over the top

Thursday, March 3rd, 2005

If not for anonymous sources, there wouldn't be a newspaper printed in this country - at least not one worth reading. Off-the-record interviews with confidential sources would be impossible. And the black box known as government would grow ever more opaque.

Bash journalists as you wish, but without them most of the corruption, sloth and ineptitude in our public institutions would never see daylight. And without being able to safeguard their confidential sources - a practice traditionally protected by the First Amendment - journalists would rarely be able to get their fingers around the facts.

"Watergate is the prime example where we needed confidential sources," said journalist Carl Bernstein of "All the President's Men" fame. "We made agreements of confidentiality with our sources back then that we honor to this day."

But now that vital confidentiality is being put at risk unnecessarily as two top national journalists face jail in a legal case that has as many holes as a city street after a snowstorm.

Rewind to July 2003 when columnist Robert Novak revealed the name of undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame, the wife of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who was then blasting the Bush administration for making bogus claims that Saddam Hussein had obtained uranium from Niger. Novak attributed the information to two senior Bush officials.

In government, of course, leaks are daily fare. But this one seemed different because it's a felony to reveal a covert federal agent's identity, according to a 1982 statute. The law, however, sets high standards and is rarely invoked. For instance: the leaker must know the person being exposed is a covert agent; the leaker must know the government is actively trying to conceal the agent's relationship to the United States and the covert agent must have served abroad in the last five years.

"According to these standards, the Novak case is more than questionable," said Victoria Toensing, who was the top Senate lawyer involved in drafting the 1982 law. "Every fact I know tells me the CIA did not take sufficient steps to hide Plame's identity. There is a huge question over whether the law was even broken in this case."

That's why it's a sin for Judith Miller of The New York Times and Matthew Cooper of Time magazine - neither of whom ever identified Plame, although they apparently got the same leak as Novak - to face the prospect of jail.

They followed the creed that, whether hero or snake, a source gets protected. Their reward? A judge threatens them with up to 18 months in jail. That ruling was just upheld on appeal. Their last chance will be in the Supreme Court, which must reverse this insidious ruling.

"If this were a murder, I'd say Miller should go to jail for withholding evidence," said Toensing. "In this case, we're far from sure a crime was committed. We ought to figure that out first."

The real crime, however, is weakening the institution of journalism. Subvert the fundamental faith in a reporter's confidentiality and our window into the black box called government shrinks.

Rob Corddry is my new hero

2005-03-01T10:24:00.000-05:00

Newsday:

The reporter was fake, using a fake name, spoofing alleged fake White House reporter "Jeff Gannon." But the news conference was real serious.

A "correspondent" from the fake news show, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, was outside City Hall yesterday to get some answers from City Council Speaker Gifford Miller.

Wearing a badly groomed hair piece, a fake mustache and an ugly 1970s tie, Rob Corddry waited patiently until after the real reporters had posed their questions to ask one about about Social Security.

Standing awkwardly with his legs far apart as though he were getting ready to sprint, nodding in agreement to every word spoken by Miller about the West Side Stadium, Corddry finally raised his hand.

"Mr. Speaker, Mr. Speaker," he shouted, as if in a White House news conference, identifying himself as "Dino Ironbody"

His question: "How do you feel about the president's awesome plan to privatize Social Security?"

The Wisdom of Calvin and Hobbes

2005-03-01T10:18:00.000-05:00

Calling J-School Baseball Fans

2005-02-28T14:41:00.000-05:00

May 8, Sunday, 1:05 pm
A's vs. Yanks
Yankee Stadium

April 30, Saturday, 7:05 pm
Mets vs. Nationals
RFK Stadium

Who's down?

Email me:

cfarivar@cfarivar.org

this may be the most i've ever heard lemann say about us

2005-02-22T11:35:00.000-05:00

"Is he a hero at Columbia Journalism School?" asked Nicholas Lemann, the school's 50-year-old dean. "Sadly, I think no. He's much more a hero to my generation of journalists. He's sort of a giant, but I don't think rising young journalists are reading him with the same degree of admiration."

Duke: Against Atavism, 1937-2005

2005-02-21T16:26:00.000-05:00

--
"For Mr. Thompson the goal was to tell the truth - at least his version of the truth - and it did not much matter how he got there. "Fiction," Mr. Thompson said in an interview with The Associated Press in 2003, "is based on reality unless you're a fairy-tale artist. You have to get your knowledge of life from somewhere. You have to know the material you're writing about before you alter it."
...
[His] early work presaged some of the fundamental changes that have rocked journalism today. Mr. Thompson's approach in many ways mirrors the style of modern-day bloggers, those self-styled social commentators who blend news, opinion and personal experience on Internet postings. Like bloggers, Mr. Thompson built his case for the state of America around the framework of his personal views and opinions.”[Ed: !]
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/22/books/22thompson.html
--
http://jschool05.blogspot.com/2005/02/1937-2005.html
http://www.gonzo.org/
http://www.aspentimes.com/article/20050220/NEWS/102210004
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/022105Z.shtml
http://www.livejournal.com/users/docgonzo19/3127.html
http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=1428
http://www.iamcorrect.blogspot.com/
--
“Hunter S. Thompson had the gift and burden of being able to see the truth. He lived and died by his own truth, and he could not understand why so many around him were living lies. The problem is that not everyone has the courage to live so honestly according to what is in their heart.

Vayo Con Dios, brave one. You will be missed.”
http://forums.nytimes.com/top/opinion/readersopinions/forums/books/booknewsandreviews/index.html?offset=6193&fid=.f328a27/6193

"I read every word he ever published. If you want to know him, read his published letters. There is a great sadness attached to his brutal death. A sadness that will not soon pass. The famous and imfamous will rush to praise him and recall their brushes with his madness and how they barely saved their own souls by escaping in the nick of time. If you want to know how he feels about these thinly veiled self-promotional activities ... read his letters. If you want to touch his genius, go to the passage near the end of Hell's Angels and read the passage about ripping down the highway on a motorcycle at impossible speeds. There is only one guy I want to hear from at this moment ... Johnny Depp. Hunter let Depp inside his bubble at the end. I want to know what Depp has to say. Everyone else is just banging their own drum."
http://forums.nytimes.com/top/opinion/readersopinions/forums/books/booknewsandreviews/index.html?offset=6192&fid=.f328a27/6192

It is nice to see the love pouring out over the press in regards to Hunter. He is still respected by the finest writers.
He went to a place Homer wrote about. Herman Melville would have traded places with HST. Mark Twain and Hemingway were a far second. He wrote about things we were afraid of. We learned about our dark side from him. But was it really so dark? It must have been his time. His angels were definately there with him in the agony of his last moment. Some die and no one even knows. He was a lucky, talented and inspired many.
Hope you have caught the fleeting raimbow. RIP"
http://forums.nytimes.com/top/opinion/readersopinions/forums/books/booknewsandreviews/index.html?offset=6203&fid=.f328a27/6203

"Like Hemingway, Dr. Thompson wrote with masculinity and precision, yet at the same time we can see an extraordinary sensitivity and creative mind that sought to explore the truth through the written word. As to his death, we cannot call his suicide an act of cowardice or bravery, we will never be able to fully understand why he chose to leave, and we are in no position to judge what he did as we cannot experience the kinds of barriers he must have faced. But Hunter is gone and the field of journalism has lost a real hero and probably doesnt even know it."
http://forums.nytimes.com/top/opinion/readersopinions/forums/books/booknewsandreviews/index.html?offset=6200&fid=.f328a27/6200
--
"When The Going Gets Weird, The Weird Turn Pro." - Hunter S.
Thompson, 1937 - 2005

Bill Keller and Jeff Jarvis

2005-02-21T12:27:00.000-05:00

Jeff Jarvis:

The other day, I wrote an open letter here to Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times, suggesting that we should get professional and citizen journalists, Timesmen and bloggers, together to find common ground. Mr. Keller responded.

Let me first confess that I'm late telling you about that response because, well, I'm lazy or busy (pick your excuse). I didn't even respond to Mr. Keller for two days because I didn't want to just dash off an email to the editor of the damned NY Times. He emailed me here and there wondering what had become of his response and my manners. So I apologize to him and you for not making it clear earlier that he responded promptly.

We had an enjoyable if sandy exchange of email. I said I would blog that we'd had that and wouldn't say more yet because the exchange wasn't over. He said I could blog as much of the emails as I wanted. He outdid me in the transparency derby and boy, am I embarrassed.

U.S. newspaper industry struggling

2005-02-20T18:51:00.000-05:00

WashPost:

"Print is dead," Sports Illustrated President John Squires told a room full of newspaper and magazine circulation executives at a conference in Toronto in November. His advice? "Get over it," meaning publishers should stop trying to save their ink-on-paper product and focus on electronic delivery of their journalism.

Rare is the paper these days that is not embracing the Web. In addition to their own sites, papers such as the New York Times, the Miami Herald and the Houston Chronicle e-mail free headlines and news summaries to people who don't have time for the newspaper but carry BlackBerrys and other electronic gizmos.

In December, The Washington Post Co. bought online magazine Slate from Microsoft Corp. to increase the paper's Internet footprint.

"I could argue pretty forcefully that the free model and the non-newsprint model is what we're looking at in the future," said San Francisco Chronicle editor Phil Bronstein. "Things are moving far quicker than we thought a few years ago" to new outlets besides ink-on-paper.

The San Francisco Chronicle is an example of the changeover underway: Its daily sales have dropped in recent years, but its Web site boasts more than 5 million unique visitors a month.

Anderson Cooper takes on Jeff Gannon

2005-02-19T19:11:00.000-05:00

Check it.

2nd best

2005-02-18T11:26:00.000-05:00

Freelance reporters for Homeland Security drill
Reporters wanted to participate in press component of Department of Homeland Security's TOPOFF 3 exercise for senior U.S. and local officials simulating a terrorist attack on the United States. Those selected will write copy for online news service reporting events within the exercise for an audience of exercise participants. This position will require seasoned reporters who can write quickly, using AP style, meeting tight deadlines, as if they were covering an actual incident for an actual online news service. Ideal candidates will be reporters with daily or wire experience who can write wire-style stories accurately, completely and quickly. You must NOT be currently employed by a real news organization and will be required to sign a nondisclosure agreement barring you from writing about this in the future.

best job listing ever

2005-02-17T14:13:00.000-05:00

Why bother with those meetings with Pulitzer jurors when you can answer this?

Reporters and journalist for Levi print ads
Looking for male and female reporters and journalists for Levi Jeans Print Ad. Shoot dates are March 3-6, 2005 at New York (will provide travel). MALE & FEMALE REPORTERS: ANY AGE AND ANY ETHNICITY. Real -looking, beautiful women with lean, good bodies, attractive, pretty, natural, approachable,and cool-looking. Real–looking men with good bodies, handsome, interesting, rugged. Lean bodies, not buffed. Must currently be a reporters and journalists. We WILL do a check to confirm.

"News industry advocates are urging passage of a proposed federal shield law..."

2005-02-17T00:42:00.000-05:00

In Wake of Plame Ruling, Federal Shield Law Seen as Best Hope
By Joe Strupp
Published: February 16, 2005 12:40 PM ET

NEW YORK As the fallout continues from a federal appeals court's rejection yesterday of two reporters' claims that they should avoid jail for refusing to reveal sources in the Valerie Plame case, news industry advocates are urging passage of a proposed federal shield law as the best way to counter such legal actions in the future. [it. added]

Hopes hang on two versions of such a law that were introduced earlier this month in the House and Senate. Each would provide protection similar to that of shield laws currently on the books in 31 states and the District of Columbia.

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press yesterday called for a "coordinated effort" [see below] to support a federal shield law in the wake of the unanimous decision by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. That ruling denied an appeal from Judith Miller of The New York Times and Matthew Cooper of Time magazine, who were ordered jailed last fall for up to 18 months for refusing to disclose sources that leaked to them the identity of CIA Agent Valerie Plame. Lawyers for both plan to appeal, likely delaying any jail time for at least several weeks or months.

The ruling has heightened concerns about the need for a federal law in the wake of not just the Plame case but also several other federal investigations from Washington to San Francisco that have resulted in subpoenas or demands for sources from numerous reporters. While more than half the states have shield laws, none exist at the federal level.

"The decision in this case underscores that these are perilous times for journalists and the public's right to know," said Lucy Dalglish, the Reporters Committee executive director. "There are more than two dozen cases pending across the United States where journalists are being asked to operate as investigators for the government and litigants. The ability of the media to act as independent sources of information for the public is in jeopardy."

George Freeman, a New York Times attorney who has worked on the paper's defense of reporters in several cases, agreed that a federal law is imperative. "There is an inequity between the state and federal courts on this," Freeman told E&P today. "This would provide similar protection."

Two similar shield bills have been introduced in Congress in the past two weeks.

The first, H.R. 581, is co-sponsored by Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) and Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.) and was introduced Feb. 2. The Senate version, S. 3440, is authored by Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), who introduced it on Feb. 9. Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) offered his own bill in late 2004, but has yet to introduce a new version for the current session.

"Reporters rely on the ability to assure confidentiality to sources in order to deliver news to the public, and the ability of news reporters to assure confidentiality to sources is fundamental to their ability to deliver news on highly contentious matters of broad public interest," Boucher said in a statement after introducing his bill. "Without the promise of confidentiality, many sources would not provide information to reporters and the public would suffer from the resulting lack of information."

Freeman said the bi-partisan sponsorship is a strong sign that the issue is not being treated as just a political battle. "We're heartened that we have support from both sides of the aisle," he said. "I think everyone in Washington realizes this is the way information gets to the public."

Still, even the strongest supporters realize that the chances of getting a bill passed this year and signed by President Bush, who has shown little support for press access and rights, is slim. But they realize that just debating the issue in congress can move such laws a step closer to reality.

Irwin Gratz, president of the Society of Professional Journalists and a producer at Maine Public Radio, agreed that the pending bills are important as a strong response to the federal court actions. "Clearly, it would help us in a lot of places where there is no protection," he told E&P. "Reporters are pretty naked on this issue. We presume to have a First Amendment protection, but we really don't have much of anything nationally."

Bob Steele, the Nelson Poynter Scholar for Journalism Values at the Poynter Institute, also supported such a law. But, he stressed that even a federal shield statute would not give blanket protection on confidential sources.

"It is one step and it is a less-than-perfect step," Steele said. "It would not be absolute. Journalists would still have to justify in some cases why the shield law applies."
Joe Strupp (jstrupp@editorandpublisher.com) is a senior editor at E&P.
--
The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE -- Contact: Lucy Dalglish, (703) 807-2100

Reporters Committee calls for shield law passage in wake of today's D.C. Circuit decision

Feb. 15, 2005 - The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press called for a coordinated effort to support a federal shield law in the wake of the decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia Circuit today that two prominent journalists do not have a privilege to keep sources of information from a federal grand jury.

"The decision in this case underscores that these are perilous times for journalists and the public's right to know," said Reporters Committee Executive Director Lucy Dalglish. "There are more than two dozen cases pending across the United States where journalists are being asked to operate as investigators for the government and litigants. The ability of the media to act as independent sources of information for the public is in jeopardy."

The shield bills current under consideration in Congress were introduced in early February by Reps. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) and Rick Boucher (D-Va.) in the House (H.R. 581), and by Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) in the Senate (S. 3440). A similar bill was introduced late in the last congress by Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), but no action was taken.

In today's action by the D.C. Circuit, the three-judge panel unanimously held that no privilege would protect Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper and New York Times reporter Judith Miller from being compelled to testify about their sources. The court held that the U.S. Supreme Court "unquestionably" answered the question about maintaining confidentiality before grand juries in 1972 in Branzburg v. Hayes.

This leak investigation began after undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame's identity was published by columnist Robert Novak in a July 2003 column. Novak cited two unnamed "senior administration officials" as his sources.

Following the Novak column, several other journalists, including Cooper, reported receiving the same information. Miller did not report on the allegations, but was subpoenaed after her name apparently came up during the investigation as another journalist who had also heard the disclosure.

The leak has been characterized as a politically-motivated attack on Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, because Wilson publicly criticized the Bush administration's assertion that Iraq had been attempting to buy uranium from Niger to make nuclear weapons. The unnamed sources disclosed Plame's name to point out that Wilson, who had travelled to Africa for the CIA in order to investigate the uranium claims, was only chosen because his wife suggested him for the assignment.

Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was appointed to investigate the leak last fall, which could lead to criminal charges if the leakers were aware that Plame was an undercover operative. Fitzgerald subpoenaed or otherwise demanded testimony from a number of journalists -- including Cooper, Miller, Tim Russert, host of NBC's "Meet the Press," and Walter Pincus and Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post -- before a grand jury concerning alleged conversations the reporters had with confidential sources. It is not known if Novak has been subpoenaed or if he has testified.

Miller received a subpoena to testify before the grand jury on Aug. 12. Cooper reached an agreement with prosecutors and testified about conversations with Libby on Aug. 24, but was then subpoenaed again Sept. 14. In October, Hogan held Miller and then Cooper in contempt, fined them $1,000 per day and ordered them to jail until they testify. The fines and sentences were stayed pending a consolidated appeal. The U.S. Court of Appeals (D.C. Cir) heard oral arguments on Dec. 8 and released its decision today.

More information about the federal shield bills and the grand jury investigation into the Plame matter is available from the Reporters Committee's Web site at: www.rcfp.org/shields_and_subpoenas.html
--

Shafer: Fire Floyd

2005-02-16T15:36:00.000-05:00

Question 1. Should Miller and Cooper ditch the First Amendment defense?

Question 2. Does this really mean that a judicial remedy is unlikely, and the Bush administration knows that - which is why a legislative remedy is necessary?

Question 3. Will Dodd and Pence move their legislation in time to make a difference here, if not formally, than in the court of public opinion? (I find it unlikely.)
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press box
Memo to Cooper and Miller
Fire Floyd Abrams. Hire Bruce Sanford.
By Jack Shafer
Posted Tuesday, Feb. 15, 2005, at 3:55 PM PT

Today, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit scuttled the appeals of Matthew Cooper and Judith Miller. Both reporters are contesting grand jury subpoenas to testify in the investigation of the leak of CIA covert agent Valerie Plame's name to columnist Robert Novak. Novak published Plame's identity in a July 2003 syndicated column.

Circuit Judges David B. Sentelle and David S. Tatel manhandled the defendants' attorney, First Amendment legend Floyd Abrams, during the Dec. 8 oral arguments before the appeals court, and today's decision only continues their thrashing. (Judge Karen L. Henderson asked only a couple of questions at argument and authored a brief concurrence today.) In the majority opinion, Judge Sentelle finds no merit in Abrams' assertion that a First Amendment privilege protects Cooper and Miller from the subpoena. Talk to the grand jury about your confidential sources or go to jail for contempt, he says to Cooper and Miller. Judge Tatel's nuanced and learned concurring opinion teasingly entertains the privilege notion before folding down the sheets on the two journalists' prison bunks and fluffing their pillows.

