Here's something every journalist need reminding of: The Breaking News Consumer's Handbook Friday, September 20, 2013 - 11:55 AM By Alex Goldman This week's shooting at the DC Navy Yard was the latest in a long string of breaking news reporting to get many of the essential facts wrong. In fact, the rampant misreporting that follows shootings like this is so predictable that OTM has unintentionally developed a formula for covering them. We look at how all the bad information came out. We suggest ways that the news media could better report breaking news. This time, we're doing something different. This is our Breaking News Consumer's Handbook. Rather than counting on news outlets to get it right, we're looking at the other end. Below are some tips for how, in the wake of a big, tragic story, you can sort good information from bad. We've even made a handy, printable PDF that you can tape to your wall the next time you encounter a big news event. 1. In the immediate aftermath, news outlets will get it wrong. Everyone we talked to made this point. Details on the ground will be sketchy, a shooter may still be active, all the dead may not be accounted for. "whatever you might hear in the first couple of hours after a major news event, you should probably take it all with a grain of salt," says Andy Carvin, senior strategist on NPR's Digital Desk. "It’s quite possible that what you hear as the news stories the next morning – what they focus on might be quite different than the day before." 2. Don't trust anonymous sources. Often, news outlets will cite "sources," or a "law enforcement official." "I think you need to be very careful," says Ian Fisher, assistant managing editor for digital operations at the New York Times. "[law enforcement official] could be anything from the FBI to a cop in a car. So you just don’t know and you shouldn’t really trust that." 3. Don't trust stories that cite another news outlet as the source of the information. "Also be wary of organizations that blindly quote other organizations without solid sourcing," says Fisher. "They aren’t taking a very big chance in doing that. They can always say 'oh, that was them, not us.' So I think that they are a lot less choosy and careful than they would be if their own reporting was attached to it." 4. There's almost never a second shooter. In the case of the DC Navy Yard shooting, the Sandy Hook shooting, and many others, initial reports included possible second and third shooters. “There’s pretty much never another one,” says Fisher. “So if you hear that, you can almost always discount." 5. Pay attention to the language the media uses. Whether you realize it or not, the language the media uses tells you how reliable it is. Here's a helpful glossary: "We are receiving reports" - sources are claiming something has happened, but it has not been confirmed. "We are seeking confirmation" - the news outlet is confident, but still can't confirm. "We can confirm" - information has come from multiple sources, and the news outlet feels confident that it can claim something as an actual fact. "We have learned" - how a news outlet declares it has a scoop. As Andy Carvin says "on the one hand, it could mean that they’re the first ones to confirm something. Or they’re going out on a limb and reporting something that no one else has felt comfortable reporting yet." 6. Look for news outlets close to the incident. "What you want to do is ask yourself who is close enough to this situation," says Craig Silverman of Poynter's Regret the Error column. "In an incident of terrorism or shooting or even when it’s sort of weather focused in a specific area, that’s always your preferred source. Have they actually seen it with their own eyes? Are they actually there, and do they know the area? Really, really, important." 7. Compare multiple sources. "If a news organization says 'we can confirm that such and such has happened,' pay attention to what the other networks are saying." says Andy Carvin. "Because ideally you can triangulate that information and get to some nugget of truth. But the fewer examples you have of entities claiming that something has happened, the more wary you should be about it." 8. Big news brings out the fakers. And Photoshoppers. "There are lots of hoaxsters who know that in this moment people are just grabbing onto any images they can find," says Craig Silverman. "So they might Photoshop something and send it out. Or images that were taken previously find their way to be presented as if they're new. If it’s somebody who’s sharing a photo on twitter, it’s very possible that that photo isn’t one they actually took themselves. You also need to kind of triangulate and see, well, 'has anyone else shared that, and are they giving me a link that I can go to, to actually learn more about this?'" 9. Beware reflexive retweeting. Some of this is on you. Thanks to Twitter and Facebook, you are a repeater and reporter of information, both good and bad. It is up to you to apply scrutiny to the information you encounter to avoid passing amplifying the same bad information you hope to filter out.

Here is a good summary of the state of the news in America by the Brooking Institute (you can see the original story here with pictures and graphs> http://www.brookings.edu/research/essays/2014/bad-news<: newspaper reader on train © Thomas Hoepker/Magnum Photos Published 10/16/2014 n 1998, Ralph Terkowitz, a vice president of The Washington Post Co., got to know Sergey Brin and Larry Page, two young Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who were looking for backers. Terkowitz remembers paying a visit to the garage where they were working and keeping his car and driver waiting outside while he had a meeting with them about the idea that eventually became Google. An early investment in Google might have transformed the Post's financial condition, which became dire a dozen years later, by which time Google was a multi-billion dollar company. But nothing happened. “We kicked it around,” Terkowitz recalled, but the then-fat Post Co. had other irons in other fires. Thomas Jefferson Quotation Such missteps are not surprising. People living through a time of revolutionary change usually fail to grasp what is going on around them. The American news business would get a C minus or worse from any fair-minded professor evaluating its performance in the first phase of the Digital Age. Big, slow-moving organizations steeped in their traditional ways of doing business could not accurately foresee the next stages of a technological whirlwind. Obviously, new technologies are radically altering the ways in which we learn, teach, communicate, and are entertained. It is impossible to know today where these upheavals may lead, but where they take us matters profoundly. How the digital revolution plays out over time will be particularly important for journalism, and therefore to the United States, because journalism is the craft that provides the lifeblood of a free, democratic society. The