Transcript of Panel Discussion

Tom Rosenstiel: What we're going to try to do in the next hour and a half or so is talk about the landscape for watchdog reporting and the kind of traditions that Izzy Stone represented and, hopefully, at the end we will have enough time to talk about what, if anything, can be done to improve matters, not just to critique them. And we'll try and have some time for questions at the end. And when we do those questions, rather than speak from your seat, where, four rows behind, the question is lost, we'll ask you to come to the microphone.

John, in your talk, which I personally thought, was quite thoughtful, you said there were a lot of holes, so what we're going to do now is try to find some of those holes. This is a question that several of you may actually have wanted to weigh in on, but Walcott says that the “temptation to play it safe” in the media is greater than it's ever been in his experience. Is that really true? Has the press become, less skeptical, less insurgent? Or is that the kind of thing we always think is sort of a condition of life? Chuck, you have sort of dedicated yourself to try and work from a different perspective. What do you think?

Charles Lewis: I actually kind of agree with the sentiment John said, I, you know, I've been looking at deception in the twentieth century and where the press was, and actually, this is a common problem which is part of the conversation. The media is frequently late on most issues involving power. [It] usually takes years to sort out the truth. We don't really have real-time truth. What John and his colleagues did is the exception to the rule, generally speaking. So, I think this is not just a Washington problem, but it is especially exacerbated here in Washington. It's always been a problem in Washington as, I think, it's gotten worse. And I think, as news organizations smaller and the business interests of companies have become more significant. There are compromises that are made with folks who are closely regulated, such as the broadcast industries, that have increased their ownership radically in the last twenty years. And that's not the only reason it's happening, but access, of course, that terrible problem that has besieged journalists since the beginning of time, the moth-and-flame problem. I don't think that's gotten any easier, and when you have an administration that keeps score, about who their friends are, and puts people off the bus, and other administrations have done this. Each one seems to get better at it. And then finally the susceptibility in this punditocracy, or whatever the word is. The David Barstow stories in the New York Times, I think, were really telling. You had, fifteen or more generals working, all getting contracts, all getting rich, and going on Cheney's private jet to Guantanamo and having talking points emailed to them, but told to the public that they were former generals. And the susceptibility of the media, particularly in this fast-moving, warp-speed world that you and Bill wrote about, it's gotten worse. Information's moving faster, chances, in an information age of standing down and checking the information, is almost hopeless now. And who's going to do it, by the way? So yeah, I think it's a really serious problem, I think it's out of control, basically.

Tom Rosenstiel: Okay, you mention business consolidation, access and communication strategies, the susceptibility of a media that is moving at more rapid pace. Jane, are there other — first of all, do you agree with the premise that the press is sort of more gullible, less skeptical than at some other time? If you do, are there other factors you would add to it?

Jane Mayer: I'm not sure I think that that's the issue. I think that what we have seen is the professionalization of the spin machine to a point where it's outmastering the press in a way. When I covered Reagan for the Wall Street Journal with John Walcott, who was one of the only people in the bureau who actually had sources, it was, you know, they tried to manipulate us and they did, on most good days, win that battle, but not everyday, and one of the things that changed was, when I was at the Wall Street Journal covering Reagan, once a week or once every other week, anyway, we had access to the Chief of Staff, Jim Baker, or we got to see Deaver, or we got to see the people who were in charge of, you know, running the country and making these decisions, and there's no access like that to the Bush Administration. And so, when you can see the real people, they tend to talk and make mistakes and play off against each other, and you can get stories. It's that they're such a professional handling operation by now. It's really hard to get past it and I think you have to be very sophisticated, very determined, and pretty savvy to get around it. You know, a lot of the, I think, people who are new to reporting and maybe in the blogosphere, and in the television networks and cable, are just not, you know, up to it; it's really hard to do at this point, to penetrate that.

Tom Rosenstiel: Okay, we've got daunting factors here: consolidation, speed, the game of access, professional spin machine, cutbacks in newsrooms. Florence, are there any other factors we've forgotten here?

Florence Graves: Well, one of the people whose work I have been particularly influenced by is Michael Schudson's work. And he's a professor at the University of California, San Diego. And he also teaches at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia. And he's written several books. He's a sociologist, but he's written several books on the media, and one of them is “The Power of News” and another one is “Watergate and American Memory: How We Remember, Forget, and Reconstruct the Past.” And when I was doing some thinking about all of this for some writing that I was doing, actually one of the articles was in the Nieman Reports. One of the things that he said that I found confirmed what I thought but didn't know that someone else had actually studied it. And he wrote in one of his books “the muckraking theme has been powerful in American journalism for a century — even though its practice is the exception, not the rule.” And he says, his theory is, and he has a whole book on Watergate, is that we live with the image of Watergate. We live with the picture of that's who we are, that's who the press is, that's what we expect from the press. When, he says, in fact, Watergate was really the exception rather than the rule. And, that, he says, and I think this is really something especially profound, he says, “the press as a whole during Watergate, was, as before and since, primarily an establishment institution with few ambitions to rock establishment bonds.”

That's how I've often seen it during my career in Washington. And I think, personally, as an outsider, it was hard for women my age to get into investigative reporting, that sometimes as an outsider, you see it even more clearly. Does that make sense?

Tom Rosenstiel: Yeah. It's interesting that the Pulitzer Prizes didn't actually have a category for investigative reporting until 1960.

Florence Graves: Right.

Tom Rosenstiel: It's not as though this has been something that we've celebrated throughout our history. Gil, I know you wanted to weigh in on this.

Gilbert Cranberg: Yeah.

Tom Rosenstiel: The fact is that — is sort of the notion of the press as a kind of insurgent watchdog overstated?

Gilbert Cranberg: Yes, very much overstated because when you most want a courageous press, you don't get it. When feelings run high and you have the press in full herd mode as it was in the run up to the Iraq war and you don't get the kind of skepticism that is absolutely essential. Think back at the time of the uprooting of Japanese Americans at the outset of World War II. This was a horrendous event. These people were put in camps, taken away from their homes and the press did not make an issue of that. The Tonkin Gulf — incidentally, I.F. Stone, as admirable as he was, didn't say a word about the treatment of Japanese Americans, most of whom were American citizens. Is Myra McPherson here? Oh, there you are. I see you nodding. Okay, you pointed out that you couldn't find any instance where I.F. Stone raised his voice about the treatment of Japanese Americans.

The same thing happened during the McCarthy years. Did I mention the Tonkin Gulf resolution? Same thing. So, what happened in the run up to the Iraq war was not an exception. It happened before and it'll happen again. I was struck by the question to John Walcott from a member of the audience. Why? Why was the press — why was Knight Ridder out there virtually alone? Where was the rest of the press? His answer was he didn't know. Well, I think that's an extremely important question and the fact that we don't know means it's going to happen again. What we need very seriously is a full scale review of what happened while the people are still in place, while their memories are fresh, and when key stories did not appear.

For example, as the piece that Walter Pincus wrote and the initial reaction of the editor of the Washington Post was “Kill it!” Finally, with Bob Woodward's intercession, it ran on page 17. Why? What was his thinking? I had personal experience at that time, after Colin Powell spoke to the UN — which was a seminal event that turned public opinion around totally to support the war. I did what I.F. Stone recommended. I was sort of a disciple of I.F. Stone. I actually read the speech. I didn't watch it, I read it, and it leaped.

Tom Rosenstiel: How twentieth century of you.

Gilbert Cranberg: Pardon me?

Tom Rosenstiel: How twentieth century of you.

Gilbert Cranberg: [laughs]

Tom Rosenstiel: [laughs]

Gilbert Cranberg: Well, the holes in that speech leaped off the page. So, I wrote a piece immediately after Powell's speech and I sent it to Columbia Journalism Review because his speech relied so heavily on unnamed sources. I thought CJR would be an appropriate outlet. They were not interested. They told me no. I could not get that piece published in any newspaper with any kind of a national reach. It appeared in three papers: The Des Moines Register, my own former paper, Sarasota and Lakeland. These are not journalistic powerhouses. It's the same mindset that resulted in an unwillingness to take on questions about Powell's speech. I could read you some excerpts from editorials; the trouble is it might make you want to throw up.

[Laughter]

Gilbert Cranberg: What was said at that time about Powell's speech.

John Walcott: Let me add something to that. Just a second, Tom. If you haven't read it, David Foster Wallace, the novelist who committed suicide not long ago, did a marvelous graduation speech at Kenyon in 2005, I think. The central point of it is that we put ourselves at the center of everything we see. I think one distinction — I deliberately didn't mention this when I was talking earlier — one distinction between the way we looked at this march to war and the way the Washington Post and New York Times did was driven by the fact that we don't own newspapers in Washington or New York. We're not writing for those people.

