Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama's Washington

by Sharyl Attkisson

  While reporting a story in 2012, I was working to get an interview with a political figure. I told his spokesman that his boss might not like the story but that he’d get a fair shot in an interview. The spokesman said, “I know. I’ve asked around. I know you’re fair. And I know you can’t be bought.”

  Can’t be bought?

  In nearly thirty years of journalism, nobody else had been so blatant. It made me wonder. Are some reporters really “bought”? I began asking my friends who are journalists what they thought. Most of them speculated that yes, absolutely, reporters are bought, but not with cash. They’re bought with implied promises such as “if you don’t use this negative information today, I’ll funnel a bigger story your way tomorrow.” Or “if you back off, there might be a nice, high-paying job waiting for you outside of journalism down the road.”

  I think more reporters are lured by the path of least resistance than by bribery. We’ve watched many of our talented peers give up trying to get original, meaningful stories on the air. Why battle the organized interests who mercilessly disparage the stories—and you? Why fight your own managers who discourage rather than value the digging and tenacity? Why put yourself through having to answer late-night phone calls, legal threats, and angry emails as some of the broadcast managers cower rather than support you?

  On the other hand, the “day-of-air” reports, weather and transportation stories, features about animals, stories that everybody else is covering on a given day—those sail onto the news. Today a television journalist can earn a healthy six-figure salary barely lifting a finger and the news supervisors are happier than if they’d gotten an exclusive investigation. It’s Alice in Wonderland and everybody sits at the table, smiles, and drinks hot tea as if the Hatter isn’t Mad.

  I received more kudos from the CBS Evening News managers for doing a thirty-second live shot that contained virtually no insight after the August 2011 East Coast earthquake than for investigations that my producer, Kim, and I sweated over for months, night and day. In fact, most often in the last couple of years those investigations were met by important people within the news division with a silence that signaled disapproval. And the propaganda whispers about me being a conservative grew to a loud roar.

  Judging by the response I received after concluding my CBS News career, most people out there in the so-called real world who care at all about the drama didn’t fall for the creative story line. A friend forwarded me an online opinion piece in Commentary that reflected on my job change. The magazine describes itself as “neoconservative Jewish.” The article was memorable for its clear expression of how propagandists today don’t seek simply to influence the debate; they wish to censor contrary facts and opinions.

  Speaking of the president’s supporters on Benghazi, the commentary states, “They aren’t interested in winning a debate. They want to silence opposing views.” The article also provides the astute observation that some who work in the news “are so biased that they actually think critical reporting about a liberal President they personally support is somehow wrong and those who pursue such stories are worthy of suspicion rather than praise.”

  | NEW ERA

  As in most any news organization, there were editorial and story challenges over the years. But, over time, with the help of my producers and support from key executives along the way, I was generally able to successfully navigate the challenges and establish a meaningful career and a strong record of reporting at CBS. For about seventeen years.

  There was a sudden and insurmountable change when the CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley era began in May 2011. Many of us inside the company would later come to often speak to the irony that the broadcast, desperate to develop a reputation for original and investigative reporting, was in fact moving ever further from both.

  Strangely enough, Pelley and his executive producer Shevlin showered verbal and written compliments on the first investigative story and script that I offered the new broadcast. It was an exclusive, non- political report about alleged travel industry deception involving a powerful group of influential people. Pelley and Shevlin called the story incredibly compelling and said that it was the sort of reporting that made them proud. I’d already gotten the seal of approval from our CBS lawyers. The story was scheduled to air.

  From there, it all went downhill.

  A few days later, I learned that the story was pulled off the schedule. Postponed. I had no idea what discussions had transpired. At first, it seemed Pelley just wanted to put his own style and spin on my work. That was unusual for an anchor at CBS. Dan Rather, Bob Schieffer, and Katie Couric had big-picture ideas and editorial input on stories but had never rewritten my scripts.

  I acquiesced to Pelley’s oppressive editing, the countless style changes and revisions. I felt a pit in my stomach as I agreed to alterations that softened the facts and made the story convoluted and difficult to follow. But I needed to understand and adjust to Pelley’s style so that we could work together successfully. As the process dragged on for weeks, it became clear that I was on a fool’s errand. The revision process never ended. Were they scared of going after the powerful entities in the story? Were they feeling heat from the entities’ strong pushback? They didn’t say. All I know is, the story would never air on Pelley’s broadcast. The report that he had so effusively complimented was permanently sidelined.

  This soon became a distinguishable pattern. Profuse compliments were often proven hollow. In fact, some of us in the field remarked that it seemed like the more the New York fishbowl claimed to “love” a story, the greater the odds it would never air. They rarely said the story wasn’t going to air. They just let it sit around and “loved it” until it began to stink like old fish.

  At first, many of us held out hope that there was a way to overcome these new challenges. Getting stories on television, especially ones that address controversies and that challenge the powers that be, is rarely a cakewalk. It requires winning the confidence of managers who must have confidence in themselves.

