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Three DC journalists on the state of investigative reportingCOMMENTARY | May 31, 2007Walter Pincus, John Walcott and David Corn think the Washington press corps is being manipulated by administration officials who have become supremely adept at dominating the news agenda. They discussed that and other challenges facing investigative journalism on the Diane Rehm Show. By Barry Sussman Some of the scorn was for editors and reporters letting themselves become part of what Walter Pincus of the Washington Post called a “PR center for government” in the nation’s capital. A great deal of information is nothing more than PR, Pincus said, “but we are covering it rather than setting up our own agendas.” Pincus was joined on the program by John Walcott, Washington bureau chief for the McClatchy Company, and David Corn, Washington editor of the Nation magazine. Walcott, whose bureau is credited for its aggressive, independent reporting during the run-up to the Iraq war, made a criticism heard frequently: that the press during that period “became stenographers, they were not journalists. They simply repeated what people in high places said; they didn’t ask whether or not it was true.” Corn, talking about Washington reporting in recent years, said “it was the worst of times, it was the best of times.” He listed a series of stories broken by traditional news organizations that included “Jack Abramoff, Duke Cunningham, secret CIA prisons; the NSA is [eaves]dropping, Bush signing statements…I took my hat off to the reporters who did that.” Audio of the show is available here; following is a lengthy excerpt from the transcript of the hour-long program. INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING MS. REHM: Thanks for joining us, I'm Diane Rehm. Some say old-fashioned investigative reporting has fallen out of favor in the new age of corporate media ownership. In-depth stories require both time and money, resources that can take a toll on profit margins... Walter Pincus, let me start with you, we hear so many complaints that what we used to think of as the investigative journalism is no longer being done. Is that a fair criticism? MR. PINCUS: Well, some of it's being done. It's not being done on a national scale, and I think, people have never quite recovered from Watergate. They think investigative reporting is the first thing you think about, the only thing to do is take down a president. The irony is it's being done much more now at the local level, because the big national news papers, one is sort of -- we're all having our troubles, and two it takes time and money and papers like THE POST and The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, can spend time doing it. But a lot of other papers have cut back, particularly the chain. So it's more difficult for them to find the time and place. The other thing which people forget about is that Washington's really became a "PR Center" for government, and people are putting out more information, a lot it is really just PR. But we are covering it, and rather than setting up our own agendas, we find there is more "news being put out than is fit to print," so you can't find time to go off and do your own. MS. REHM: Well, on to what extent does that mean for example that someone like yourself who is very definitely covering Washington national security affairs, on what do you depend to write your stories? MR. PINCUS: Well, normally I start off with things I've read and try to pursue them. There is a lot of written material put out. I always use an example, but when I first came, started reporting, they may have been may be ten hearings on the Hill, or reports put out in the day. Now when Congress's is in session you can have 50 hearings going on plus reports put out, plus the White House has two press conferences a day; the Pentagon under Rumsfeld had two or three a week; the State Department has one a day. The government is just putting information out all the time. We have three stories on the front page today involving the President. So it's very hard to find time and people to do their own work, The Post let's me alone so, I can spend some time doing it. MS. REHM… John Walcott, how do you see that criticism that there is no longer the kind of in-depth reporting, really hard-hitting investigative journalism that we saw as Walter cited under Watergate? MR. WALCOTT: Well, I think Walter is right that there are two different things going in here. The first one is that a lot of the press including some of the big national newspapers fell down on the job, while the administration was making its case for War in Iraq. They became stenographers, they were not journalist. They simply repeated what people in high places said. They didn't ask whether or not it was true. That said, there is an awful lot of terrific investigative work going on in Washington, and around the country. The Wall Street Journal did a fantastic story on backdated stock options. The Miami Herald did