It's easy to blame Abrams for Cooper and Miller's predicament, especially now that some of the other journalists subpoenaed in the case, including Tim Russert, Glenn Kessler, and Walter Pincus, appear to have cut face-saving deals with the prosecutor to avoid jail. Maybe a First Amendment legend isn't what this case called for in the first place. Maybe Cooper and Miller would have been better served by having a criminal lawyer who knows how to bargain.

With New York Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. promising to appeal this decision, perhaps both Cooper and Miller might want to rethink the utility of hanging their whole case on this First Amendment defense. If I were running their defense committee, I'd give the case to Bruce W. Sanford.

Sanford, no First Amendment slouch, helped write the law that special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald is using to hunt Plame's leaker—the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982. (Interest declared: More than 10 years ago, Sanford represented me. On a much later occasion he bought me a nice breakfast, which I'm sure he billed to his firm.)

Victoria Toensing, another framer of the 1982 Act, and Sanford wrote last month in a Washington Post op-ed, that it's "time for a timeout on a misguided and mechanical investigation in which there is serious doubt that a crime was even committed. Federal courts have stated that a reporter should not be subpoenaed when the testimony sought is remote from criminal conduct or when there is no compelling 'government interest,' i.e., no crime."

Citing their intimate knowledge of the 1982 legislation, Sanford and Toensing explain how they drafted a dart gun of a law, and not the blunderbuss Fitzgerald keeps firing into the bushes. The law as they conceived of it was so narrowly defined that it's been used in only one prosecution, back in 1985.

Sanford and Toensing line up the specifics of the law like Burma Shave signs:

The law wasn't designed for the prosecution of government employees who unintentionally or carelessly divulged a covert agent's identity.
The agent must truly be covert in the eyes of the 1982 Act (they doubt Plame was).
The disclosure must be intentional and backed by the knowledge that "affirmative measures" are being taken by the government to conceal the agent's identity. (Plame was working a desk job at the CIA's Langley headquarters at the time of Novak's column, not a very compelling cover. Also, the agency seems to have done none of its usual jawboning to dissuade Novak from divulging Plame's identity when he called.)

(I catalogued similar specifics in an October 2003 Slate column, "Stop the Investigation.")

What could Sanford do for Cooper and Miller that Abrams can't? For one thing, he could tack away from the First Amendment argument. Even though I'm a First Amendment extremist, I found Abrams' oral argument before the D.C. Circuit to be wishful and flabby. I don't know of any court, let alone the Supreme Court, that is likely to hold that reporters possess a near automatic right to ignore grand jury subpoenas.

If I'm right, a fresh law jockey might be the ticket. In their op-ed, Sanford and Toensing called upon the special prosecutor Fitzgerald and the two reporters to ask Judge Thomas Hogan, who oversees the grand jury, "to conduct a hearing to require the CIA to identify all affirmative measures it was taking to shield Plame's identity." They conclude their piece, "Before we even think about sending reporters to prison for doing their jobs, the court should determine that all the elements of a crime are present."

And if that strategy fails, Cooper and Miller should find the right guy to cut a face-saving deal with Fitzgerald. For all Fitzgerald's Javertian tendencies, I doubt if he wants to be remembered as the guy who jailed reporters from Time and the New York Times.

The last shot, of course, is the Supreme Court. But the Supremes don't have to take the case, and my guess is that they won't if it's argued on First Amendment grounds, preferring to let their Branzburg precedent stand.

Regardless of the specific legal theory on which they proceed, Miller and Cooper could do worse than coax an insanely bright legal argument out of the guy who helped write the law Fitzgerald is swinging like a meat hook.

Jack Shafer is Slate's editor at large.

Escalation: What Remedy, Judicial or Legislative?

2005-02-16T01:43:00.000-05:00

Note that the WH is speaking about a judical remedy when it says: "We'll leave it to the courts to address that matter," McClellan said.

Others, like Dodd, Lugar, Pence and Pinch are asking for a legislative remedy. This quote speaks for itself. But see this on Pence.
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"If the findings of this decision are upheld, they will also severely restrict all citizens’ ability to make fully informed electoral decisions. When you thoughtfully consider the innumerable ramifications of this decision, it becomes absolutely apparent that they are a direct threat to our newspaper, our Company, our profession and our democratic form of government. This is why we must individually and collectively urge our friends, family, colleagues and neighbors to write their members of Congress and support a federal shield law recently introduced by Senator Richard Lugar and Congressmen Mike Pence and Rick Boucher." - Arthur Sulzberger Jr. (emp. added.)
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Fed Court Rules Against Miller, Cooper - Floyd Protests

2005-02-15T13:52:00.000-05:00

UPDATE: PINCH RESPONDS
(thanks Gawker)
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To the Staff:

The United States Court of Appeals today decided that a New York Times reporter, Judy Miller, and a Time magazine reporter, Matthew Cooper, must disclose confidential sources to a grand jury investigating the leak of the name of a woman who works for the CIA or go to jail for up to 18 months.

As you know, Judy (and we believe Matthew, as well) will not do this. We support her fully in this decision and will now pursue all avenues of appeal, including asking the United States Supreme Court to review the case. The consequences of this landmark case are almost impossible t overestimate. When we consider the many complex issues that we face at home and abroad, it is hard to imagine a more inopportune moment to restrain the free flow of information. Given all that is at stake, we all need to know much more — not a lot less — about the major issues of the day.

While confidential sources and unattributed quotes are not our favorite part of the journalistic process, they are an important factor in how Washington and most of the rest of the world operate. Unless we are content with newspapers that are just reprints of press releases, official pronouncements and news conference transcripts, we must accept such sources as a way of life. The Times goes very far in trying to tell our readers why someone won’t speak on the record. But when individuals do speak to us confidentially, they do so knowing we will protect their identity.

If the findings of this decision are upheld, they will also severely restrict all citizens’ ability to make fully informed electoral decisions. When you thoughtfully consider the innumerable ramifications of this decision, it becomes absolutely apparent that they are a direct threat to our newspaper, our Company, our profession and our democratic form of government. This is why we must individually and collectively urge our friends, family, colleagues and neighbors to write their members of Congress and support a federal shield law recently introduced by Senator Richard Lugar and Congressmen Mike Pence and Rick Boucher.

We can take some solace and inspiration from the fact that we’ve been in this position before — in fact, quite a few times. The first for The Times was in 1857, when we published an editorial criticizing lobbying activity involving congressmen who were paid to support a piece of legislation. A congressional committee was established to probe the charges. Instead of pursuing our story, it sought out our reporter — a Mr. Simonton — and asked him to reveal his sources. Mr. Simonton, bless his heart, refused, was held in contempt by the House of Representatives and served 19 days. Mr. Simonton was finally released and the House members in question resigned when the full story became public.

In 1978 a New York Times reporter, Myron Farber, was ordered to jail, also for doing his job and refusing to give up confidential information. He served 40 days in a New Jersey prison cell. In response to this injustice, the New Jersey Legislature strengthened its shield law, which recognizes and serves to protect a journalist’s need to protect sources and information.

As we did in 1857, in 1978 and many times in between, we will stay true to our values. We have confidence that as the United States Supreme Court and the American public review the full details of the Judy Miller and Matthew Cooper case, the reporters? courageous decision to protect their confidential sources will be fully vindicated.

Arthur
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Well, here we go.....
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SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
Tuesday, February 15, 2005 · Last updated 10:17 a.m. PT

Appeals court upholds ruling in CIA leak

By MARK SHERMAN
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

WASHINGTON -- A federal appeals court on Tuesday upheld a ruling against two reporters who could go to jail for refusing to divulge their sources to investigators probing the leak of an undercover CIA officer's name to the media.

The three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit sided with prosecutors in their attempt to compel Time magazine's Matthew Cooper and The New York Times' Judith Miller to testify before a federal grand jury about their confidential sources.

"We agree with the District Court that there is no First Amendment privilege protecting the information sought," Judge David B. Sentelle said in the ruling, which was unanimous.

Floyd Abrams, the lawyer for both reporters, said he would ask the full appeals court to reverse Tuesday's ruling. "Today's decision strikes a heavy blow against the public's right to be informed about its government," Abrams said in a statement.

In October, Judge Thomas F. Hogan held the reporters in contempt, rejecting their argument that the First Amendment shielded them from revealing their sources. Both reporters face up to 18 months in jail if they continue to refuse to cooperate.

The special prosecutor in the case, Chicago U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, is investigating whether a crime was committed when someone leaked the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame. Her name was published in a 2003 column by Robert Novak, who cited two senior Bush administration officials as his sources.

The column appeared after Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, wrote a newspaper opinion piece criticizing President Bush's claim that Iraq had sought uranium in Niger. The CIA had asked Wilson to check out the uranium claim. Wilson has said he believes his wife's name was leaked as retaliation for his critical comments.

Disclosure of an undercover intelligence officer's identity can be a federal crime if prosecutors can show the leak was intentional and the person who released that information knew of the officer's secret status.

Cooper is a White House correspondent for Time who has reported on the Plame controversy. He agreed in August to provide limited testimony about a conversation he had with Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, after Libby released Cooper from his promise of confidentiality.

Fitzgerald then issued a second, broader subpoena seeking the names of other sources.

Miller is facing jail for a story she never wrote. She had gathered material for an article about Plame, but ended up not doing a story.

Prosecutors have interviewed President Bush, Cheney, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell and other current or former administration officials in the investigation. Journalists from NBC and The Washington Post also have been subpoenaed.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan declined Tuesday to comment on the appeals court ruling. "We'll leave it to the courts to address that matter," McClellan said.

"The president has made it clear that he wants to get to the bottom of this matter," he said, adding that Bush also has urged anyone with information on the case to come forward.

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On the Net:

U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit: http://www.cadc.uscourts.govinternetinternet.nsf
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My tough independent question is...

2005-02-14T17:49:00.000-05:00

White House Briefing - February 14, 2005

The following transcript of a recent White House "Press" briefing comes to our attention:

Spokesman: Good morning. A lot of admin stuff this morning. Copies of the President's schedule will be distributed this afternoon. Copies of the vice president's itinerary are on the table in the back. Various bogus news stories and fake news briefings will be available on the web for those on our payroll, just change the names as you see fit. It's all make-believe but please make it look good. W-2s are in the mail, scribes (Laughter). Now, questions? Bill?

Reporter: yes, Bill Jones here, a.k.a. Tom True, a.k.a. Rev. Wholey Rowler. My tough independent question is, Do you think that the President is even more handsome today than he was a week or ago? And, really, is there any end to how dashing and gallant he can be? Whatta hunk.

Spokesman: Thank you, that's a good point. The president strives to meet all his challenges with equanimity. He's a War President after all. And, Bill, your 1099 form is misplaced and accounting can't pay you without it. Can you work on that? Sarah?

Reporter: Sarah Fistooch or Melanie WangerBanger or Lynne Shiny of liberalsarescumandshouldbekilled.com here. How does the President get through day being soooooo right all the time and having to work with all those subhuman Democrats and those lying cheating bums, sex perverts and drug addicts?

Spokesman: Now, don't be so tough on Rush and Bill O'R. (Laughter) Seriously, Sarah, the War President understands this is a diverse world we live in full of both good people and the Spawn of Satan who are the Democrats as you so independently have written in your web page and its ancillary BushForBucks.com. Follow-up, Sarah?

Reporter: Sort of. Why do I have to pay taxes on my White House bribes and boodle in the District of Columbia when I live in Virginia? No child left behind. It is very annoying to get all these checks no child left behind and then see them whittled down by my having to actually pay taxes. No child left behind. I am quite rich, you know, I thought I didn't have to pay taxes.

Spokesman: Thanks, Sarah. We'll look into that. It is not this administration's policy that a rich person should ever pay taxes. That's what the poor are for. Hank?

Reporter: Aye. And Pharaoh said unto Joseph, In my dream, behold, I stood upon the bank of the river: And, behold, there came up out of the river seven kine, fatfleshed and well favoured; and they fed in a meadow: And, behold, seven other kine came up after them, poor and very ill favoured and leanfleshed, such as I never saw in all the land of Egypt for badness: And the lean and the ill favoured kine did eat up the first seven fat kine: And when they had eaten them up, it could not be known that they had eaten them; but they were still ill favoured, as at the beginning. So I awoke. And I saw in my dream, and, behold, seven ears came up in one stalk, full and good: And, behold, seven ears, withered, thin, and blasted with the east wind, sprung up after them: And the thin ears devoured the seven good ears: and I told this unto the magicians; but there was none that could declare it to me. How long will our Mighty President, May His name Be Glory, Wonderful, have to endure the blasphemous and sinful sight of yon perverts Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck in their debauchery and poisonous relationship??? It is ye olde virtue for the President to lay a warm, wet kiss on Joe Lieberman but thunder & brimstone be on these cartoons!!!

Spokesman: The War President does not believe his kissing of Senator Lieberman, D-Iraq, conflicts too much with his opposition to same-sex sex. Incidentally, Reverend, we all love your new web pages, www.hornymaleministers.com and www.thelambshallliedownwiththelion(wink-wink).com. The checks in the mail. Next.

Reporter: Joe from Faux News Channel. Does this brilliant President ($1,000, please) plan to use -- having a little trouble reading this, you guys might get bigger type on these "questions" you give us to ask (Laughter) -- his great manly wisdom ($2,500, more) to respond to outcry from the heart of honest good clean America over the Weapons of Mass Destruction in the bankrupt, busted Social Security building ($3,000), the biological weapons and nuclear program there? ($7,500) Bleat bleat bleat.

Spokesman: Tough questions as always, Joe. (Laughter) The War President knows that the Social Security program is a hotbed of liberal al-Qaeda terrorists wanting to kill our babies in their cribs, as you would have asked if you had turned over the card and read them ALL, Joe. We'll be invading this outpost of tyranny soon. Next? Who's that back there. Haven't called on you for so long I've forgotten your name.

Reporter: Smith from the AP. Speaking of Iraq, the war has been going on for .... (Question drowned out by cries from the rent-a-reporter corps of "Commie," "Pinko rat," "Why don't you go back to your lover Saddam?," "Blue state wimp!" and the reporter from a legitimate newspaper was beaten and escorted from the building by the Secret Service) Spokesman: I don't know what's happening to the neighborhood, here, when we actually get press people in the press briefing. That'll be it for today. You're the best media corps money can buy. (Applause.)

Copyright 2005, Hartford Courant

Finally, Bob Gets a Little Lovin'

2005-02-13T17:40:00.000-05:00

February 13, 2005
Robert Moses, Superhero?
By PHILIP NOBEL (NYT)

THE most famous image of Robert Moses depicts the chairman of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority - just one of his many titles - standing on a red I-beam suspended over the East River, arms on his hips, a roll of drawings in his hand: the master builder at work. Behind him, on the opposite shore, is the United Nations complex - just one of the hundreds of city-altering projects Mr. Moses captained between the 1920's and 1960's, decades in which, having consolidated political power through a genius for writing legislation, he shaped New York City.

What is the legacy of the man responsible for building many of the city's beloved parks and river crossings, but also acre after acre of controversial public housing? Was Mr. Moses, who envisioned Jones Beach and Lincoln Center as well as the ruinous Cross Bronx Expressway, a savior or a scourge?

Particularly since the publication in 1974 of Robert Caro's book "The Power Broker," an exhaustive, critical look at the master planner, Mr. Moses' life and work have come under intense scrutiny by academics and policy wonks. Now it is time for an absurdist theater troupe to take a whack.

"Boozy: The Life, Death and Subsequent Vilification of Le Corbusier and, More Importantly, Robert Moses" opens at the Ohio Theater in SoHo on Tuesday. The latest production of "Les Freres Corbusier" - a group best known for staging last year's Obie-winning "A Very Merry Unauthorized Children's Scientology Pageant" - places Mr. Moses as the visionary hero in an epic struggle between heaven-sent inspiration and group-think mediocrity. Along the way, the show sketches the combustible, imagined romance between the antiestablishment urban theorist Jane Jacobs and the group's namesake, the architect Le Corbusier. It features a walk-on by a Daniel Libeskind impersonator (the man himself was approached but declined), and depicts Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Benito Mussolini and Josef Goebbels - played by obliging rabbits in full costume - as they implore Mr. Moses to transform the world through sacred geometry.

With the stage at times invaded by a traffic jam of remote-control cars and a cabal of hooded Masons dancing to Philip Glass, it would be easy to see the production as fun and games. But Les Freres' intentions are more profound: to engage their audience, as the redevelopment of the World Trade Center site carries on and the debate over the West Side stadium intensifies, in a nuanced discussion of urban planning.

"You want to get a lot of information out there, but you can't lecture or people will just tune out," said Aaron Lemon-Strauss, the show's producer. "In the end, this is theater - we'd teach a class at Hunter College if we didn't want to entertain."

Liberties have certainly been taken (it seems unlikely that Goebbels and Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi ever French kissed), but the show - conceived by Juliet Chia (who also designed the lighting), David Evans Morris (the set designer), and Alex Timbers (the director) - aims to portray the historical essence of the unlikely cast through what Mr. Lemon-Strauss referred to as "negative argument."

In the Scientology pageant, Les Freres lionized the sect's founder, L. Ron Hubbard, in order to critique him. In "Boozy," we get Robert Moses, martyr and visionary, pitting his wits against the forces of design-by-committee for the greater glory of the city he loves. "If you read any of the Caro book, you see Moses as a racist, classist villain," said Jacob Grigolia-Rosenbaum, who, at 6 feet 4 inches tall, plays the famously Napoleonic planner. "Portraying him as a Christ-like superhero has been fun."
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Would You Accept Dating Advice From This Man?

2005-02-12T14:40:00.000-05:00

Gannon Get a What-What?

2005-02-12T02:49:00.000-05:00

WHITE HOUSE SPOKESMAN: WHAT IS A REPORTER? Thu Feb 10 2005 20:49:03 ET White House spokesman Scott McClellan On Thursday challenged liberal media activists, who are currently feigning outrage over events surrounding "Jeff Gannon," to examine the definition of reporter in the new century. "In this day and age, when you have a changing media, it's not an easy issue to decide or try to pick and choose who is a journalist. It gets into the issue of advocacy journalism," McClellan said. "Where do you draw the line? There are a number of people who cross that line in the briefing room. "There are a number of people in that room that express their points of view, and there are people in that room that represent traditional media, they represent talk radio, they're columnists, and they represent online news organizations." Developing...

Gannongate

2005-02-10T11:40:00.000-05:00

Wednesday, February 9, 2005

The Honorable George W. Bush
President of the United States
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, DC 20500

Dear Mr. President:

In light of the mounting evidence that your Administration has, on several occasions, paid members of the media to advocate in favor of Administration policies, I feel compelled to ask you to address a matter brought to my attention by the Niagara Falls Reporter (article attached), a local newspaper in my district, regarding James "JD" Guckert (AKA Jeff
Gannon) of Talon News.