Founding Fathers knew this. They believed that their experiment in self-governance would require active participation by an informed public, which could only be possible if people had unfettered access to information. James Madison, author of the First Amendment guaranteeing freedom of speech and of the press, summarized the proposition succinctly: “The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty.” Thomas Jefferson explained to his French friend, the Marquis de Lafayette, "The only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed.” American journalists cherish another of Jefferson's remarks: “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” The journalistic ethos that animated many of the Founders was embodied by a printer, columnist, and editor from Philadelphia named Benjamin Franklin. The printing press, which afforded Franklin his livelihood, remained the engine of American democracy for more than two centuries. But then, in the second half of the 20th century, new technologies began to undermine long-established means of sharing information. First television and then the computer and the Internet transformed the way people got their news. Nonetheless, even at the end of the century, the business of providing news and analysis was still a profitable enough undertaking that it could support large organizations of professional reporters and editors in print and broadcast media. Now, however, in the first years of the 21st century, accelerating technological transformation has undermined the business models that kept American news media afloat, raising the possibility that the great institutions on which we have depended for news of the world around us may not survive. Pulse news reader Pulse news aggregator app. source: alphonsolabs.com These are painful words to write for someone who spent 50 years as a reporter and editor at The Washington Post. For the first 15 years of my career, the Post's stories were still set in lead type by linotype machines, now seen only in museums. We first began writing on computers in the late 1970s, which seemed like an unequivocally good thing until the rise of the Internet in the 1990s. Then, gradually, the ground began to shift beneath us. By the time I retired earlier this year, the Graham family had sold the Post to Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, for $250 million, a small fraction of its worth just a few years before. Donald Graham, the chief executive at the time, admitted that he did not know how to save the newspaper. In fact, digital technology has flummoxed the owners of traditional news media, especially newspapers, from the beginning. For example, in 1983, in the early years of computerized production of newspapers when almost no one knew what was coming, The New York Times almost committed digital suicide. The Times decided it only needed to retain the rights to the electronic versions of its stories for 24 hours after publication. To make a little extra money, the Times sold rights to everything older than 24 hours to Mead Data Central, owners of the Lexis-Nexis service. Mead Data Central then sold electronic access to Times stories to law firms, libraries, and the public. By the early 1990s, as the Internet was becoming functional and popular, this arrangement was a big and growing problem: newspapers, including the Times, were planning “online,” computerized editions, but the Times had sold control of its own product to Mead Data. Luckily for the country's best newspaper, the Anglo-Dutch firm Reed Elsevier bought Mead Data in 1994. The sale triggered a provision in the original Times-Mead contract that allowed the Times to reclaim the electronic rights to its own stories. That enabled the Times to put its journalism online in 1995. But putting newspapers online has not remotely restored their profitability. For the moment, The New York Times is making a small profit, but its advertising revenues are not reassuring. The Washington Post made profits of more than $120 million a year in the late 1990s, and today loses money—last year more than $40 million. Newsweek magazine failed, and Time magazine is teetering. Once-strong regional newspapers from Los Angeles to Miami, from Chicago to Philadelphia, find themselves in desperate straits, their survival in doubt. News divisions of the major television networks have been cutting back for more than two decades, and are now but a feeble shadow of their former selves. google ad revenue chart Overall the economic devastation would be difficult to exaggerate. One statistic conveys its dimensions: the advertising revenue of all America's newspapers fell from $63.5 billion in 2000 to about $23 billion in 2013, and is still falling. Traditional news organizations' financial well-being depended on the willingness of advertisers to pay to reach the mass audiences they attracted. Advertisers were happy to pay because no other advertising medium was as effective. But in the digital era, which has made it relatively simple to target advertising in very specific ways, a big metropolitan or national newspaper has much less appeal. Internet companies like Google and Facebook are able to sort audiences by the most specific criteria, and thus to offer advertisers the possibility of spending their money only on ads they know will reach only people interested in what they are selling. So Google, the master of targeted advertising, can provide a retailer selling sheets and towels an audience existing exclusively of people who have gone online in the last month to shop for sheets and towels. This explains why even as newspaper revenues have plummeted, the ad revenue of Google has leapt upward year after year—from $70 million in 2001 to an astonishing $50.6 billion in 2013. That is more than two times the combined advertising revenue of every newspaper in America last year. And the situation for proprietors of newspapers and magazines is likely to get worse. One alarming set of statistics: Americans spend about 5 percent of the time they devote to media of all kinds to magazines and newspapers. But nearly 20 percent of advertising dollars still go to print media. So print media today are getting billions more than they probably deserve from advertisers who, governed by the inertia so common in human affairs, continue to buy space in publications that are steadily losing audience, especially among the young. When those advertisers wake up, revenues will plummet still further. Newspaper Closings King County Journal -January 2007 Union City Register Tribune -November 2007 Kentucky Post -December 2007 Cincinnati Post -December 2007 Halifax Daily News -February 2008 Albuquerque Tribune -February 2008 San Juan Star -August 2008 Tucson Citizen -May 16, 2009 Rocky Mountain News -February 2009 Baltimore Examiner -February 2009 View sources News organizations have tried to adapt to the new realities. As the Internet became more popular and more important in the first decade of the 21st century, newspaper proprietors