a fabulous story on corruption in the Public Housing Authority. Walter's paper did an enormous and very important series on the Agriculture Department. The Hartford Courant, a relatively small local paper in Connecticut did a terrific national story on the practice of sending soldiers back to Iraq, even though they had serious mental health issues, and the consequences of that. So, that kind of reporting is still going on. But I agree completely with Walter that here in Washington, a kind of co-dependency has developed between high officials and reporters. That makes reporters reluctant to challenge what those officials say for fear of losing access to them. And there is an enormous cost to that. MS. REHM: Did that happen to your newspaper? MR. WALCOTT: We think it may have at the Defense Department. MS. REHM: How? MR. WALCOTT: Well, we have not been able to travel with the Secretary of Defense for a little more than three years now. MS. REHM: Is that unusual? MR. WALCOTT: We think it is. Its quite different from the pattern of the Whitehouse or the State Department where there is a regular rotation and we take our turn with The Washington Post and The New York Times and The AP, and others, whereas at the Defense Department, we never our turn never seems to come up. MS. REHM: How come? MR. WALCOTT: Well, we believe, and have been told in fact that it is because we have been so critical of the administration's case for, planning for, and conduct of the war in Iraq. MS. REHM: Told by whom? MR. WALCOTT: People in the Defense Department. We've been told, you can keep trying, but it's not going to happen. Now that was under secretary Rumsfeld. And we have a new secretary of defense, and judging from what he said in this commencement address at the Naval Academy last week, he may feel a little differently about the role of the press than his predecessor did, and we hope he does. MS. REHM: In other words give me an example, of what you wrote about the lead up to the war that the Defense Department found so objectionable? MR. WALCOTT: Well, we wrote a great deal as did Walter and David also, all three of did about a small unit that was setup in the Defense Department that was essentially "cooking" the intelligence, particularly about the relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda. There was in fact no relationship of any meaningful sort between Iraq and al-Qaeda and yet they kept trying to tie the two together, and that was all done under secretary Rumsfeld's aegis. And we wrote about it early and often. We wrote about their dependence on the Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi and the defectors he produced, all of whom were fraudulent, failed lie detector tests and the information was used anyway to make a case for war against Iraq. So, we did some very tough reporting, Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel and the McClatchy Washington Bureau did some very, very tough reporting. MS. REHM: And where did those stories appear? MR. WALCOTT: In every paper that belonged at the time to the Knight Ridder, the company we worked for at the outset of the war, later on McClatchy which bought Knight Ridder last June and in all of the client papers of the McClatchy Tribune Information Service of which there are about 500 who would print them. Now, did all of the papers print them, did all of the papers give them the play that we hoped they would get, thought they deserved? No, they didn't, a lot of them, what we did, to be very honest with you, Diane, was drowned out by stories in the New York Times about how the, we couldn't allow the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud, and the kind of stenography I referred to earlier. MS. REHM: …Turning to you now, David Corn, what is your take on why there is so much criticism about the newspapers, the media for having not done its investigative journalism? MR. CORN: I feel like the Dickens cliché is appropriate here, it was the worst of times, it was the best of times to put a plug in, since I don't really work for a mainstream media outlet, I put a plug-in for the msn as the bloggers like to call it. Jack Abramoff, Duke Cunningham, secret CIA prisons. The NSA is dropping, a bushing signing statements, you know, basically vacating laws passed by Congress. All those are stories done in the last couple of years, by Boston Globe, New York Times, Washington Post and The San Diego Union Tribune newspaper that has had a tremendous impact in Washington, and were fantastic stories and I took my hat to the reporters who did that. But I think that, you know, Walter and John and I would echo and second their criticisms, why people are upset or if you look at the run-up to the war in Iraq. Perhaps the issue in which good journalism might have mattered the most that was the biggest failure of American journalism in recent years. And it's sort of people looking from, you know, for reasons to blame and to reasons to understand how we ended up in the mess in Iraq, you know, partially, rightfully