We were writing, and it was very much on my mind the whole time, for the mothers and the fathers and the sisters and brothers and the sons and the daughters of the people who were going to be sent to fight this war because we own the paper in Columbus, Georgia where Fort Benning is. Lexington, Kentucky, near Fort Campbell. In Fort Worth, Texas, near Fort Hood. Wichita and Kansas City near Fort Riley. That's who we were writing for and that's who we were thinking about. Is the administration making a case that justifies sending those young men and women into what the administration was arguing were going to be clouds of sarin gas and heaven knows what else. Whereas in Washington, it was all about what was going on inside the Beltway. I think it's a different perspective.

Tom Rosenstiel: Yeah, that's a very interesting point at a time when coverage of national affairs is being essentially abdicated to a handful of national outlets for whom the audience is not a community but more of an abstraction. I feel a little like Woody Allen in Annie Hall when you say, 'Does anybody know why the run up to the war went the way it does?' because I have Marshall McLuhan here, behind, to bring in the movie line in Michael Massing. But in asking this question, Mike, I want to play devil's advocate a little bit. What else would we expect? Let's recall that the Democratic Party, the opposition party, was in support of this war. The public supported it. When the President says, 'Let's go to war,' the press tends to be jingoistic and we're imbued with, we imagine, a pragmatic realpolitik philosophy as journalists. We were thinking, 'Okay, the war is going to happen.' So, why should we expect the press to behave any differently than it did?

Michael Massing: Well, that's a good question, Tom. I've thought about that a lot and there's so many threads here to pick up. The question of why the press behaved the way it did — I did talk to a lot of journalists too in the wake after the war to see why the run up was handled so poorly and John actually got it. I mean, John, I would not agree with you about the laziness thing. I mean, maybe so, but a lot of journalists, most journalists are hard working. I really do fear the other factor you mentioned, the fear factor, was paramount. Within two weeks of the war, we all remember what happened to Susan Sontag when she dared to venture in the pages of The New Yorker that these hijackers were not cowards. That, in fact, they had courage to do something like that and all hell broke loose and The New Yorker was inundated. Frankly, I think The New Yorker got spooked by that experience.

I spoke to Dana Priest at the Washington Post and she said, 'If you wrote anything challenging the Bush administration, you would get hundreds of — with email and the blogs and it's vicious stuff.' I mean, recently, I don't know how many of you read about Kathleen Parker, this columnist who's a conservative who criticized John McCain and she wrote a piece about people who wanted her children dead. When you get stuff like this, I really — when journalists say that it doesn't affect them, I don't think they're being totally aboveboard, but the best ones do ignore it.

So, Tom, when you emailed us some questions, you said that Congress, or the Democrats, were not opposing this. How many people here know how many Democrats in the Senate voted against the resolution to authorize war? [inaudible audience response]

Very close. Twenty-three. One quarter of the Senate actually did oppose. And the reason I know this, because I was speaking on a panel about a year ago, and Jack Reed, the Senator, was there, and he says, “You know, a lot of us were opposed to this, but the press did not actually — were not that interested in talking to us.” And I would just like to broaden the discussion. John [???] did an excellent job of talking about the Beltway side of things and sources, and how you work that. But this problem went way beyond that, because the war, on the one hand, we tended, in Washington and New York, to focus on, 'Did Saddam Hussein have links to Al Qaeda? And did he have weapons of mass destruction?' But there was a whole range of questions out there about whether this war was a wise thing or not. And our European allies, a lot of them agreed that they might have had weapons, but they thought it was unwise. And Arab opinion, and the whole idea of occupying a country in the Mideast, and that we were going to somehow build a peaceful democratic state — there were so many dissenting voices out there. John referred to the Washington Post editorial page, which was one of the worst offenders in terms of presenting one-note and largely hawkish view of this and after Colin Powell's speech, they did a famous four editorials, including Mary McCarthy — bless her, departed — but, 'I'm persuaded,' she said.

So in the light of all this, Tom's question, 'Can we expect otherwise?' I have to say that I am pessimistic on one level because, a good question is, now suppose — now the Bush administration is so damaged that it couldn't happen, but suppose they were to start beating the drums on Iran, and wanting to go there? Would the press do a good watchdog role? I don't know; we could actually have a discussion of that. But to me, Tom, the question is not so much, 'Can we expect it?' but, we must expect it. We have to demand it of the press. I totally — Gil said something that I was going to say, which is, it is in the times that you most need it that the press seems absent. And we just have to push it.

And so many journalists now are aware that they fell down. Bob Woodward himself has done a mea culpa that, you mentioned Walter Pincus, but Bob Woodward was involved with that; in one of his books, he's actually said, Why didn't we push this story that we had, on the eve of the war, that the intelligence was not so good? And Jill Abramson, the managing editor of the New York Times, admitted, in reviewing Woodward's book, that James Risen, one of her reporters, came to her with similar information, and they stuck it way back inside the paper and she didn't have a good explanation why, but I do think it's the fear factor. And, I think, Tom, you're right to raise the concern about, Can we expect otherwise? But I think we must, and the spirit of I.F. Stone would demand that we do that.

[applause]

Tom Rosenstiel: Hold your applause until the end of the debate.

Michael Massing: That's not my mother applauding.

[laughter]

Tom Rosenstiel: Jane, there's a couple of questions that I want to ask you, following up on your point about the spin machine, the ability or the efforts to try and control journalists, because, yeah, there's cutbacks and a lot of pressures that go beyond what an individual reporter is actually feeling when they're working their beat. But you have worked in the daily press and now at the New Yorker in a slightly different side of this. Do you think that the arguments, from largely conservative critics, that the press is liberal — which some people have argued is an insincere critique, designed to sort of work the refs, whereas others say, no, it's a heartfelt argument, about liberalism. Is that putting journalists on the defensive? Or is it putting editors on the defensive who are feeling that heat more directly? What's your sense on that? And John, I want to ask you that, too.

Jane Mayer: Well, I think it's certainly put editors and on the defensive for years. I mean, the development it's taken, if it started with, at least in my experience, with accuracy in media, and Reed Irvine, and this huge attack on CBS about the Vietnam War coverage, and continued on through the Reagan Era, but there's been a development in just the more recent years. You can get left-wing critics, too, now weighing in, who very consciously have molded themselves to try to create a counterbalance to that, and I think it has had some effect, whether they're working the refs or making these criticisms for political reasons, it's obvious. If you take a look at the last couple weeks, it's almost comical, where you've got the McCain campaign first saying that the New York Times was completely in the liberal tank and this was right before they were about the write a very tough piece about McCain and then, the minute that they came out with their piece about Bill Ayers, you've got a quote from Sarah Palin saying, “and the New York Times is almost always right.” You know, they'll work it whichever way it works for them. But I think what I was trying to get at was about the spin machine was, I think it's become such an assault on the media at such a basic level in this last administration, where you've got — Ken Auletta did a piece for the New Yorker where people in the Bush White House said, basically, reporters are no more legitimate than just the man on the street. What right do they have to question us? And what authority do they have to write? And they're basically saying that the press is an illegitimate institution.

And when I see things like that — and also, of course, they've created their own press. They've got their phony news organizations with their PR anchormen that really turn out to be working for the Bush administration, without explaining it to anybody in the audience. So I think this requires a new level of vigilance on the part of reporters, too. And I also feel like, I have to say, I think that somehow the press has got to win over the public to its side more. This is not a popularly held belief, I think, but we're getting clobbered by people who are political opponents, who want to make us the problem. I feel like most of us think we perform a function for the public, and a very important one, but somehow the public doesn't share our enamored feelings about ourselves. And maybe, somehow, we have to do a better job explaining why what we're doing is a public service for them.

Tom Rosenstiel: Well, let me ask this also more personally — and John, also, after Jane answers it, I'd like to hear from you on this — what do you do personally? You're still a reporter, for the liberal New Yorker magazine, with Sy Hersh and all those other pinkos working there, what do you do when you go and call sources up in a conservative administration, how do you win their trust ?

Jane Mayer: You know, personally, I try to be very careful and assume that anything I say or do is on the record, with any interview I do with anybody. I don't get involved in politics, personally. I don't put bumper stickers on my car. I don't sign petitions. I don't — I try to go the extra mile to talk to the people who probably disagree with what they think my bias is. And if they won't speak to me, such as in the case of David Addington, who I was profiling, I then went and called his mother. I called his best friend in grade school. And people who liked him. You just do everything you can to humanize and understand the people who you're not expected to be sympathetic to. Otherwise you do get stuck in a little gulag with one point of view or another. And I think John's done a great job of writing stories that — they can't be authoritative unless you talk to all sides. So you have to do it.