dreamed of paying for their newsrooms by mimicking their traditional business model in the online world. Their hope was to create mass followings for their websites that would appeal to advertisers the way their ink-on-paper versions once did. But that’s not what happened. The news organizations with the most popular websites did attract lots of eyeballs, but general advertising on their sites did not produce compelling results for advertisers, so they did not buy as much of it as the papers had hoped. And the price they paid for it steadily declined, because as the Internet grew, the number of sites offering advertising opportunities assured that “supply” outstripped “demand.” Advertising revenues for the major news sites never amounted to even a significant fraction of the revenues generated by printed newspapers in the golden age. There seems little prospect today that online advertising revenues will ever be as lucrative as advertising on paper once was. The other online innovation that has devastated newspapers is Craigslist, the free provider of what the newspapers call “classified advertising,” the small items in small print used by individuals and businesses for generations to buy and sell real estate and merchandise, and to hire workers. Twenty years ago classifieds provided more than a third of the revenue of The Washington Post. Craigslist has destroyed that business for the Post and every major paper in the country. Philadelphia Inquirer Building The Philadelphia Inquirer/Daily News headquarters building on Broad Street in Philadelphia, October 6, 2005. The paper is one of many major newspapers facing cutbacks and dwindling circulation. Reuters/Tim Shaffer espite two decades of trying, no one has found a way to make traditional news-gathering sufficiently profitable to assure its future survival. Serious readers of America's most substantial news media may find this description at odds with their daily experience. After all, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post still provide rich offerings of good journalism every morning, and they have been joined by numerous online providers of both opinion and news—even of classic investigative reporting. Digital publications employ thousands of reporters and editors in new and sometimes promising journalistic enterprises. Is this a disaster? how people get their news Of course not—yet. But today's situation is probably misleading. The laws of economics cannot be ignored or repealed. Nor can the actuarial tables. Only about a third of Americans under 35 look at a newspaper even once a week, and the percentage declines every year. A large portion of today's readers of the few remaining good newspapers are much closer to the grave than to high school. Today's young people skitter around the Internet like ice skaters, exercising their short attention spans by looking for fun and, occasionally, seeking out serious information. Audience taste seems to be changing, with the result that among young people particularly there is a declining appetite for the sort of information packages the great newspapers provided, which included national, foreign and local news, business news, cultural news and criticism, editorials and opinion columns, sports and obituaries, lifestyle features, and science news. Alas for those who continue to want access to that kind of product, there is no right to reliable, intelligent, comprehensive journalism. We only get it when someone provides it. And if it doesn’t pay someone a profit, it’s not likely to be produced. Walter Cronkite New York City. 1959. TV news anchorman Walter Cronkite. © Dennis Stock/Magnum Photos efore digital technology changed the world, the news was quite orderly and predictable. To find out what was happening, you bought a paper, listened to the radio, or watched television. Most people relied on one or two sources for all their news—a newspaper and a TV network, for example. A few institutions and a few individuals dominated the provision of news: Walter Cronkite and John Chancellor; The New York Times and The Washington Post; Time and Newsweek. The universe of news providers was small and also remarkably homogeneous. David Brinkley could move from NBC to ABC without causing much of a stir. When Roone Arledge, whose first big accomplishment was to make ABC the leading network for sports, was empowered to build a new ABC News, he did it by raiding the staffs of NBC and CBS. Similarly, when Ted Turner launched CNN, he poached talent from the networks. This small, nearly-closed world rarely provided any surprises. Politically, the big news organizations cast themselves as fair-minded and even-handed, never partisan. Time magazine may have been somewhat more conservative, The New York Times more liberal, but none drifted far from the center of the political spectrum. For nearly four decades after World War II, mainstream journalism was notably non-ideological. At the height of their success, all the best news organizations shared two important qualities: a strong sense of responsibility about their roles as providers of news and analysis, and plenty of money to spend on those missions. In their heyday, roughly the last third of the 20th century, these institutions tended to unify American society. News anchors like Cronkite, Chancellor, Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, and Peter Jennings were reassuring, avuncular figures with whom millions of Americans shared the dramas of the day. All the mainstream print and broadcast media sought to provide an information supermarket whose aisles—from sports to business to politics, foreign affairs, entertainment news, and gossip—would hopefully attract mass audiences across all classes of society. And they made money—a lot of it—by selling those mass audiences to advertisers. TV news anchors NBC NIGHTLY NEWS -- Pictured: (l-r) John Chancellor, Tom Brokaw, Connie Chung, Garrick Utley. NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images The money allowed for an extravagant approach to news. Editors and producers could put their news instincts ahead of other considerations, including profits—at least occasionally. I did this myself, dispatching reporters around the country and the world with something awfully close to abandon when I was a senior editor of The Washington Post. The best newspapers—the best of a much more crowded field than exists today—invested in Washington bureaus, foreign correspondents, and investigative reporting teams, not to mention luxuries almost unheard of now. For years, for example, no reporter for the Los Angeles Times had to suffer the indignity of flying in coach; business or first class was the norm. The broadcast media enjoyed even more extravagance. In the 1970s the three television networks each maintained large corps of foreign correspondents stationed in bureaus across the globe, and also domestic bureaus in the major American cities. They all did serious documentaries and showed them in prime time. Editors and