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2009 Panel Discussion on Journalistic Independence

Moderated by Rick MacArthur with journalists Chris Hedges, Jon Alpert and Walter Pincus.

Introduction by Bob Giles, Nieman Foundation curator.



Bob Giles: [Congratulations, Russ. Will the panelists please come up to the stage and get “mic’d” while I do some introductions. Where is Wal--? Come on up, Walter.]

Our panel this evening represents a gathering of thoughtful experienced journalists who have demonstrated the spirit of journalistic independence in their own work and who have a deep knowledge of the issues laid out in the stories and the images that Jon Alpert presented in his address to us.

The panel will be moderated by Rick MacArthur in the middle. Rick is a journalist, author, president and publisher of Harper’s Magazine. He has joined on the panel on your far right by Walter Pincus, who covers the intelligence community and national security for The Washington Post. He shared with four colleagues the Pulitzer Prize in national reporting in 2002 for coverage of America’s war on terrorism.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of several books. He spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He is currently a senior fellow at the Nation Institute and posts a column each Monday on Truthdig and our medal winner, Jon Alpert.

NOT ON TAPE:
[Bob Giles: As part of the discussion, we invite you to ask questions. We have microphones on both aisles. Please identify yourself as you ask yourself and I should tell you that this evening’s program is being taped and it will be posted on several Web sites. So, Rick, let’s begin.]

Rick MacArthur: I wanted to get right to a case study that we could discuss. James Risen, 2004, a New York Times Washington reporter gets the story before the election for November 4th that the NSA, National Security Agency, is conducting illegal wire taps, or at least what we think were unconstitutional wire taps, domestic wire taps. It’s a long story. I have to compress it. The New York Times, including the publisher of The New York Times, met with—I don’t know if it was Bush, personally, but with White House officials and the Times was persuaded not to publish the story. Now, some of you—most of you—some of you probably know how the story ends, but some of you may not. So, to keep you in suspense, let me first ask Walter Pincus. If you’d been in Risen’s situation and you got the news from the bosses that we’re just not going to run it for whatever reason—national security—and we don’t want to wreck our relationship with the White House, whatever. What would your response have been? What would you have done?

Walter Pincus: Well, I think I’ve been in semi-similar situations and I think that James Risen was an experienced reporter. I think there are times when we do things that governments argue you shouldn’t print. And there are times when actually we don’t print them. So, to second guess what happened is rather difficult. A case I was in involved publishing a piece of information about how we discovered a spy. After it was published, the White House and the CIA came in and saw our editors and said, “We don’t want that referred to again because it could give away the source of where the information came from.” So, we didn’t publish it again.

There are times when we don’t publish—And we, as a matter of policy, don’t publish the names of people who are acting for the CIA in a covert situation. That’s their job. Their name really isn’t important. So, you withhold that name unless they announce it.

Rick MacArthur: But Walter, just for the hell of it, let’s second guess and just posit…Say you were angry and you thought this is absolutely essential that we get this out even if it’s not in The New York Times, tactically, what do you do?

Walter Pincus: First place, we don’t publish information like that without going to the government to let them comment on it. That is just the statement. So, they know the information we are about to publish. Then, the standard that we generally use is a) Is it important? b) Is it going to harm national security the way we look at it? Because we make the judgment. They come in and make their arguments and then, in the cases I’ve been involved in, I know the case (unclear) been involved in. We get a chance to sit in and make our arguments and then it is up to the editor.

Rick MacArthur: But if it’s still no, and Chris you can join in now, please, because Chris has worked at the Times and has worked in an institutional setting before he went off the reservation. Supposing they still say no and you’re absolutely determined to get it out. What’s your first move? What do you do? You think that it is a matter of principle and it’s got to be published somehow, somewhere, what would you do? In the name of journalistic independence? Either one of you?

Chris Hedges: Well, Risen put it in his book.

Rick MacArthur: Well, but he waited for a year.

Chris Hedges: Yes, but he put it in his book and—

Rick MacArthur: The point is that it is essential to get it out before the election so that people know about it before they go to vote.