Tom Rosenstiel: Well, John, you said you guys were vilified. How did you cope with that? And also, do you think that editors are somehow more susceptible to these pressures than reporters?

John Walcott: The answer to the vilification question, Tom, is easy: we ignored it. And I hope Kathleen Parker ignores it. And if you read the column that Dana Milbank wrote today about going to a campaign rally, I hope every reporter ignores it. Whether they're being yelled at because they're African-American or because they're perceived to be in the tank, that's all you can do. And there's no reason to pay any attention to it, frankly. So that part of it is easy. As I said earlier, for Jon and Warren and the others on the staff, I kind of made a joke out of it.

Tom Rosenstiel: Mm-hmm.

John Walcott: Defused it that way, because it was so ridiculous. Jane, of course, is exactly right, that you have to seek out all sides of an argument. But I'll reiterate something I said earlier because I think it's lost on a lot of reporters; most of the people that work for the United States government did not take an oath to support and defend the President of the United States. They took an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. And our government, as politicized as it's become, and as polarized as it's become, and as powerful as the message machine has become, and the message discipline has become, is still full of people whose highest allegiance is to the Constitution and the people of the United States. And you have to seek those people out. They also happen to be the people who are most expert in these things, the people who write the intelligence reports and don't just read them. They're hard to find. Talking about classified matters is a felony, so you work at night, you go to people's houses, you meet people in odd places — not parking garages moving flower pots, but — never tried that one. But, you know, it is hard work. But that's the antidote to this message machine that, I agree with Jane, has become more effective than I've ever seen before.

Tom Rosenstiel: I want to pick up, Chuck, on a point that you made about speed and I think sort of the architecture of the press. You have sort of a reporting press that digs stuff up, but for that to have an impact, it needs to somehow penetrate the other elements of the press. You mentioned the Times piece about the program that the Pentagon had to, essentially, spin the generals who were going to be on T.V. and plant them in places. In the month after that piece ran, and in the week after that piece ran, our content analysis, which examines 48 different news outlets every day, found that that piece was picked up exactly zero times on cable television in the following month.

And that story did not really generate momentum. It sort of stayed there in the Times and I think people recognize it as an important story, but it didn't sort of enter the dialogue. How important is it now for what the reporting press does to penetrate that 'commentariat' element of the press that is on cable and in blogs, et cetera?

Charles Lewis: Well, no, it's a crucial problem. You can't have a one-day story, generally, because it will fade in to the ether. It has to be a multiple-day story. Obviously, it's not in television's interest to particularly play up that story and so it wasn't shocking. But, I would have liked to have seen more play throughout the regular text or print press. But something Jane said is part of the problem here, the energy that's brought now, there's twice as much spent by this administration — 450 PR people hired in the first four years, double what Clinton hired.

The video news releases where a hundred million people were exposed to phony news — faux news — where, 'This is Bonnie reporting from Washington' and basically worked for the Bush administration, which the head of the GAO called illegal propaganda, which, of course, nothing happened from it. And, you know, in many ways, reporters have gone from pencils to pens to typewriters to electric typewriters to word processors, but they're still watching what those in power say. And the means of manipulation and distortion, because of the new media sources with the web and also the ease of television, the advent of cable, and the Internet together are part of what creates that speed. It's the information age. Leon Panetta, the former Chief of Staff to President Clinton, once talked about this problem: if a story breaks at 3:00, 3:15, or 3:30, the other side's going to be on TV and there's a war all over the airwaves. And then the reporter is forced to do the 'tweedledee, tweedledum,' 'on the one hand, on the other hand' relativistic type story, which is basically pabulum. The average reader's eyes glaze over on the second graph.

That's what passes for most reporting. It's volleyball, basically, and that is very irritating. And, oh yeah, the truth, where was that? And so it's a really serious problem and I think it's gotten much worse. And now that you have decimated bureaus, half the number of reporters are now trying to do twice as many stories, if they do them at all, now.

So I think it is extremely serious and I don't exactly have all the answers about how you change it, but I do think the profession and the business has got to recognize the game has changed. It's been changing for years. Each administration is more sophisticated. I'm sure the next one will be even better. But anyway, that's what I worry about.

Tom Rosenstiel: Michael, as the reportorial part of the architecture shrinks, what are you seeing?

Michael Massing: Well, I just — one thing, I think we maybe need to — I totally agree with Chuck. I interviewed, probably a couple years ago, Doyle McManus, the Washington Bureau Chief of the LA Times, was ruing the cutbacks that his staff was having in Washington on the ability to cover just the federal regulatory agencies. And when you look back now at how important it is with everything happening in terms of our financial system, just literally, not having reporters who can cover labor or the environment, he was going on and on about that. But I don't know, Chuck and Jane. I mean, it seems to me the government's ability to manipulate the press rises and falls according to, sort of, the power of an administration and its popularity. I mean, it seems to me the run up to the war was a time when we really needed it, but President Bush's poll ratings were so high and there was such a sort of congealing conventional wisdom that people shrunk.

Right now, does the administration have an ability to really get its message out even with all those PR people? I think when an administration is weak and there's a sense of the 'sharks in the water,' then the press is willing to be much, much more aggressive.

Tom Rosenstiel: So if that was the honeymoon, this is the divorce. Florence, you've got some statistics on —

Florence Graves: I do.

Tom Rosenstiel: — this coverage in Washington.

Florence Graves: On what's happening in the coverage of the federal agencies. And, again, in research that I was doing on something for the Nieman Reports for an article, I came across an article that was done in American Journalism Review. It's a 2001 project on the state of American Newspapers and they surveyed wire services to determine which ones regularly covered certain federal agencies. This is what? Eight years ago? Seven years ago? And they had 19 agencies that they were looking at and the survey found that — apart from the major departments, such as Defense and State, Treasury, et cetera — that comparatively few reporters are now being assigned to cover, in many cases, any of these agencies.

And exactly the point that you were making in your address earlier this afternoon, they found no full-time reporter — guess where? Veteran's Affairs, with a 46 billion dollar budget. And another one —

Charles Lewis: Yeah, but 46 billion is nothing now.

Florence Graves : Well, I just forgot. [laughter] And the Nuclear Regulatory Commission: zero reporters on a full-time — you know, assigned to cover this agency. Two full-time reporters at the Department of Interior. Three full-time reporters at Agriculture. Environmental Protection Agency and the Social Security Administration — three full-time reporters in the U.S. of A. I mean, it's pretty astonishing. When you think about that, you can see, I mean, they can get away with — I don't want to say murder — but, these agencies can get away with a lot. There's no one watching them.

Tom Rosenstiel: Well, Gil, I want to go to you on this; isn't it possible that we're measuring the wrong thing here? That, yes, we're seeing a shrinkage in traditional, mainstream newspaper reporters, but if I were to look at the number of foreign reporters who are covering Washington, the number of specialized websites and newsletters that are targeted at places, that there are watchdogs here. They're just different watchdogs. Is that possible?

Gilbert Cranberg: Sure. Well, I was struck by John Walcott's statement in his talk that this was not rocket science, what they did. This was doable by any journalism organization if they had the will to do it. The problem was they didn't have the will to do it. And why not? That's the bedrock question. Why didn't they have the will? That's what I think needs to be carefully studied. Try to figure out what happened or what didn't happen.

Jane Mayer: I don't think it's that mysterious. I mean, if you look at — The New York Times had stories by Carlotta Gaul early on saying that in Bagram Air Force Base, US soldiers had brutalized a detainee to death.

Tom Rosenstiel: Yeah.

Jane Mayer: The foreign editor could not get that story in the paper and Howell Raines wouldn't put it on the front page and he kept saying, 'I feel like there's something wrong with it' and it took weeks and weeks and weeks in arguing and they finally put it on the inside. Two years later, it became a front page series about the death of this detainee and a tremendous scandal and the subject of an Oscar-winning documentary, 'Taxi to the Dark Side.' What changed was the political environment in which the editor was making the decision. I mean, in the beginning there was this rally around the flag thing which editors feel part of, too. I mean, right or wrong. I think you made the point in your argument, it's been always so and it's when you most need them that they cave.

Gilbert Cranberg: Well, I think this is not a problem for journalists to solve. It's a problem for social psychologists. They need to get into these news organizations and talk in depth to the decision makers, to the editors and the subeditors who decided, 'No, this is not an appropriate subject for us to deal with, on the front page especially.'

Tom Rosenstiel: Michael, John mentioned in his talk the fact that the influence of a few key news organizations, the New York Times, Washington Post, that not all players are equal here. Is that a fair representation of what you were saying?

Michael Massing: Yeah, I think so.

Tom Rosenstiel: I think we know a fair amount now about the dysfunction of the New York Times. It involved Howell Raines and the other political sort of forces there. Are there still key players in the 21st century who have particular influence over the public agenda or is that weakening? Is that an excuse that we use because people didn't pay attention to the things we care about?