point at the, at the aspects of the American media for taking Bush and other advocates of the war too much at their word. And they were taking stenography, and they were taking leaks or at least not being as skeptical and the frustrating thing is, and we talk about this in the book that I coauthored with Michael Isikoff, Hubris, is that there was evidence out there. Walter in the Washington Post wrote several stories talking about the skeptical intelligence regarding Iraq's WMDs. In fact two days before, I think it was two days before we went to war, he and I think you wrote this Dana Milbank, a piece that basically said and it's not a commentary an analysis piece it was news piece saying that Bush is, as Bush prepares America to go to war, he is doing so on the basis of assertions that have been either challenged or proven false by people within his own administration. MS. REHM: And where did that piece end up? MR. CORN: Well, it was inside the paper. … MR. PINCUS: But I guess what my concern is, are things like the Senate Intelligence Committee on Friday released a 229-page report, at something like 12 noon. And I could spend time reading it and another reporter did too. But there are very few people who could spend that time that quickly, and write about it and we wrote the details of it but the wires didn't get that chance, and I doubt that many people also did it and there is more stories in those 229 pages and we'll write some more about it. But it's a luxury that The Washington Post has. MR. CORN: Walter is rare and sometimes it gets me angry because he'll get these reports and he'll write three, four, five stories out of them and I am thinking, "Gosh, why didn't I see that as well." But that really isn't done by too many of the news institutions. And it's certainly not done, you know, we are talking about newspapers primarily so far, it's not done by the television. You know, they may do headlines, you know, if The Post puts the story on that report on the front page as it did, you know, there may be a headline on a broadcast news or a cable news about it. But they certainly won't dig into it the way that Walter will, because most of their reporters are doing double and triple duty on several beats all at once. MR. WALCOTT: But think about the irony of this. If we have in the newspaper industry and we do problems of circulation and revenue. Why are we committing all our reporters to doing the same stories that everybody else's reporters are doing, and shying away from the stories no one is doing expect may be Walter? It doesn't really make sense that we all chase the same thing. It's like a five-year-old soccer game, where everybody chases the ball and nobody is off doing his or her own work, independently. As Walter says, that has become a luxury in lot of places, not ours fortunately. MS. REHM: There are many who say that the American press, and this terrible generalization but nevertheless a generalization, that the American press has become lazy; that they have simply contented themselves with this stenographic aspects of reporting on Washington, waiting for those Whitehouse press releases, and that's all you get. MR. CORN: I understand why people feel that way that it's not as simple as that. I think there is, as Walter mentioned earlier there is so much more information now and you have, and keeping up with just the, say the bottom-line of what's coming out, you know, takes up a lot of time and energy and resources. But I do think particularly, and this happens, I think in all beat reporting, actually although we see it may be more so with the Whitehouse press, and Washington press, is that there is always a calibration, at least as I see it, in how confrontational to be with whom you are covering. John mentioned a few moments ago when they go too confrontational with Rumsfeld at the Defense Department where you get cut out. And it's not fun to be cutout and something you actually you lose stories as well. And if you are in TV, you may lose that precious video clip that you need to get your story on the air. And Ben Bradlee of The Washington Post once famously said that the hardest thing to do in the world is to call the President a liar. By that I think he meant that it's hard to be overly confrontational. You know, they, I think The Post and The New York Times tend to give the President usually too much his due. And they, you know, they spend a lot of time covering what he is saying and then in the bottom of the story they may put in competing voices, and it contextualizes the story in such a way that what the President said is news, not whether what the President said is right or wrong, is the news element of the story. And that's a debate I would be happy to have with Len Downey of The Post. But these are the different factors that go in to, you know, preventing reporters some times from being more, you know, aggressive and you see their times when you, they get more aggressive in times when they pull back. In 9/11 I think I changed the