producers pursued stories that interested them, without much concern for how readers or viewers might react to the journalism that resulted. Members of this tribe of journalists shared a sense of what “the news” was. The most influential of them were the editors and reporters on the best newspapers, whose decisions were systematically embraced and echoed by other editors and writers, as well as by the producers of television news. As many have noted now that their power has declined, these news executives were gatekeepers of a kind, deciding which stories got the most attention. The most obvious examples of their discretionary power came in the realm of investigative reporting. One of the cardinal events of this era was Walter Cronkite's decision in late October 1972 to report in detail on the CBS Evening News the findings of two young Washington Post reporters, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, on the developing Watergate scandal. Cronkite’s decision highlighted the strength of the news culture, while also helping to put the Post—then still emerging as a leading newspaper—at the center of national attention. Walter Cronkite Joseph N. Welch (left) being questioned by Senator Joseph McCarthy (right), June 9, 1954. Wikimedida Commons This was a golden era in journalism, a time when a prosperous and widely-respected press demonstrated an unprecedented willingness to confront a sitting president. Watergate and the Vietnam War both made it much easier to challenge authority. Newspapers especially began to show increasing self-confidence—sometimes it felt like arrogance—by moving away from reactive journalism that focused on the events of the previous day and devoting more space and energy to “enterprise” journalism, which included not just in-depth investigations, but stories about trends in society, profiles, and feature stories. Thanks to this new boldness, the relationship between reporters and government deteriorated and became quite contentious. Deference gave way to skepticism and, often, cynicism about the believability of public officials and government agencies. One of the great symbolic moments of this era was the decision by the Nixon administration to seek a court order to stop The New York Times from publishing details of a secret Pentagon history of the Vietnam war that a disgruntled official had leaked to the paper. Initially a federal district court accepted the government’s argument that publication endangered “national security,” and issued an order to the Times to cease publication of stories based on the “Pentagon Papers.” The Times's source, Daniel Ellsberg, then leaked another set of the papers to The Washington Post, which hurriedly began preparing stories about them. The government sought court action to block the Post as well. The Supreme Court agreed to take the case. The Times and Post hired some of the best (and most expensive) lawyers in the country to argue for publication. The court quickly decided in favor of the newspapers' right to publish. Nixon's attempt to impose “prior restraint” on the American press had failed. Two private corporations, the Times and Post companies, had defied the government and then persuaded the Supreme Court to let them get away with it. Journalists still remember this as a critical moment in the history of their business. Since the late 19th century, American journalists have used their craft to call government and corporations to account for wrongdoing, secret practices, and even corruption, often sparking public outcry and reform. Listed here are ten noteworthy moments in U.S. investigative journalism. It is neither a top ten list nor a ranking of any sort; many well-qualified media outlets have assembled their own excellent lists. It also focuses on print journalism, though many great episodes of the form have appeared on television. As well, this investigative journalism is but one facet of the vital profession that reports the news. 1902-03:Ida Tarbell profiles John D. Rockefeller and the Standard Oil Company The progressive era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was a time of social activism as Americans and their president, Theodore Roosevelt, fought corruption and monopolistic practices in government and industry. Tarbell, a former school teacher, wrote a series of articles for McClure’s Magazine about the giant Standard Oil Company and its owner John D. Rockefeller. The series was published in book form in 1904, and in 1911 the U.S. Supreme Court found the company to be in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act, causing its breakup. Ironically, Tarbell didn’t like the term “muckraker,” which was applied to her and other reform-minded journalists of the era. Standard Oil Refinery No. 1 in Cleveland, Ohio (1899). Standard Oil Refinery No. 1 in Cleveland, Ohio (1899) Wikimedia Commons 1906:Upton Sinclair exposes conditions in Chicago's meatpacking plants Chicago was America’s center of meat processing and packing around the turn of the century in 1900. Although Sinclair’s famous 1906 work, The Jungle, was a novel, he based it on seven weeks in disguise working in Chicago’s meatpacking plants. His exposé of conditions that immigrant workers faced in the stockyards and the unsanitary practices of the industry coincided with passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 and the Federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906. Sinclair later focused on American journalism itself, calling attention in 1920 to the practice of “yellow journalism” in his book The Brass Check. stockyards Chicago's Union stockyards cattle pens c. 1909. Wikimedia Commons 1953:Murrey Marder dogs Sen. Joseph McCarthy's witch hunt In February 1950, U.S. Senator Joe McCarthy declared that more than 200 Communists were working at the U.S. State Department. After his re-election in 1952, McCarthy conducted a series of hearings on the matter and implicated Army personnel in espionage. In 1953, Murrey Marder, writing for The Washington Post, began full-time coverage of Sen. McCarthy and his hearings. Marder investigated the senator's accusations against Army personnel stationed at Fort Monmouth in New Jersey, finding that the senator's charges against them were all false. Marder later opened the London bureau of the The Post, and after his retirement, helped create the Nieman Watchdog Project. McCarthy Sen. Joseph McCarthy chats with his attorney Roy Cohn during Senate Subcommittee hearings on the McCarthy-Army dispute. Wikimedia Commons 1962-64:David Halberstam calls foul on the U.S. military's rosy Vietnam claims In October 1963, President John F. Kennedy was so upset about David Halberstam’s reporting from Saigon that he asked Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times, to transfer David Halberstam out of Vietnam. Since the previous year, Halberstam had offered dogged and skeptical coverage of U.S. government officials’ optimistic portrayals of their and the South Vietnamese government’s efforts against