Michael Massing: That's a very good question and it's odd in a sense because on the one hand, the mainstream media, as we've said, is being attacked from left and right and it's sort of almost like the space is shrinking. And yet, with all the cutbacks that have gone on at many papers, particularly these regional, these once very good regional papers, like the Boston Globe and Newsday and the Baltimore Sun and so on, these sort of elite organizations have in some ways become more important, and the New York Times and Washington Post in particular, I mean, it's remarkable the way— I don't know if anyone disagrees, but the way they stand out, and they continue, in spite of all the slings and arrows that they take, to set the agenda so that Knight Ridder can pump out all this good material. I mean, John, in one way, it was an advantage, right? You weren't in the limelight and so, it allowed you — As you were saying, your editors or your publishers were so stalwart that it didn't matter, but it did allow you to go off and do this and not have, for instance, it's one thing for the administration to do it, but did you see Bill O'Reilly went after you or not? You mentioned Bill O'Reilly, but —

John Walcott: He did once or twice, I think.

Michael Massing: Yeah.

John Walcott: I don't watch the Bill O'Reilly, so.

Gilbert Cranberg: He watches you, apparently.

John Walcott: I'd rather have it that way.

Michael Massing: And the blogosphere is if a tree falls and nobody hears it, I mean, if no one hears it, does it fall? I mean, if the blogosphere is out there and you could have people, it's interesting to think — Like now, suppose you had a site where somebody put out this information about the aluminum tubes, and we probably will have things like that happening in the future. And yet, if it doesn't make it, if this doesn't get picked up, who becomes the megaphone? Who is the amplifier on that?

Tom Rosenstiel: Does anybody disagree that as the reportorial part of the press shrinks, that the few major institutions that are still in that game become actually relatively more important ironically at a time when there are more outlets?

Gilbert Cranberg: Yeah, the technology also is going to negatively impact what the press can do. Reporters nowadays just don't write a story. They'll update the story during the day. They'll be asked to do blogs. They have less time to do basic reporting, and this is on top of all the cutbacks. So, I think the future is bleak. But this is a very appropriate time where we're celebrating I.F. Stone, to get back to basics. I.F. Stone showed the way! He said, 'You dig!' and what I.F. Stone did is what John Walcott and his colleagues did. They found people in the lower ranks of government. That was the way Stone operated. Stone studied documents. That's still basic reporting. It's still darn important.

Tom Rosenstiel: Well, that's where we want to go. We'll talk about the future in a second. I think it's a good moment to go to this survey that the Nieman Watchdog group did of 145 Nieman Fellows. I'm not sure where I'm supposed to point this, but the first question that they asked people was grade the American news organizations for their reporting in the run up to the war. That's the question, that's the answer.

Gilbert Cranberg: I think that's a generous grade!

[Laughter]

Panelist: Grade inflation.

Tom Rosenstiel: Yeah, grade inflation. A D? As a parent, I'm in favor of grade inflation.

[Laughter]

Tom Rosenstiel: Okay. The Nieman group asked the fellows, 'What would you recommend?' and we're going to talk about that in a minute, but let's see what some of the recommendations that they offered. This is a small — 'Quit letting spin drive the coverage,' 'Jon Stewart is our hero' and 'quit the internal need to balance one side's transgressions with the other side's view.' That's a point that John made, as well. Murrey Marder says, 'The American press must face the fact that it has swallowed a totally illusionary concept of blind reliance on authoritative sources. This is a substitute for reporting.' Many people have made this point about, go to the secondary level. [???] talks about this, Jim Risen talks about this. All the best reporters that I know make this point.

It's a tragedy that really professional reporters from topnotch news organizations have been offered early retirement packages because of the change in economics of traditional fourth estate. I believe some sort of pooling arrangement is necessary. I should add here that when we surveyed newspaper editors earlier this year and asked them what was the cutbacks in their own newsrooms, they said the worst thing that was happening was the loss of institutional memory, the loss of the sort of knowledge and source contacts that you were talking about, John.

There were some positive things that they saw to the changeover in newsrooms too: 'Check spin reality by developing more rank and file administration sources.' 'Staff the White House with a competent stenographer. Otherwise, boycott the daily spoon feedings. Steno reporters have to do their jobs.'

[Laughter]

 

I think it's the notion of how you arrange beats and staff people in Washington that's an interesting thing we should talk about. And that's it. So, we've got a little time left before we go to questions and we asked all of you to come prepared. Bob and Barry and Dan and I all wanted you to have some suggestions for what could be done, in the words of Lennon. Michael, we'll start with you since we finished with you.

Michael Massing: Okay. Well, I jotted down three things that I would like to — They're sort of different in the realm of internal journalistic practice, although one of them is. I would like to prohibit this sort of access journalism where you hang out with a profile subject or you travel with the Secretary of State or hang out with the CEO of GE or something. I find inevitably that a lot of leading magazines do it. But profiles always become denatured and watered down because, a) you've developed a bond with this person and even when you are trying to be as objective as possible, you get co-opted and there's no way around it. You can get just as much information by talking to the mother of the person or classmates or just people that they deal with and what you lose in terms of access, I'm thinking of people who go on the plane with the Secretary of State and then write a profile. I would outlaw that.

Do I have a chance to just talk about two other things very quickly? Can we?

Tom Rosenstiel: Yes, you do.

Michael Massing: Okay. There's an interesting phenomenon that's developed that, again, McClatchy started, which I've actually written about and is becoming more common, which is allowing reporters to have blogs and what McClatchy did is they actually got their Iraqi reporters writing on their blog and somebody tipped me off to this and it was just fascinating, I got a whole different view of how Iraq looked because the actual Iraqis were talking to us. And it's remarkable, even in the best reporting out of Iraq, how rarely Iraqis are allowed to talk, like about actions of the US military. You almost never see that, the embedding process which is necessary in some ways, has created a big screen against that. I'm so often amazed at how reporting on the blog does not make its way into the newspaper. And there's even informa — there's even material about how the story itself was gotten, and what got into it and what had to be left out because they either couldn't nail it down, or the access was limited and so on. And I'm reading this stuff and I know, like, five percent of the people who read the newspaper articles are going to read this, and there's like a separation of blogosphere and newspaper reporting that I'd like to see broken down. And more of that sort of contextual — both analysis and the story behind the story — brought into the newspapers. I think not only would it be enlightening, but it would actually bring in more readers because it's another way of reporting the news, it's very, very engaging and engrossing. And finally, I think we have to look at, okay, the blogosphere, we all know, is a new force out there, but it doesn't do reporting, but, we had this new example, ProPublica, which is this, been set up with some money from the west coast. Ten million dollars to set up an investigative reporting organization and we don't know yet how it's going because it's getting started. I think they made one mistake where they set up a bricks-and-mortar type of, they made it like a real news room, and that is a huge absorber of resources. What I'd like to see, when the LA Times was up for sale, it looked like it might be up for sale from Tribune, David Geffen and all these other people I'm sure who followed it, they thought they might buy it, it didn't happen. Somebody had the idea that David Geffen and these other people should set up a website and take all the talent that's being dropped from the LA Times and start a new organization, on the web, which could be done cheaply. And I had this idea of like, maybe, a consortium of people could raise money, for ten million dollars you could hire a hundred top editors and reporters. They'd work out of their home, like I do and like other people up here do, they don't have to go to a site. And they could start doing the type, not just investigative reporting, but analysis, report on the world in a way that, fill in the gaps, that is, that so many of which are opening up in our mainstream media.

Tom Rosenstiel: It's interesting when you think about ProPublica, John Carroll, former editor of the LA Times, said that, you know, that people might think that's a drop in the bucket, ten million dollars, because the New York Times editorial budget is probably somewhere closer or was at one point, closer to two hundred and fifty million dollars. But the investigative reporting budget, of the New York Times, might not be much more than ten million dollars. So it's, in scale, it's not an insignificant thing.

Chuck, you have actual experience with trying to create new models, so what are your thoughts on how to reinvigorate what advice to mainstream, uh, folks, or, non-mainstream?