equation too in the early days. MS. REHM: Walter? MR. PINCUS: Well, I think what's happened is that each administration has become more and more clever about handling PR, and they know more about how we work than we know about how they work. I often use as an example this administration particularly when the war goes badly, leaks a story that the President is going to go out and make a series of speeches to support the war. That story gets leaked in The Times or The Post or maybe some other newspaper. We print it, and then when he goes out and makes the speeches we cover that, and he is not saying anything new, he's just repeating things. And what's important about it is not just that repetition in this country; it's a form of advertising. It's why Bayer Aspirin keeps, you know, puts two ads on one show, because you need that much to get through. It also eats up space, but you could be doing other stories. The question is how many news organizations have their own agenda. How many editors say, this ought to be covered, and the President's statement isn't new and we’re going to go with our stuff. MS. REHM: John Walcott. MR. WALCOTT: I don’t -- every thing that David and Walter said, I think, is true. Yes, it is hard to be confrontational. Yes, the administration has become progressively better at spinning, dominating the news agenda. What I don’t understand is why anyone goes along with that? Why anyone feels compelled to practice this kind of stenography? You saw it most recently over the weekend, when the White House leaked word that the President was going to make a big announcement about sanctions on Sudan, and the big papers did, what I thought were very credulous stories, about this great breakthrough and getting tough with Sudan. I think the odds frankly are very long, that that will have any effect at all, because it requires international cooperation and that’s something this administration has not spent a lot of time cultivating. But none of that was in those original stories. They simply took the White House spin and considered it news. But I don’t know why anyone plays that game, I really don’t. MS. REHM: So, was there anything new in that story? MR. WALCOTT: There was, what was -- if there were sins in those stories, they were sins of omission. Certainly, we cover what the President does, we cover a policy announcement, that was a policy announcement, but what you then do was what David was talking about. You stop and you ask, is this going to have any effect? The President said it, so what? Is it really going to save lives in Darfur? Is it really going to change the behavior of the Sudanese Government? That element was missing from a lot of the stories. MR. CORN: Well, can I tell a self-serving story? MS. REHM: Go ahead. MR. CORN: They’re the best ones, right? A couple of years ago, I don't go to White House press briefings too often, you know, the daily press briefings -- MS. REHM: Oh, you were allowed in? MR. CORN: Oh yes, yes, they've been kind to me that way. And you know, the press briefing, you know, whether it's, you know, Ari Fleisher, Tony Snow, or Scott McClellan, they tend to call in everybody, everybody gets their say, not the same thing with a presidential press conference. But this particular one, a report had come out saying that the intelligence had been wrong, it was on the early reports, a few months after the invasion. And I asked Scott McClellan about it, and -- about statements that Collin Powell had made, and before the war that Saddam Hussein was boxed in and he wasn't a WMD threat. And Scott McClellan just kept denying, saying, "Well, that’s not what Collin Powell said, that’s not what this report says." I go "Well, it is, I have copies right here." And he said, "No, it isn't." I said, "Yes, it is." I said -- and I felt like we’re arguing whether the sky was blue or green. And I kept pushing him. At some point I gave up, because you can only go so far in this. But afterwards, some of the regulars came up to me and said, you know, you should be here everyday. And I felt like saying, "Well, you’re here everyday. You can give these guys as hard a time as you choose to, and" -- MS. REHM: But is that what’s going on, is there a certain fear that what happened to you, John Walcott, is going to happen to all those reporters if they keep pressing? MR. WALCOTT: I suppose there is, but so what? I mean, so we can't travel with the -- I would rather do, and have Jon Landay, Nancy Yousef, Joe Galloway, Warren Strobel, do the stories they've been doing at the cost of traveling on the plane, than travel on the plane and not do those stories. If that’s the choice, I'll choose the stories over the trip every time. It doesn’t bother me greatly that we haven’t been able to travel with Secretary Rumsfeld; frankly, no it doesn’t. Those trips haven’t produced much in the way of real news anyway. MS. REHM: You John, and you Walter, were featured very prominently in a segment that aired last month, when Bill Moyers offered analysis of how press reports