Street roots., August 21, 2009, Page 9, Image 9

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c e i e b b & t ix g a d eca d e
Street roots
Education * Dialogue * Independence
cut back on. It’s the most expensive type of
reporting you can do. It’s much easier to .
send some schmo down to Capitol Hill and
report on a press 'conference. That doesn’t
cost you anything, except maybe the cab fare.
But even back in the ’70s when you had the
iconic figures of Woodward and Bernstein,
and you had Watergate and probably one of
th e high-water marks for investigative
reporting, most newspapers still didn’t do
' that much investigative reporting. Most of
what was going into the newspaper wasn’t all
that interesting^ certainly not investigative.
And what’s interesting is if you look back,
th t people who were most scared about the
high impact of investigative journalism back
then were newspaper publishers and editors.
Katherine Graham, publisher of the
Washington Post apthe time of Watergate,
was absolutely freaked out about the damage
that her paper had wrought After Watergate,
the Post, internally, became very frightened
that maybe it had gone too far in bringing
down a president. And all the critical
reporting about Vietnam, which simply
reflected the fact that the war was a failure^
And so it wasn’t so much critical reporting in
terms of digging up muck for the sake of
digging up muck, but that the war was a
failure and that was acknowledged in the
reporting.
But Katherine Graham gave a very famous
speech soon after Nixon resigned in which
she says maybe we went too far. We have to
be very careful and exercise our
responsibility very carefully Which to me is ..
very much reflective of the real role of the
newspaper, which as I said is a vehicle for
elite opinion. And she thought, as a
representative of the elite opinion, that;,
maybe the Post had gotten carried away. And
there was a retrenchment.
So I want to be careful about being too
romantic about the past. There have been
g rea t p erio d s of investigative jou rn alism but
it has always been the,exception. And now I
think it’s even more so as the economy
makes it more difficult. Media outlets just
simply don’t want to ppny up the money.
J. Z.: There are other dynamics as well that
you have written about. In your work in
investigative reporting, your undercover work,
you came across companies that were quite
unabashed at how well they could manipulate
the media and public opinion and the
politicians. What did you learn about media
.manipulation from other forces out there? *
K. S.: You’re speaking about a piece I did
for Harper’s a couple of years ago in which I
posed as a representative' for a phone
company called the Maldon Group, which ,
was London-hased and has a stake in the
natural-gas fields of Turkmenistan, one of the
world’s last remaining Stalinist dictatorships,
along with North Korea. And I approached a
number of high-end Washington lobby firms
and told them that we had an investment in
Turkmenistan and working on behalf of the
government to improve its image and
improving its relationship with the United
States. So we wanted to hire lobbyists and
heal their opinions about how they could sell
the country to U.S. public and policy makers.
The lobbyists I met with bragged about
how everything they could do would be under
the radar screen so it would be barely noticed
by the press and it wouldn’t draw unwanted
scrutiny of my phony company, the Maldon
Group. And then they talked specifically
about they would write op-eds and then
recruit some academic or some think tank
9
UZ t ÌO e J
person to sign it and then plant it in the
the reporting is going to be terrible. There’s
newspaper. They had someone on staff 9 to
a lot of conspiratorial thinking On this point
5, where that was their whole job, writing
It may impact the coverage. Certainly, for
and planting phony oped pieces in.
example, NBC broadcasting thè Qlympics
newspapers. And then they talked about their from China I think raised a lot of questions I
relationship with journalists. They didn’t say, , because of the huge investment of GE in
nor was there any evidence, that they had
China, and a variety of other sponsors of the
reporters ipth eir hip pockets who they cóuld Olympics who were big advertisers or who
call up and say, “Hey plant this story.” The
had ties to NBC. I think there are certainly
system doesn’t Work like th a t There is a lot
problems and I think it’s worth paying
of media corruption but its not that simple.
attention to ownership issues. But I don’t
But they did have contact with reporters with think that’s the fundamental problem with
whom they thought they could spin the story
American Journalism.
with. They talked about how they could
J. Z.: I f it’s not conspiratorial, and I ’m not
organize junkets whereby journalists and
suggesting that it is, but you talked earlier
politicians could be flown over to
aboùt the financialpressures on the newsroom,
Turkmenistan and get the “good side” of
that investigative reporting is the most expensive
Turkmenistan.
kind. Its not a matter that it’s intentional or
J. Z.: They felt that the media was Susceptible
conspiratorial, but that as stewards òf the
to that and open to that kind of manipulation.