Charles Lewis: Sure, first of all, non-profit investigative journalism has been around for thirty or forty years in the US, the oldest institution is the Center for Investigative Reporting, the last decade the largest was the Center for Public Integrity. There are actually several dozen non-profits doing investigative reporting around the world. This is all recent, and it's obviously not unrelated to what's happening. And I, you know, my last year at the Center for Public Integrity the staff was forty people, full-time, including Pulitzer prize winners and we had a hundred journalists in fifty countries available on a contract basis doing content across borders for ten years, from 97 until today, so can you do things with the new technologies that most media organizations including the New York Times actually don't do, the answer is yes. Can you get twenty people for six months and have them pull every contract in Iraq and Afghanistan and post it and reveal that Halliburton and KBR got the most money? You can; six months after the war started, we did that. So, did the New York Times do that? No. Could they have done it? No, they actually didn't have twenty people to do that. And they also don't pull contract data that extensively. We then looked at the Pentagon's contracts for five years, every contract, and we found that forty percent there was no competitive bidding. The web has got the viral qualities — it's real exciting when you post that Halliburton information — 350,000 unique visitors, 15 million hits and a hundred news stories within 18 to 24 hours. A little scrappy group, not one of the big institutions, so I actually don't see it all as totally dire. There are some equalizers here, their i-teams generally stop around 13 people. They're not generally global, so, and then you know, many of these non-profits are starting up in hyper local coverage throughout the nation. San Diego, Minneapolis, lots of other cities. One foundation was going to put up ten million and challenge the Philadelphia Inquirer at one point. So, uh, this is still evolving, it's moving at actually pretty high speed right now. And the possibilities that Michael is just mentioning, there's all kinds of possibilities. We're going to see new models emerge in the coming months. So, I, I'm actually pretty excited about it.

Florence Graves: Including yours, huh?

Charles Lewis: No, I didn't-

Florence Graves: No I mean new models.

Charles Lewis: Yeah.

Tom Rosenstiel: Yeah. Florence, you're in the business of teaching people how to do this well.

Florence Graves: No.

Tom Rosenstiel: No, not anymore?

Florence Graves: No we don't teach.

Tom Rosenstiel: Oh, you don't teach?

Florence Graves: No, it's an independent reporting center.

Tom Rosenstiel: Okay.

Florence Graves: Based at Brandeis. And we use students, but we pay them, so we get to choose who we want to work with us.

Tom Rosenstiel: Does that mean once you start getting paid you stop learning?

Florence Graves: No, but it means you don't get credit.

Tom Rosenstiel: So what's your -

Florence Graves: So you can choose who you want.

Tom Rosenstiel: Gotcha. What is your — what are the solutions or reforms that you would suggest, for how to invigorate the skeptical reporter?

Florence Graves: I think there's a lot of inv — just as Chuck was saying — that there's a lot of investigative reporting out there. Your series proves that there's a lot of investigative reporting out there. I don't think there's enough, given the size of this country, given the size of the world, given that we're now all interconnected, given the huge — the fact that very few people really cover Wall Street and that's now very clear to us. So, I think there's more and better investigative journalism today than there used to be, but I think it's, compared to what? But the culture, the world, the budgets have grown so enormously, in just the past twenty or thirty years that the media, I think, have not kept up in being able to really cover a lot of this. And, none of these organizations, my small — pre-ProPublica, that didn't have ten million a year, and Chuck's fantastic Center for Public Integrity, none of us are going to be the answer, and I think, but, I do think, but we're part of the solution. We can make a dent. I think the biggest problem that we have and that your stories illustrate, is traction. It is very difficult to get traction for a lot of these stories, if they aren't in the New York Times, or in the Wall Street Journal, or the Washington Post, and if they don't hit broadcast, it's, the people out there in, you know, what they call the Hinterlands here in Washington, they don't get access to this stuff. They're listening to a lot of people and I say this, related to many of them are listening to Rush Limbaugh, that's where they get their news. So you, you know, how does some — how do articles like the ones that were in Knight Ridder, the work was done. How could it have gotten traction? That's the tough question.

Gilbert Cranberg: Well, even Knight Ridder didn't run many of those articles. The Knight Ridder papers. And, my, my former paper subscribed the Knight Ridder service, they hardly ran any of them. And that's a serious newspaper.

Tom Rosenstiel: Okay but —

Florence Graves: One, can I say, one solution so to speak.

Tom Rosenstiel: Yes, we're talking solutions now.

Florence Graves: Is to —

Tom Rosenstiel: We had forty minutes of what's wrong —

Florence Graves: All the problems, right. I think one thing that we're trying to do is to do impact journalism, we're trying to pick the stories that we do that have the potential to have a greater impact. And then, promote them. Heavily. To try to get them out into more of the mainstream media, and, you know I think you can also target kinds of stories. What is the purpose of the story that you're doing? What is the purpose of the journalism? Is it just to inform the public, or is there in some cases, a greater purpose where you're trying to put a spotlight on malfeasance, corruption, whatever, you think there should be a result as a result of the investigative reporting that you've done. And so I think there are ways of targeting certain audiences for certain stories, and another thing that we've started doing is footnoting our articles on the web. You know, the news organizations are increasingly doing shorter stories, not longer stories, the public is bored by, you know, all this detail. But, there are certain audiences that aren't bored with it, and those are the ones that are most affected by that particular story that you're doing, without the detail they have a hard time arguing that something needs to be done, or they are affected by the spin. I am going to take one more second to say that back in the 80's I had founded Common Cause Magazine to do investigative reporting because, in my view then, there was still more to be done than what the New York Times and Washington Post were doing. And I did a story on NutraSweet. And in his wisdom, my boss, Fred Wertheimer, allowed me, and it cost a lot of money, to print twenty page investigation in Common Cause Magazine, and I had argued, it was like an extra, like $30,000, that, you know, that an organization, non-profit, does not have. And I argued that, if we did not answer every single question that was going to be brought up by a lobbyist, if we did not answer them all, nothing would ever happen, because they would immediately say, 'She didn't address this, she didn't address that. She didn't take on this. She missed this, she missed that.' We covered it. Any question that we could think of that was significant. Now we could do that on the web. You could have run the shorter story and said, 'For more detail, see the web.' Someone suggested in a letter to the New York Times that they should have done that about their Sarah Palin story and the way she conducted government in Alaska. There were so many questions that were left unanswered. Why wasn't that story run in a much longer version on the web? Why don't they do that more? I don't know.

Tom Rosenstiel: Okay, you've mentioned a few really interesting ideas. Pick your stories strategically, for impact, more documentation and transparency to establish that they've been verified and are true, aggressively market them into the commentariat media after publication, and go to great lengths to defend them. I'd add Michael's idea about limiting other reporting, the sort of access reporting, and doing more to contextualize. Putting a lot more effort into the what we used to call the, 'Nut Graph,' the 'So what graph.'

Florence Graves: And I have one more thing that I want to throw out there. I've started to put together a team of lawyers who are willing to — because we don't get our FOIA's answered. Two or three years later, they are still working on them. Can't find them. Don't know where the documents are. We're putting a together a team of lawyers who, pro bono, are willing to sue the government to get the documents for us. We certainly cannot afford to do that. But we have found that there are some civic-minded business type lawyers that want to do this type of work.

Tom Rosenstiel: Okay, John, you are both a boss and somebody who is winning awards for this type of stuff. What are the solutions you would suggest?

John Walcott: Well, I think the first boss responsibility, is to try to defeat the cynicism that has invaded the profession. It got as far as, I'm sad to say, Nieman Reports, sort of saying it didn't matter that no one covered the run-up to the Iraq war, because they were going to do it anyway. And that is a very tempting way to dispose of this burden. To say that nobody listens, and the message machine is too powerful. Why should I continue to work 16 or 18 hours a day to do stuff that doesn't matter? When it doesn't get traction. Without that, we're going nowhere. The second thing, which maybe is a little different than what Chuck and Michael are talking about, is I have tried to break down the wall between “investigative reporting” and what everybody else in the bureau does. There is a tendency to think that investigative reporting is what those three or four or ten people do, they write one story every three years, its 11,000 words when they get done with it.

Tom Rosenstiel: Hey! I worked for the L.A. Times. Stop making fun of that.

John Walcott: 12,000 words, sorry. And that's investigative reporting. Every reporter in every bureau should be an investigative reporter. In our bureau, for example, we have a national staff, and they are the ones who are assigned to State, Defense, Justice, the environment, economics. But, we have a big staff of regional reporters, who report, each one, for each of the 30 papers we own. Now, you know, the guys who are reporting for papers in Idaho, or Alaska, or Washington state, ought to be the ones investigating the agriculture department, the forest service, et cetera. And they are. Everybody ought to be doing investigative work. We have seen, over the past 7+ years, regulatory changes that are mind-boggling. And now, the evidence is starting to come out that this was largely political. Everybody should be a regulatory watchdog in that sense. And the last thing, somebody mentioned earlier, and I'm afraid that it's right, that we, we as an industry, the news media, have lost an awful lot of public support. And I think there are a couple of reasons for that that can be remedied. One of them is that we have got to stop screwing up. That would help. But the other one is that we have lost touch with most of America. We write for each other, we write for the Sunday talk shows, we write for the elites in New York and Washington. And the average person picks up a newspaper, even the best, maybe especially the best newspapers, and says, 'There is nothing in here that helps me live my life.' And I'm sure that there are millions of Americans out there who are watching their 401ks evaporate, and wondering why no one told them that their retirement was at risk, that their chance of retiring was at risk, and we were too busy covering guys who made hundred million dollar bonuses. We were too enamored of that world. Just this week, I've got a reporter and a television crew from the American News Project, which is another of one of these independent video outlets. We have no video talent whatsoever. In addition, as you can see, to not having too many people who are videogenic.