in the months leading up to the Iraq war. Asking about that, to what extent do you think, John Walcott, that the press could have prevented the war? MR. WALCOTT: I’m skeptical that even if every institution in the press, every television network, every newspaper had done the stories that Walter did, the stories that we did, the stories that some other people did, that the administration would have changed course. MS. REHM: Walter, what do you think? MR. PINCUS: Oh, no, they were going to war. It was a decision -- MS. REHM: They were going to war. MR. PINCUS: -- that had been made well before we started writing. MS. REHM: But do you believe that had those stories been on the front pages, that you were writing, rather than the Judith Miller stories on the front page of the New York Times, that the public would -- and the Congress would have felt differently? MR. PINCUS: Some people might have, but I doubt it. I think you've got to remember that what drove that as much as anything was the post 9/11 fear in this country, which is -- which was palatable and which, I think still exists. And I think it's a great concern that the country itself still has this fear of what's going to happen tomorrow. And it was tied to that. They did a very clever job. Although there was no tie between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, we did a poll in November, which was shortly after the Congress had already voted and 70 percent of the American people thought that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11, 45 percent still do. MS. REHM: So you’re saying that despite anything that anyone had written that that was in the American people's minds? MR. PINCUS: The American public believes in its President, and when the President repeatedly appears day after day, saying the same thing, and it's reported whether we do it on the front page or not, or whether it comes on television, television is terribly important, and the White House knows it, so that it is deeply ingrained in the American public's mind. MS. REHM: At 27 before the hour, you’re listening to The Diane Rehm Show. It's time it open the phones, (800)433-8850. Let's go first to Deer Park, New York. Good morning, Holly, thanks for joining us. HOLLY: Yes, good day gentlemen, how do you do ma’am? MS. REHM: Hi. HOLLY: I'd like to make a comment. I think that we have reporters as good as Winchell, Edward R. Murrow, and Jack Anderson, and everyone is trying to do the best as they can do under the circumstances. MS. REHM: And that’s your statement. HOLLY: Yes, ma’am. MS. REHM: I appreciate it, thanks for calling. What’s your reaction to that John Walcott? MR. WALCOTT: I think she's right. I think there are reporters today, and we could sit here for the next hour and tick off names who are as good as any who have ever been. That does not mean that we have always done our jobs well, and if you listened to what Walter said a moment ago, the fact that the American people are inclined, and probably rightly so, to believe a President, any President, is what makes our job of challenging the President's assertion so important. MS. REHM: All right, so considering the fact that the press is held in such low esteem these days, considering the fact that many believe that you haven’t done your jobs, even though there have been those who have, what do you now do differently, if anything, David? MR. CORN: Well, I think some of the issues that we've talked about today, such as being overly stenographic are industry-wide practices that have to be reexamined. Now maybe in the advent of -- with the advent of websites and the internet and blogging, that will give newspapers a little more freedom. Now, I know that you know, there is the cult of objectivity in a lot of newspapers, and I firmly believe that you can be aggressive and even confrontational as need be with -- and still being objective. That doesn’t mean you have to sort of, you know, let the President or any politician say whatever they want to say, and without challenging them. You can challenge them acridly without making it opinionated. But I think newspapers have to want to do that. And I think there is a cultural -- there are some cultural biases that make that very difficult within Washington. And I -- you know, again, we keep focusing on newspapers but you know, there's the whole world of television -- MS. REHM: Of course. MR. CORN: -- where there's even less time in the coverage of everything as it has to be is more superficial. And you know, trying to tell TV people to do more in-depth reporting in serious matters strikes me almost as a lost cause. MS. REHM: Walter? MR. PINCUS: Well, I -- go back in time, because I was half-owned by CBS at one point, what's been lost is television has huge impact. MS. REHM: Right. MR. PINCUS: And the evening news programs have become much more entertainment than they are news, and they have a hard time doing investigative work. The other part of it is that there used to be documentary series once -- CBS had once a week, then