Chris Hedges: You have to go to an alternative news source. That’s probably—That is a very difficult thing when you are working for—as a staffer for a particular news organization. But if you want to get it out, than either you take it to an alternative news source or you give it to somebody at an alternative news source to write.

Rick MacArthur: You leak to another newspaper or to another journalist, in effect?

Chris Hedges: Yes.

Rick MacArthur: Yes. [Laughs]

Chris Hedges: I’ve had that happened. I’ve had people. I’ve had journalists—I mean, I was overseas. So, it was a little different. But I’ve had actually Michael Kelly ran into some stuff in the war in Bosnia that the Atlantic wasn’t going to run. And he came to me and we put it in the Times. But he found the story. His name was never on the story.

Rick MacArthur: Okay, that’s a practical approach. Walter, have you ever done anything like that? Have you ever leaked to another reporter a story that you thought was so important that the Post didn’t want to publish, that you thought had to get in somewhere else? Did you tell somebody else about it?

Walter Pincus: I’m probably not that good of a reporter—who had information that good that the Post didn’t publish. They have never not published what I wanted to publish.

Rick MacArthur: Okay, let’s bring it down a couple of levels and say that it is not quite as dramatic as the Risen story and I am going to get back to you to talk about television. A story where they’re just burying your stories. A lot of the stories about the phony nuclear capability of Suddam Hussein were buried in the Post—anything contradictory to the official White House line. He was doing his stories, I assure you, but they were getting buried. At what point do you act on that? Or do you just say, look, I’ll live to fight another day the way Jon said he did in that one instance, I think. He said, “I’m not going to take on GE if they have a decent case to make. Why pick a fight with the bosses right away?” At what point do you say that this is enough? I quit or I go start my own newsletter or I give the story to somebody else? How far do you have to get pushed?

Walter Pincus: I’m just persistent. I just keep writing the stories. And they do get published. I don’t like where they are, but I don’t run the paper. I certainly argue about it. But I belong to an extraordinary news organization and maybe I’ve just been lucky. But I’ve never had a story not published.

Rick MacArthur: Okay, I’ll give you an example of your extraordinary news organization self censoring and we can discuss this. The Washington Post broke the story very admirably of the black sites prison, the CIA black sites prisons in 2005, I think. I forget, who broke it?—Who broke the story?

Walter Pincus: Dana Priest.

Rick MacArthur: Yes, Dana Priest, But in the story you will recall, perhaps that they declined to name, to say where they were. I thought reading the story that this was an absolutely essential piece of information not only because people deserve to know where the secret prisons were located because they are being run in the name of the American people with our tax dollars etc., etc. But also, because it would have given the European Union a chance to act against two of their members—I think we know now they were Poland and Romania. But at the time, the Post took it upon themselves to say in the name of National Security and to prevent reprisals against American installations of soldiers, etc, we are not going to tell you where the black site prisons are, even though we know where they are.

Is that something that is worth getting fired over or leaking to another news organization? Or, what do you think, Chris? Is that small potatoes? Is it just not worth it, especially if there is a chance that you are going to get caught? They figure out that you are the source of the leak.

Chris Hedges: Again, I have to speak as a reporter who worked overseas. There’s a kind of cross-pollinization overseas that you probably don’t get domestically because every night The Washington Post, the LA Times, the networks were all eating in the same restaurant. Especially in a conflict zone, as Jon knows, you don’t go out alone. We often travel with other journalists. So, there was a kind of free exchange of information and if stuff didn’t get run that we thought should be run, there was usually someone around who was going to run it. You’d be the perfect person to hand it off to.

So, I think that overseas, especially when you are in a conflict zone and you’re emotionally caught up in the conflict, I don’t think anyone who was in Sarajevo as I was during the war was quote/unquote “neutral” about it. We were there because we understood that this was an egregious crime against humanity and there was a kind of solidarity in many ways among the press that you don’t get, I think, out of Washington. So, if we came upon stories, the networks in particular were running into stuff in Bosnia towards the end of the war that they weren’t putting on the air because the argument was that we’ve been seeing these images for three and a half years and the network people who under—You know, it was very dangerous to film in the streets of Sarajevo or certainly within the countryside in Bosnia. If they got stories that wouldn’t run, they wouldn’t let them sleep. They’d usually get them to me or to someone else to get them out. Would you say, Jon? You’ve had the same kind of experience.