Tom Rosenstiel: Hillary, you are likable enough.

John Walcott: Harpy, shrew. But they started this little journey in Greenwich, CT. And, among other things, went through a house that is in foreclosure, where the family had to leave so quickly that the kids' sports trophies are still on the bureau. But they are in Newark today. And then they're going to go on to, I think maybe, the Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania. And look at how what's going on in Wall Street affects Main Street. Different kinds of Main Streets. And I don't think we do enough of that kind of reporting. I think we've kind of lost touch with what matters to people across the country living their daily lives, and I think we need to rededicate ourselves to that.

Tom Rosenstiel: Okay, you've talked about a leadership challenge to fight against the cynicism that can wear down your staff, to inspire them, to make everybody a skeptical reporter in your newsroom, by encouraging them to not be stenographers. And to stay in touch with, not the discussion of elites, but the discussion that's going on around kitchen tables. Jane, I'm struck by the extent to which, when your book came out, you had connected dots, and seen a phenomenon that was sort of there in front of everybody, but people hadn't put together before and had done that through deep, deep reporting. What are your, as somebody that had been in daily, and now is doing, is able to take that longer look, what are your thoughts about how we can as a profession, do this job better?

Jane Mayer: I am the luckiest of reporters to work at a place like the New Yorker, where you can take time, which is the ultimate luxury in reporting, or writing a book, also. One of the things that I did in the book, that I think maybe would be useful, if people did more often just generally in daily reporting, was to give credit and follow up on other people's reporting. There is some kind of bias that editors have that if somebody else has broken a story, and you even acknowledge that they've broke the story in your rival news organization, that you can't do your own version of it. And in fact, what it prohibits then, is following up and adding on, and to some extent you can see it in press scrums, when the President comes out in front of the White House Press Corps. When the Press Corps works together, and follows up on each other's questions, they can pin somebody down and get somewhere, but when they are all sort of preening to get their own ten seconds, they don't get very far. And I really think that we probably should have picked up on the reporting that John and his team were doing. And it would have been better if the New York Times and Washington Post said, 'What are these curveball stories?' and ran with it and took it further and in some of the stuff that I have been working on, there has been that dynamic. You, John, you mentioned that it's a very competitive business and obviously they will stay so and that's good in many ways, but in the rarified world of people writing about torture, there has been a kind of an international relay race going on where people have been tossing the baton across national barriers, really. I mean, something will break in Poland about — where it seems to be that there is a secret prison, and people or Dana Priest, who has done such amazing reporting, will have her stories out and then people will go and look for those prisons and there are flight records and plane spotters looking for the rendition planes and it's been a really interesting thing to see. And one of the possibilities of working with computers is that it can be international and it can be accumulative if you are sort of willing to give a little bit of credit. And I think that, especially as we get weaker and weaker, as individual news organizations, if we, you know, have the sort of courage to work a little more collectively, and follow up on each other's work, we might get someplace further. So I think that's one thing.

I have to say my pet peeve is one of the innovations of the '80s and '90s, which are ombudsmen, in-house ombudsmen, I am sorry to say that, but I just feel like, somebody who sees how hard it is to break news and get stories and how hard the good people work. I would like to see Ombudsmen explain to the public what we are doing in a way that makes them appreciate it, instead of constantly piling on, and taking us apart on the inside. It's bad enough to be criticized from the outside, and then to also have somebody on the inside pulling your stuffing out, so I am really sick of that and..

Gilbert Cranberg: Spoken like a true reporter. [laughter]

Jane Mayer: You know, and I mean, I don't really think that reporting has been all bad. I think that there is lots to be ashamed of but there has also been some amazing stuff done at even the New York Times and the Washington Post. James Risen and others and a lot of us. One more thing on the collective aspect of this — I think on the campaign, we would be so much more powerful if news organizations kind of picked up on each other's demands and for instance, say about John McCain's pathology reports when he has cancer, 'We want to see them,' and if they say no to one organization, the next one should say, 'We want to see them too,' you know, and just keep — There are ways to have more pressure put on the administration or people in power when they simply sort of diss us. I would like to think that we can be more creative with that.

John Walcott: The biggest example of that is the Sarah Palin interview availability.

Jane Mayer: Yeah! Really! [laughs]

John Walcott: We were all told that we had to show proper deference. That was the word they used. And I couldn't agree with you more, especially on that front.

Jane Mayer: So to be supportive, you know, I think we can be a little more supportive of each other and demanding things like access.

Gilbert Cranberg: Speaking of being supportive, everybody knows the name of her book. “The Dark Side” is well worth reading.

Jane Mayer: Thank you very much.

Gilbert Cranberg: You are welcome.

Tom Rosenstiel: A lot of people say to me that it was the best book they read this year.

Jane Mayer: God! Thank you.

Tom Rosenstiel: What's intriguing to me about that, Jane, is two things. First of all, that's very much the model that scientists use in trying to investigate a problem, who do not work in large institutions but really sort of work as singular researchers in collaboration with each other. Yes, they're in universities, but you are not part of the Harvard team; you are part of the group of biochemists who are studying a certain problem and you see each others as colleagues and across competing or across different institutions. But the other thing about that I think we have to remember is that there is a kind of meta-narrative that goes on in the commentariat media, where you know, one booker is watching a TV show and says 'Let's have that guy on'. But what do we have in our collaborative discussion about, is it journalism of empiricism, that you were talking about John, or is it whatever the buzz of the moment is? So if we are going to collaborate, we need to be picking the right subject, it seems to me. Gil, so what are your solutions and we've got time for questions.

Gilbert Cranberg: The underlying reason we are here today is that there has been a massive journalistic failure. And we are celebrating the exception.

Panelist: The maverick.

Tom Rosenstiel: Pardon me?

Panelist: The maverick.

[laughter]

Gilbert Cranberg: We are celebrating somebody who wasn't a failure; they did a wonderful job. So where has there been the institutional self-examination as a result of this failure? The New York Times had a fairly modest mea culpa. The Washington Post didn't even have that! They did not speak in their own voice about their failing. This was a piece written by their media critic, Howard Kurtz. So as an institution, they have been silent. That is not good enough. My own former colleagues in the editorial writing business — they had a massive failure. And they have not said anything institutionally about what they did. I read some forty editorials. I am going to go back to Colin Powell because that was the crux of the failure. There were 40 editorials. He spoke on February 5th. 80% of those editorials appeared on February 6th. How could that be? They could only have watched the thing on television and then swiveled their chairs around to their word processors and banged out an editorial saying, “Yeah! Yeah! Let's go to war!” That's essentially what they did. And they were way off base. Now what have they done about it? Zero! They have not responded as an organization. There is an organization of editorial writers, and they have never touched this. And this, it's going to happen again. I predict it's going to happen again. Because journalism has simply not gotten to the bottom of the problem. And they need to get to the bottom of the problem. They need to have a lot of self-examination about what they did wrong. And they did massively wrong.

Tom Rosenstiel: Okay, I want to invite members of the audience to come up and ask questions at the mic, if you don't mind, so that people can hear, because in the back of the room you can't hear. I would just — while you are coming here, I would just — go ahead — say one thing that's interesting to me about all the things that you said is that you steered us towards some things in journalism can be found out to be true. There are some questions that are matters of fact. And there are some questions in journalism that are matters of opinion or discussion. And if we focus on the things that are matters of fact, and that are questions of empiricism, and there are things that are in the past. Is Al Qaeda in Iraq? Did this person do what he said he would do? Can those tubes be used to make weapons? That's not open for discussion. That is something that we, as journalists, can find out whether it's true or not. And that's good ground for us.

Jim Snider: So you have spoken —

Moderator: Identify yourself if you would.

Jim Snider: Jim Snider, President of iSolon. I was a Shorenstein Fellow in the spring semester at the Kennedy School. So you have spoken a lot about the institutional failure of journalism often, the indifference to the truth, media outlets. But all your examples come from the national media —very high profile institutions, basically. What about at the local levels? It is my perception that however bad it might be at the national level, it is ten times worse at the local level. Incomparable. Maybe there are offsetting institutions so that if journalism basically is completely broken at the local level, it doesn't matter as much. But what is your take about the relative importance of the breakdown you are talking about at the national versus the local level? I mean when I say local, I am talking all the way down to school boards and town councils, not metropolitan local, which is the way most people will, you know, San Diego, New York City. I am talking about real local.