According to several credible reports, "Mr. Gannon" has been repeatedly credentialed as a member of the White House press corps by your office and has been regularly called upon in White House press briefings by your
Press Secretary Scott McClellan, despite the fact evidence shows that "Mr. Gannon" is a Republican political operative, uses a false name, has phony or questionable journalistic credentials, is known for plagiarizing much of the "news" he reports, and according to several web reports, may have ties to the promotion of the prostitution of military personnel.

Several weeks ago when it was revealed that radio/TV host Armstrong Williams had received payment from your Administration in exchange for his vocal support of the 'No Child Left Behind' initiative, I was stunned. For years now I have been leading the fight in Congress for fairness and accountability in the media; the Williams revelation only underscored the need for a media that has integrity, is balanced and expresses the local interests and concerns of its consumers.

Since that time, two more members of the media have been found to have received money from your Administration in exchange for their vocal, yet undisclosed support of Administration policies.

And just this morning we have learned that "Mr. Gannon" has resigned his post at the, so called, Talon News amid growing concerns over his controversial background and falsified qualifications. In fact, it appears that "Mr. Gannon's" presence in the White House press corps was merely as a tool of propaganda for your Administration.

Mr. President, I am sure we both agree the White House Press Corps is an honored institution in America that should be beyond the scope of partisan meddling, and that a free and independent media is the cornerstone of our success as a democracy. Likewise, I am sure we can both agree the American people have the right to expect that journalists who question their President everyday are experienced, independent, and perhaps most importantly, unbiased in their approach.

I was already concerned about what appears to be an organized campaign to mask partisan propaganda as legitimate news by your Administration. That we have now learned this same type of deception is occurring inside the White House briefing room itself is even more disturbing.

That is why I am asking you to please explain to the Congress and to the American people how and why the individual known as "Mr. Gannon" was repeatedly cleared by your staff to join the legitimate White House press corps?

Mr. President, your Administration has driven the so-called "values" debate in this country. But the most important value for those of us in public service should always be honesty and integrity, particularly when considering the manner in which we conduct our affairs of state.

I would appreciate your prompt response on this matter.

Respectfully,
/LMS

Louise M. Slaughter
Ranking Member, House Committee on Rules

---------------------------------------

From the Niagara Falls Reporter on Monday, February 7, 2005

AN OPEN LETTER TO LOUISE SLAUGHTER
Dear Rep. Slaughter,

As a small newspaper located in your district, we are asking for your help. It has come to our attention that an individual who calls himself "Jeff Gannon" has been credentialed by the White House to attend press briefings and presidential news conferences.

He is affiliated with an organization called Talon News, and is frequently called on by White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan and President Bush. This individual has no background in journalism whatsoever, and his "syndicated column" appears solely on his personal Web site, www.jeffgannon.com. According to the Philadelphia Daily News, "Jeff Gannon" isn't even his real name.

In his biography at the Talon News site, where he holds the title of "Washington Bureau Chief," he claims to be a graduate of the "Pennsylvania State University System" and the Leadership Institute Broadcast School of Journalism.

While the 23 schools in the Penn State system award diplomas, the system itself does not, and the Daily News investigation has thus far failed to turn up a "Jeff Gannon" who holds a degree in education from Penn State, as this person claims he does. Furthermore, the Leadership Institute Broadcast School of Journalism is a right-wing diploma mill where anyone with $50 and two days to waste can receive a degree.

As for Talon News itself, it seems to consist solely of a Web site that links directly to a Republican site called www.gopusa.com. Both Talon and GOPUSA have the same mailing address, a private residence in Texas. It isn't clear whether anyone at Talon News is paid, as one portion of its site asks, "Want to join the Talon News team? Click here to find out more about being a volunteer reporter for Talon News."

Looking at the staff biography section of the site, none of the 10 individuals listed appear to have any training or previous experience in journalism, although all list credentials as Republican activists.

We respectfully ask your office to look into how a partisan political organization and an individual with no credentials as a reporter -- and apparently operating under an assumed name -- landed a coveted spot in the White House press corps.

Sincerely,

Bruce Battaglia, publisher, Mike Hudson, editor in chief, Rebecca Day, senior editor, David Staba, sports editor, Bill Gallagher, national correspondent, John Hanchette, senior correspondent, Frank Thomas Croisdale, contributing editor, Bill Bradberry, contributing editor, Niagara Falls Reporter.

Dean Lemann's musings on the state of MSM

2005-02-08T23:42:00.000-05:00

FEAR AND FAVOR
by NICHOLAS LEMANN
Why is everyone mad at the mainstream media?
Issue of 2005-02-14 and 21
Posted 2005-02-07

Just before last fall’s Presidential election, Bill Keller, the executive editor of the Times, and Philip Taubman, the paper’s Washington bureau chief, went on the road to inspect the candidates’ campaigns. In Florida, on October 22nd, they arranged to have drinks with Karl Rove, the White House’s chief political strategist, and Dan Bartlett, its head of communications. It was supposed to be a friendly get-together, and that’s how it went for the first few minutes, until Keller asked Rove what he thought of the Times’ coverage. It’s the sort of question that editors often ask important people, in the same spirit that a politician asks, “How’m I doing?,” usually hoping for an answer somewhere in the lower-middle range of politeness and candor. But Rove, Keller told me not long ago, “pounded on us for two cocktails’ worth of conversation.” Saying what? “It was three kinds of things,” Keller explained. “It was Bush accomplishments we had ignored, flaws in the Kerry record that we had put inside the paper, and a number of pieces we had done looking hard at the Bush record. In their view, that all amounted to arming the Kerry campaign.”

Keller and I were talking in his office in the Times newsroom at nine one morning, a moment when most newspaper offices are empty and expectantly quiet, like a theatre a couple of hours before the curtain. Keller took his time describing the conversation, to suggest that he wasn’t dismissing the criticisms out of hand. “Your initial reaction, especially in someone as ferocious as Rove, is to drop into a defensive crouch,” he said. “But I try not to do that. I listened, with a fair measure of skepticism, because a lot of it is calculated. But there was some genuineness to it. He went through a long litany of complaints. I do think he was channelling a feeling about the New York Times that’s out there in the land, that we should be concerned about, or at least aware of.”

One item that particularly drew Rove’s ire was a Times front-page story, by Ford Fessenden, which appeared on September 26th, under the headline “a big increase of new voters in swing states.” As Keller remembered it later, in an e-mail message to me, Rove “fired off complaints like a Gatling gun, some specific, some generic, some about specific writers, some about specific elements of specific stories.” When I spoke to Rove about his conversation with Keller, it was obvious that, to his mind, the September 26th story was No. 1 among the Times’ journalistic misdeeds during the campaign. The story left the impression that the Democrats’ organization was vastly superior to the Republicans’, especially in Florida and Ohio. Getting out the G.O.P. vote in those two states had for several years been one of Rove’s main projects, and he spoke about the article in roughly the same tone as a writer discussing a bad review of his magnum opus. He gave me a highly detailed, twelve-point critique, and then, in the interest of conciseness, he boiled down the twelve points to two or three.

Continue reading . . .

blogging while on the job can be perilous

2005-02-08T22:56:00.000-05:00

beware the perils of blogging about your work when you get a job - even at a newspaper, yes. A CSM story here has more on that.. it's truly appalling - whatever happened to first amendment rights?

Talking on the Air and Out of Turn: The Trouble With TV

2005-02-07T13:36:00.000-05:00

NY Times:

Last Sunday, Times reporter Judith Miller appeared on MSNBC's "Hardball With Chris Matthews" to discuss the Iraqi elections. In the course of the conversation Miller said sources had told her the Bush administration "has been reaching out" to the Iraqi political figure Ahmad Chalabi "to offer him expressions of cooperation." She continued, "According to one report, he was even offered a chance to be an interior minister in the new government." This led Matthews to interrupt Miller, exclaim "Wait a minute!" and press her to elaborate.

Now, Matthews is the sort of television host who will interrupt a guest about as often as he blinks, and his reliance on exclamation is roughly equal to his reliance on breathing. But to anyone who has tried to follow the jagged contours of Ahmed Chalabi's connections to the Bush administration, Miller's statement was a shocker. This piece of news hadn't appeared in The Times that morning; it didn't appear in The Times the next morning; as I write this column, on Friday, it still hasn't appeared. A lengthy analysis of the election aftermath by reporter Dexter Filkins, published Tuesday, didn't even hint of any current contact between Chalabi and the Bush administration.

How blogs are shattering the arrogance of the Columbia Journalism Review and why that's good for journalism

2005-02-07T10:48:00.000-05:00

Washington Examiner:

Joseph Newcomer had never heard of the Columbia Journalism Review, the magazine of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, before friends told him to check out what CJR said about him in the January/February 2005 issue. Newcomer, a Microsoft programming teacher who has studied typesetting for decades, suspected the hubbub was about his recent assertions that CBS's 1972-73 memos on President Bush's National Guard service were fakes.

Sure enough, "Blog-Gate," by Corey Pein, a CJR assistant editor, said Newcomer was a "self-proclaimed" expert whose r/sum/ "seemed" impressive. His conclusions were "bold bordering on hyperbolic." Newcomer's font analysis, posted on his Web site, www.flounder. com., was "long and technical, discouraging close examination."

Then, without asking Newcomer for help on those long, technical parts, Pein concluded that Newcomer's ability to replicate the CBS memos with Microsoft Word (not available in 1972) proved nothing. Blogs had not been instrumental in exposing CBS and, through it all, "liberals and their fellow travelers were outed like witches in Salem, while Bush's defenders forged ahead, their affinities and possible motives largely unexamined."

Newcomer, who voted for Sen. John Kerry in November, was baffled. When I spoke with him recently, he told me that The New Yorker once called his wife, a botanical illustration expert, to ask whether a certain plant could grow in a certain area, because a fiction writer had mentioned it in a piece. That was fact-checking. CJR "did not do any fact-checking," he says. Pein did spend weeks researching his story, even traveling to Texas to report it. He wrote that CBS screwed up. But the suggestion that blogs were "guilty of many of the very same sins" that CBS committed, and that Newcomer did not know what he was talking about, set the blogosphere howling. More than 40,000 people read Pein's article the first week it was online (CJR's circulation is 22,000); CJR received over 100 letters. Many featured the same theme: "This was spin-doctoring, not media criticism," says Tim Graham, director of media analysis at the right-leaning Media Research Center. Pein received nasty letters noting his youth and his politics (he graduated from Washington's Evergreen State College, known for its lefty bent, in 2003).

Delacorte Schedule

2005-02-03T17:19:00.000-05:00

Wow.
--

<>Feb 3
Victor Navasky, editor, publisher, editorial director, The Nation

Feb 10
Hendrik Hertzberg, senior editor, The New Yorker

Feb 17
Mike Tomasky, editor-in-chief, Tango Magazine

Feb 24
Elise O’Shaughnessy, editor, Prospect Magazine

March 3
Maer Roshan, editor-in-chief, Radar Magazine

March 10
Adam Moss, editor-in-chief, New York Magazine

March 24
Lewis H. Lapham, editor, Harper’s Bazaar

April 7
Amy Gross, editor-in-chief, O Magazine

April 14
TBA

April 21
Stephen B. Shepard, editor-in-chief, BusinessWeek

CONVERGENCE

2005-02-02T13:06:00.000-05:00

Somebody call Han Solo and tell him to get the Falcon fueled up.

Today, Mike Pence (R-IN) introduced on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives an act that would create a federal shield law that would protect journalistic confidentiality.

Please find the video here.

UPDATE: More on Pence. And More.

UPDATE2: And get a load of this whopper. Develo......well, you know.

And then there is this and this. And this. And it goes on and on. And on.

FLASHBACK: The Dodd Letter. Taricani.

committee to protect bloggers..

2005-02-01T22:45:00.000-05:00

a site that looks set to grow?

Crazy 8

2005-01-26T23:36:00.000-05:00

The Hill:

The ex-landlord of Jennifer 8. Lee, the New York Times reporter who drew attention for the parties she threw for well-connected twenty-somethings in her apartment while on assignment in D.C., says she intends to sue Lee for damage inflicted on the place during her tenancy.

Lee’s soirees were the subject of 2004 articles in the New York Sun and the Washington City Paper, which portrayed her as a junior version of the late Katherine Graham. Perhaps that was the problem.

Beth Solomon, owner of the 1,500-square-foot penthouse condo in the neighborhood of Shaw, is preparing to sue Lee in D.C. Superior Court for more than $60,000 for loss of use and damage incurred during Lee’s residency there from January 2003 to August 2004.

The $2,800-per-month rent included a fully furnished living room and fully stocked kitchen.

Among the damage alleged in the complaint is destruction of flooring, some subfloor areas and kitchen cabinets, resulting in full replacement; stains on wall-hanging artwork, rugs and all living-room furniture; a broken tabletop; damage to an heirloom baby grand piano; and missing kitchen items.

In addition to damage to the apartment and its furnishing, Solomon’s fellow condo owners complained about Lee’s parties, citing instances of beer raining “down onto us,” the walls of the building “shaking” due to the number of people in the building, and party guests relieving themselves wherever the spirit moved them.

Said one e-mail, “At every gathering there, you can anticipate that racket on their floor and upon the roof will ensue until 2:30 a.m., when sufficient noise and litter have been created to pacify themselves.”

Lee’s attorney, Larry Bank, said, “I think [Lee] is less responsible” for the damage than alleged. “I think Beth Solomon had existing conditions and she put them off on Jenny.”
After months of negotiations, the parties have reached an impasse and Solomon has taken a previous offer of a $20,000 settlement off the table.

Bank said he thought the previous negotiations were “fair and reasonable,” adding, “I guess she just wants her pound of flesh.”

I can't wait for the Daily Show tonight

2005-01-26T10:30:00.000-05:00

Argh.

I'm listening to Bush on the radio, and he DOESN'T ANSWER ANY QUESTIONS!

I point you now to this gem from Matt Loker of The Daily Californian:

The simple fact is this: Kerry spent record amounts of money, collected the endorsements of basically everyone except Chuck Norris and still lost to a guy who talks like he’s giving a sixth grade report on something he didn’t study.

“Mr. President, how do you feel about Indonesian President Yudhoyono’s recent actions in regard to International Monetary Fund lending policies?”

“The thing about Indonesia is it’s got a land area of one point eight million square kilometers and its main export is bauxite. Next question.”

["What the Hell, People" by Matt Loker, The Daily Californian, November 5 2004]

C'mon you DC Press Corps, get some balls!

Politics Anyone?

2005-01-26T02:50:00.000-05:00

I’m going to keep this brief:
Paper Tiger Dems lash out at Condi.

Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy called Rice "a key member of the national security team that developed and justified the rationale for war, and it's been a catastrophic failure, a continuing quagmire."

Sen. Mark Dayton of Minnesota said Rice "misled the people of Minnesota and Americans everywhere about the situation in Iraq, before and after that war began." He added: "I really don't like being lied to repeatedly, flagrantly, intentionally."…

Sen. John Cornyn of Texas accused Democrats of "inappropriate partisan attacks against a nominee who deserves our respect," and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska proclaimed it "a nomination all of America can be proud of."

While most lawmakers who opposed Rice were long-standing critics of the war, Indiana Democrat Evan Bayh, who backed the invasion, also said he would vote against her.

"We have been the authors of much of our own misery and as a result of that I cannot find it in my heart or in my mind to vote for a promotion of Dr. Rice," Bayh said.

$80 billion more to pay for a military disaster.

White House Projects 2005 Deficit at $427 Billion
Jan 25, 11:52 PM (ET)
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House estimated on Tuesday that the U.S. budget deficit for 2005, including an extra $80 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan operations, will total $427 billion.

How much?
Say again?
Oh...right.

So really, notwithstanding the transparent dishonesty and manipulation, we are looking at a record $430 billion annual budget deficit – almost 5% of GDP.

Every year the U.S. borrows $500 billion. Where does it get it? Increasingly China. To service this debt, American taxpayers pay interest. Even at roughly prime, this means $25 billion per year in debt service alone, borne by the taxpayers – us. Think of it this way: instead of cash, the US could give one giant American technology company to its debtors, increasingly China and Japan, every year or two.

Like HP or Google, both worth about $50 billion based on current market capitalization.

I heard IBM just did a big deal with a Chinese company.

So in essence, America is borrowing money from China to feed its wars, tax cuts and consumption (of many, many Chinese goods), which the American taxpayer repays with interest, the profit from which the Chinese use to finance the purchase of major American business properties.

Hmmm…trade imbalance? Sweet. ;P
---

Why do newspapers charge for yesterday's news?

2005-01-25T13:25:00.000-05:00

Boing Boing:

Dan Gillmor's got a great post on what's wrong the the major newspapers' approach to their Web archives. I've long been mystified by the way the newspapers have approached the Web. Papers like the New York Times have decided that their archives -- which were previously viewed as fishwrap, as in "today it's news, tomorrow it's fishwrap" -- are their premium product, the thing that you have to pay to access; while their current articles from the past thirty days are free.

The thing is that while there is certainly a small commercial audience for newspaper archives -- corporate researchers, the occassional grad student with a grant -- the noncommercial audience for archives is much larger: people who want to read the news from their birthdays, researchers amateur and pro looking up historic dates, Bloggers writing about seminal moments.

Conversely, there is a large commercial audience for new news, that is, people who'll pay to see today's news while it's still news and before it becomes history. That's why the news business is so much larger than the history business.

The End of Objectivity? (Version 0.9)

2005-01-19T19:12:00.000-05:00

Ed: Dan Gillmor is a longtime former reporter/columnist for the San Jose Mercury News and is author of We the Media. He recently left the Merc to begin working on a project on "citizen journalism." He posted this to his blog earlier today. Would love to hear your thoughts.

Maybe it's time to say a fond farewell to an old canon of journalism: objectivity. But it will never be time to kiss off the values and principles that undergird the idea.

Objectivity is a construct of recent times. One reason for its rise in the journalism sphere has been the consolidation of newspapers and television into monopolies and oligopolies in the past half-century. If one voice overwhelms all the others, there is a public interest in playing stories as straight as possible -- not favoring one side over the other (or others, to be more precise, as there are rarely just two sides to any issue).

There were good business reasons to be "objective," too, not least that a newspaper didn't want to make large parts of its community angry. And, no doubt, libel law has played a role, too. If a publication could say it "got both sides," perhaps a libel plaintiff would have more trouble winning.

Again, the idea of objectivity is a worthy one. But we are human. We have biases and backgrounds and a variety of conflicts that we bring to our jobs every day.

I'd like to toss out objectivity as a goal, however, and replace it with four other notions that may add up to the same thing. They are pillars of good journalism: thoroughness, accuracy, fairness and transparency.

The lines separating them are not always clear. They are open to wide interpretation, and are therefore loaded with nuance in themselves. But I think they are a useful way to approach quality journalism. They are, moreover, easier to achieve in an online setting.

Thoroughness

When I was a reporter and, later, a columnist, my first goal was to learn as much as I could. After all, gathering facts and opinions is the foundation of reporting. I liked it best when I felt I had left 95 percent of what I'd learned out of the final piece. The best reporters I know always want to make one more call, check with one more source. (The last question I ask at all interviews is, "Who else should I talk with about this?"