Jon Alpert: I haven’t had that type of experience recently because, although we had camaraderie, we were lone-wolfing it in many cases. But reporters do stick up for each other and in many instances, we are the only people who have each others backs and there are a lot of people after us. So, there is the desire to help everybody get their stories out. Even though we all have some proprietary interests in the story, if it is an important story, we are going to give it to somebody else.

Rick MacArthur: Okay, could the three of you talk a little bit, since you’ve all worked for big organizations. And let me tell you, having worked for big organizations and published my own investigative reporting in The New York Times, it’s great to have a big club. It is so much better than being on your own with your own newsletter. It has more instantaneous impact. It also is nice to have the backing of a big corporation or a big institution when you start getting attacked by critics and on the right, left, whatever. Talk a little bit about—Because this is about the context of journalistic independence, what you give up when you give up that institutional backing. Walter hasn’t given it up yet, so, Chris, what is it like not to have the institutional backing of The New York Times, now. Because there are tremendous advantages to it when they are on your side.

Chris Hedges: Well, and of course the issue of law suits is huge because if you are an independent reporter, liable cases can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. So it’s nice to have a team of lawyers to vet your material which they do when you do investigative pieces and know that The New York Times legal team has never lost a case. They have paid a few people off, but they have never lost a case. I think in my own case, it was a kind of evolution so that by the time I left The New York Times, they were as happy to see me leave as I was happy to go. I felt increasingly constrained reporting domestically in a way that I had not been overseas. It was very easy to go on a program like Fresh Air and speak very frankly about Slobodan Milosevic and who he was and what he was doing in Bosnia. While it was very hard to do that when you were talking about George W. Bush.

So the same kind of standards that I had set as a foreign correspondent and the same kind of bluntness that I had had in covering many of the major conflicts around the globe for two decades got me into a lot of trouble at the paper. I just felt incredibly constrained. I, like Jon, came at the (route). My route to journalism was unorthodox. I graduated from seminary, lived in a housing project, went off as a freelancer to Latin America because I thought it was as close as my generation was going to come to fighting fascism. This was a time of Pinochet, the dirty war in Argentina. The death squads in Salvador were killing between 700 and 800 people a month. So, I was never interested, particularly, in a career. I ended up at The New York Times, really, by accident and I felt the walls really close in. I think also that as the press financially and culturally felt more under siege, there was less and less room for voices like mine within traditional institutions. I left over public denouncements of the war in Iraq, but I think the time was coming anyway when it just wasn’t going to work anymore. The kind of moral focus that I had had driven me into wars out of a degree of anger, out of a sense of injustice, just made for a very uncomfortable fit in the newsroom.

Rick MacArthur: So, it doesn’t kill you to have lost the institutional affiliation. This is what I am trying to get at, right? You don’t get up in the morning and say gee, I wish I still had the institutional affiliation and backing.

Chris Hedges: No, I’m very happy, but I’ve been able to—My books sell enough that I can make a living. If you write books, which I do, and they don’t sell like that, then in the end you have to pay the rent.

Rick MacArthur: What about you, Jon. Do you miss the NBC affiliation? Do you miss the power …?

Jon Alpert: I did.

Rick MacArthur: ….that accompanies it. Because of course it is not just that they will back you up. It is also the calling card to say that I am showing up from NBC. Everybody straightens up and flies right or from The New York Times or from The Washington Post. You show up and say I’m from Community—DCTV—Downtown Community Television, the reaction, the reception is a little bit different.

Jon Alpert: It certainly is. I used to like walking around airports in Kansas City and having somebody come up to me and ask me how this particular farmer was doing that had been featured in a report. I liked the fact that people were eating their breakfast all over America and watching these stories. I make programs to have people see them and when you loose that, you sort of feel like the kid at summer camp who is not allowed to go in the swimming pool and you just have to sit there and watch everybody else. It is really, really frustrating because it gets in your blood and it makes you feel useful. This is a wonderful job that we all have in which we can feel like we are doing something that is very, very useful.