North Vietnam. “The job of the reporters in Vietnam,” Halberstam wrote in 1965, “was to report the news, whether or not the news was good for America.” In 1964, Halberstam earned a Pulitzer Prize for his Vietnam reporting. David Halberstam Reporters David Halberstam of the New York Times, AP Saigon correspondent Malcolm Brown and Neil Sheehan of UPI, chat beside a helicopter in Vietnam. AP 1969:Seymour Hersh exposes the My Lai massacre and cover-up In March 1968, U.S. Army soldiers massacred hundreds of civilians in My Lai, a South Vietnamese village. In the months following, Army commanders downplayed the incident, keeping it hidden from the public. However, due to pressure on the chain-of-command from a soldier in the infantry company involved, Lieutenant William Calley, Jr. was court martialed in September 1969 for his role. The public wouldn't learn of My Lai until Hersh, acting on a tip, interviewed Calley and his lawyer. Hersh's story was published by Dispatch, a small news agency with a tiny staff, and then picked up nationally. Calley was the only soldier convicted in relation to the massacre. Hersh won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for his reporting. Seymour Hersh New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh talks on the telephone at his New York Times Washington Bureau office June 14, 1972. © Wally McNamee/CORBIS 1971:The Pentagon Papers leaked and published In 1971, with the Vietnam War still going after almost a decade, a military analyst named Daniel Ellsberg leaked a seven-thousand page history of U.S.-Vietnam relations that had been prepared for internal use by the Pentagon. Lengthy sections of these “Pentagon Papers” were published in The Washington Post and The New York Times, revealing the covert origins of a war that was exceedingly unpopular at home. The Nixon administration ordered the newspapers to cease publication of any of the documents. This led to a Supreme Court case (New York Times Co. v. United States) that eventually ruled in favor of the press. Daniel Ellsberg Daniel Ellsberg (l) talks to reporters outside the Federal Building in Los Angeles, Ca. on Jan. 17 1973. His co-defendant, Anthony Russo is on the right. AP Photo/stf 1972:Woodward and Bernstein expose the Watergate break in In June 1972, five men were arrested for breaking into the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate Complex in Washington, DC. Two young reporters at The Washington Post, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, were intrigued that one of the burglars was on the payroll of President Richard Nixon’s reelection committee and began digging further. Woodward and Bernstein uncovered a series of political crimes and “dirty tricks” that connected the burglary back to the White House. Their reporting led to indictments of 40 administration officials and the eventual resignation of President Nixon. The paper won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for the investigative reporting. Nixon departs Richard Nixon departs from the White House , August 9 1974 after resigning the presidency. Reuters 1992:Florence Graves reveals sexual misconduct in Congress In 1992, shortly after the Anita Hill controversy, Florence Graves, founder of Common Cause magazine, began an investigation into sexual misconduct on Capitol Hill. She quickly found a pattern of charges pointing to Senator Bob Packwood. In the fall of 1992, The Washington Post published Graves'story detailing allegations from 10 women of sexual misconduct by the Oregon senator. The story not only led to the first-ever Senate Ethics Committee investigation of sexual misconduct and the eventual resignation of Senator Packwood, but also to the passage of the landmark Congressional Accountability Act, subjecting Congress to the same discrimination laws as the rest of the nation. Packwood Sen. Bob Packwood leaves his Senate office after he announced his resignation September 7, 1995. The Senate Ethics Committee had recommended Packwood's expulsion on sexual and official misconduct charges. Reuters 2010:Dana Priest and William Arkin detail secret government organizations On July 19, 2010, Washington Post reporters Dana Priest and William Arkin published “Top Secret America,” a series of investigative articles revealing the massive and what they characterized as mismanaged post-9/11 growth of the U.S. intelligence community. The series, benefiting from the work of more than a dozen other journalists at The Post, compiled hundreds of thousands of records over two years, identifying 45 government organizations (1,271 sub-units) and 1,931 private companies engaged in top-secret intelligence work. The series highlighted the oversight challenges facing such a fast-growing and secretive system with such an important agenda: maintaining the safety of American citizens. CIA U.S. President George W. Bush (r) and Porter Goss, director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), walk to make remarks in the lobby of the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Reuters/Jason Reed JIR 2013:The Washington Post and The Guardian report on NSA surveillance In early June 2013, The Post and The Guardian broke nearly-simultaneous stories about National Security Agency surveillance activities being conducted on U.S. citizens and foreign officials. Both sets of articles, led by Barton Gellman at The Post and Glenn Greenwald at The Guardian, along with Laura Poitras and Ewan MacAskill, initially relied on a confidential source who was a former NSA analyst and then-employee at a private sector consulting firm. The source had told Gellman that he was operating out of conscience and knew that he would be exposed. That person was Edward Snowden. Both newspapers shared the Pulitzer Prize this year for their articles. CIA The Guardian's NSA Files: Decoded theguardian.com click a date dot to explore the timeline 1903 1906 1953 1963 1969 1971 1972 1992 2010 2013 Fred Dews and Thomas Young contributed to this presentation. View sources coverimg Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein (center) and Bob Woodward (left), the team who broke the Watergate story. Washington, D.C., 1974. © Wayne Miller/Magnum Photos he golden era had its shortcomings, to be sure. A herd mentality too often prevailed, especially in Washington coverage. Self-important journalists were too common. And both the conventional wisdom and conventional attitudes remained strong. So, for example, when confronted by a story like the AIDS epidemic, the great news organizations reacted slowly and clumsily. Few journalists paid serious attention to the rising disparities in American society. Toward the end of the era, in the first years of the 21st century, the news media succumbed to the national anxieties produced by the 9/11 attacks and failed to challenge effectively the Bush administration's rush to war in Iraq. Many journalists joined the rush. This was an embarrassment for our major journalistic institutions and a disservice to