To them, newsgathering is defined as, quite literally, gathering other outlets’ news. Far more emphasis is put on watching the competition than digging up our own unique stories. We’ve become expert confirmers. Experienced field reporters and producers who seek to advance a story are relegated to copying or matching what other news outlets’ reporters have already reported, often tasked with finding the people others already interviewed to repeat the things they’ve already said. I liken it to assigning a talented artist to do a paint-by-numbers project. Use the colors we instruct you to use. Fill in the preselected image. Stay in the lines.
A colleague at another news outlet recently got a tip from one of his sources about a developing story and told a young broadcast producer about it.
He says the producer responded by saying, “I haven’t seen this on the wires, how do you know it? Where can I find it?”
“It never occurred to this producer,” says my colleague, “that news that’s original to us doesn’t come from the wires, it’s not on the Web. So then, the young producer says, ‘Can we confirm this? How do we confirm this?’ and I’m saying, ‘I’m confirming it to you. I’m telling you I just spoke to the source who was there.’ That’s what we’re dealing with.”
This syndrome is so endemic that good reporters are always trying to figure out ways to beat the flawed system. One shared a successful strategy with me a few years back. Too often he’d get a great interview or exclusive piece of information on a big breaking story in the field only to have supervisors in New York tell him to find, instead, the witness interviewed by the Associated Press or shown on CNN. So now, if he’s out on a big breaking story and lands a fantastic interview, he might let someone from a wire service listen to an excerpt of the interview recording. The wire service then publishes its own account of the story, using the witness’s quote. Sure enough, often within minutes, the New York supervisors call and say, We need you to find that guy interviewed by the wire service. . . .
“No problem,” answers the reporter in the field, who already has the interview in hand. He had it first but knows that New York wouldn’t have valued it unless they’d seen it elsewhere first. They covet what they see on other outlets, not what their own expert reporters can bring them.
In some cases, we’re little more than casting agents. Entire stories are conceived of by New York managers who not only assign a given topic but also tell us whom we should interview, what they should say, and how the story should be written. We’re asked to create a reality that fits their New York image of what they believe, what they’ve read, what they’ve been told by their contacts, or what they’ve heard at parties. For these types of managers, you gather the information in the field and if the truth doesn’t reflect their preconceived notion, they’ll either change the story so that it does, or it won’t air. They use heavy-handed editing to alter the script so that it’s written in their style, using their thoughts and vernacular. One network producer told me, “When I wrote stories about workers protesting to gain a hike in the minimum wage, I was not allowed to write that the majority of the people protesting were not minimum wage workers, but were paid by outside groups to protest. . . . [W]e conducted 10 separate interviews of actual workers who make minimum wage. In these interviews, all 10 revealed to us that they had several times been offered raises, but turned them down because of the added responsibility that came with the pay hike. I was told directly by my supervisor, ‘you can’t put that into the story because it will skew the viewer’s impression of the demonstration.’” More accurately, it would have skewed the supervisor’s preconceived notions of the story that he wished to be told, or the agenda that he sought to advance, regardless of the facts encountered in the field.
Another colleague observes, “You have these executive producers and senior producers in New York who attend the same social gatherings, they all read the same newspapers, they all listen to the same radio, they all go to the same birthday parties with their kids. And they’re all trapped in their socioeconomic groups. The stories are happening in New Mexico, Arizona, Georgia, Alabama, Iowa. But if they’ve ever been to those places, they’ve made fun of the people while they were there.”
I got a call on February 28, 2014, from a CBS colleague who, like many of us, had been put in the position of defending the CBS Evening News’s content and, at times, its perceived political tilt.
“You know, people ask me and I tell them it’s not as if everyone at CBS News is a raving liberal. In fact, there’s a pretty diverse spread among the correspondents and a lot of the producers. It’s this small group of managers in New York that’s affecting everything right now.”
It’s as if they’re ordering up their own little novelettes instead of allowing us to seek out and portray the reality.
If you resist, you’re considered a troublemaker. Or controversial. Because first and foremost, they know best and they’re always correct.
A network field producer I know recently boiled it down to this metaphor: “New York tells us to write in our script that the car is red. We tell them it’s blue. They insist it’s red because the wire service says it’s red. We tell them we’re here on the scene, looking at the car right now, and it’s blue. ‘Okay,’ they say ‘but make it red.’ ”
A typical conversation about assigning a story often begins with “We need to find someone who will say . . .” what we want them to say. Or “We need to find a sympathetic character to show . . .” that a policy we like is good or one that we don’t like is bad. In other words, we’ve decided what the story is before we’ve researched it fairly and thoroughly ourselves. All we need is the right actor to portray our managers’ viewpoints.
Almost every journalist with a few years in network television knows exactly what I’m talking about and none of them likes it. Correspondents and producers have had countless fuck you battles over this very issue, and more that I know of in the last three years than in the past two decades. They’ve lost their tempers, walked out of the building, threatened to quit, had screaming matches, or complained about it almost every day. Sometimes, they’re considered troublemakers, too.