Today, thoroughness means more than asking questions of the people in our Rolodexes (circular or virtual). It means, whenever possible, asking our readers for their input, as I did when I wrote my book (and other authors are doing on theirs). Competitive pressures tend to make this a rare request, but I'm convinced that more journalists will adopt it.

Accuracy

Get your facts straight.

Fairness

This one is as difficult, in practice, as accuracy is simple. Fairness is often in the eye of the beholder. But even here I think a few principles may universally apply.

Fairness means, among other things, listening to different viewpoints, and incorporating them into the journalism. It does not mean parroting lies or distortions to achieve that lazy equivalence that leads some journalists to get opposing quotes when the facts overwhelmingly support one side.

Fairness is also about letting people respond when they believe you are wrong. Again, this is much easier online than in a print publication, much less a broadcast.

Ultimately, fairness emerges from a state of mind. We should be aware of what drives us, and always willing to listen to those who disagree. The first rule of having a conversation is to listen -- and I know I learn more from people who think I'm wrong than from those who agree with me.

Transparency

Disclosure is gaining currency as an addition to journalism. It's easier said than done, of course.

No one can plausibly argue with the idea that journalists need to disclose certain things, such as financial conflicts of interest. But to what extent? Should journalists of all kinds be expected to make their lives open books? How open?

Personal biases, even unconscious ones, affect the journalism as well. I'm an American, brought up in with certain beliefs that many folks in other lands (and some in this one) flatly reject. I need to be aware of the things I take for granted, and to periodically challenge some of them, as I do my work.

Another way to be transparent is in the way we present a story. We should link to source material as much as possible, bolstering what we tell people with close-to-the-ground facts and data. (Maybe this is part of accuracy or thoroughness, but it seems to fit here, too.)

To the extent that we make thoroughness, accuracy, fairness and transparency the pillars of journalism, we can get a long way toward the worthy goal of helping our audiences/collaborators. I don't claim it's easy, but I do think it's worth the effort.

Tuesday news

2005-01-18T14:05:00.000-05:00

Jeff Jarvis tears the NYT a new one on their piece today on the blog Iraq The Model.

And also, shit is going down right here on our own campus. Weird.

In defense of CBS

2005-01-13T14:34:00.000-05:00

Greg Palast lashes out at the CBS panel, the Times, and parent company Viacom for the CBS sackings. What the media left out in recent weeks: that Mapes et al waited way too long to work on something he'd produced for the BBC five years earlier.

http://207.44.245.159/article7665.htm

CBS said, "The Panel found that Mapes ignored information that cast doubt on the story she had set out to report -- that President Bush had received special treatment 30 years ago, getting to the [Texas Air National] Guard ahead of many other applicants …."

Well, excuse me, but that story is stone cold solid, irrefutable, backed-up, sourced, proven to a fare-thee-well. I know, because I'm one of the reporters who broke that story … way back in 1999, for the Guardian papers of Britain. No one has challenged the Guardian report, or my follow-up for BBC Television, whatsoever, though we've begged the White House for a response from our self-proclaimed "war president."

CBS did not "break" this Chicken-Hawk George story; it's just that Dan Rather, with Mapes' encouragement, found his journalistic soul and the cojones, finally, after 5 years delay, to report it. Did Bush get special treatment to get into the Guard? Baby Bush tested in the 25th percentile out of 100. Yet, he leaped ahead of thousands of other Vietnam evaders because the then-Speaker of the Texas legislature sent a message to General Craig Rose, head of the Guard, to let in Little George and a few other sons of well-placed politicos.

[See some of the documentation at http://www.gregpalast.com/ulf/documents/draftdodgeblanked.jpg and a clip from the BBC Television report at http://www.gregpalast.com/images/TrailerClips.mov]

Mapes and Rather did make a mistake, citing a memo which could not be authenticated. But let's get serious folks: this "Killian" memo had not a darn thing to do with the story-in-chief -- the President's using his daddy's connections to duck out of Vietnam. The Killian memo was a goofy little addition to the story (not included in my Guardian or BBC reports).

So CBS inquisitors took this minor error and used it to discredit the story and ruin careers of reporters who allowed themselves an unguarded moment of courage. And, crucial to the network's real agenda, this nonsensical distraction allowed the White House to resurrect the fake reputation of George Bush as Vietnam-era top gun.

at least melanie doesn't send us these:

2005-01-12T22:56:00.000-05:00

why be a journalist when you can babysit for one?

The Future of The New York Times

2005-01-09T02:18:00.000-05:00

BusinessWeek, ; January 17, 2005

Since 1896, four generations of the Ochs-Sulzberger family have guided The New York Times through wars, recessions, strikes, and innumerable family crises. In 2003, though, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., the current proprietor, faced what seemed to be a publisher's ultimate test after a loosely supervised young reporter named Jayson Blair was found to have fabricated dozens of stories. The revelations sparked a newsroom rebellion that humiliated Sulzberger into firing Executive Editor Howell Raines. "My heart is breaking," Sulzberger admitted to his staff on the day he showed Raines the door.

It turns out, though, that fate was not finished with Arthur Sulzberger, who also is chairman of the newspaper's corporate parent, New York Times Co. (NYT ). The strife that convulsed The New York Times's newsroom under the tyrannical Raines has faded under the measured leadership of his successor, Bill Keller, but now its financial performance is lagging. NYT Co.'s stock is trading at about 40, down 25% from its high of 53.80 in mid-2002 and has trailed the shares of many other newspaper companies for a good year and a half. "Their numbers in this recovery are bordering on the abysmal," says Douglas Arthur, Morgan Stanley's (MWD ) senior publishing analyst.

Continue reading...

Strip mall stripper

2005-01-06T01:04:00.000-05:00

http://www.herald-mail.com/?module=displaystory&story_id=100930&format=print

by ANDREW SCHOTZ
andrews@herald-mail.com

HAGERSTOWN - A man strolled naked outside at the Centre at Hagerstown on Tuesday before police took him to Washington County Hospital for psychiatric care.

"He just got undressed" and walked, Officer Chris Robinson of the Hagerstown Police Department said.

The man, who was not identified, "was lucid at points," but didn't fully understand what had happened, Robinson said.

Robinson said the man, who might be homeless, would not be charged.

At around noon, Duane Roy, a computer network administrator for The Herald-Mail, was at the shopping center on his lunch break when he saw the naked man jogging, then walking.

The temperature was about 53 degrees then, according to weather observer Greg Keefer's Web site.

As shoppers gawked and made cell phone calls, Roy stopped and took pictures from his car as the man approached Wal-Mart. Roy said he's a freelance photographer and keeps a camera in his car.

Then, he drove past the man, parked his car, got out and took more pictures as the man passed Wal-Mart.

As the man turned around and went back past Wal-Mart, store employees wrapped him in a blanket.

Roy said a store official told him not to take pictures or publish them without getting permission. Then, a man in a suit who identified himself as a store security official ordered him to surrender his camera, Roy said.

Roy said he refused, so the man demanded the film in his camera, unaware that it was a digital camera.

Again, Roy refused. He locked the camera in his car.

"He said if I didn't turn the camera over to him, he would have me arrested" and ban him from the store, Roy said.

Attorney Mary R. Craig, who represents The Herald-Mail, said Roy "certainly was well within his rights" to take pictures.

The store can set limits, such as on taking pictures inside, but the expectation of privacy probably is less outside, she said.

She said Roy probably didn't violate anyone's privacy, especially the naked man's.

Alice Neff Lucan, an attorney who represents the Maryland-Delaware-D.C. Press Association, said Wal-Mart "emphatically" had no right to demand Roy's camera.

"He didn't violate any of Wal-Mart's rights and he didn't violate the streaker's rights," she said. "He just took a picture of what was in the public's view."

The Herald-Mail is a member of the press association.

Store manager Frank Archer couldn't be reached for comment Tuesday.

Co-manager Barry Brown said the security officer demanded Roy's film - not his camera - because Roy didn't have permission to take pictures on Wal-Mart's property.

Brown said he didn't see the confrontation, but heard about it.

Wal-Mart corporate spokeswoman Christi Gallagher in Bentonville, Ark., said she hadn't heard what happened.

In general, though, the company insists that all requests for pictures, inside or outside its stores, be made in advance, she said.

If a photographer doesn't get permission, a store manager would tell him or her to call the corporate office, Gallagher said.

"We don't confiscate cameras," she said.

Roy said police officers at the scene decided that store officials couldn't seize his camera, but they could ban him and have him arrested for trespassing if he returned.

He said no one at the store took his name, so he doesn't know how the ban will be enforced.

Wal-Mart and The Home Depot own their buildings, while the other stores at the center lease space from Washington Real Estate Investment Trust of Rockville, Md., according to Deborah Everhart, Hagerstown's economic development coordinator.

Wal-Mart's photo policy

Wal-Mart's policy that all photos taken on its property must be approved in advance includes breaking news coverage, company spokeswoman Christi Gallagher said.

The company requires the media - or anyone else - to get approval before taking pictures in Wal-Mart stores or on Wal-Mart property, she said.

Asked if journalists photographing unexpected news, such as a fire, need the same permission, Gallagher said they do.

After hours, a journalist should call the company's 24-hour corporate hotline before taking pictures, she said.

- Andrew Schotz

Happy New Year!

2005-01-05T10:04:00.000-05:00

Slate tears CJR a new one:

Paging Dean Lemann! The prestigious Columbia Graduate School of Journalism could use this meandering, weak piece--which fails to deliver the goods in support of whatever its vaguely delineated thesis is--as a case study of an article that desperately needs editing before it's published. ... Oh, wait. The piece was published. By the prestigious Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. ... 5:40 P.M.

SAFIRE: SUPPORT A FEDERAL SHIELD LAW

2004-12-13T20:21:00.000-05:00

Regardless of what you think of William Safire's politics, there can be no doubt, at the end of his legendary career, that he is a true journalist. He gets it.

...Isn't every citizen obliged to give sworn testimony to help the government enforce the law?

The answer is no. The government may not compel a man to testify against his wife, nor doctor against patient, nor priest against penitent, nor lawyer against client. The law has extended this "privilege" to psychologists and social workers, on the theory that society is ill served by erosion of trust within relationships dependent on such trust.

Certainly the public interest in the robust and uninhibited flow of information should continue to protect confidential relations between source and journalist (as more than 30 states now do through "shield" laws).

Here's the rub: No privilege is absolute. Constitutional rights sometimes conflict. Extreme example: Everybody - spouses, doctors, lawyers, clergy, journalists, bartenders - must break any confidence to prevent a murder. We are expected to use common sense in balancing our right to remain silent with our obligation to bear witness.

That good sense is being swept away today by leak-happy prosecutors and activist judges. This trend toward the jailing of journalists for protecting the free flow of news is an abuse-of-power abomination. If higher courts can't control the plumbing fashionable below, it's up to Congress to enact a federal shield law.

Liberals may now be fearful of opposing mindless media hatred, but why are principled conservatives not aroused by imperial judges? The founders ensured freedom of the Fourth Estate as a check against the powers of all three branches of central government. Most states are doing their part. Pass that federal shield law before a judiciary on steroids throws Strike 3. (emphasis added.)

TV reporter gets six-month home confinement sentence

2004-12-12T18:02:00.000-05:00

Flashback: Taricani Statements - Nov. 18, Dec. 1
November 18:

When I became a reporter 30 years ago, I never imagined that I would be put on trial and face the prospect of going to jail simply for doing my job. Today, I was tried and convicted for refusing to identify the confidential source who gave me a videotape showing corruption in City Hall. On Dec. 9, I will be sentenced, possibly to jail.

The government has used its resources and power and the threat of jail to try to coerce me to identify a confidential source. This assault on journalistic freedom exacts a high price by stifling the flow of newsworthy information to reporters and to the public. I wish all of my sources could be on the record, but when people are afraid, a promise of confidentiality may be the only way to get the information to the public, and in some cases, to protect the well-being of the source. I made a promise to my source, which I intend to keep. Although I am willing to go to jail, I think it is wrong that journalists should face this type of threat simply for doing their jobs.

December 12, 2004
The Associated Press

PROVIDENCE, R.I. – A TV reporter who defied a court order to identify the source of a secret FBI videotape will spend the next six months in home confinement, serving a sentence a federal judge says will "mirror as close as possible" prison conditions.

Jim Taricani, 55, was sentenced Thursday, three weeks after he was found guilty of criminal contempt for refusing to say who gave him the FBI tape, part of a federal investigation into municipal corruption in Providence.

U.S. District Judge Ernest Torres told Taricani that he would have sent him to prison had it not been for his fragile medical condition: Taricani had a heart transplant in 1996 and takes medication daily to prevent organ rejection.

FLOYD IN THE HIZZOUSE!!!

2004-12-08T23:44:00.000-05:00

UPDATE - E+P:

NEW YORK On Tuesday night's "Charlie Rose" show on PBS, in a segment on the Valerie Plame/CIA leak probe, attorney Floyd Abrams said that if Judith Miller and Matt Cooper "have to go to jail it will be a defeat and the world will change....We have a history of not putting reporters in jail, and that is changing."

[Ed: This one's going to the Supremes - I feel bad for Rehmmy, a 4-4 split could be interesting.]

SUPPORT YOUR ELECTED REPRESENTATIVES, THE STATES, AND THE CONSTITUTION - BACK DODD'S FREE SPEECH PROTECTION ACT OF 2004. THE FATE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION HANGS IN THE BALANCE. THIS IS NOT A TEST.

Reporters Fight in Court Not to Reveal Sources
December 8, 7:16 PM (ET)
By Deborah Charles

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A lawyer for two journalists subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury asked a federal court on Wednesday to rule that they do not have to disclose their confidential sources in an investigation into the leak of a covert CIA officer's name in the build-up to the Iraq war.

Floyd Abrams, who represents New York Times reporter Judith Miller and Matthew Cooper of Time Magazine, urged a three-judge panel on the federal appeals court to rule that the two do not have to comply with the subpoena.

Abrams said journalists are protected under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

A lawyer for the government, James Fleissner, argued that under a 1972 Supreme Court ruling, journalists are not granted absolute First Amendment protection in criminal cases.

Abrams said times had changed in the past 30 years, and noted that most states have some protection for journalists.
--
To support the Free Speech Protection Act of 2004, please send a blank email to cjf2105@columbia.edu.

Think before you write.

2004-12-03T16:56:00.000-05:00

The WashPost ran an article today about two Massachusetts soldiers who were killed in Iraq. Their funerals were attended by Sens. Kennedy and Kerry.

But down on the second page, this paragraph jumped out at me:

On Sept. 11, 2001, during the moments before the attacks on the World Trade Center, Gavriel had been on the phone with a friend working in one of the towers, according to the news stories. That made it clear: He would go to Iraq.

On 9/11, he knew he would go to Iraq? Wow. That's even before Bush knew he was going to Iraq.

C'mon guys (read: reporters), think about this stuff before you write it.

Mr. President, will you answer the question?

2004-12-03T14:59:00.000-05:00

Salon.com:

Finally, in the absence of answers, the press corps should do a better job of reminding the public of all the outstanding questions from Bush's first term. Aren't some of these questions important enough to keep asking, even if no answer is forthcoming? And isn't it worth reminding our readers and viewers that we have been denied the answers? For instance:

• Who was responsible for the faulty intelligence about Iraq's WMD, and why haven't they been held accountable?
• What has changed about the administration that would give the public the certainty that if we go to war again, it won't be based on faulty intelligence?
• When did Bush become aware of the memos written by White House and Justice Department lawyers sanctioning torture and the circumvention of the Geneva Conventions in certain circumstances? And did he support or reject them?
• Does Bush know who leaked Valerie Plame's identity as a CIA operative? Who did it?

There are many more. And there are also now a growing number of questions about Bush's ambitious but amorphous plans for his second term that should be asked until they are answered. Among them:

• If current workers are allowed to invest some of their Social Security taxes, that amount will have to be made up in some other way, unless the government reduces payments to current or future retirees. So what's it going to be?
• How can the government reduce the deficit if it won't increase taxes and it doesn't reduce spending?
• If the tax code overhaul is to be revenue neutral, and one goal is to reduce the tax rate on savings, what taxes go up?
• If preemptive war against Iraq was justified, what other nations might merit preemptive action?

At this point, the best thing reporters can do is ask questions so simple and direct that Bush's almost inevitable evasion is obvious to everyone. And then they should repeatedly remind their readers and viewers that the questions remain unanswered. Maybe Bush can be prodded and shamed into meeting with the press more often. And maybe White House reporters -- who are, after all, among the best of their profession -- can craft the occasional question that actually prompts the president to reflect upon a decision, recall an event or reaction, give some insight into his judgment, or even spill some beans.

But more realistically, the best outcome we can hope for is that better questions themselves will help the media and the public focus on the vital issues of the day -- so that the president's minimally valuable responses to them can at least appear in well-researched, consequential news reports full of context and facts.

L.A. Times To End National Edition

2004-12-03T13:21:00.000-05:00

WashPost::

The Los Angeles Times is killing its printed daily national edition at the end of the year, saying the Internet and other electronic distribution channels have made the paper copy irrelevant.

The Times, owned by Chicago-based Tribune Co., prints the national edition in Baltimore and distributes it in Washington and New York. The Times would not disclose how many copies it sells or whether the edition makes money. Like the paper sold in California, the national edition is a broadsheet, but a pared-down version, focusing mainly on political news and other national stories.

BBC got hosed

2004-12-03T09:25:00.000-05:00

Reuters:

Dec 3, 2004 — LONDON (Reuters) - BBC World said on Friday that an interview it ran with a man it identified as a spokesman for Dow Chemical Co, in which he said the U.S. company accepted responsibility for India's Bhopal disaster, was wrong and part of an "elaborate deception."

A spokeswoman for Dow Chemical in Switzerland also confirmed that the report was wrong.

The BBC had earlier twice run an interview with a man it identified as Dow Chemical spokesman Jude Finisterra, who said the company accepted full responsibility for the disaster 20 years ago in the central Indian city of Bhopal.

This would have represented a major policy reversal for Dow Chemical which has said it has no responsibility for the Bhopal disaster.'