the country. Quotation Nevertheless, America's best news organizations have proved their value again and again, even in recent years, as their fortunes have declined. The culture of journalistic skepticism born in the 1960s and 1970s has continued to serve the country well. Repeatedly, journalists have broken significant news stories that government officials hoped would never be revealed, from accounts of Americans torturing terror suspects to revelations of the systematic mistreatment of veterans at Walter Reed Hospital; from accounts of the government's eavesdropping programs to descriptions of its vast, post-9/11 intelligence apparatus. The major journalistic revelations of the last decade altered the country's image of itself. They mattered. And society has benefited in less tangible ways, too. “How would this look on the front page of The Washington Post?” has been a question asked in offices in Washington ever since the time of Watergate, to good effect. Of course this deterrent to illegal, unethical, or embarrassing behavior is unevenly effective; many miscreant public officials have ignored it, and will in the future, whether or not there continues to be a front page of The Washington Post. But this sense of accountability has had a salutary effect. Iraq satellite image A slide from Secretary of State Colin Powell's presentation to the UN asserting WMD manufacturing capabilites in Iraq and a link between Saddam Hussein and alQaeda. state.gov The best journalism has most often been produced by those news organizations that have both the resources and the courage to defend their best work when it offends or alarms powerful institutions and individuals. The public may perceive journalism as an individualistic enterprise carried out by lone rangers of rectitude, but this is rarely the case. The best work is usually done by a team that has the backing of an organization committed to maintaining the highest standards of seriousness and integrity, and to nurturing talented reporters and editors. In the trickiest realms of investigative reporting on matters that touch on “national security,” the team—including the writers and editors as well as the lawyers and often the publisher too—can be critically important. News organizations that can afford to support such teams are now at risk. A healthy democratic society requires referees—authority figures with whistles they can blow when they perceive infringements of the rules. Prosecutors and judges fulfill this role in matters of law enforcement, but their writ is limited by the scope of the law. “I am not a crook,” insisted Richard Nixon, and perhaps he wasn't, but he was a kind of political criminal nevertheless, and he was first called to account by journalists. Will such whistle blowers be on the job to confront the next Nixon? Paul Starr, the distinguished Princeton scholar, has put the matter succinctly: “By undermining the economic basis of professional reporting and by fragmenting the public, [the digital revolution] has weakened the ability of the press to act as an effective agent of public accountability. If we take seriously the idea that an independent press serves an essential democratic function, its institutional distress may weaken democracy itself. And that is the danger that confronts us.” Stewart and O'Reilley Bill O'Reilly vs. Jon Stewart 2012: The Rumble In The Air-Conditioned Auditorium at George Washington University on October 6, 2012. Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images for The Rumble 2012 entitled to opinions quote f today's providers of the best journalism—often referred to these days, somewhat ominously, as “legacy media,” meaning the old stuff—cannot survive their continuing tribulations, what will take their place? Predicting the future is a fool's errand, but some trends are clear. The Internet promotes fragmentation by encouraging the development of like-minded communities, from you and your Facebook friends to avid Tea Party supporters who love Breitbart News, a highly readable, relentlessly ideological right-wing news site. Surveys by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press show that increasing numbers of American get their “news” from ideologically congenial sources. The news media are fragmenting just as American society is fragmenting—by class, by region, by religious inclination, by generation, by ethnic identity, by politics and more. trust in news sources chart The rise of the fragmented news media is quite a recent phenomenon. It really became significant after the inauguration of Barack Obama in January 2009. President Obama came into the White House in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. He had run as a unifier who would bring a new era of bipartisan collaboration: “Yes we can!” But no, he couldn't. Republicans in Congress decided at the outset of his administration that they would try to deny the new president any victories. Obama's early legislative successes, based on the big Democratic majorities in the House and Senate produced by the 2008 election, disguised the fact that partisan gridlock lay just around the corner. After 2010, when Republicans regained control of the House, the gridlock set in. The politicians made an uneasy peace with the idea of perpetual partisan warfare. Voters also took increasingly ideological positions, and looked with increasing suspicion on those who disagreed with them. demise of expectations quote Today's politicians, especially on the right, communicate to “their” voters through “their” media, most notably, of course, Fox News. Similarly, liberal Democrats like to appear on MSNBC. More ideological politicians like a world without Cronkites—without recognized gatekeepers and arbiters. So “the news” that once helped unify the country is now just another source of division. Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to argue that “everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” No longer. Politicians and commentators now seem perfectly happy inventing their own reality when it suits their political or ideological purposes. Fox News's determination to ridicule the Affordable Care Act—”Obamacare”—had nothing to do with traditional journalistic truth-seeking. Rather, it was part of a propaganda campaign. The MSNBC cable network, part of NBC, which used to be a serious news organization, saw a business opportunity in making itself a liberal alternative to Fox, the most profitable cable news network, and now unabashedly propagates a liberal view of the news. Fox and MSNBC have both decided to cater to their audiences not with original reporting of the news (which is expensive), but with commentary on the news interspersed with broadcasts of set-piece events like presidential news conferences. Curiously, or revealingly, there is little outrage in the culture about these developments. We seem to have adapted to the demise of the old expectations about accuracy, fairness, and reporting without much of a fight. Decline in newspaper