Many who are starting out in journalism know no other way. They take the lead from their elders or non-journalist managers who have worked their way up the ranks and help codify the syndrome. They eagerly scan the Web for celebrity news and political scandals, they monitor social media of selected bloggers and opinionmakers, they subscribe to the edgiest Twitter accounts. They report their findings to their superiors so that the best pickings can be passed along for us to confirm or repeat. Nothing frustrates a good reporter more than having to use his time chasing other reporters’ efforts when he, in fact, has a better story that he can’t get the broadcasts to take seriously.
| HOMOGENIZED, MILQUETOAST NEWS
The result of all this is a homogenization of the mainstream news. It helps explain why, on a given night, the three evening news broadcasts are often more alike than they are different. It’s not that there are only ten stories in the world that matter. It’s that we all employ similar decision-making processes that result in the selection of the same ten stories.
On February 21, 2014, all three networks lead with three minutes on the troubles in Ukraine. Everyone has two to three minutes on the weather: a new popular favorite dominating the news almost every night. Everyone has stories on the Olympics. Everyone does the exact same feature in the middle of their broadcasts about a woman who saved her baby nephew’s life (a story widely circulated on the Web the day before). Everyone reports President Obama’s decision to award the Medal of Honor. Two of the three networks devote more than two minutes of their precious, limited news time to tributes to their own network’s employees: one who passed away and another who is retiring. Are we producing a newscast more for ourselves and each other rather than the public? What did we really tell America on this night that they didn’t already know?
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p; My own network is passing up stories on the crumbling Affordable Care Act; an exclusive investigation I offered about a significant military controversy; an investigation uncovering a history of troubles surrounding Boeing’s beleaguered Dreamliner; and massive government waste, fraud, and abuse. Largely untouched are countless stories about pharmaceutical dangers affecting millions of Americans, privacy infringement, the debate over President Obama’s use of executive orders, the FDA monitoring of employee email, the steady expansion of terrorism, the student loan crisis, the confounding explosion in entitlements, the heartbreaking fallout from the Haiti earthquake, continuing disaster for government-subsidized green energy initiatives, the terrorist influences behind “Arab spring,” various congressional ethics investigations and violations, the government’s infringement of and restrictions on the press, escalating violence on the Mexican border, the debt crisis, the Fed’s role and its secrecy, to name just a few.
We do stories on food stamps but only to the extent that we prove the case that they’re needed, without also examining well-established fraud and abuse. We look at unemployment but only to the extent that we present sympathetic characters showing that benefits should be extended rather than examining, also, the escalating cost and instances of fraud. We cover minimum wage but only to the extent that we help make the case for raising it, without giving much due to the other side, which argues it will have the opposite effect than intended. We cover sequestration but only to the extent that we try to show how much the cutbacks hurt Americans, rather than also cover the abuses by those who attempted to make the cutbacks more visible and hurtful to build a political case against sequestration.
| ACCOUNTABILITY INTERRUPTED
It’s June 20, 2013, and I’m at the annual Investigative Reporters and Editors conference at the Marriott Rivercenter in San Antonio, Texas. Five weeks ago, the Associated Press exposed the Obama administration’s shockingly broad seizure of AP reporters’ phone records as part of a government leak probe. Four weeks ago came news that the Obama Justice Department targeted a FOX News reporter and his source in a different criminal leak investigation. Two weeks ago, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden began revealing massive, secretive surveillance methods the government is using on American citizens. And one week ago, CBS News officially announced that an unauthorized intruder remotely accessed my work computer on repeated occasions using sophisticated methods to search and remove data.
But I’ve known that, and more, since January.
At the Marriott with hundreds of investigative journalists in attendance, there are several conference sessions examining the new surveillance revelations and the chilling effect it has on our work. My own situation is part of the official discussion as well as the conference gossip. My producer Kim, who arrived before me, alerted me in an email ahead of time.
“So many people have asked about you and voiced support over the computer issue,” she tells me. Later, in person, she says that one conference attendee told her they heard that I’m “radioactive.” I imagine a cartoon of myself surrounded by green waves of a radioactive glow, as other cartoon journalists hover just outside the aura to avoid me.
As I meander through the crowd on the third floor, some of my peers stop me to ask questions.
Do you know who did it? How did you find out?
They express a mix of support and outrage. “It was the government, wasn’t it?” they ask. “You don’t have to tell me. But you know, don’t you?”
A few of them think the government is surveilling their work, too. A high-ranking executive from another network sends me a text message. He wants to set up a meeting. He’s curious about the symptoms my computer displayed that led me to suspect it was being hacked. His computer has been acting strangely of late and his techs can’t seem to fix it.