Charles Lewis: Well, AJR and others have done systematic analyses in the last 6-7 years, about the breakdown of local coverage. One thing I have noticed was state capitals, of course, most news organizations no longer have reporters in the state capital. There are 25,000 laws passed every year in the fifty state capitals. Health insurance is actually regulated at the state level and not the federal level. The canary in the mine shaft about the Enron could have been detected in the states because 22 states deregulated Enron not coincidentally... There are 40,000 lobbyists in the state capitals, 30,000 here in Washington. Is anyone watching them? Basically, no. Not really, not in a systematic way. And if you do cover it, it's for your state and not the next state. And so there's this insular element. Local coverage, even the micro kind of granularity you're talking about at that level, I've got to think is not good but I haven't studied it. But, I think, although there has been an increase in small and mid-size weekly papers, and some of them are the giveaway types with lots of advertising.

Gilbert Cranberg: — get the dinner afterwards?

Panelist: That probably a good thing, but I've got to think it's not great but I, I don't know if, Tom, you have probably studied this. I'm sure you have.

[laughter]

Tom Rosenstiel: — my burden. John, you want to weigh in on this?

John Walcott: Yeah, well, we own 30 newspapers across the country, literally from Miami to Anchorage — and point one, you're right, the cutbacks in staff that have been forced by revenue declines. And we're looking at revenue declines year on year of fifteen, sixteen percent.

Tom Rosenstiel: — could get worse in the fourth quarter.

John Walcott: Well, yeah, that—that's where this recession that's staring us in the face can really hurt. So yeah, it could get worse. We can only hope it doesn't. The '09-'08 comparisons ought to be a little easier than the '08-'07 comparisons were. But nevertheless, the cutbacks in staff have been huge. And there has been a huge loss of institutional memory. One of the things that McClatchy has done, that I think makes a lot of sense, and I think somebody alluded to it earlier: in North Carolina, for example where we own both the Charlotte Observer and the Raleigh News & Observer — they've combined their capital bureaus, so as not to lose that. But it has required getting over what Jane's talking about — the traditional rivalry between the two papers. But it has I think, helped guarantee a better level of coverage for the readers throughout North Carolina. And you're going to see more of that kind of thing, sometimes reaching beyond one company. I think you're going to hear, in the near future, some more about those kind of arrangements — in which traditional competitors are now collaborating, to try to protect exactly that kind of reporting. But it is extremely difficult to do under these financial circumstances.

Tom Rosenstiel: I would say, just based on the information that we have, that as newspapers make cutbacks, and they're throwing a lot of things overboard. Let's not be — you know let's not sugarcoat it. But most editors believe that watchdog journalism is a franchise operation that is good for their brand, good for their business. And they claim, whether they live up to it or not, that that is not an area that they're cutting back. It is an area, however, that they're going to make more local. So the notion you're going to do a regional or state investigation is less likely. The idea that you're going to do something locally — There's a concept that you're going to hear about in the news business of the distinction between commodity news, which isn't news about commodities. It's news that is a commodity that you can learn from lots of different places — and franchise news, which is news that only my news organization is going to produce — and the way that people imagine they're going to compete with smaller newsrooms is focus more on the franchise news, news that people cannot find anywhere else. And they think that investigative reporting is part of that. I would say that's their aspiration at this point. Skill levels and things like that is a big challenge. If you, I mean, the fact is — not everybody is as skillful as Jane Mayer. It's not just about having the luxury of time.

Jane Mayer: I've just been doing it for a long time. I started at the smallest weekly newspaper in Vermont. So, and It was cheap to start it, I actually started one, too, after college. So I kind of thing maybe the blogosphere, the web will be able to cover local news to some extent.

John Walcott: Well, the web does one other thing for us. We collect, for example, on the McClatchy DC website — McClatchyDC.com for those of you who haven't bookmarked it —
— these kinds of stories from all our papers. We've done it now on the economy, specifically. We've got an “Economy in Turmoil” page. And we're collecting the stories that the Kansas City star and the Sacramento Bee, and the Miami Herald and the Charlotte Observer and the Lexington Herald-Leader are doing about what's happening in their areas. And a lot of that is investigative work. And you can find pretty much all of it on our web page, linked back to the individual papers, so that they hopefully get some traffic out of it because their sites are monetized better than ours. So I think the web offers some possibilities for enabling some of that work to get more traction that it could have even five years ago.

Tom Rosenstiel: Let's go to the next question.

Nonna Gorilovskaya: Hello, my name is Nonna, and I'm a researcher for the Nieman Watchdog project. My question is about — I was wondering if you had any suggestions on whether there needs to be anything done in regards to revamping the way the presidential debates are run — and, if there was some questions that you thought should have been asked during the debates that haven't been?

Tom Rosenstiel: Anybody want to play debate critic?

Michael Massing: Well, I certainly think one question. The debates are heavily formatted in terms of what the two parties or candidates will agree to. If you want to get specific, the last debate, I thought the sort of lack of follow up question by the moderator. And the fact that, in some cases the questions were rather blatantly ignored and, and not answered. I think I'm not alone in speaking for a sense of frustration among people about that. But that's just one observation. There's going to be a—

Florence Graves: But she wasn't allowed by the rules. To, to —

Michael Massing: She couldn't even do anything?

Florence Graves: That's my understanding. That's the way the parties wrote the rules — for the debate.

Michael Massing: I would have ignored them.

Florence Graves: Well —

Tom Rosenstiel: There is an argument to be made that — not to excuse anything a moderator does — but that, the effect of a debate is to really get the cut of the candidates' jib, and that the questions may be less important than whatever the answers happen to be. That may be, that may be too glib.

John Walcott: I don't think there's been enough holding the candidates feet to the fire. And I'll give you one example, a nice bipartisan one for those in favor of fair and balanced. John McCain proposes to remove a fair number of troops from Iraq and save money that way. Barack Obama wants to transfer a fair number of troops from Iraq to Afghanistan. I just checked the website; there's a limit to what I can say about this. I was hoping that Jon and Warren would get back to work faster than they did, but. You will see shortly, inshallah, a story that raises serious questions about whether the United States can remove any significant number of troops from Iraq any time soon, given the conditions there. And you've heard, if you pay attention, Secretary Rice yesterday, interestingly, said she didn't think victory was assured in Iraq. And General Petraeus has been very careful about what he's said about conditions. And the most recent Defense Department report is very cautious. Much more cautious than those who say we're on a path to victory. And I didn't see any of that follow up, they just said those things, they were accepted and nobody said, 'Wait a minute, are you sure we're going to be able to do that?' How—you know? And so I think the debates have lacked that kind of feet-to-the-fire element, and some of that is because people have accepted rules that were dictated by the political parties. The bottom line is, I don't know about you guys, but I don't think I've heard what I would call a debate yet.

Jane Mayer: No, I mean on the area of the war on terrorism, whatever you want to call it, both candidates say they want to close Guantanamo, but nobody's explained what are they going to do then. There are so many questions that we've haven't heard answers to. We haven't even heard the questions asked, basically. And again, I don't know if it's partly a press failing. It's also as people were saying earlier, a failure of the opposition parties on both sides of these candidates. People aren't sort of pushing them.

Gilbert Cranberg: For what it's worth, I think the debates are a terrible idea; the things they measure have absolutely nothing to do with the ability to be a president or vice president. If you can have a snappy comeback, or your personality comes across, that's all irrelevant to governing the country. I think they're a waste of time and I don't watch them.

Gareth Porter: I'm Gareth Porter. I'm an independent investigative journalist though I write for Inter Press service most of the time. And I'm interested in the discussion you had on the question of why there is not more investigative journalism, why there's not more watchdogging by the media, particularly in national security issues, and particularly on the point that Michael Massing made on the suggestion that this might fluctuate depending on the poll numbers of the president, of the administration, and I wanted to bring up an issue that might be a test of this and I'd be interested in the panel's explanations for this. I'm interested in the question of the administration's explanation, the administration's political line, if you will, on the story of the so-called Iranian EFPs in Iraq. It was a fairly controversial issue in that the evidence that was promised by the administration was really never presented; they never came up with, really, any evidence to support what was the bedrock of its position on the Iranian so-called meddling in Iraq. And this was at a time when the administration's numbers were plummeting, really, at a fairly low point in terms of certain support for the war in Iraq and the administration's policy and I'm interested in whether any of you would have any thoughts about why there wasn't more investigative journalism on that question which, seemed to me, cried out for debunking by the media. It seems to me that was a missing story and at a time you would have expected, perhaps, more energy on this.