Free Speech Protection Act of 2004

2004-12-02T15:49:00.000-05:00

"Our Founding Fathers recognized then that for a society to remain free, it must also allow for divergent views and opinions to be expressed, and for ideas to be openly exchanged. In many respects, the rights of free speech and a free press protect the government from trampling on the other political and personal liberties all Americans hold so dear.
Freedom of speech and freedom of the press are like the government watchdog that shines a spotlight when other rights are being threatened. Without this, the press becomes an extension of the government and the people know only what the government wants them to know. As Jefferson once commented:
When the press is free and everyone is able to read, all is safe.
Congress cannot afford to stand idly by and allow our sacred First Amendment freedoms to be threatened. Let me be clear. The legislation I submitted to the desk, the Free Speech Protection Act of 2004, is not merely about protecting the press. Instead, this legislation is about consumer protection. It is about openness, debate, the free flow of information and deliberation--the very ideals that the Senate holds so dear."
-- Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CT)

-------
By Mr. DODD:
S. 3020. A bill to establish protections against compelled disclosure of sources, and news or information, by persons providing services for the news media; to the Committee on the Judiciary.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
This Act may be cited as the ``Free Speech Protection Act of 2004''.
SEC. 2. DEFINITIONS.
In this Act:
(1) COVERED PERSON.--The term ``covered person'' means a person who--
(A) engages in the gathering of news or information; and
(B) has the intent, at the beginning of the process of gathering news or information, to disseminate the news or information to the public.
(2) NEWS OR INFORMATION.--The term ``news or information'' means written, oral, pictorial, photographic, or electronically recorded information or communication concerning local, national, or worldwide events, or other matters.
(3) NEWS MEDIA.--The term ``the news media'' means--
(A) a newspaper;
(B) a magazine;
(C) a journal or other periodical;
(D) radio;
(E) television;
(F) any means of disseminating news or information gathered by press associations, news agencies, or wire services (including dissemination to the news media described in subparagraphs (A) through (E)); or
(G) any printed, photographic, mechanical, or electronic means of disseminating news or information to the public.
SEC. 3. COMPELLED DISCLOSURE PROHIBITED.
(a) IN GENERAL.--Except as provided in section 4, no entity of the judicial, legislative, or executive branch of the Federal Government with the power to issue a subpoena or provide other compulsory process shall compel any covered person who is providing or has provided services for the news media to disclose--
(1) the source of any news or information procured by the person, or any information that would tend to identify the source, while providing services for the news media, whether or not the source has been promised confidentiality; or
(2) any news or information procured by the person, while providing services for the news media, that is not itself communicated in the news media, including any--
(A) notes;
(B) outtakes;
(C) photographs or photographic negatives;
(D) video or sound tapes;
(E) film; or
(F) other data, irrespective of its nature, that is not itself communicated in the news media.
(b) SUPERVISORS, EMPLOYERS, AND PERSONS ASSISTING A COVERED PERSON.--The protection from compelled disclosure described in subsection (a) shall apply to a supervisor, employer, or any person assisting a person covered by subsection (a).
(c) RESULT.--Any news or information obtained in violation of the provisions of this section shall be inadmissible in any action, proceeding, or hearing before any entity of the judicial, legislative, or executive branch of the Federal Government.
SEC. 4. COMPELLED DISCLOSURE PERMITTED.
(a) NEWS OR INFORMATION.--A court may compel disclosure of news or information described in section 3(a)(2) and protected from disclosure under section 3 if the court finds, after providing notice and an opportunity to be heard to the person or entity from whom the news or information is sought, that the party seeking the news or information established by clear and convincing evidence that--
(1) the news or information is critical and necessary to the resolution of a significant legal issue before an entity of the judicial, legislative, or executive branch of the Federal Government that has the power to issue a subpoena;
(2) the news or information could not be obtained by any alternative means; and
(3) there is an overriding public interest in the disclosure.
(b) SOURCE.--A court may not compel disclosure of the source of any news or information described in section 3(a)(1) and protected from disclosure under section 3.
SEC. 5. ACTIVITIES NOT CONSTITUTING A WAIVER.
The publication by the news media, or the dissemination by a person while providing services for the news media, of a source of news or information, or a portion of the news or information, procured in the course of pursuing professional activities shall not constitute a waiver of the protection from compelled disclosure that is described in section 3.
************************
Mr. DODD. Mr. President, I am going to send a copy of this bill to the desk to be printed in the RECORD. It is not going to be referred to any committees in the waning minutes of this 108th Congress, but I will submit it for the RECORD. My plans are to reintroduce this legislation in January when we reconvene for the 109th Congress.
I thought it might be helpful to have this legislation in the RECORD for my colleagues to review. It is called the Free Speech Protection Act of 2004.
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This bill is designed to ensure that the free speech guarantees enshrined in the First to the Constitution will be strong and effective for many generations to come. After all, it is the free flow of news and information to the public on a wide variety of concerns which makes our democracy vibrant and alive.
Indeed, the very design of our democratic institutions is premised in large part upon an informed citizenry that could exercise informed judgments.
As James Madison once observed:
Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And apeople who mean to be their own Governor, must arm themselves with the power that knowledge gives.
Madison and the other Founders of our great Republic understood full well that the best guarantee of a knowledgeable citizenry is a free press and a public free to speak to the press. The press must be free to report on the human condition, the conduct of public officials, matters of business and corporate governance, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of our society and its institutions.
A free press must also be able to access a broad spectrum of views from a wide variety of sources. Once individuals deliberate over such information, they are able to make more educated decisions. In addition, they can also more effectively and intelligently participate in matters of public concern. To quote Madison once again:
Popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it is but a prologue to a farce, or a tragedy, or perhaps both.
In fact, one of the hallmarks of a totalitarian government is that the state controls the press and similar sources of public information. Such regimes are characterized by extreme levels of secrecy and a total lack of transparency. The free flow of information to the public is greatly restricted. Criticism of the government could result in imprisonment or even death.
In recent memory, such regimes existed in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and Saddam Hussein's Iraq, where the press was often used as a tool for propaganda. Unfortunately, there are still a number of governments around the globe today that greatly restrict the flow of news and information to their citizens.
The United States, in its formative years, never chose that path. The Founding Fathers of this great Nation of ours knew the value of a free press because they had often been denied it by their colonial rulers. Repressive measures had long been part of English history in this regard, such as the censorship of published materials and a licensing system whereby nothing could get published without the government's consent.
Our Founding Fathers recognized then that for a society to remain free, it must also allow for divergent views and opinions to be expressed, and for ideas to be openly exchanged. In many respects, the rights of free speech and a free press protect the government from trampling on the other political and personal liberties all Americans hold so dear.
Freedom of speech and freedom of the press are like the government watchdog that shines a spotlight when other rights are being threatened. Without
this, the press becomes an extension of the government and the people know only what the government wants them to know. As Jefferson once commented:
When the press is free and everyone is able to read, all is safe.
Congress cannot afford to stand idly by and allow our sacred First Amendment freedoms to be threatened. Let me be clear. The legislation I submitted to the desk, the Free Speech Protection Act of 2004, is not merely about protecting the press. Instead, this legislation is about consumer protection. It is about openness, debate, the free flow of information and deliberation--the very ideals that the Senate holds so dear.
It is also about ensuring that our constituents, the American citizenry, have access to the knowledge and information they need to make educated decisions and fully participate in our democracy.
Yet these freedoms which we hold so dear are not as safe as they have been in other times in the life of our Nation. They have come under attack by the heavy hand of Government in a manner not seen since the height of the Watergate scandal 30 years ago.
The press today is frequently being subpoenaed to appear in Federal court and threatened with fines and/or imprisonment if they refuse to reveal a confidential source to the prosecutor or attorneys involved in the lawsuit. In some instances, the prosecutor or attorneys might also request the reporter's notes, video outtakes, or other unpublished information.
In recent months, the press has come under intense pressure to reveal the identity of their confidential sources, threatening the public's right to know.
In Providence, RI, WJAR-TV reporter Jim Taricani aired an FBI surveillance tape in 2001 that showed an aide to Mayor Vincent ``Buddy'' Cianci accepting a bribe from a local businessman. Taricani broke no law in airing the tape, but a special prosecutor was subsequently brought in to investigate who leaked the information. He refused to identify the source and was convicted of criminal contempt yesterday in Federal court. Taricani now faces 6 months in prison when he is sentenced in December.
Perhaps the most alarming instance in recent months of the growing threat to the sacred right to freedom of speech in America is the case of Judith Miller of the New York Times. Last month, a Federal judge held Miller in contempt of court for refusing to name her sources to prosecutors investigating the disclosure to syndicated columnist Robert Novak and to other journalists of Valerie Plame's identity as a covert CIA agent. Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, IV, had in a New York Times editorial criticized the Bush administration for claiming that Iraq had tried to buy uranium from Niger.
Unidentified senior administration officials revealed Plame's identity to Robert Novak and other Washington area journalists, allegedly as an act of revenge for Wilson speaking out against President Bush's rationale for invading Iraq.
Mr. Novak then published Plame's identity in a July 2003 column, which prompted an investigation by the Justice Department and the subpoenaing of several journalists before a Federal grand jury, including Judith Miller, Tim Russert of NBC's ``Meet the Press,'' Walter Pincus and Glen Kessler of the Washington Post, and Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper.
Some of these reporters have talked to the prosecutors after the alleged Government sources signed waivers releasing the journalists from any pledge of confidentiality. New York Times reporter Judith Miller, however, has refused to testify, even under the limited terms of the waiver. As a result, she is being held in contempt of court and could face up to 18 months in jail unless she agrees to testify.
What is so surprising about this case is that Judith Miller never even published an article in the New York Times, or any other newspaper or magazine for that matter, about Valerie Plame. The mere fact that Miller contemplated writing such an article and had conducted interviews for it was enough for the judge to hold her in contempt of court for refusing to name sources.
Currently, 31 States and the District of Columbia have enacted protections for gatherers and disseminators of news and information. They include red States, blue States, Alabama, North Carolina, and Montana, for example.
Why then is there a need for a Federal statute in this area? A strong and uniformed Federal law on shielding would provide uniformity and consistency to the patchwork of inconsistent court decisions and State statutes currently in place.
In many instances, whether the disclosure will be compelled and how much information will be disclosed depends upon the particular State in which the journalist is pursuing a story when he or she is subpoenaed. The different potential outcomes affect reporters' practices, the flow of information, the articles written or not written, in various news media. It ultimately impacts the public's ability to learn about matters of interest and importance as well.
The protections that these laws and court rulings provide vary widely in detail and in scope. For example, some States grant nearly complete protection for sources and information, while
[Page: S11648] GPO's PDF
others provide little or none. In addition, the protections may differ in their applicability to criminal and/or civil proceedings.
In the Federal court system, for instance, most have interpreted Branzburg, a 1972 United States Supreme Court decision, to provide at least qualified news gathering protection--that is, a protection that can be overcome in certain circumstances. A few Federal courts, however, such as the Seventh Circuit, have rejected such protection, or have limited it only to when the subpoenas are being used to harass the press.
For those reasons, I think it is quite clear that a national standard would protect gatherers and disseminators of information from the varying State statutes and their interpretations by State courts. This goal is exactly what the Free Speech Protection Act of 2004 would achieve.
Under the legislation, the protection against compelled disclosure for sources would be absolute. The protection against compelled disclosure of news and information, however, is qualified. That is, an individual involved in gathering news would be required to reveal their unpublished material only under certain circumstances. The legislation requires three criteria to be met before such news or information can be disclosed.
First, the person seeking the news or information must prove by clear and convincing evidence that the news or information is critical or necessary to significant legal issues before a judicial, legislative, or administrative body that has the power to issue a subpoena.
Secondly, the news or information could not be obtained by alternative means. Finally, there is an overriding public interest in the disclosure that must exist.
The legislation I am introducing this evening is a work in progress. Obviously, in the coming weeks I intend to further refine it, and in the 109th Congress to seek out my colleagues' advice and counsel on how we might proceed. I am nevertheless introducing this bill in the closing hours of this Congress because I believe the Senate discussion of this matter is urgent. The public's right to know is under attack. When that happens, all Americans suffer since they are deprived of knowledge and information which affects their lives.
There are countless examples of information that we have received because there have been confidential sources who have come forward. Certainly, we can go back to Watergate, Whitewater, or Iran-Contra, Abu Ghirab--the prison scandal in Iraq--Enron, WorldCom, corporate governance issues, the list is almost endless. Had it not been for confidential sources coming forward and sharing information with a free press that would then share that with the public, if we had to rely exclusively on government press releases or press conferences, then we might never have learned anything about some of these issues which have been so vitally important to make our Government and our Nation stronger.
I urge my colleagues to take a look at this proposal and urge them to consider it when we return in January. I will reintroduce it again and urge them to support it.
I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the RECORD.
************************
PRESS RELEASE
November 19, 2004
Washington, DC - In response to recent reports in which the press has come under intense pressure to reveal the identity of their confidential sources, Senator Dodd today introduced federal legislation to protect individuals and organizations involved in gathering and disseminating news from being hauled into federal court and forced to disclose their sources or other unpublished information. The Free Speech Protection Act of 2004 would establish a strong and uniform federal reporters' shield law modeled after statutes currently in place in thirty-one states and the District of Columbia.
"This legislation is fundamentally about good government and the free and unfettered flow of information to the public," said Dodd. "The American people deserve access to a wide array of views so that they can make informed decisions and effectively participate in matters of public concern. When the public's right to know is threatened, and when the rights of free speech and free press are at risk, all of the other liberties we hold dear are endangered. The legislation that I am introducing today will protect these rights, and ensure that the government remains open and accountable to its citizens."
The proposed legislation creates an absolute protection against compelled disclosure for sources, regardless of whether or not the source was promised confidentiality. The protection against compelled disclosure of news and information, however, is qualified - that is, an individual involved in gathering news would be required to reveal their unpublished material only under certain circumstances.
There is currently a patchwork of inconsistent court decisions and state statutes that provide protections for individuals and organizations that gather and disseminate news and information. The protections that these laws and court rulings provide vary widely in detail and scope. The national standard enshrined in The Free Speech Protection Act of 2004 would alleviate many of these concerns.
- 30 -

FALLUJA FIRST-HAND

2004-11-30T16:56:00.000-05:00

More revealing than any nightly news broadcast, this lengthy candid letter from a Marine officer to his father is astonishing in its description and feeling. I received it from a colleague, who received it from a friend in the military. Please keep in mind, this is propaganda.
---------------
--begins--
...
Source and authenticity not verified.

November 21, 2004
The Real News from Fallujah
by Lt. Col. B-----.

Dear Dad -

Just came out of the city and I honestly do not know where to start. I am afraid that whatever I send you will not do sufficient honor to the men who fought and took Fallujah.

Shortly before the attack, Task Force Fallujah was built. It consisted of Regimental Combat Team 1 built around 1st Marine Regiment and Regimental Combat Team 7 built around 7th Marine Regiment. Each Regiment consisted of two Marine Rifle Battalions reinforced and one Army mechanized infantry battalion.

Regimental Combat Team 1 (RCT-1) consisted of 3rd Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion (3rd LAR), 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines (3/5); 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines (3/1) and 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry (2/7). RCT-7 was slightly less weighted but still a formidable force. Cutting a swath around the city was an Army Brigade known as Blackjack. The Marine RCT’s were to assault the city while Blackjack kept the enemy off of the backs of the assault force.

The night prior to the actual invasion, we all moved out into the desert just north of the city. It was something to see. You could just feel the intensity in the Marines and Soldiers. It was all business. As the day cleared, the Task Force began striking targets and moving into final attack positions. As the invasion force commenced its movement into attack positions, 3rd LAR led off RCT-1’s offensive with an attack up a peninsula formed by the Euphrates River on the west side of the city. Their mission was to secure the Fallujah Hospital and the two bridges leading out of the city. They executed there tasks like clockwork and smashed the enemy resistance holding the bridges. Simultaneous to all of this, Blackjack sealed the escape routes to the south of the city. As invasion day dawned, the net was around the city and the Marines and Soldiers knew that the enemy that failed to escape was now sealed.

3/5 began the actual attack on the city by taking an apartment complex on the northwest corner of the city. It was key terrain as the elevated positions allowed the command to look down into the attack lanes. The Marines took the apartments quickly and moved to the rooftops and began engaging enemy that were trying to move into their fighting positions. The scene on the rooftop was surreal. Machine gun teams were running boxes of ammo up 8 flights of stairs in full body armor and carrying up machine guns while snipers engaged enemy shooters. The whole time the enemy was firing mortars and rockets at the apartments. Honest to God, I don’t think I saw a single Marine even distracted by the enemy fire. Their squad leaders, and platoon commanders had them prepared and they were executing their assigned tasks.

As mentioned, 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry joined the Regiment just prior to the fight. In fact, they started showing up for planning a couple of weeks in advance. There is always a professional rivalry between the Army and the Marine Corps but it was obvious from the outset that these guys were the real deal. They had fought in Najaf and were eager to fight with the Regiment in Fallujah. They are exceptionally well led and supremely confident.

2/7 became our wedge. In short, they worked with 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines. We were limited in the amount of prep fires that we were allowed to fire on the city prior to the invasion. This was a point of some consternation to the forces actually taking the city. Our compensation was to turn to 2/7 and ask them to slash into the city and create as much turbulence as possible for
3/1 to follow. Because of the political reality, the Marine Corps was also under pressure to “get it done quickly.” For this reason, 2/7 and 3/1 became the penetration force into the city.

Immediately following 3/5’s attack on the apartment buildings, 3/1 took the train station on the north end of the city. While the engineers blew a breach through the train trestle, the Cavalry soldiers poured through with their tanks and Bradley’s and chewed an opening in the enemy defense. 3/1 followed them through until they reached a phaseline deep into the northern half of the city. The Marine infantry along with a few tanks then turned to the right and attacked the heart of the enemy defense. The fighting was tough as the enemy had the area dialed in with mortars. 3/5 then attacked into the northwest corner of the city. This fight continued as both Marine rifle battalions clawed their way into the city on different axis.

There is an image burned into my brain that I hope I never forget. We came up behind 3/5 one day as the lead squads were working down the Byzantine streets of the Jolan area. An assault team of two Marines ran out from behind cover and put a rocket into a wall of an enemy strongpoint. Before the smoke cleared the squad behind them was up and moving through the hole and clearing the house. Just down the block another squad was doing the same thing. The house was cleared quickly and the Marines were running down the street to the next contact. Even in the midst of that mayhem, it was an awesome site.

The fighting has been incredibly close inside the city. The enemy is willing to die and is literally waiting until they see the whites of the eyes of the Marines before they open up. Just two days ago, as a firefight raged in close quarters, one of the interpreters yelled for the enemy in the house to surrender. The enemy yelled back that it was better to die and go to heaven than to surrender to infidels. This exchange is a graphic window into the world that the Marines and Soldiers have been fighting in these last 10 days.

I could go on and on about how the city was taken but one of the most amazing aspects to the fighting was that we saw virtually no civilians during the battle. Only after the fighting had passed did a few come out of their homes. They were provided food and water and most were evacuated out of the city. At least 90-95% of the people were gone from the city when we attacked.

I will end with a couple of stories of individual heroism that you may not have heard yet. I was told about both of these incidents shortly after they occurred. No doubt some of the facts will change slightly but I am confident that the meat is correct.