So, when I get frustrated and I’m frustrated about some things right now, I get on my bus. So, we’ve built a bus that has a video wall on the side of it and when we want people to see our programs and I can’t talk HBO into seeing them, we get on the bus and we park this in the town square someplace and we show our programs. It’s back to the mail truck. My high school folks will tell you that they always thought I never had an original idea in high school. So, it’s the same thing that we did with the mail truck. We are just doing it with a bigger truck. We actually have two DCTV staffers here who are organizing a program that nobody wants to broadcast. We are fighting against gun violence and we are going to take this bus to 20 cities and we are going to have town meetings. We are going to talk about gun violence and we are going to try to find solutions, but I don’t have a network that will broadcast it.

Rick MacArthur: Okay, I think I got to the point I wanted to get to which is there are not just career implications or career consequences from exhibiting or exercising journalistic independence, there are also emotional consequences. It hurts to lose the audience. It hurts sometimes to lose the—

Jon Alpert: It is devastating.

Rick MacArthur: It is devastating to lose …

Jon Alpert: He’s tougher than me. I really—

Rick MacArthur: ….all the things that come with the institutional affiliation. Now, let’s have some questions. Right here, in front.

Male: What stories can you only do with the institution backing you and what stories can you only do if you are independent?

Rick MacArthur: Who are you asking?—Ask Chris, okay.

Chris Hedges: Money. I mean, I covered Al Qaeda out of Paris for a year. I wrote five—(oh sorry) I covered Al Qaeda for a year out of Paris for The New York Times. I wrote five stories and spent most of the year living in the Hotel [xxx] and flying all over Europe and the Middle East. My budget, excluding salaries for the first year in the war in Bosnia was $600,000. So, covering conflicts or doing investigative reporting is incredibly expensive. That’s a big problem if you don’t have that kind of backing. It is very hard to do foreign reporting or investigative work.

Rick MacArthur: Yes, money is a big thing. I can tell you as a publisher, too. Right here.

Male: …After listening to everything and seeing everything tonight, are we as Americans really living in the kind of democracy that we’d like to think we are or are we [not]? In other words, we like to think that we are living in a transparent society where everybody has an equal voice and everybody’s voice of equal opportunity is heard. I’m not hearing that. I’m hearing a lot of suppression, a lot of information we as Americans need to know. We criticize other nations for doing precisely what we are doing. So, I am just asking you, are we living in a society that we believe we are living in? Or are we living in [inaudible]?

Rick MacArthur: Okay, I don’t want to—I don’t want them to answer that question because it is too broad. Let’s just agree that a lot of information gets suppressed. We know it. You know it. The question here today is what to do about it? I hope that we have some students in here. Right here.

Michael MacLeod-Ball: I am not a student. I wish I were. I am with the American Civil Liberties Union. My name is Michael Macleod-Ball. The current issue in Congress is whether there should be a federal reporter shield statute to provide privilege. And the issue seems to be right now in particular whether there should be protection at all when the reporters are working in the area of national security and whether the government should essentially get the benefit of the doubt. “Just trust us” kind of benefit when there is a question of whether a reporter should be compelled to testify in some sort of legal proceeding. I am asking the panelists whether that has a practical implication in their day-to-day work. And then the second part of that which is also part of the legislation is—You know, one of the issues is who is a reporter that is entitled to the privilege and do the new media reporters get the same kind of protection or not as the folks that are on the panel.

Rick MacArthur: Walter, please answer that.

Walter Pincus: If you read the paper tomorrow, you will see one answer. I wrote about it in tomorrow’s paper. There is a shield law that is being promoted up on the Hill. It is a very complicated piece of legislation. It’s not quite as simple as everybody makes it out to be. The cold fact from my kind of reporting is, it’s not going to cover me. A lot of people are worried about that. I don’t believe in a shield law, which gets my paper very upset. I basically don’t believe in it because I’m asking people in effect to break the law to give me information. They face loss of job and possible prosecution. And I think I ought to face the same problem because it will make me make a firmer judgment about whether the information is needed—worth publishing. And if they are willing to stand up for it and it is accurate. I ought to face the same problem and in fact I have. So, I can look at it that way.