  But there would be no movement. With few exceptions, the writing was on the wall. A number of us sharing the same observations and experiences engaged in countless conversations speculating as to why the Pelley-Shevlin regime was so hostile to original and investigative reporting.

  This new environment belied what the new CBS News CEO, Jeff Fager, had told me. In July 2011, just a few months into Pelley’s leadership, I told Fager that I was inexplicably meeting with roadblocks in getting any investigative stories on the Evening News. He asked me to fly to New York to talk about it before I went off for summer vacation. During our meeting, Fager was supportive and encouraging. He assured me that, under his vision, the Evening News with Scott Pelley would benefit nobody’s reporting more than mine. He envisioned my brand of reporting as the mainstay and mission of the new, hard news newscast. Considering Fager’s expressed vision, which I shared, it was particularly ironic that the Pelley broadcast ended up being the death knell for that type of journalism. At least when it came from me.

  The universe of what they desired narrowed to a paper-thin slice that was inversely proportional to the expanding universe of what was censored or deemed undesirable. Several New York broadcast managers displayed an overtly visceral rejection of stories that they perceived as negative toward the Obama administration, which eventually equated to nearly any story that critically examined any facet of government or its functions.

  There were exceptions. If a story reached such critical mass that many other news outlets were pursuing it, or if the New York Times covered it, our folks might jump on board and air some reports on that topic, too. But in general, the environment for my brand of reporting was poisonous.

  Meanwhile, the New York–based investigative unit led by the award-winning team of correspondent Armen Keteyian and senior producer Keith Summa was following a similar trajectory. Their original investigations—once a valued staple
of the Evening News—were now generally unwelcome. Instead, the Evening News largely relegated the accomplished producers to chasing an endless stream of rumors and leads on breaking stories copied from other outlets.

  In part because of this issue, Summa asked CBS News management to remove the investigative unit from the Evening News budget, in hopes that the investigative team would be free to make original contributions to other broadcasts. To our amazement, Evening News agreed to let go of the New York investigative unit without a fuss. No broadcast that valued investigative reporting at all would dream of doing that. We didn’t know why they felt this way, but it confirmed my inferences: they simply had no serious appetite for true, investigative reporting. Don’t let the screen door hit you on the way out.

  Unfortunately, with Summa, Keteyian, and their team freed up to offer stories to other broadcasts, the overall decline in the environment for investigative reporting continued. Keteyian, the New York unit’s only on-air correspondent, left and wasn’t replaced. Now there was a New York investigative team with no investigative correspondent. And nobody seemed to care. In 2012, senior producer Summa departed as well, and went on to become vice president of news partnerships at Univision, where he helps oversee many investigations.

  The decimation of the CBS investigative infrastructure didn’t make sense.

  Together, Kim and I (and other Washington-based producers who assisted) and the New York–based investigative unit had helped forge a formidable reputation on behalf of CBS News. The decision to cut things off at the knees had to involve other factors besides journalism and viewer interest. We felt like we went from batting a thousand to zero practically overnight.

  I’d never been better sourced and better positioned to break interesting stories. But never were the prospects for getting them on TV so grim. Kim and I began drowning in our endless sea of story pitches that would never be answered by New York or, if occasionally accepted, would never air. There were the ideological obstacles in New York. There was our belief that some of the broadcast managers were fearful of hard-hitting investigative reporting. There was their tendency to want to avoid most anything that hadn’t already been published elsewhere first. It was a perfect storm of often competing and contradictory factors that resulted in that narrowing, paper-thin slice of what they desired.

  We tried to adjust by offering noninvestigative but still original, interesting stories. Stories that happened to appeal to liberal interests, conservative interests, all interests, or apolitical interests.

  Consumer mortgage scams, food safety, failed green energy investments, labor union complaints against corporations, use of tax havens, whistleblowers, environmental damage, a major military scandal, a national monument controversy, government surveillance, drug cartels, medical costs, taxpayer waste, a dozen sequestration stories (pro and con), an unethical federal medical study, the hookah trend, consumer fraud, medical fraud, the IRS targeting of conservatives.

  Thanks, thanks . . . but no thanks.

  Kim and I tracked down Nakoula Basseley Nakoula in jail, the Egyptian filmmaker whom Hillary Clinton and other Obama officials incorrectly blamed for inciting the September 11, 2012, Benghazi attacks with his YouTube video. We knew that whatever he had to say, his story would be of great interest to many. Though we were not permitted to interview him in jail, we worked to persuade him to do an exclusive on-camera interview with CBS News immediately upon his release from a halfway house in California. It took some convincing, as Nakoula told me that he and his family had received death threats.

  Nakoula agreed to let us and our camera meet him in the car that he’d arranged to transport him to a secret safe house upon his release. Just a few years back, a story like that would have led the CBS Evening News. Kim and I were excited at the prospect. But in the current CBS climate, I could no longer make final arrangements for such a shoot unless I had the advance commitment from a broadcast to air the story. In fact, in the current CBS climate, it just might be that nobody would want what could prove to be a high-interest gangbuster. The only way to ensure a taker would be if I could get CBS News president David Rhodes behind the effort. So I told him about the opportunity for the exclusive. He was unenthusiastic.