The first is a Marine from 3/5. His name is Corporal Yeager (Chuck Yeager’s grandson). As the Marines cleared an apartment building, they got to the top floor and the point man kicked in the door. As he did so, an enemy grenade and a burst of gunfire came out. The explosion and enemy fire took off the point man’s leg. He was then immediately shot in the arm as he lay in the doorway. Corporal Yeager tossed a grenade in the room and ran into the doorway and into the enemy fire in order to pull his buddy back to cover. As he was dragging the wounded Marine to cover, his own grenade came back through the doorway. Without pausing, he reached down and threw the grenade back through the door while he heaved his buddy to safety. The grenade went off inside the room and Cpl Yeager threw another in. He immediately entered the room following the second explosion. He gunned down three enemy all within three feet of where he stood and then let fly a third grenade as he backed out of the room to complete the evacuation of the wounded Marine. You have to understand that a grenade goes off within 5 seconds of having the pin pulled. Marines usually let them “cook off” for a second or two before tossing them in. Therefore, this entire episode took place in less than 30 seconds.

The second example comes from 3/1. Cpl Mitchell is a squad leader. He was wounded as his squad was clearing a house when some enemy threw pineapple grenades down on top of them. As he was getting triaged, the doctor told him that he had been shot through the arm. Cpl Mitchell told the doctor that he had actually been shot “a couple of days ago” and had given himself self aide on the wound. When the doctor got on him about not coming off the line, he firmly told the doctor that he was a squad leader and did not have time to get treated as his men were still fighting. There are a number of Marines who have been wounded multiple times but refuse to leave their fellow Marines.

It is incredibly humbling to walk among such men. They fought as hard as any Marines in history and deserve to be remembered as such. The enemy they fought burrowed into houses and fired through mouse holes cut in walls, lured them into houses rigged with explosives and detonated the houses on pursuing Marines, and actually hid behind surrender flags only to engage the Marines with small arms fire once they perceived that the Marines had let their guard down. I know of several instances where near dead enemy rolled grenades out on Marines who were preparing to render them aid. It was a fight to the finish in every sense and the Marines delivered.

I have called the enemy cowards many times in the past because they have never really held their ground and fought but these guys in the city did. We can call them many things but they were not cowards.

My whole life I have read about the greatest generation and sat in wonder at their accomplishments. For the first time, as I watch these Marines and Soldiers, I am eager for the future as this is just the beginning for them. Perhaps the most amazing characteristic of all is that the morale of the men is sky high. They hurt for the wounded and the dead but they are eager to continue to attack. Further, not one of them would be comfortable with being called a hero even though they clearly are.

By now the Marines and Soldiers have killed well over a thousand enemy. These were not peasants or rabble. They were reasonably well trained and entirely fanatical. Most of the enemy we have seen have chest rigs full of ammunition and are well armed are willing to fight to the death. The Marines and Soldiers are eager to close with them and the fighting at the end is inevitably close.

I will write you more the next time I come in about what we have found inside the city. All I can say is that even with everything that I knew and expected from the last nine months, the brutality and fanaticism of the enemy surprised me. The beheadings were even more common place than we thought but so were torture and summary executions. Even though it is an exaggeration, it seems as though every block in the northern part of the city has a torture chamber or execution site. There are hundreds of tons of munitions and tens of thousands of weapons that our Regiment alone has recovered. The Marines and Soldiers of the Regiment have also found over 400 IEDs already wired and ready to detonate. No doubt these numbers will grow in the days ahead.

In closing, I want to share with you a vignette about when the Marines secured the Old Bridge (the one where the Americans were mutilated and hung on March 31) this week. After the Marines had done all the work and secured the bridge, we walked across to meet up with 3rd LAR on the other side. On the Fallujah side of the bridge where the Americans were hung there is some Arabic writing on the bridge. An interpreter translated it for me as we walked through. It read: “Long Live the Mujahadeen. Fallujah is the Graveyard for Americans and the end of the Marine Corps.”

As I came back across the bridge there was a squad sitting in their Amtrac smoking and watching the show. The Marines had written their own message below the enemy’s. It is not something that Mom would appreciate but it fit the moment to a T. Not far from the vehicle were two dead enemy laying where they died. The Marines were sick of watching the “Dog and Pony show” and wanted to get back to work.

D---

Jizzudy, Flizzoyd on Chizzuck on PBS Tonizznatch

2004-11-30T13:46:00.000-05:00

If for no other reason than to push that obnoxious Anderson Cooper quote down the page, I alert you to the following, courtesy of E+P.

Judith Miller, Floyd Abrams on Charlie Rose Tonight
By E&P Staff
Published: November 30, 2004 10:00 AM ET

NEW YORK New York Times reporter Judith Miller and her attorney Floyd Abrams will be featured tonight on the Charlie Rose talk show on PBS, discussing her involvement (and possible jailing) in the Valerie Plame/Robert Novak/CIA leak case. The show was taped yesterday, E&P has learned. The next hearing on Miller's refusal to go along with a subpoena in the federal probe is scheduled for Dec. 8.

"You seem to have all the answers?" "I'm a reporter. That's my job."

2004-11-29T15:17:00.000-05:00

CNN's new ad campaign: "Your Command"

Pretty funny.

Death of a Legend: Murray Schumach

2004-11-28T22:24:00.000-05:00

November 28, 2004
Murray Schumach, Neighborhood Storyteller, Dies at 91
By FRANCIS X. CLINES

Murray Schumach, a reporter who harvested rich stories from New York's neighborhoods and whose 48-year career at The New York Times also took him from the Orient to Hollywood, from the back rooms of City Hall to the gem-cutting sanctums of the diamond district, died on Saturday.

Read on...

Thankgiving of the Moguls

2004-11-28T21:33:00.000-05:00

In this Sunday's NYT Magazine, The Donald responds to Richard Branson's multiple disses in his Deborah Solomon's Q+A last week. An excerpt from the Branson piece:

So, basically, it's an ad campaign for Virgin Domestic, your new airline for the American market. How can it possibly prosper when most American airlines are on the verge of bankruptcy?

The service offered by American, Delta and United is abysmal. They treat people like cattle. The difference between Virgin and the other airlines is like the difference between Donald Trump and me, or chalk and cheese.

Speaking of Trump, it seems fair to liken your new show to his ''Apprentice,'' which also entices contestants with the promise of a plum job.

But the shows are so different! His is based in an office. I never spend any time in an office. And none of my companies have ever gone bankrupt.

Have you met the Donald?

I had dinner with him three or four years ago in New York. He has a list of the most important things you need in order to be successful in business, and I don't agree with any of them. He says you mustn't shake someone's hand because you might catch a cold someday. That is not my approach.

And now, we have Trump's riposte:

Your questions for Richard Branson failed to mention any of his numerous failures, including cola, cellphones and soon, I predict, his excursion into the world of railroads (Deborah Solomon, Nov. 7). After years of trying, he couldn't even circle the globe in his wonderful balloon. Also, I find it hard to believe that anybody in the airline business is, in fact, a billionaire.

Since your feature appeared, Richard Branson's reality show, "Rebel Billionaire," has opened to minuscule ratings, even lower than Mark Cuban's failed attempt at knocking off me and my show. In the meantime, "The Apprentice" continues to bring in top ratings, and I am having fun on all fronts, especially beating my copycat rivals.
Donald J. Trump
New York

"Go Fuck Yourselves." - (former) State-Run Ukranian Media to Government

2004-11-26T17:26:00.000-05:00

Update: AP
Ukraine Parliament Calls Election Invalid, Raising Possibility of a New Vote

Nov. 27, 2004 - Ukraine's parliament on Saturday declared invalid the disputed presidential election that triggered a week of growing street protests and legal maneuvers, raising the possibility that a new vote could be held in this former Soviet republic.

Parliament's vote came amid a flurry of domestic and international support for the possibility of a revote. A European Union envoy Dutch Foreign Minister Ben Bot said new elections were the "ideal outcome" for the standoff between Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych and Viktor Yushchenko. Asked if new elections were the only solution, Ben Bot answered: "Yes."

The Unian news agency quoted Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Yakovenko as saying Friday that Moscow regarded a potential revote favorably an apparent significant retreat from its earlier insistence that the Nov. 21 elections were fair and valid.

Things appear to have taken a dramatic turn as the state-run media has said that they will no longer lie on behalf of the government.

BBC Story:

by Sebastian Usher
BBC world media correspondent

Journalists on Ukraine's state-owned channel - which had previously given unswerving support to Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych - have joined the opposition, saying they have had enough of "telling the government's lies".

Journalists on another strongly pro-government TV station have also promised an end to the bias in their reporting. The turnaround in news coverage, after years of toeing the government line, is a big setback for Mr Yanukovych.

Journalists in Ukraine seem to have responded to the call by opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko for them to reject government censorship.

A correspondent on the state channel, UT1 , announced live on the evening bulletin that the entire news team was going to join the protests in Independence Square. She said their message to the protesters was: "We are not lying anymore".

(Read On...)

Kevin Sites Explains....

2004-11-24T16:00:00.000-05:00

To Devil Dogs of the 3.1:

Since the shooting in the Mosque, I've been haunted that I have not been able to tell you directly what I saw or explain the process by which the world came to see it as well. As you know, I'm not some war zone tourist with a camera who doesn't understand that ugly things happen in combat. I've spent most of the last five years covering global conflict. But I have never in my career been a 'gotcha' reporter -- hoping for people to commit wrongdoings so I can catch them at it.

This week I've even been shocked to see myself painted as some kind of anti-war activist. Anyone who has seen my reporting on television or has read the dispatches on this website is fully aware of the lengths I've gone to play it straight down the middle -- not to become a tool of propaganda for the left or the right.

But I find myself a lightning rod for controversy in reporting what I saw occur in front of me, camera rolling.

It's time you to have the facts from me, in my own words, about what I saw -- without imposing on that Marine -- guilt or innocence or anything in between. I want you to read my account and make up your own minds about whether you think what I did was right or wrong. All the other armchair analysts don't mean a damn to me.

Read on....

The decline of print media

2004-11-24T13:16:00.000-05:00

From Wired News (via Dave Winer) :

"Young people just aren't interested in reading newspapers and print magazines. In fact, according to Washington City Paper , The Washington Post organized a series of six focus groups in September to determine why the paper was having so much trouble attracting younger readers. You see, daily circulation, which had been holding firm at 770,000 subscribers for the last few years, fell more than 6 percent to about 720,100 by June 2004, with the paper losing 4,000 paying subscribers every month.

Imagine what higher-ups at the Post must have thought when focus-group participants declared they wouldn't accept a Washington Post subscription even if it were free. The main reason (and I'm not making this up): They didn't like the idea of old newspapers piling up in their houses.

Don't think for a minute that young people don't read. On the contrary, they do, many of them voraciously. But having grown up under the credo that information should be free, they see no reason to pay for news. Instead they access The Washington Post website or surf Google News, where they select from literally thousands of information sources. They receive RSS feeds on their PDAs or visit bloggers whose views mesh with their own. In short, they customize their news-gathering experience in a way a single paper publication could never do. And their hands never get dirty from newsprint."

Dan Rather to Step Down at CBS in March

2004-11-23T15:17:00.000-05:00

By JACQUES STEINBERG

Less than two months after acknowledging that he could not authenticate documents central to a broadcast report that raised fresh questions about President Bush's National Guard service, Dan Rather has decided to step down as anchor and managing editor of the "CBS Evening News" on March 9, on what will be his 24th anniversary behind the anchor desk.

"I have been lucky and blessed over these years to have what is, to me, the best job in the world and to have it at CBS News," Mr. Rather said in a statement issued by the network just after noon today. "Along the way I've had the honor of working with some of the most talented, dedicated professionals in the world, and I'm appreciative of the opportunity to continue doing so in the years years ahead."

Mr. Rather will continue to work full time at CBS News, as a correspondent for the Sunday and Wednesday editions of "60 Minutes." There was no word from CBS News on a successor as anchor, although the front-runners in the view of network reporters and producers have long been John Roberts, the chief White House correspondent for CBS News, and Scott Pelley, a correspondent for the Wednesday edition of "60 Minutes." But neither is considered to have strong name recognition among viewers, and the network has not ruled out looking beyond its own news division.

Mr. Rather's decision represents an abrupt, somewhat ignominious end to the nearly quarter of a century that he spent in one of the most visible jobs in journalism. In announcing his decision now to quit the anchor desk, Mr. Rather, 73, is seeking to act ahead of an independent panel investigating the journalistic breakdowns that led CBS News to broadcast and then vigorously defend the Guard segment, which it later acknowledged to be based on documents whose genuineness and origins it could not substantiate.

Follow the petition's progress

2004-11-23T01:20:00.000-05:00

Here.

I will be updating this as more signatures come in. I'll be taking a printed version of this page to Dodd's Hartford office on Wednesday morning. Jared Allen has also agreed to take a copy to his DC office this week as well (he's heading there anyway).

Thanks!

By the way, the bill number is S.2030, and you can follow its progress in the Senate here.

NYT discount for j-schoolers

2004-11-22T16:12:00.000-05:00

An RW1 buddy told me about this on Friday, so I called the same day and it's true: if you tell the NY Times that you're a Columbia j-school student, you can get the full 7-day subscription for $15 (thanks, Zak, I don't know where I came up with $35 earlier) a month. Which is pretty damn good.

They'll even deliver the weekday issues to one address and weekends to another, which is a nice perk if you have a honey that you hide out with on the weekends in the vain hopes of escaping schoolwork...

Best. Dateline. Ever.

2004-11-20T13:24:00.000-05:00

LAKE CHARGOGGAGOGGMANCHAUGGAGOGGCHAUBUNAGUNGAMAUGG, Mass.

It is spelled just the way it sounds.

Unless you spell it differently, like in the sign put up by the chamber of commerce at the southern end of town, which has an O for one of the U's and an H for one of the N's.

Or the postcards at Waterfront Mary's, the lake's best-known restaurant, which have smuggled an extra "gaug" into the name.

Even for the locals, this sprawling central Massachusetts lake with the even more sprawling name, Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg - the longest place name in the country - is not for the tied of tongue.

NYT, Nov. 20 2004

SEN. DODD (D-CT) PROPOSES NATIONAL SHIELD LAW

2004-11-19T15:53:00.000-05:00

Contact your elected senators and representatives and tell them to support Senator Dodd!

Sen. Introduces Bill to Protect Reporters

By DONNA CASSATA, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - Reporters would not be forced to reveal their sources, and their notes, photographs and other material would be protected from government eyes under a bill introduced Friday.

Amid a spate of First Amendment fights pitting the government against journalists over confidential sources, Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (news, bio, voting record), D-Conn., proposed the legislation as critical to ensuring the nation's liberties.

"Democracy is premised on an informed citizenry," Dodd said at a Capitol Hill news conference. "A free press is the best guarantee of a knowledgeable citizenry."

Journalists contend the First Amendment, which established freedom of the press, gives reporters the right not to divulge their sources. Thirty-one states and the District of Columbia have "shield laws" to protect the media from disclosing sources in state cases.

But no federal law exists, and special prosecutors in a number of high-profile cases have aggressively pursued journalists. The possibility of jail time looms for some.

A television reporter in Rhode Island was convicted of criminal contempt Thursday for refusing to reveal who leaked him an FBI (news - web sites) videotape of a politician taking a bribe. Reporters for Time and The New York Times have been held in contempt as part of an investigation into the disclosure of an undercover CIA (news - web sites) officer's identity.

Under Dodd's bill, the federal courts, legislative or executive branch could not compel a journalist to provide the source of information, whether or not that person has been promised confidentiality. That right would extend to a journalists' notebooks, photographic negatives and other material.

The bill says a court could force disclosure of news in cases in which it is critical to a legal issue, the information cannot be obtained anywhere else and an overriding public interest exists in the disclosure.

Lawyers who have handled First Amendment cases welcomed the legislation as overdue.

"The advantage of a shield law once and for all is defining the privilege and establishing what the scope is," said Kevin Baine, a lawyer at Williams and Connolly.

Bruce Sanford, an attorney at Baker and Hostetler, cited the courts' respect for confidentiality in certain relations — priest and penitent, doctor and patient, husband and wife — and argued that it should apply to reporters and their sources.

"It's an issue of open government and whether the public receives the information they need," Sanford said.

Dodd, the lone sponsor of the measure, introduced the bill in the waning hours of the congressional session, but promised to reintroduce it when a new Congress begins in January. He voiced optimism about gaining the support of Republicans and Democrats, noting that several states with shield laws are conservative, GOP-leaning states.

That point was echoed by media lawyer Laura Handman of Davis, Wright and Tremaine who said, "Informing citizenry really crosses party lines."

John Strum, president of the Newspaper Association of America, said the bill would allow journalists to do their jobs without fear of penalty.

It is rarely wise to bring sex into the office, but apparently no one informed the employees of The Spectator.

2004-11-19T01:20:00.000-05:00

what?!?

oh.

nevermind.

Reporter Is Convicted in R.I. for Protecting Source

2004-11-18T17:08:00.000-05:00

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) -- A television reporter was convicted of criminal contempt Thursday for refusing to say who gave him an FBI videotape showing a city official taking a bribe.

Jim Taricani, of WJAR-TV, faces up to six months in prison when he is sentenced Dec. 9 by U.S. District Judge Ernest Torres.

Taricani, 55, broke no law by repeatedly airing the tape, but a special prosecutor was appointed to find out who leaked it because the court had ordered attorneys, investigators and defendants not to disseminate any tapes connected to a federal corruption probe during former Mayor Vincent ``Buddy'' Cianci Jr.'s administration.

-- AP, Nov. 18 2004

Why, Kerry? Why?

2004-11-17T23:54:00.000-05:00

Well, this was the man so many convinced themselves to follow. So sad.

Democrats Question Kerry's Campaign Funds

Wed Nov 17, 6:01 PM ET Politics - AP

By RON FOURNIER, AP Political Writer

WASHINGTON - Democratic Party leaders said Wednesday they want to know why Sen. John Kerry (news - web sites) ended his presidential campaign with more than $15 million in the bank, money that could have helped Democratic candidates across the country.

AP Photo

AP Photo
Slideshow: John Kerry

Some said he will be pressured to give the money to Democratic campaign committees rather than save it for a potential White House bid in 2008.

"Democrats are questioning why he sat on so much money that could have helped him defeat George Bush (news - web sites) or helped down-ballot races, many of which could have gone our way with a few more million dollars," said Donna Brazile, campaign manager for Al Gore (news - web sites)'s 2000 presidential race.

Brazile is a member of the 400-plus member Democratic National Committee (news - web sites), which meets early next year to pick a new party chairman. One high-ranking member of the DNC, speaking on condition of anonymity, said word of Kerry's nest egg has stirred anger on the committee and could hurt his chances of putting an ally in the chairmanship.

Congressional Democrats and labor leaders also privately questioned Kerry's motives. One said he would personally ask the Massachusetts senator to donate some of the money to the Democratic House and Senate campaign committees.

Three former Kerry campaign aides, also demanding anonymity out of concerns about alienating their former boss, said they were surprised and disappointed to learn that he left so much money in the bank.

Kerry had roughly $45 million left in his primary campaign fund as of mid-October, according to his Federal Election Commission (news - web sites) report, and could use that as seed money for another presidential bid.