There’s an interesting problem in going to Congress for a shield law because most privileges, lawyers—attorney-client privilege, priest-penitent, and all those are privileges that have been earned by court decisions, not by the law. So, on the one hand we have lobbyists going up and going to the same Congress we cover. The same kind of lobbyists we criticize are representing the media to get a shield law. The second part of it and it fits into what you are saying about who is a journalist. Journalists argue about should it include bloggers? Should it include people who do newsletters? Who should it include as journalists? In the bills that are before the House and the Senate, there’s also a provision saying that law won’t cover persons who are agents of foreign powers or associated with or have aided a whole series of groups that are now on a terrorist list. The media people never talk about that. So what the impact of it is, is that Congress is eliminating a group of people and if this were, as I once wrote, if this were 40 years ago, it would say communist or fellow travelers. If it was the 60’s, it would probably say anti-war, practitioners, maybe Black Panthers, anybody who supports the Black Panthers. So, we’re giving Congress the idea of being able to establish who is a journalist and who is going to be covered. That is another reason why I am against it.

There is a very important part of it, though, because in civil suits, it’s become almost a practice now that people who feel—particularly ex-government employees who feel they have had unflattering stories written about them and even people who have been in—gotten in to trouble and lost their jobs, they can turn around and sue under the Privacy Act against their bosses or former colleagues who leaked the information about them in the unflattering stories and put us in the middle. Many of the subpoenas most recently that don’t involve national security or leaks from criminal cases have been these Privacy Act cases. So, I think by—should the—is the reason in that case, I think it’s useful. But I think in cases of national security and then just sort of top it off, you get the whole lecture.

In the House bill, in order to get it passed by the House with the support of business interests, Chamber of Commerce, they treat equally to national security. In other words, a story appears that violates a trade secret or violates medical records or violates private banking records. That also would be treated in the same way as national security. That was the way they got the Chamber of Commerce to support the bill.

Rick MacArthur: We don’t have much time. I’ll just quickly say that journalists as a practical matter also need help. I’ll give you an example. Is it Diaz, the lawyer at Guantanamo, the army lawyer who leaked the list of detainees, excuse me, prisoners? There I go into Pentagon speak. Prisoners. He sent—he folded it up. He mailed it regular mail to the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York and the legal director, I’m sorry to say the Center for Constitutional Rights, which I like very much without asking any of our colleagues what to do, sent it to the judge in the case. So, instantly they were able to track down. I think his name was Diaz, the army lawyer, who was outraged by the treatment of the prisoners and thought it was unconstitutional and they busted him and put him in jail for six months.

So, as a practical matter, you don’t just need—and as Chuck Lewis knows better than any of us, you need protection of the leakers, first, maybe of the reporters second. Though, I think in principal, I agree with Walter. But the leakers have to be protected, but even with the protection under law of leakers, you have to have go-betweens and journalists and publishers who are willing to publish the information. If the legal director of the CCR had sent it to Walter or sent it to me, I think we probably would have published it, I don’t know about The Washington Post, but very likely would have published the list. Of course, this was claimed to be a great national security secret, but in fact, the Pentagon was planning to release the names eventually anyway because they were forced to under the Supreme Court decision. So, we need help too as a practical matter. I.F. Stone needed help. We can’t all be I.F. Stone, but it sometimes needs to be a collaborative process between leaker, courageous government employee, Ellsberg. Well Ellsberg is not working for the government at that point, but somebody who is very closely tied to the government, or somebody who is literally working in the government. But that person has to know when they leak that The Washington Post, New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, NBC is going to back them up.

I can tell you as a practical matter many of the discussions we have about what we’re going to put in an article and whether or not it is going to put the reporter at risk eventually come around to is it actually going to put the source at risk, the leaker at risk. And you have to reassure the leaker that you are going to back them. You are going to protect them. You are going to do everything in your power to back them. More and more newspapers, magazines and television networks are unwilling or unprepared to back the leaker, not just the reporter. And I think that we are out of time.

Thank you very much.

[Applause]

Bob Giles: Thank you to our panel. Jon Alpert, thank you so much for a wonderful presentation. Thank you all for coming and we are adjourned.

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