employees graphic Some of the new online products produce interesting and informative journalism, but none has the ambitions or the sense of responsibility of the best publications. They couldn't afford those luxuries. A great news organization is expensive. The newsroom of The New York Times costs about $230 million a year. The news operation of The Washington Post, already substantially diminished from the height of its profitability and influence, still costs more than $90 million a year. Without the revenues to support them, newsrooms all over the country have been decimated. Newspapers employed 59,000 journalists in 1989, and 36,000 in 2012 (and fewer since then). Once-formidable institutions including The Baltimore Sun, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, and Miami Herald are vastly diminished. Others have gone out of business altogether. Quotation The significant news organizations that have survived are under terrific pressure now. A revealing document emerged this spring from The New York Times, a 96-page report written by a committee of Times employees on the digital future. Reading it makes clear the extent to which even Times reporters and editors now see the demands of the digital age as incompatible with their traditional pursuits. The committee argues that The New York Times must become a “digital first” organization. “That means aggressively questioning many of our print-based traditions and their demands on our time, and determining which can be abandoned to free up resources for digital work.” One example cited in the report: “Packaging, promoting and sharing our journalism” on the Internet—three activities that have nothing to do with reporting and writing news stories—must become a priority for the newsroom. Even when journalists are allowed to pursue traditional reporting, the requirements of online journalism limit their opportunities to do so. Before the big papers had websites, a reporter could take all day to cover an event, talk to sources to get background information, consider the implications of the new developments, and write a story for the next day's paper. Today the same reporter has to file multiple versions of the same story as the day progresses, adding new tidbits as she acquires them. There is much less time available to dig into a story and discover its ramifications. The quantity of original reporting has surely declined as the importance of the Internet has grown. time spent on media chart One immediate effect of all these changes and cutbacks is that there's no paper in America today that can offer the same coverage of its city, suburbs, and state that it provided 20 or even 10 years ago, and scores of city halls and state legislatures get virtually no coverage by any substantive news organizations. Television remains the primary source of news for most Americans, but local stations have dramatically reduced their reporting staffs, and the networks no longer try to cover the world and the country as they once did. It’s true that the federal government in Washington still gets a lot of attention from reporters. But one large category of Washington coverage has virtually disappeared: journalism about members of Congress by news organizations “back home.” A generation ago scores of local newspapers and television stations employed Washington correspondents who kept an eye on the members of the House and Senate from their cities and states. Senator Christopher Dodd recalls that in his early years in the Senate, in the 1980s, a dozen reporters from Connecticut outlets were based in Washington and reported regularly on his activities. By the time he retired in 2010, that number had fallen to zero. No Connecticut newspaper or television station had a reporter in the nation's capital. Newseum exterior Facade of The Newseum, incorporating the text of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. David Monack/Wikimedia Commons re there no grounds for optimism, or even hope? Of course there are. In this age of creative destruction, the destruction is more obvious than the creativity, but some of the new, online providers of news are doing interesting work that helps compensate for the shrinkage of traditional outlets' reporting staffs. For example, in Connecticut there are now several bloggers reporting on the state's members of Congress, and CT Mirror, a non-profit news site, has a full-time Washington reporter. Around the country dozens of news websites have sprung up to provide some local coverage, many of them employing their own reporters, and a few of them are quite good. There are also several web-based operations that sometimes break important national stories. The very best of them is ProPublica, a non-profit organization founded by Paul Steiger, the former managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, that is devoted to investigative reporting, an expensive specialty that has suffered in the era of disappearing newspaper profits. ProPublica provides pro bono journalism of the highest quality, as good as the investigative projects of the major newspapers. Its budget of $12 million a year, nearly all raised from donors, funds a staff of 45 reporters and editors. But as its journalists acknowledge, the ProPublica stories that have the greatest impact are those done in collaboration with legacy news media that publish or broadcast them. Its own excellent website has a relatively small audience. Chris Hamby Pulitzer Chris Hamby, right, of the Center for Public Integrity, winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting, poses for a photo with Columbia University President Lee Bollinger during the awards ceremony at Columbia University's Low Library, May 28, 2014, in New York. AP Photo/Jason DeCrow Other non-profit organizations are also providing reporting at a level that only the major news organizations used to offer. The winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting was Chris Hamby of the Center for Public Integrity in Washington, a non-profit watchdog organization that maintains vast electronic files tracing the flow of money into our politics. Marcus Brauchli, who has served as the senior editor of both The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, observed recently that thanks to Internet offerings, the quantity of American journalism has never been greater. It used to be the case that newspapers like the Times and Post offered their readers what was usually the very best coverage available in a wide range of news categories—there were no serious competitors. Today there are competitors in every one: ESPN in sports, Politico in Washington coverage, BuzzFeed in the world of popular culture, and so on. We at the Post used to have a corner on the market in Washington—no competitor could challenge us in any of our major categories. No corners are available now. coverimg New York Times Building Jleon/ Wikimedia Commons f there is some good news, it's hardly enough to be reassuring. Something more substantial