I duck into an investigative reporting session underway on the topic of How Not to Get Sued. It includes broadcast network lawyers and, prior to my arrival, the conversation has somehow deviated from Topic A. They’re now discussing how the Obama administration has crossed the line in withholding public information from the public.
“In all my experience, this is, by far, the worst, least transparent administration,” says one of the network lawyers on the speaker’s panel.
He goes on to describe what he sees as the Obama administration’s outrageous pattern of rejecting Freedom of Information Act requests—and he pulls no punches. He tells the audience of investigative reporters that he’s worried about what’s happening to journalism under this administration. About the liberties that the government is taking. He says it’s unprecedented. “We’d better start doing something about it or it’s just going to get worse.”
Looks like the bloom is beginning to fall off the Obama rose. Albeit, belatedly.
In 2009, President Barack Obama pledged to make history with the high level of transparency his administration would bring to government.
The directive he issued to federal executives reads in part:
My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.
It looks so good on paper. The Clinton years had proven difficult for the cause of transparency. Any hopes that George W. Bush would usher in a new era of openness were quickly dashed. But Barack Obama—here he was placing a value and emphasis on openness that really set him apart. It could only mean positive things to come for journalists. Especially for investigative journalists, whose effectiveness as watchdogs of government is directly proportional to our ability to access public information and inside sources.
But barely into his second term, the Obama administration finds itself making history instead for its secrecy and assaults on the press. I, and other investigative reporters who are fully experienced in the indelicate art of prying public information from the tight grip of the government’s hands, have now begun comparing notes about the daunting challenges this administration poses. There’s delay, denial, obstruction, intimidation, retaliation, bullying, surveillance, and the possible threat of criminal prosecution. In my view, and that of other national reporters, this is proving to be the least transparent administration we’ve covered.
It’s so bad that practically every major national news outlet, including CBS News, the Washington Post, and the New York Times, signs a scathing letter to the White House on November 21, 2013, objecting to unprecedented restrictions on the press. “As surely as if they were placing a hand over a journalist’s camera lens, officials in this administration are blocking the public from having an independent view of important functions of the Executive Branch of government,” reads the letter addressed to White House spokesman Carney. It calls some Obama administration press policies “arbitrary restraint and unwarranted interference on legitimate newsgathering activities. You are, in effect, replacing independent photojournalism with visual press releases.” The letter also states that the White House behavior raises constitutional concerns.
It’s so bad, the free press advocacy group Reporters Without Borders gives a serious downgrade to America’s standing in the 2013 global free press rankings, rating the Obama administration as worse than Bush’s. “The whistleblower is the [government’s] enemy,” writes the group in explaining its findings under the Obama administration. “Amid an all-out hunt for leaks and sources, 2013 will also be the year of the Associated Press scandal, which came to light when the Department of Justice acknowledged that it had seized the news agency’s phone records.”
In March 2014, New York Times reporter James Risen speaks at a journalism conference and calls the Obama administration “the greatest enemy of press freedom” in at least a generation.
President Obama seems to be either oblivious or in den
ial. Or maybe he just thinks that repeating the same thing often enough will make people believe it to be true. During an Internet question-and-answer session hosted by Google on February 14, 2013, he proudly declares to the online audience: “This is the most transparent administration in history.” Then he presents his evidence in support of the bold assertion. “Every visitor that comes into the White House is now part of the public record. Every law we pass and every rule we implement we put online for everyone to see.”
The Obama administration measures its supposed transparency accomplishments by the sheer number of documents published online and the amount of paper turned over to Congress. On Benghazi, the president says, “We’ve had more testimony and more paper than ever before.” Never mind all the paper they’re withholding, the ignored and denied Freedom of Information Act requests or the fact that they refuse to answer many basic questions.
The job of getting at the truth has never been harder. In part, it’s because the Obama administration has figured out how to avoid questions and accountability by cutting out the news media middleman. White House officials have perfected exploitation of the non-news media to spoon-feed unfiltered messaging—at times, pure propaganda—directly into the public’s mouth. That Google-sponsored chat? It came with a preselected audience and questions submitted in advance via the White House’s own YouTube channel. That’s the way they like it. They generate their own content. Rely on surrogates to help spread it on partisan blogs, Twitter, and Facebook. Give lots of interviews to entertainment programs, digital media, and feature press. And when they feel the situation demands an appearance of newsiness, such as a presidential apology for HealthCare.gov’s disastrous launch, they look for a soft landing with a handpicked outlet and reporter.
All of this impacts not only how well-informed we can keep the interested public, but also the very survival of investigative journalism. In three decades of polling by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, news organizations are near all-time lows when it comes to the public’s view of our accuracy, fairness, and independence. But there’s one thing the public still values most, and it makes no difference whether they’re Democrat, Republican, or independent: they overwhelmingly support our role as government watchdogs. That support rose a full 10 percentage points from 2011 to 2013 amid revelations about government-conducted surveillance of the public and the press.
Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama's Washington Page 9