once a month. You now have these reality shows, which are totally entertainment so that you've lost that really important factor. Plus TV stations had an FCC requirement that they had to do public interest, public news, broadcasting and that's been dropped, so that you have more sources, but you have less information and certainly less time to sort of do independent work… MS. REHM: Let's go to Greensborough, North Carolina, good morning Steven, you’re on the air. STEVEN: Hello, good morning Diane, and thank you. I’m just curious why the BBC is very popular in America? And I’m curious to see whether the -- your gentlemen think there are any differences between the BBC's investigative journalism as compared to the American ones? MS. REHM: Walter Pincus. MR. PINCUS: Well, the whole British tradition is -- they are much more outspoken and freer with analysis mixed with fact. I've done some work over in England with both the BBC and some of the private companies, London Weekend for years. Some of what they do is quite exciting. They were the first ones to re-enact in the Watergate case, the Watergate trial. And it was fascinating television; they had the time to do it and they it. It was something we wouldn’t do. They used actors, reading the script right off the transcript of the court. MS. REHM: But is there a greater separation between the press and the administration in the case of the BBC than what you find here in the U.S.? MR. PINCUS: You can’t really say that. First of all the press is multi-face. I mean, we practice differently -- within the paper, I have different sort of ideas on relationships with people I know. But the press in England, some of the better journalists have been members of parliament and hold jobs. It is a whole different atmosphere. MS. REHM: All right, let's go now to Chicago, Illinois. Good morning, Jim, thanks for joining us. JIM: It's my pleasure to be with you. The -- I go back to the Bill Moyers series on public TV. That was excellent. The mainline press has become like ducks where they take the samples from the President and especially the vice president. And then he manipulates them and then they print it. And they don’t follow up. And if you do that day after day after day, and then one day they come out, and they wring your neck, and then they serve you up as a duck dinner. And this is what the press has done. They have to get back to be independent. These guys have gotten lazy. And you’re dealing with a bunch of individuals who know how to manipulate the press and use the press like no other government has done previous to this -- MS. REHM: I think that’s exactly what you, Walter Pincus, had said earlier that each succeeding administration seems to learn how to do that PR in a more and more clever way. MR. CORN: But the -- I think they also learn to take advantage of the standard practices of the, you know, establishment media. And a good example that goes back to, well, the prewar period. So the President would come out occasionally and say Saddam Hussein was dealing with, and that’s the exact quote, was dealing with Al-Qaeda, one of the reasons why we had to, you know, move towards war against him. The Times and The Post would dutifully report that the President had said that today and that’d be the lead story. Eight, nine, ten, eleven grafts into the story there would also be a paragraph, intelligence officials -- intelligence sources within the administration who cannot be named say there is no evidence for this. So The Post and The Times can say, “Well, we’re doing our job. We’re reporting both sides.” But I would argue that the lead of that story should have been, “Today the President said that Saddam Hussein is dealing with Al-Qaeda, even though intelligence officials in his own administration say there’s no evidence.” MS. REHM: John -- MR. CORN: But that gap is the news, not the President’s assertion. MS. REHM: John Walcott. MR. WALCOTT: Oh, I agree with that. And it -- this isn’t rocket science. Yes, this administration is very adept at this. But, you know, when the other team figures out your game plan, you change your game plan. That’s pretty simple. And there was case after case after case, as David is explaining it, when someone in the administration would say something. We would make a couple of phone calls and immediately be told either that they’ve told you half the story or that they’ve turned the story upside down as they did in the case of what they alleged was a hijacking training facility that Saddam Hussein maintained for terrorists at a place called Salman Pak. It turns out it was a counter-hijacking training facility. And who was Saddam Hussein afraid might hijack an Iraqi airliner? Oh, Al-Qaeda. They had the story exactly backwards. MS. REHM: Walter. MR. PINCUS: What I tend to do now, which is both amusing and also good journalism, is to watch the Jon Stewart program because he’s learnt how, using film, which shows you how powerful television is, to do in a row statements, say, by the President or Condi