His final report is not due until next month, but officials close to Kerry said he has $15 million to $17 million in that account, with no outstanding debts, after giving the DNC about $23 million and state parties about $9 million since the mid-October report.

In addition, the report showed that Kerry had about $7 million on hand in a legal and accounting compliance fund that he could use for legal expenses in a 2008 campaign. Officials said he raised several million more for that account since the filing.

Last summer, Kerry donated $3 million each to the House and Senate campaign committees and $2 million to the Democratic Governors Association.

While Kerry has likely given more money to state committees than any other nominee, no other Democrat has raised as much as he did. And second-guessing Democrats said Wednesday they couldn't recall a candidate leaving so much money on the table after a campaign.

"He's going to have to give some of it up for 2005 and beyond," Brazile said. "The party will demand it."

This is the NYT cracking down on anon sources

2004-11-17T17:33:00.000-05:00

In sports, philanthropy, Eminem, Lenny Kravitz's real estate, and cooking, all places where anonymity is critical:

One Minneapolis woman, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid family discord, said she and her husband were so attached to their mothers' stuffing recipes that they had to alternate years at each table. (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/17/dining/17STUF.html)

The hospital has discussed a potential gift of tens of millions of dollars with Evelyn and Leonard Lauder, the cosmetics magnates who have supported Memorial Sloan-Kettering for years, said two longtime fund-raisers familiar with its capital campaign. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they did not want to alienate the Lauders. (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/15/giving/15STRO.html)

Two Western Conference officials who spoke on condition of anonymity said Denver officials were upset by the Nuggets' effort, their sputtering up-tempo game and Bzdelik's inability to control both. (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/14/sports/basketball/14hoops.html)

Universal Music Group has licensed songs from its stable of artists including U2 and Eminem to a company that has developed technology designed to prevent the unauthorized distribution of audio tracks over online file-sharing networks, a source familiar with the venture said. (http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-Legal-Peer-to-Peer.html)

Sometimes the prices are bid up; sometimes they just start higher. The vice president of a Manhattan real estate company who requested anonymity for fear of offending clients said, "I have represented many famous people and I automatically put the price 15 percent higher than I would without the big name for the same sort of apartment, and they have always sold." (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/14/realestate/14celeb.html)

The team preferred to build a new stadium that the team would own, according to team officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity. (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/11/nyregion/11meadow.html)

Notes from the Blog/'04 Campaign Panel

2004-11-17T11:52:00.000-05:00

Comprehensive notes from last night's event, "Pamphleteering in the Digital Age: The Impact of Blogs on the 2004 Campaign?"

- Wonkette rolls her eyes as Madore uses the inevitable "sassy" in his intro of her
- Columbia is so clueless they list Duncan Black's credentials for Media Matters and not Eschaton on the invite
- "People do blogs because they can't get published elsewhere" ... partisan, high-pitched nature of '04 campaign ... blogs ... most lasting contribution and least novel ... "blogs made it impossible for mainstream media (MSM) to sit on the story until it's ready to go" ... "I'm not sure what we'd do if MSM changed the way we want them to." (Wonkette)
- (Scan alumni newsletter)
- Thomas Fitzgerald, Election Reporter, The Philadelphia Inquirer: we're the whale (heh) and they chew our krill, or something. "Peeing in your pants makes you feel warm on a winter night" (neighbor looking at me with concern as I jot this down) "We're not dead yet! We might be dying..."
- Why'd they close the bar?

Safire to Leave NYT Op-Ed Page

2004-11-16T13:46:00.000-05:00

Kurtzmeister...

Pour out a little bit of your 40's for a master, kids...

When William Safire left the Nixon White House to hold forth on the op-ed page of the New York Times, many readers reacted with disbelief, as if an intruder were defiling their liberal temple.

After three decades, the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist has become a comfortable fixture at the paper, a must-read even for those who disagree with his conservative views.

Safire, 74, said yesterday he is giving up the column in January. "It's time to leave when you're still hitting the long ball and have something else you want to do," he said. Safire said he told Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. last year that the 2004 campaign would be his "last hurrah" and that Sulzberger "expressed the proper dismay" but urged him not to give up his "On Language" column. Safire will continue that idiosyncratic column for the paper's Sunday magazine.

Don't fuck with our VP. He'll . . . nevermind.

2004-11-15T01:47:00.000-05:00

New NYT memo, courtesy Slate

2004-11-12T13:35:00.000-05:00

Thanks, Jack:

Memorandum for: THE STAFF

In the last year and a half, The Times has deepened and widened its efforts to deserve readers' trust. Most notably, we have appointed a public editor and given serious consideration to his questions and advice; we have required that every unidentified source quoted in the paper be known by name to at least one editor; we have tried to describe our sources and their motives more candidly and usefully. We'd like to believe we have reduced our dependence on anonymous sources; certainly we have begun trying and intend to push ahead.

Now, as Bill Keller told us in his town hall meetings before the election, we want to examine our practices, and our readers' demands, even more thoroughly. We especially want to examine the measures we have NOT yet taken, asking ourselves why not, and whether they could improve our accuracy and accountability.

For that purpose, Bill has asked me to put together a committee of news people to collect and evaluate those possibilities. It will be a small group, but a central part of its mandate will be to reach out to everyone anywhere in the news department who offers a useful idea. Some of our first thoughts about proposals to examine include these:

* Can we cut back, or even cut out, our attendance at background briefings by nameless officials?

* Can we otherwise squeeze more anonymous sources out of our pages? Can we make our attributions (even the anonymous ones) less murky? Are there some stories we can afford to skip if they are not attributable to people with names?

* Can we encourage writers, in an organized way, to cultivate the respect of our sources by checking back with the people they have interviewed, and making sure they have both words and nuances correct?

* Is there a systematic way to keep track of the errors we make, and analyze their causes, and make better use of training to reduce their frequency?

* What are the best practices in our business for accuracy and accountability, and which ones should we adapt or emulate?

* Should we join the small number of papers that send out random questionnaires after publication, to ask our story subjects what they thought of our accuracy and the civility of their encounter with us?

* Should we print the writer's e-mail address at the bottom of each story? Does our practice have to be identical throughout the staff? Can it differ by department? By writer?

* Should we consider an electronic spot-check for plagiarism?

* Should we be responding systematically to outside critics who attack our believability for political or commercial reasons of their own? What is an effective vehicle for doing this? A column by the editor or editors on how we work?

The membership of the committee is listed below. Our introductory meeting will take place on November 11. We expect to meet for a few weeks, but not in marathon sessions like those of the 2003 Siegal Committee. We're trying to blend many kinds of expertise. We'll be grateful to everyone in the newsroom who has an idea to add to the list above, or who is willing to share thinking with the committee members.

Many thanks.

Al

MEMBERSHIP OF THE COMMITTEE

David Barstow, Metro
Dana Canedy, National
Rebecca Corbett, Washington
Steve Crowley, Washington Pictures
Kevin Flynn, Metro
Steve Holmes, Washington
Christine Kay, Investigations
Charles Knittle, Metro
Patrick LaForge, Metro
Mike Leahy, Managing Editor's Office
Eric Schmitt, Washington
Terry Schwadron, Newsroom Technology
Al Siegal, Chairman
Phil Taubman, Washington
Duff Wilson, Sports
Diane Cardwell, Metro
Fred Andrews (Rapporteur)

America's Finest News Source

2004-11-12T09:46:00.000-05:00

Nation's Poor Win Election For Nation's Rich

WASHINGTON, DC—The economically disadvantaged segment of the U.S. population provided the decisive factor in another presidential election last Tuesday, handing control of the government to the rich and powerful once again.

"The Republican party—the party of industrial mega-capitalists, corporate financiers, power brokers, and the moneyed elite—would like to thank the undereducated rural poor, the struggling blue-collar workers in Middle America, and the God-fearing underpriviledged [sic] minorities who voted George W. Bush back into office," Karl Rove, senior advisor to Bush, told reporters at a press conference Monday. "You have selflessly sacrificed your well-being and voted against your own economic interest. For this, we humbly thank you."

So Sorry....

2004-11-11T15:47:00.000-05:00

UPDATE: THEY'RE NOT SORRY!!!

Everybody...

And because we're an equal opporunity apologizer around here...from the other half...we have:

Letter of Apology.

And while we're doing a little web roundup, I'd like to apologize for the really, really bad manners on the part of the person who recently said, Fuck The South.

All those Federal taxes you love to hate? It all comes from us and goes to you, so shut up and enjoy your fucking Tennessee Valley Authority electricity and your fancy highways that we paid for. And the next time Florida gets hit by a hurricane you can come crying to us if you want to, but you're the ones who built on a fucking swamp. "Let the Spanish keep it, it’s a shithole," we said, but you had to have your fucking orange juice.

Just unconscionable.

Livingston Awards

2004-11-10T14:57:00.000-05:00

"The Livingston Awards for excellence by professionals under the age of 35 are the largest all-media, general reporting prizes in American journalism. They are also unusual in judging print, broadcast and on-line entries against one another, a practice of increasing interest as technology blurs traditional distinctions between rival branches of the profession."

http://www.livawards.org/awards/

All aboard

2004-11-10T10:29:00.000-05:00

Earlier this month, Editor and Publisher reported that ever since U.S. Forces were ordered back into Fallujah, "the Pentagon-run embedded-journalist program has surged," and Iraqi insurgents "invited journalists to 'embed' with them to report their side of the war."
Wait...both sides? We can't do that. That'd be wrong. That'd be heresy.

The Falluja Mujahideen Shura group of insurgents, tribal chiefs and Sunni clerics said they would welcome all journalists to embed with their program, including U.S. media (their hostage supply must be running low). Reuters reported that "the few journalists remaining in Fallujah ... are mainly Iraqis."

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000707752

[War] Much More Scary...

2004-11-10T01:00:00.000-05:00

Falluja
Fallujah
(Google News Search)

It should hardly be surprising that Bush held out as long as he did before the inevitable siege of Falluja.

Washington Post: 10 Americans Dead.
Wong: Sunnis leave government over Falluja assault.
Reuters, Dexter:

FALLUJA, Iraq, Wednesday, Nov. 10 - After two days of street-to-street fighting, the American-led assault on Falluja had wrested at least a third of the city from insurgents on Tuesday, capturing the mayor's office, two mosques, a commercial center and other major objectives in the heart of the downtown and advancing past the main highway through the city.

Meanwhile, life goes on. Arafat's wife has gone nuts, and it's not clear if the poor guy has knocked off or not. CNN just said that Arafat never made a will, but that's a little unclear. Bottom line is no one really knows where his millions are, nor what is going to happen to the Palestinian Authority now that he is gone.

Meanwhile, Theo Van Gogh, a distant relative of Vincent and agent provocateur, was mourned after he was murdered by an Islamic assassin, because Van Gogh made a film critical of Islam. BBC reports that even moderate Dutch Muslims are feeling the reaction - another example of the Europe's quiet demographic revolution.

Item: Christopher Hitchens has hysterically pleaded his fealty to the Bush administration and gloatingly protested too much against liberal bitterness at Bush's victory. You unhappy man.

In New York, Mayor Bloomberg bitched out the MTA on its new proposed fare hike (was it just lip service?) and it looks like Guy "Do Not Pass Go" Vellela might very well be going back to jail.

So now, national politics aside, its time to get back to work. I wish I had any inspiring words other than Fuck You, Let's Get This Shit On.

Scary

2004-11-09T23:59:00.000-05:00

Really Scary

But if we can get past the sense of nauseaus horror that last week's debacle has left us with, if for no other reason that wallowing in shit sucks, its time to get back to work. Ashcroft and Evans have left the building.

Because this shit is on.

Seymour Hersh and Jonathan Schell at NYU

2004-11-08T21:52:00.000-05:00

Seymour Hersh (The New Yorker) and Jonathan Schell (The Nation) spoke tonight at a panel discussion moderated by Bruce Shapiro (The Nation, Salon.com, Yale University).

Apparently there you were supposed to register, but I didn't know that until I arrived with a guy from my RW2 class that I met on the subway, who had registered for himself and another one of his classmates that he was with. When we arrived at the door, the people at the ticket table told us that it was full already, and when he'd said that he'd registered already, they said: "Yeah, we filled up already, sorry." They'd underestimated how many people wanted to come -- they had too small of a room (a < 100 person classroom) to hold everyone.

I wandered down the hallway, and within a minute or two, someone came out the backdoor, and I slipped in. I found a space on the floor a few feet away from the panel and took as detailed notes as possible.

Following the discussion, Hersh signed books outside, so I shook his hand, bought a book and he signed it. When he noticed my name, he asked where I was from -- I said California. When he asked where my family was from, I said that my father was Iranian, and he was interested -- he said he's going there soon. I look forward to his reporting.

My unedited account is here.

JS: Jonathan Schell
SH: Seymour Hersh
BS: Bruce Shapiro
Q: Question from the audience

Hold Your Head Up

2004-11-05T13:11:00.000-05:00

Ok, well politics has gone to shit. I guess this is all we have left:

William Saletan on how the Dems can get their shit together

2004-11-04T23:15:00.000-05:00

Democratic Values
How to start winning the red states.

By William Saletan
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 3, 2004, at 1:15 PM PT
Slate.com

Hey, Democrats!

One silver lining in last night's debacle is that for another 24 hours or so, you might be open to rethinking what your party stands for. So, while I have your attention, here's an idea.

Go back to being the party of responsibility.

I'm not talking about scolding people. I'm talking about rewarding them. Be the party that rewards ordinary people who do what they're supposed to do—and protects them from those who don't.

If you think this kind of moral talk is anathema, you're the sort of person Karl Rove wants to be running the Democratic Party. Get out, or get a new attitude. Nearly 60 million people came out to vote for George W. Bush yesterday because they think that he represents their values and that you don't. Prove them wrong and you'll be the majority party again.

. . .

Democrats in the Roosevelt-Truman years didn't have this problem. They called tyrants by their name, and they didn't sound like they were faking it. A party that believes in right and wrong at home must be assertive about right and wrong abroad. You need a serious antiterrorist agenda. Otherwise, when you object to a war like Iraq, you sound like the peace party.

Continue Article

I'm not asking you to act like you care about this stuff. I'm asking you to care about it for real, and not just at election time. When a Republican president runs a TV ad accusing you of failing to protect us from wolves, you should be able to point out that he's the one who emptied our shotgun into a fox, leaving us helpless against the wolves. And you should sound credible saying it.

Once you eliminate the sincerity gap between you and the Republicans on national security, you can exploit the reverse sincerity gap between you and them on responsibility. Think about the values of our armed forces: shared risk, shared sacrifice, and reciprocal duty between officers and soldiers, regardless of race or class. Those are your values.

When leaders betray troops through bad planning and false pretenses for war, that should be your issue. When Republicans cut taxes for the rich while the nation is at war and the Treasury is empty, that should be your issue. When soldiers from poor families die while corporations skim from the war budget, that should be your issue. I've heard John Kerry talk about each of these issues separately, but each time, he sounded opportunistic. To be powerful, they must flow from a common message. That message is responsibility.

"4th inning" tallies

2004-11-02T18:18:00.000-05:00

These early exit-poll numbers do not divine the name of the winner. Instead, regard these numbers as a sportswriter does the line scores from the fourth inning of a baseball game. The leading team might win the game, but then again it might not. But having the early data in front of him helps the sportswriter plot the story he thinks he'll need to write at game's end.

- Jack Shafer, Slate
November 2, 2004

That aside, Zogby says:

Zogby International's 2004 Predictions
(as of Nov. 2, 2004 5:00 pm EST)

2004 Presidential Election

Electoral Votes:
Bush - 213
Kerry - 311

Too Close To Call
Nevada (5)

Too Close To Call
Colorado (9)

South Mississippi Sun-Herald to The New Yorker: They're Called Periods...

2004-11-01T16:49:00.000-05:00

Very funny piece.
(via Gawker)

It is time, once again, for propounding a paean to the period. Heavenly dot! Divine orb! Precious pea of punctuation! Let us pray for thy unceasing employment!

Why this unseemly ruckus? I shall explain - regretfully explain. On Oct. 4, The New Yorker magazine carried 1,500 words of truly abominable editing. The piece was a think-piece of little thought. It started nowhere, went nowhere, and arrived at no interesting destination. Even so, the content was not improved by the style. All of us may learn something here.

Newspaper Circulations Decline Slightly; Readership Holds

2004-11-01T15:46:00.000-05:00

NAA release. Recent historical CMI numbers.

From E+P via Drudge:

According to an analysis of the latest FAS-FAX circulations figures, due out this afternoon, the Newspaper Association of America reported today that overall daily circulation dropped .9% and Sunday circulation decreased 1.5%. The NAA said that 281 of 841 papers that reported figures gained circulation...

The NAA also released its Competitive Media Index, which measures readership, and found that in the top 50 markets, eight out of 10 adults, or 115 million people, read the newspaper over the course of a week.

Small declines occurred in the index as well: Every weekday, 52.8% adults read the newspaper, compared with 53.4% in spring 2004. For Sunday, 61.2% of adults read the paper, down from 62% in spring 2004.

The CMI is an analysis of Scarborough Research data from the top 75 markets covering February 2003 to March 2004 and all adults 18 and older.

The following are the top 10 markets for adult readership:

Daily
1. Hartford/New Haven, Conn. (62.7%)
2. Cleveland (62.4%)
3. New York (61.7%)/Pittsburgh (61.7%)
4. Boston (61.4%)
5. Philadelphia (61.2%)
6. West Palm Beach, Fla. (61.1%)
7. Providence/New Bedford, R.I. (59.9%)
8. Tampa/St. Petersburg/Sarasota, Fla. (59.4%)
9. New Orleans (59.3%)
10. Harrisburg/Lancaster/Lebanon/York, Pa. (58.7%)

Sunday:
1. Cleveland (74.4%)
2. Tampa/St. Petersburg/Sarasota, Fla. (72.3%)
3. West Palm Beach, Fla. (72.2%)
4. Providence/New Bedford, R.I. (72%)
5. Pittsburgh (70.5%)
6. Hartford/New Haven, Conn. (70.1%)
7. Buffalo, N.Y. (68.8%)
8. Philadelphia (68.7%)
9. Milwaukee (68.5%)
10. Norfolk/Portsmouth/Newport News, Va. (67%)

WWJKDA380TOME: What Would John Kerry Do About 380 Tons Of Missing Explosives?

2004-11-01T02:33:00.000-05:00

I got this forwarded to me:

October 31, 2004

	

As the political firestorm ignited by the revelation

of almost 380 tons of missing high explosives in Iraq

raged last week, experts warned that the missing cache

– which includes the most powerful and sophisticated

conventional weapons in existence – could provide

insurgents with tactical advantages in their violent

rebellion against the American occupation.



On Monday, the New York Times reported that Iraq's

Ministry of Science and Technology last month notified

the International Atomic Energy Agency that the

explosives disappeared from the Al Qaqaa weapons base

sometime after early April 2003 because of "the theft

and looting of the governmental installations due to

lack of security."