  “That’s kind of old news, isn’t it?” he told me.

  My heart sank. How could the impending release from jail of the YouTube filmmaker, the only person really held accountable in the entire Benghazi debacle, who had never done an on-camera interview, who was in essence running for his life, be old news? It hadn’t even happened yet. Many would surely find his story, whatever it may be, of interest. But clearly it would never air on CBS.

  I broke the news to Kim, who was distressed. After spending all that time and effort convincing Nakoula to do an interview, and knowing how interesting the interview would be, we canceled on him.

  We tried “selling” our stories to other broadcasts such as CBS This Morning, CBS Sunday Morning, and the CBS Weekend News. Occasionally, it worked. But the sales job grew more difficult as that universe narrowed, too.

  For example, CBS This Morning enthusiastically accepted our original pitch about a school lunch fraud investigation. It was perfect for the morning show audience: popular, national school lunch food distributors were under criminal investigation for selling crappy, unhealthy products to schools in exchange for illegal kickbacks. We had exclusive information, an exclusive interview with a prosecutor on the case, and an exclusive interview with an inside whistleblower.

  After traveling to several states to conduct the interviews, a senior producer on the broadcast began pushing us. The show was excited about the story and wanted to schedule it to air as quickly as possible.

  How fast can you write the script? asked the senior producer. Can we edit on Friday?

  I rushed to write the story, but before I could send the script to anybody to review, the whole vibe suddenly changed. The urgency cooled. They were no longer anxious to see the script. They changed their mind on scheduling a day to edit.

  Kim and I had no idea why the light switch went off. We had grown accustomed to trying to predict objections from broadcast producers based on their political leanings, but we couldn’t figure out what they saw as a political angle to this story.

  Out of curiosity, I searched news topics on the Web using the term school lunches. A lot of stories turned up about First Lady Michelle Obama’s initiative to make school lunches healthier.

  Do they think this story will somehow negatively reflect on Mrs. Obama’s efforts? we wondered. Several CBS colleagues pointed out that CBS This Morning cohost Gayle King is good friends with Mrs. Obama. Did she put the kibosh on the story?

  They’ll change their mind when they read the script, I think. It doesn’t criticize Mrs. Obama and the information is just too interesting to pass up.

  But after reading a first draft, the senior producers on the story said the subject matter just wasn’t right for them. Wasn’t interesting to their audience, after all.

  Kim and I were befuddled. I had been discussing the story with acquaintances for weeks—often a good way to gauge reaction to a topic—and received 100 percent enthusiastic responses, especially from the very sort of women targeted by the morning broadcasts. Everyone seemed interested in learning about the little-known processes behind delivering mass quantities of food to schoolchildren, and how that system could be rife with fraud.

  What was weird about the wholesale rejection of the script was the fact that they didn’t want a rewrite. They were uncharateristically quick to accept the loss of the thousands of dollars they’d spent on the shoot. They didn’t want to see a cut of the piece (I assured them they would find the interviews strong and compelling). They just didn’t want the story. It was a complete 180 from just a few days before.

  Among other disappointments was the almost wholesale rejection of the once-popular line of “follow the money” type stories I’d be
en assigned to do for years involving waste, fraud, and abuse of tax dollars. Almost every day, Kim and I were coming across new ideas for these important stories. They had become more relevant than ever with Congress unable to agree on a budget and spending more than it takes in, the debt growing ever larger, and sequestration looming. But there was near zero interest under the Pelley-Shevlin regime. During this time frame, New York producers initiated subtle edits that didn’t make sense to me substantively but, in retrospect, might be explained from an ideological standpoint. For example, when I wrote about misuse or waste of “tax dollars,” as I’d done for years, they began changing the phrase to “federal money.” When it became a pattern, I wondered if they didn’t want viewers reminded that it’s their hard-earned tax dollars being wasted.

  In 2013, Kim and I tried convincing the Weekend News executive producer that it would be in the interest of our viewers and the network to air our brand of taxpayer watchdog stories. We started small with a simple story that we figured even skittish broadcast producers could feel comfortable with: a hearing on waste within the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. It was especially “safe” because it was the government itself, HUD’s inspector general, who had unearthed the problems, so the facts were pretty well established: billions of dollars in wasteful and abusive spending. The IG had presented his findings in a public hearing—so there were no pesky, original investigative facts to worry the broadcast. Even so, I had the script approved by the CBS legal team. It should be perfect.

  But when it came time for our script to be reviewed by the executive producer in New York, she was out of the office and handed the task off to her number two. Kim and I immediately sensed trouble. This particular senior producer was commonly referred to as Shevlin’s ideological clone. The two had worked together on Weekend News for years prior to Shevlin’s promotion to Evening News as Pelley’s executive producer. This Weekend News senior, we predicted, wouldn’t like a story that exposed waste by the federal government.