Rice or somebody else and show either how he’s using the same language over and over and over again, or he’s changing it around. It’s very powerful stuff. You can’t do that in print. I think the whole trend was really started back during the Reagan era. I always give credit to that time because of what they would do, would put the President out at noon for about 10 or 15 minutes to make a statement. I was working in television in the mornings in those days. And there used to be a meeting held at the White House where TV producers would come on, sit there, and they’d be told where the President is going to appear. Well, that meeting was turned into the story of the day. They were told the President will speak today at noon and he’ll talk about crime in San Francisco and Chicago. The television stations could go shoot in Chicago and San Francisco. He’d appear for 10 or 15 minutes, take one or two questions, and leave. It would be on the evening news. At the end of his first year, David Broder, who is a wonderful political reporter, wrote that this is the least involved President he had ever seen in his life, Reagan. And the mail came pouring in saying, “How could you say that? I see him every night taking on one subject after another.” They have seen, you know, a 60-second spot of his speaking and something around it. And what he did for the other 23 hours of the day, nobody knew. But it didn’t matter. MS. REHM: I think that that is such an extraordinarily telling statement. Go ahead, David. MR. CORN: But we’re talking about also a couple of different things here because you started the show talking about investigative journalism, which is almost a -- is a phrase that has never been well-defined. I think investigative journalism is just good journalism. But we’re also talking about how beat reporting happens in the White House. And it seems to me that most people who are complaining these days are upset with sort of the coverage of the Bush administration because they see the Bush administration refining these techniques that Walter just described that really kicked in with the Reagan years, though previous Presidents have tried. And I’m upset that the media is not a better more powerful check on these practices of information control and manipulation. MS. REHM: All right. Let’s go to Talent, Oregon. Diana, you’re on the air. DIANA: Thank you. Yes, I think we, the people, really need to read more than we are to be informed in a democracy. But on the other hand, I would like to bring up Greg Palast who is reporting, has won awards. He’s been hired by the BBC and is printed in both the American and British press now. I’ve just started reading his book, Armed Madhouse. And I’m kind of amazed at what I’ve learned just in the first few pages that really can -- that I haven’t read anywhere else. And, you know, he’s reported on things like our elections, on the Exxon Valdez, on our administration, on Katrina, so many topics where we’ve often seen only one side. I would really like to hear your guests comment about this particular reporter who has complained that his news has not always been welcomed by CBS and other networks as well as by many newspapers. MS. REHM: Thanks for your call. David Corn. MR. CORN: Well, let me join the complaint in the sense that I feel there is lots of things that I write about at The Nation website, and my own blog, and things that came out in the book that I wrote with Mike Isikoff that didn’t get the attention that I felt these stories, new stories deserved. What I take heart in these days, one reason that I -- one of the positive things about the development of the Internet is that I feel that whether it’s Greg Palast, or whether it’s David Corn, or whether it’s Wonkette, or whatever, you know, we can compete now with Walter, with John for public attention. I can get -- I get stories up almost as fast as Walter on some of the same subjects or on different subjects. And if they hit a chord, if they resonate with people, then they zap around through e-mail and through various links in the website. And so people like Greg Palast or like myself, who don’t work in -- you know, in the depths of mainstream media, the playing field indeed has been leveled. And I’m tremendously heartened by that. But there isn’t a reporter on the face of this planet who feels that his scoops have not been overlooked in some manner, shape, or form. MR. PINCUS: Look, I have to be deadly honest and say I’ve never read anything he’s written. So you can’t read everything. The blogosphere is loaded with material. But, you know, Congress is loaded with material. So there’s just so much one person can do. The blogs essentially talk to each other. And when they finally hit something is when they’re picked up by mainstream media. That’s the irony of the blogosphere. MS. REHM: One of the questions that Greg Palast has apparently raised is in regard to Karl Rove’s e-mails. And as far as I know, those e-mails have not yet been produced. Is that correct, David? MR. CORN: Well, if