Michael Massing: Well, let me — I have some number of thoughts about the coverage of Iran. I had a chance to go to Iraq in May and the Iranian question was the one that kept coming up, I mean, you didn't even have to bring it up, and I have to tell you that the sense that I got out of Iranian involvement it was pervasive in all aspects of Iraq, and so I actually sort of went somewhat skeptical as you were about — we're talking about these highly explosive devices that can pierce armor even of the most highly protected US vehicles and were being blamed by the pentagon for causing a lot of deaths. I was also skeptical — is this a dog and pony show type thing? I came away feeling that almost every claim about what Iran is doing there is accurate, including that one, and so I say that as a skeptic, where I thought the coverage of Iran is on a much broader level and it has to do with — and this gets to this broader question of how we've become prisoners of preconceptions here and of the conventional wisdom, which I see as such an overriding problem. The Bush administration and the whole foreign policy establishment, I feel had demonized Iran, in a way, and the coverage follows that now Iran has a terrible regime and Ahmadinejad, if you heard his speeches at the UN, was horrible, but it's just been missed by so much of our press, the way in which Iran has been hungry for some sort of normalization with the United States and particularly after 9/11, they were helpful with us in getting rid of the Taliban and gave signals that they wanted to cooperate with us to get rid of Saddam Hussein. After all, he was one of their great mortal enemies. And the Bush administration, because of its 'axis of evil' view of the world, basically has walled off Iran, and well, this has obviously become an issue in the campaign now. If we're talking about the media, I feel that the problem with Iran is not the narrow one of this particular explosive device. I feel that it's a failure to really step back out of Washington out of the Beltway and look at this broader context and see things from the Iranian side. This also happened with the Georgia-Russia struggle. I felt a lot of press fell back and did some Cold War reflexive coverage. Although it's improved, I think that, you know, the press actually, when they had more time they began looking, but I've been very frustrated with the coverage of Iran and as I've said before if the new administration came in and started beating the drums, going, 'We've got to take out the Iranian nuclear sites.' How's the press going to perform? Will they do better or not? I don't know.

John Walcott: You know, we did look into the EFP story and came to roughly the same conclusion that Michael did. Iranian influences everywhere in Shia, Iraq, especially in the south, their relationship with the two main Shia political parties, Dawa and Siri, is like this. Some of the EFP technology is in fact traceable back to Quds Force people in Iran and beyond that back to Hezbollah in Lebanon. It doesn't mean they're importing them wholesale, but the Iranians, again to Michael's point, if you try and look at this from the Iranians' point of view, given their history with Iraq, given their casualties in the war those two fought, of course they want influence. That is one of the biggest things the administration failed to consider when they went charging into Iraq. On the nuclear front, what puzzles me in this argument of conventional wisdom is the idea that deterrence cannot work against Iran. If they get a nuclear weapon, they're going to fire it at Tel Aviv or Jerusalem the minute they get it — well, the fact of the matter is if they did that the entire country of Iran would be turned into a skating rink in no time because that's what a nuclear weapon does when it explodes over sand; it turns into glass. Somehow, deterrence can't apply to Iran. The only explanation for this I've ever read is from Norman Podhoretz, who literally wrote that deterrence can't work against Iran because their Shiites, they're crazy, they want to all commit suicide to hasten their arrival of the Twelfth Imam. That is probably the nuttiest foreign policy argument I have ever heard in my life, and I've been doing this for a long time. And yet it sort of becomes conventional wisdom that if the Iranians are close to getting a nuclear weapon, we have to attack them because deterrence can't work. And I agree with Michael completely; the power of that kind of conventional wisdom — unchallenged, unchecked, unexamined — can be a really dangerous thing.

Tom Rosenstiel: We have five more minutes, if we could have another —

Michael Massing: If I could just follow up for ten seconds? You're absolutely right, of course; the broader context is one of conventional wisdom that really takes us in the wrong direction, but my point was really that, on this rather narrow issue, the evidence was never produced. They never produced any evidence to support it, and the one point that they made in support of it was that there is this technology that only be done in Iran. It turned out that these were being produced widely in Iraq — that was the main point they were making, but that point was never covered by the media. It was a point that I thought cried out for debunking, that's all.

Tom Rosenstiel: Okay.

Andrew Craig: Hi, my name is Andrew Craig, and I'd first like to thank you all and the institutions you represent for the fantastic insights that you're sharing. I've got a mini-question: is any of this available, and when, so that each of us in the audience can try to bring these insights to a larger audience … ? [inaudible response]

Okay, well, a bit larger question: I'm concerned, rightly or wrongly, that the means of electronic surveillance of journalists, of sources, is growing much more rapidly and my question is, are you seeing concerns among your sources about this, and is there any pushback the journalist community can undertake, if the problem I mentioned is accurate, in the face of lessened judicial review of these kind of matters?

Tom Rosenstiel: Jane, I think you'd be the perfect person to answer that …

Jane Mayer: Wait, I didn't hear because we had a cross-conversation. I'm sorry. What was the question? I'm really sorry.

Tom Rosenstiel: Ask it really quickly again, if you would.

Andrew Craig: Warrants for surveillance used to be taken very seriously by the courts. I think in the national security environment, there's much more of a sense — we can, we have the means to find out who people are talking to without going through the courts and putting bugs, and so forth. Have you seen this as a worrisome factor to your national security sources who certainly know all about these increased methods and is that a factor in reporting and can there be any pushback from the journalism community on this?

Jane Mayer: A bunch of questions. Well, is it a worry — I mean, one of the people I know who knows the most about the NSA Program was worried, in particular, because he said to me that they have not gotten a single piece of useful information out of the Warrant List Wire Tapping Program. So they have gone, you know, roughshod over all of those checks and balances for no returns at this point, which I think is a story that doesn't get a lot of attention.

But as far as — you know, I worry as a reporter that people I know and have interviewed are under leak investigations. And that's related and I think it creates a chilling atmosphere. And, certainly, I'm not alone as a reporter in this situation. There are people I can't call on the telephone without causing them legal problems. So that's been a real problem.

Tom Rosenstiel: It's probably an area we should have talked about. We've got about one more minute? One more question?

Lew Wolfson: I’m Lew Wolfson from American University and in an entirely different context, I thought of what Chris Matthews said when he said a chill ran up and down his leg. [laughter] I sort of had a chill. If somebody was sitting here and didn't know a lot about the press and listened to this eminent group and said, 'My God, it's right. What Rush and Bill O'Reilly and all those guys are saying. The New York Times and the Washington Post are terrible.' [laughter]

Obviously, we're focusing on a specific thing that they were terrible on and they deserve to be pasted. And thank you for what you did say about this, John. It was just marvelous. But I wonder if there's an absent member here, which is the public. And if we have news staffs being cut, if we're going to lose investigative journalism, if we're going to lose the main street stories, do they realize how much they're the ones who suffer? And is that because we have failed a great deal in journalism, in getting across to them how important all of this is to them and that we'd better not lose The New York Times and the Washington Post and the investigative reporting?

Michael Massing: Can I just — one quick thing? I mean, I totally agree with you that we have lost sight a little bit - and Jane did allude to some of the good reporting, obviously, on many things. I mean, people like Dana Priest and Jim Risen with the NSA story and all the torture in Guantanamo, and so on.

I do, though, have a little bit of a worry, this idea that we are somehow going to find ways to make ourselves popular with the public. I don't know how that's going to happen. I don't know if journalists — I think with Woodward and Bernstein, there was a period where — again, as Florence was saying — it might be the exception that proves the rule.

Journalists usually have not been very popular and what they do often is not going to make them popular. And it is something that we wring our hands over because we feel it's so important, what we're doing, and the public will be diminished if we don't. And yet, I don't know if the public's ever going to appreciate that and I don't know if we can do anything about it.

Lou Wilson: Well, my point was that not that we need popularity, but we need to recognize that we are needed.

Michael Massing: Yes. OK. I'm with you on that. [laughter]

Tom Rosenstiel: Well, I would just say that we were asked to take on a very large topic here and I'd like to praise the panelists for coming up with some concrete techniques that I think, I hope even, we'll catalogue because I think there are some ideas here that are doable and useful.

Bob Giles: Well, thank you. First, let's thank the panel very, very much.

[applause]

Bob Giles: The Nieman Foundation anticipated that this would be a rich and productive and very useful discussion and we've made an audio recording and a video recording, which we're going to edit and make available on our websites. And the points of suggestion that you have brought forward are going to be put together and made available widely. And we hope this is the start of at least an annual conversation in conjunction with presenting the I.F. Stone Award for Journalistic Independence.

So, to our audience, thank you so much for being with us and for staying for this part of the program. We do have some refreshments left and we encourage you to stick around and chat a bit with one another or our panelists. And again, thank you very much and thank you for being with us.