One week before the U.S. presidential election, the

disclosure immediately became a campaign issue and the

Kerry and Bush campaigns bickered relentlessly over

when the explosives might have been taken from the

site, and under whose watch.



But experts say that regardless of the timing of the

disappearance, the failure of occupation authorities

to respond to an I.A.E.A. warning in April of 2003

about the missing cache was emblematic of the lack of

planning that has become a hallmark of the occupation

and threatens to scuttle the entire American

enterprise in Iraq.



“This is a symbol that underscores how badly we’ve

messed up in the post-war era,” says Larry Diamond, a

Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution who served as

a Senior Adviser to the Coalition Provisional

Authority from January to April 2004 in Baghdad. “We

failed to secure the post-war order and this is a very

graphic illustration of that.”



In the current issue of Foreign Affairs, Diamond

accuses the Bush administration of allowing “hubris

and ideology” to undermine its Iraq war plan. In “What

went Wrong in Iraq” Diamond concludes: “As a result of

a long chain of U.S. miscalculations, the coalition

occupation has left Iraq in far worse shape than it

need have and has diminished the long-term prospects

of democracy there.”



Diamond joins a growing chorus of experts, formerly

sympathetic to the administration, who believe that

the U.S. should have deployed more troops to provide

security for Iraq’s critical cultural, economic and

military resources. What galls many about the missing

explosives is the idea that insurgents may be using

weapons that the U.S. military failed to adequately

protect in deadly attacks against U.S. soldiers.



Experts fear that the explosives, mainly highly

powerful HMX and RDX, could produce bombs strong

enough to cripple airplanes or blow up buildings, or

worse, detonate nuclear weapons.



Despite their violent explosive power, HMX and RDX are

quite rugged materials and can be easily transported

without fear of accidental detonation. But when

properly triggered, the materials’ explosive power is

grave. Just one pound of HMX was enough to bring down

Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie Scotland in 1988 and

larger amounts were apparently used in the bombing of

a housing complex in November 2003 in Riyadh, Saudi

Arabia, and the blasts in a Moscow apartment complex

in September 1999 that killed nearly 300 people,

according to the New York Times.



“Pound for pound, this stuff is much more powerful

than normal explosives,” says Jon Wolfsthal, Deputy

Director for Non-Proliferation at the Carnegie

Endowment for International Peace. “Compared to TNT it

has a lot higher kinetic capabilities and properties.”





Wolfsthal fears that if the rebels possess even a

small portion of the missing weapons cache, “it could

allow them to use smaller devices or more innocuous

delivery vehicles,” in their campaign against the

American occupation.



Lee Seigal, a non-proliferation expert at the Council

on Foreign Relations agrees that the missing

explosives could provide tactical benefits to the

rebels. “They are the kind of explosives that are

particularly suitable to be transported and used by

terrorists – portable and hard to detect,” he says.

Seigal added that if the threat posed by "weapons of

mass destruction" was strong enough to justify

invading Iraq, then the Al Qaqaa weapons cache – which

the administration knew about prior to the invasion –

should have been worthy of protection.



There is also concern that the missing weapons might

be used as a nuclear detonator by the rebels, or

perhaps a rogue state or international criminal group.

Charles Ferguson, a physicist at the Council on

Foreign Relations says that both HMX and RDX could be

“useful materials to compress plutonium and uranium”

thus triggering the chain reaction needed for a

nuclear explosion. He said that it is widely believed

that scientists at the Manhattan Project combined RDX

with TNT to form a new explosive, “Composite B,” that

was used in the Nagasaki bomb.



“These materials are much more sophisticated than

TNT,” Ferguson said. “It is the kind of stuff that a

terrorist group would have a hard time gaining access

to, so if they got them, it would be like ‘whoo-hoo!’”



Indeed, for rebels waging a guerilla campaign against

an occupying power, the tactical advantages afforded

by the durability and potency of the missing

explosives could be significant. To a movement that

seems to have a steady supply of suicide bombers, the

ability to conceal more explosive power in smaller

bombs could increase the efficacy of what has already

proved to be a deadly tactic.



And given the sheer volume of the missing weapons

cache, by one account enough bomb-making material to

fill 40 large trucks, if the rebels are in possession

of even a small portion of it, they have enough

explosives to continue their attacks for many months,

if not years. But if the rebels are in possession of

the entire cache, they may be sitting on what one

I.A.E.A official last May called the "greatest

explosives bonanza in history."

--30--





Get out the vote everybody...

Guardian Strikes

2004-10-29T01:52:00.000-04:00

Apparently this number seems unusually high. How many Iraqis have been killed during the war anyway?

About 100,000 Iraqi civilians - half of them women and children - have died in Iraq since the invasion, mostly as a result of airstrikes by coalition forces, according to the first reliable study of the death toll from Iraqi and US public health experts.

The study, which was carried out in 33 randomly-chosen neighbourhoods of Iraq representative of the entire population, shows that violence is now the leading cause of death in Iraq. Before the invasion, most people died of heart attacks, stroke and chronic illness. The risk of a violent death is now 58 times higher than it was before the invasion.

It should be noted that last week the Guardian found itself in a little trouble.

Arafat To Paris

2004-10-29T01:30:00.001-04:00

Now that's what I call a news peg...Word is that Israel will let him back in, but he may never have the chance to return.

Astounding.

Amanpour quotes a Palestinian: "He is still our old father."

This could be the end of an era, folks...Who will fill the power vacuum?

Mainstream Journos "Intimidated" by Blogs

2004-10-28T13:21:00.000-04:00

I'm a fan of Jim Rutenberg, but I think this is one of the most overwrought examples of journalistic hand-wringing that I've read in a long time. It's almost as if if media criticism is a new thing now that its being delivered via the net.

Practicing cheap and dirty politics, playing fast and loose with the facts and even lying: Accusations like these, and worse, have been slung nonstop this year.

The accused in this case are not the candidates, but the mainstream news media. And the accusers are an ever-growing army of Internet writers, many of them partisans, who reach hundreds of thousands of people a day.

Journalists covering the campaign believe the intent is often to bully them into caving to a particular point of view. They insist the efforts have not swayed them in any significant way, though others worry the criticism could eventually have a chilling effect.

Many of the Internet writers say they have been empowered by the Web to begin serving as a long-needed real-time check on mainstream outlets and reporters who they say wield too much power, sometimes irresponsibly and often with hidden partisan motives.

EM: Fuck Bush, For Our Future's Sake

2004-10-28T03:09:00.000-04:00

Well he's done it.

Eminem - the brilliant lightning rod rapper famous for confounding industry convention has unleashed a cultural missile in the form of the most overtly political music video in recent memory. And he's aimed this weapon of Mr. Bush's defeat squarely at the President himself.

"Mosh" is an angry, powerful, original, self-aggrandizing, inspiring and darkly hopeful piece of political propaganda ostensibly directed at young urban voters but more subtly intended as a mass rallying call to suburban dissaffecteds.

The video is the number 1 song on MTV.

Deploying his signature dark lyrical genius against a slowed-down, almost dirge-like hip-hop marching beat, Em alternately condemns Bush's policies including the Iraq war and the tax cuts, and exhorts voters to "swarm" the polls.

Bloggers respond and dissect:

I felt this powerful sense that I had just seen something calibrated exactly for this moment, something hopeful and disturbing and honest...something spoken from the crux of this hour in our history and yet resolutely looking forward. Mosh is political art that, at the same time, speaks in an authentic and specific voice. It is art that seems to bear a power to unleash something new.

Can you feel it?

Job Well Done

2004-10-28T00:35:00.000-04:00

Congratulations, Boston Dirt Dogs. You earned it. Gotta say it was fairly spooky to see that eclipse going on during the game. Wierd.

Trick or Treat

2004-10-28T00:09:00.000-04:00

Check out this detail from globalsecurity.org about the Phantom Weapons Cache. (Just in time for Halloween, no less. I know what my constume is going to be.) There's almost 400 tons of this shit loose in Iraq, Syria, or god knows where.

RDX [Cyclonite - Hexahydro-1,3,5-trinitro-1,3,5-triazine]

RDX stands for Royal Demolition eXplosive. It is also known as cyclonite or hexogen. RDX is currently the most important military high explosive in the US...

RDX is used as an explosive, usually in mixtures with other explosives, oils, or waxes. It has a high degree of stability in storage and is considered the most powerful and brisant of the military high explosives. RDX is used as a base charge in detonators and in blasting caps...RDX has limited civilian use as a rat poison.

HMX [Octogen - Octahydro-1,3,5,7-tetranitro-1,3,5,7-tetrazocine]

High Melting Explosive [HMX] is the highest-energy solid explosive produced on a large scale in the United States...

HMX explodes violently at high temperatures (534°F and above). Because of this property, HMX is used exclusively for military purposes to implode fissionable material in nuclear devices, as a component of plastic-bonded explosives, as a component of rocket propellant, and as a high explosive burster charge. The use of HMX as a propellant and in maximum-performance explosives is increasing.

New York Times Fights Back

2004-10-27T01:07:00.000-04:00

The New York Times was playing defense Tuesday night as questions emerged about the paper's Monday exclusive on the disappearance of 380 tons of high explosives from the massive Iraqi weapons base at Al Qa Qaa. Meanwhile, the Pentagon backed away from its position that the weapons had been removed from the base by the time American troops arrived.

The paper issued a statement. And an editorial:

President Bush's misbegotten invasion of Iraq appears to have achieved what Saddam Hussein did not: putting dangerous weapons in the hands of terrorists and creating an offshoot of Al Qaeda in Iraq...It's been obvious for months that American forces were not going to find the chemical or biological armaments that Mr. Bush said were stockpiled in Iraq. What we didn't know is that while they were looking for weapons that did not exist, they lost weapons that did.

Conservatives seized on an NBC broadcast which reported that American soldiers and an NBC embedded unit had been to the base in the first days of the invasion, on April 10, 2003, and had not observed the stockpile.

But it turns out that the soldiers were only at the huge facility for 24 hours on their way to Baghdad and "the unit's commander said in an interview yesterday that his troops had not searched the site and had merely stopped there overnight."

The biggest issue appears to be no more glamorous than the sheer timing of the story. One week before the election, publishing a story that is essentially over a year old is inherently suspect, but the revelation that CBS 60 Minutes was planning to air their report (the investigation as a joint NYT/CBS affair) only two days before the election did not help the Times' case.

Nevertheless, regional papers like the Oregonian picked up on the story.

It has been interesting that the Times' follow-up stories (latest here) has centered on the political implications of its story, not the substance or latest news about where the 380 tons actually are today.

Wrapping up: according to CNN the timeline goes something like this:

March 3, 2003 - IAEA last confirms the existence of the 380 tons of high explosives at Al Qa Qaa.
March 20, 2003 - The war begins.
April 10, 2003 - The 101st Airborne arrives at the huge base with the NBC imbed. No sign of the explosives, but they weren't really looking and had other things on their mind - like toppling Baghdad.
May 2003 - IAEA relays concerns to US government.
May 27, 2003 - US exploitation team looking for WMD finds the 380 tons missing after searching the base's 32 bunkers and 87 buildings.

Gawker Gets Its Groove Back

2004-10-26T22:19:00.000-04:00

Finally, Gawker gets back to doing what it does best, skewering media bullshit. Thanks Gawker!

From the Wall Street Journal corrections page:

News Corp.'S Fox News was incorrectly described in a page-one article Monday as being sympathetic to the Bush cause.

It's amazing what a bunch of lawyers can get you to print, eh? Especially considering:

News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch denies his Fox News Channel is biased towards US President George W. Bush but says his newspapers will continue to back Republican foreign policy.

Corrections And Amplifications [WSJ]
Murdoch Denies Fox Bias In US Political Coverage, Backs Bush Foreign Policy [AFP]

Hold up, wait a second. What's that? Yeah well, it was nice while it lasted - back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Well, Brooklyn is officially near death. CBS executives are considering a new series called Cobble Hill which is "described as an hour-long version of Friends." Will the Hollywood hell machine ever quit churning through New York? Hipsters looking for refuge might as well move to fucking Yonkers.
'Cobble Hill' TV [NYP via Curbed]

Sacrebleu! Not the Hollywood Hell Machine! And Brooklyn officially near death? Not again!?! That's some awesomeness, Gawkee.

I miss Elizabeth Spiers.

The Debate Continues...

2004-10-26T09:50:00.000-04:00

From the October 26, 2004 edition of the Christian Science Monitor:

Journalism students ask: Why am I here?J-school is more popular than ever. But is it necessary?
By Teresa Méndez Staff writer

Heather Saucier learned the lesson of the "nut graf" the hard way. (In journalism jargon, the "nut graf" is a paragraph near the top of a story that concisely lays out its thesis.)

Ms. Saucier was still in college, working as an intern for the now-defunct Houston Post. She filed a piece on the city's troublesome squirrel population. The story was fine, her editor said, "But you're missing a nut graf."

She'd already written about squirrels chewing through telephone wires and gnawing on wood, so she dashed off a short paragraph about their diet: nuts.

Some would argue that Saucier learned this essential of the journalistic craft in the best possible fashion - on the job. Others, however, might point to Saucier's story as an example of one of the oddities of journalism: So many enter the field with so little formal instruction.

Whatever the answer, Saucier stayed her course. But as time went on, she considered returning to school. After five years as a features writer, her stories regularly took third place in competitions. She wanted "to be a first-place writer," though, and thought "there has to be something I don't know that I can learn."

In journalism graduate school, she says, content was held in higher esteem than style. And she discovered what had been missing from her work - substance.

It's one of the most circular and enduring debates in journalism: whether to bother with a graduate degree that certainly doesn't guarantee a job, and, unlike law or medicine, has never been required.

Nearly a century after the first journalism school opened in 1908, schools are in flux - Columbia University's vaunted program, where Saucier earned her degree, is in the final stages of an overhaul.

Debates over the value and purpose of such programs are perpetual. Should they focus on skills - or theory? Some argue their value lies largely in forging contacts to help crack open the door to a closed insider's game. Then there are those successful newspeople who insist their value is nil.
And yet - paradoxically, perhaps - even as tuition rises and the time spent earning a degree expands, enrollment at journalism schools is up.

Bolstered by a larger demographic shift in the numbers of students attending graduate school, last year students earning master's in journalism and mass communication hit an all-time high of 11,703, according to an annual survey by the University of Georgia's Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication.

It's a tough job, journalism. The pay is low. Competition is fierce. And a spate of ethics scandals hasn't endeared the profession to the public.

The median salary of a person holding a master's degree in journalism and mass communication is a little over $32,000. While a year spent earning a degree at Columbia in New York City or Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism in Evanston, Ill. - both private schools and two of the country's best - can cost up to $60,000, including living expenses.

Still, the allure - whether romantic visions of mellifluous prose, foreign correspondents confronting war zones, or oldtime newspapermen felling corrupt governments - remains strong. And journalists, both working and aspiring, talk of journalism as less a job than a calling.

"I always tell people that I didn't pick journalism. I think journalism picked me," says Roya Aziz, in her third - and, she hopes, final - year of earning a dual degree in journalism and international studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

Many are drawn to the field by a love of writing; others yearn for the role of guardian of democracy. "Some of the best students are motivated by very idealistic aspirations," says Loren Ghiglione, dean at Medill. The reasons for choosing the "J-school" path, however, tend to be more pragmatic. To many, it's a sensible credential that can't hurt, and may well help.

"I knew I needed clips," says Marta Hummel, a reporter with the Greensboro News-Record in North Carolina who attended Medill. Journalism school "was the easiest and quickest way to do it."
By the time Robert Tuttle decided to pursue journalism in earnest, he'd been out of college for more than a decade. And though he'd worked for a newspaper in Lebanon, he couldn't find a job in the US. "I saw the barriers to getting into the profession when I got back here," he says. "It's an insiders' world and I was on the outside."

He enrolled at Columbia this fall.

That school's dean, Nicholas Lemann, who most recently covered Washington for The New Yorker, doesn't suggest the journalist's skill set can't be learned on the job. The university just imparts it faster: "It's taken me decades to pick up stuff that our graduates will be leaving with," he says.

The fact that a degree isn't mandatory in the journalism world may be even more reason to earn one, says Libby Sander, a general assignment reporter at the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin. "Medill at least tried to do a bit with ethics and the legal and moral issues. It can't be a bad thing to think about these things."

In her newsroom, though, only half the people have journalism degrees, she says, and "there's no distinction in terms of who is capable of what." She wonders "whether a master's degree isn't just icing on the cake."

Robert Fulford, a columnist with Toronto's National Post, goes further. He believes that any experience bringing journalists into contact with people - whether Wall Street or waitressing - is better training than a cloistered term in graduate school.

Yet even within academe, journalism holds a precarious place. It's "an old discipline," says Melvin Mencher, professor emeritus at Columbia who wrote the book used in the school's required Reporting and Writing course. "But it has always been the poor cousin on the campus."
After rethinking the journalism school's role, and place within the university, Columbia has decided to add two more general classes. In addition, come spring it will admit students to an optional second year, when they can specialize in areas like business or environmental journalism.

Other schools have taken a similar approach. Medill, as Berkeley has done, recently began offering new joint degree programs with focuses including religion and legal reporting. Next year, Syracuse University in New York, which has the nation's fourth-largest master's program, will introduce the first master's in arts journalism.

If not in the vanguard, Columbia is "taking the direction the field is already going in and trying to codify it and push it forward, to rely a little less on the joint program mechanism and a little more on doing it ourselves," says Dean Lemann.

Tuttle, the Columbia student, is mostly interested in honing his reporting and writing. He doesn't think he can spare another year to specialize.

"I learned so much more from being out in the world than I ever could in a graduate program," he says. "I think part of the profession of journalism is learning by doing."

A Red Sox fan...

2004-10-26T01:10:00.000-04:00

who is a friend of mine posed an interesting question to Red Sox Nation tonight:

If you had to choose between Boston legends this week, would you rather have John Kerry elected president or have the Red Sox win the World Series?

Is that a tough question?

Explosive...

2004-10-25T01:02:00.000-04:00

Update 2: NYT Followup. One week before the election, this story ellicits a significant pushback.

Update: Josh Marshall is going, er, ballistic with this story.

And disturbing. New York Times exclusive.

Two weeks ago, on Oct. 10, Dr. Mohammed J. Abbas of the Iraqi Ministry of Science and Technology wrote a letter to the I.A.E.A. to say the Qaqaa stockpile had been lost. He added that his ministry had judged that an "urgent updating of the registered materials is required."

A chart in his letter listed 341.7 metric tons, about 377 American tons, of HMX, RDX and PETN as missing. [emphasis added]

The explosives missing from Al Qaqaa are the strongest and fastest in common use by militaries around the globe.

• Also interesting: The ATL on R to the O to the V-E

• Mainstream Media Sinclair roundup: Kurtz, NYT. Kos is proclaiming victory and he's got a point.

• Mildly amusing Romenesko Item.

• One week till the election. Who to vote for?..."Do it for the kids, man, the kids."