Fourth Estate, i$ this the best system? We’re now
looking at an open world out there on the
K. S.: I wouldn’t put it that the media was
Internet. Do you see that as a place where real
open to that manipulation, but they felt that
investigative journalism can thrive? Where is
they had tools by which they could influence-
the future?
media coverage of Turkmenistan. And I think
they would have been able to if I had paid
K. S.: That is the $64 million question and I
them what they wanted, which was up to ■'
wish I had an answer to i t I think that you’re
$5 million over three years in the case of
Cassidy & Associates. There’s no way they
were going to get stories written that says
Turkmenistan was paradise on Earth. But
I think the biggest problem with coverage is
they said they could get more balanced
coverage, which in the case of Turkmenistan,
this phony balance, where reporters are
that’p great They laid out very detailed plans v
expected to go out and report and review the
on how they would influence political and
situation
and then not reach any conclusion.
media coverage; .
J. Z.; You mentioned balanced reporting and
you’ve been critical of “false” balanced
reporting. Tell us what you mean by that.
K. S.: To me, when I’m critical of the
media, this is a fundamental issue.
Sometimes when I’m at a speaking event or
be on a radio show and someone will ask, do
editors tell you what to write. And that’s just
silly. I t d o esn ’t w ork like th at. I’ve w orked’in
the mainstream press. You don’t have editors •
telling you w h at to w rite. |
I think the biggest problem with coverage
is this phony balance, where reporters are
expected to go out and report and review the
situation and then not reach any conclusions,
because reaching a conclusion will lay you
open to the charge of partisanship or bias.
You can go out and find that Congressman X
is a total crook and takes money from
lobbyists and companies and goes out and
does favors for them, but you could never
really say that because you don’t want
somebody to say, Oh, they’re for the
Democrats or they’re for the Republicans. Sp
every, other paragraph in most news stories
starts with the word “but.” Every opinion has
to be X’d out. You just have this absolute
demand for impartial reporting, which of
course is completely partial. This whole
phony balance isone of the big problems
with American journalism, for m eth e biggest
problem, actually.
J. Z.: What are the implications to civil
liberties of the American public when it comes
to having a responsible media? We rely on the
media to present us with critical information to
expose Congressman X, as you say, and to tell
us what’s really going an. Is this something
that’s responsibly left to private corporations
that have interests beyond journalism?
K. S.: I think it’s best that it’s not left to •
private companies that own the newspapers
and the rest of the media. I don’t want to be
too conspiratorial. I don’t think the fact that
you have a big corporation owning the New
York Times or the Wall Street Journal that
raising an important point. I just hear so
often about the owners influencing the
coverage and I think it’s much more
complicated than that.
Look, the mainstream press produces
fantastic reporting, investigative reporting. I
th in k it should b e producing a lo t m o re. I
t h i n k a l o t of m ainstream -rep o rters;- -
particularly th e high-end W ashington p ress
co rp s is way too close to th e p eo p le th ey ’re
supposed to be covering. I’m v ery critical of
that coverage.
But what I can’t find for the most part are
online publications who are doing
groundbreaking investigative reporting,
because it’s really expensive. And most
online publications, even the fnost Successful
ones are aggregators. They’re not doing alo t
of original reporting because there’s not
money to do i t And that’s very frustrating
because as the mainstream press withers and
dies, which is happening as we speak, I don’t
see a lot Of excellent reporting replacing it on
the Web.
.
There are very interesting projects out
there. Propublica is very interesting, but
that’s private money as well, and there are
other places out there, but it’s expensive.
There’s just not a lot of new media
institutioris, whether online or m ore
conventional or old media, that are doing
really aggressive investigative reporting, and
the mainstream media does less and less of it
as it withers and dies and,is unwilling to
spend money on it, and the new media,
online media, I don’t think does nearly
enough of it either. And frankly I find a lot of
the blogs quite boring, because a lot ofijt is
just blather.
I don’t know where the media is going. I
don’t kpow where the profession is going.
We’ll probably all be unemployed in five years
. or working for free for blogs. You’re raising
the most difficult question confronting the
future of the profession and I wish I had a
better answer for you. I don’t
‘I believe in equality for
-Mahatma Gandhi
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