I understand it correctly, and, you know, believe me, I’ve been busy with many other things as well, he says that there were 500 e-mails or so that were mistakenly sent to a website. And he has access to them and he’s drawn conclusions from these about Republican dirty tricks and electoral operations, but hasn’t posted all the e-mails online. I’d be happy to see those e-mails. And if he wants to send them to me and share them, I’d be happy to evaluate them. MS. REHM: All right. To Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Hi there, Kate, you’re on the air. KATE: Hi, Diane. Great topic. MS. REHM: Thank you. KATE: Listen. I’m not sure how many journalists you have there on the show today. MS. REHM: Three. KATE: But, you know, David Corn, big Nation reader over the years. I think it’s become a lot more mainstream. For you guys to be saying that no matter what you wrote, the American people would have supported this war is preposterous because it wasn’t written enough. And The New York Times even apologized, I think it was in 2004, for not being more forthcoming with information regarding their official sources, for instance. These official sources are just a very vague thing out there in sort of another planet that the American people have become accustomed to thinking, okay, that’s correct. They were wrong in their support of the war. There wasn’t enough in those articles. And they even wrote the apology, I think, in a very, very far part of the newspaper. MS. REHM: John Walcott. MR. WALCOTT: Well, you live in Fort Lauderdale. Do you read The Miami Herald? KATE: I don’t like The Miami Herald. I don’t like the Sun-Sentinel. I read -- I watch Democracy Now! I’m a big Pacifica Radio person. I’m an Internet person. I read Mother Jones. I read Z Magazine. MS. REHM: Good. MR. WALCOTT: Well, if you’d read The Miami Herald, you would have read hundreds of stories about the holes in the administration’s case for war that we wrote in what was then the Knight Ridder Washington bureau because The Miami Herald published virtually everything we did. MS. REHM: And where did those articles appear, John Walcott? MR. WALCOTT: Some of them on page 1, some of them inside the paper. MS. REHM: Yeah, and, Walter Pincus, I want to go back to your stories because they got buried. How come? MR. PINCUS: Well, the editorial decisions are made by editors and they are competing with other stories and our front page is generally a mixture of foreign, national, and local stories. So there is a limit to what you can do. MS. REHM: … I want to go back to the question, however, as to whether corporate control of media assets does come into play or not. John Walcott. MR. WALCOTT: Well, Knight Ridder was the second largest newspaper publisher in the country and it was by far the most aggressive in challenging the administration on a case for war. We’ve reported hard on the Veterans Administration. We have probably been the leading news organization in reporting on the U.S. attorneys and the voter fraud issues in the Department of Justice. And so -- and that’s under both Knight Ridder and now McClatchy. So in our case, corporate ownership, I’ve got to say and I’ll say it bluntly, has been nothing but supportive of what we did. The highest levels of leadership in both organizations, Knight Ridder and McClatchy, has backed us up every step of the way and I know they took flak for it. But none of that flak ever tumbled down on us. So in our case, my answer is a flat no. MS. REHM: What can you say about The New York Times? MR. CORN: Well, the interesting thing about the Times is that if you read their editorials before the war, the editorial position of The New York Times was against the war. And it’s the editorial policies that tend to reflect the owner’s ideas about the world. But their reporting was completely credulous and gave a lot of ammunition to people who were supporting the war. The Washington Post in some ways was flipped. The Washington Post editorial page has -- it still, you know, thinks the war was a great thing and was, you know, very much a cheerleader. Yet The Washington Post, although its stories were buried and weren’t, well, advertised within the pages, had a slightly more skeptical approach to the WMD question and the Al-Qaeda question than did The New York Times reporting. So your model of corporate ownership affecting, you know, the coverage doesn’t work because it doesn’t apply to either of these two cases. MS. REHM: Walter. MR. PINCUS: I think the corporate issue is much more an electronic-television issue. I would think that one of the anchors could never do what Walter Cronkite did in the case of the Vietnam War. One of the things that’s happened is that the whole sort of freedom of the press -- the American media began as small-town newspapers, hundreds of -- more than a thousand of them, most of them started by businessmen who had made their money and who wanted to get involved in government. That’s all gone now.
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