has to happen to sustain the kind of journalistic excellence that a democracy requires. Of course there can be technological surprises. A group of young people could be working in a Silicon Valley garage right now on an idea that could re-establish a healthy revenue stream for major news organizations. I certainly hope so. Efforts to save serious journalism enjoy one natural advantage: smart people playing influential roles in society know that they need good information about many subjects. It is conceivable that these citizens, who are a significant audience albeit a small fraction of the total population, will be willing to pay the full cost of the journalism they consume. At first blush this may sound painfully obvious. Don't people usually pay for the services they use? Not the news. Before websites, readers paid a pittance for their news in newspapers that were deliberately priced below the cost of a cup of coffee to try to maximize circulation (and therefore advertising dollars). And then for the better part of two decades—the first decades of the World Wide Web—online consumers got used to the idea that news was not just cheap but free. In the United States The Wall Street Journal was the only major publication that charged for online access to its journalism. Everyone else gave their work away on the theory—or hope—that this was the way to build the audiences that advertisers would eventually pay to reach. Iraq satellite image New York Times paywall. Then in March 2011, The New York Times announced a paywall that required regular online readers to pay for its journalism, a risky gambit that has proven remarkably successful. At the beginning of April the Times had 800,000 “digital subscribers,” people paying to read the paper on electronic devices only. (The daily ink-on-paper Times is bought by 680,000 people, and 1.2 million on Sundays.) Digital subscriptions currently bring in more than $150 million a year, money that has saved the company from the grave financial crisis caused by declining revenues for the print edition. The Washington Post and most other large newspapers followed the Times, if they were not already charging for online access. Though none of the others has had as much success signing up digital subscribers as the Times, the newspaper’s ability to persuade online readers to pay is heartening. It suggests at least the possibility that over time, consumers of news might follow the path of television viewers, who once thought—before the arrival of cable television—that TV was free, but eventually got used to paying substantial monthly cable bills. Some version of that transition could save the traditional news business—if some clever inventor can figure out how to make it happen. Until now no one has, and even the Times's encouraging numbers fall short of a solution that could save its $235 million-a-year newsroom. Sale of Washington Post A morning edition of the Washington Post- August 6, 2013. Amazon.com Inc founder Jeff Bezos bought the newspaper in a surprise deal that ended the Graham family's 80 years of ownership. Reuters/Gary Cameron “Design the electronic classifieds now.” “Design the world’s first electronic newspaper.” Kaiser Memo see the full memo KaiserQuote ast fall, when he met the staff of The Washington Post soon after buying the paper, Jeff Bezos of Amazon spoke about the importance of “the bundle,” as he called the variety of news, opinion, useful information, and entertainment that the Post offers each day. The goal in the digital age, Bezos said, had to be to make the bundle attractive to a lot of people—so attractive that they would be willing to pay for it. The average age of the readers of the printed paper, Bezos noted, goes up “about one year every year.” It's no secret where that leads, he quipped. Quotation Now that he owns the money-losing Post, Bezos faces the challenge of how to sell that bundle. Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital, one of the country's most successful venture capitalists, summarized the problem: “How [can] an Internet property, dedicated to broad-based news and information, ever generate a lot of money? Without solving that riddle, there is no path to prosperity.” For Further Reading Good News About the Future of News Literacy July 2014, Jonathan Rauch Nudging News Producers and Consumers Toward More Thoughtful, Less Polarized Discourse February 2014, Darrell West and Beth Stone A Retrospect of Journalism: What Happened to the Washington Reporters? August 2012, Stephen Hess Of course, a large organization offering “broad-based news and information” is not the only conceivable model. Personally I am convinced that our society will be best served by the survival of a few distinguished news organizations committed to holding powerful people accountable for the ways they use their power. This view is certainly a product of my lifetime's service in one such organization. But there are other possibilities. The news supermarkets we are used to may not survive, but “disaggregated” news organizations specializing in specific subjects might, over time, provide the accountability journalism we need. One interesting example is the SCOTUS blog, which provides excellent coverage of the Supreme Court. It makes no profit, but is supported by Bloomberg. Politico's coverage of Washington and politics, though uneven, is better than that of any but the very best news organizations. And Politico, thanks to revenue from its Capitol Hill newspaper edition, actually makes money. It is also possible that “prosperity” won't be necessary. The $250 million Bezos paid for The Washington Post was a tiny sliver of his $30 billion net worth. For him to cover the Post's losses now costs the equivalent of lunch money for an ordinary mortal—something Bezos could easily afford for decades to come, if he chooses to play the angel's role indefinitely. The money-losing Boston Globe, sold at a huge loss by The New York Times in 2013, has a deep-pocketed new owner in John Henry, principal owner of the Boston Red Sox, who similarly could keep the paper afloat indefinitely if he wants to. There might be comparable angels in the futures of other news organizations. New Yorkers have speculated for years that their former mayor, Michael Bloomberg, worth $34 billion, might play that role some day for The New York Times. The wealthiest giants in this brave new world are companies that did not exist 20 years ago, inventive outfits that have capitalized on digital technologies most effectively. Facebook and Google, for example, bestride the globe like modern-day King Kongs, catering to billions of people and earning scores of billions of dollars. Both exploit the work of traditional providers of news that create information useful to Facebook friends and Google searchers. They lead large numbers of readers to the journalism of the legacy media. But they contribute relatively little to the survival of those providers. Robert G. Kaiser portrait Lucian Perkins Robert G. Kaiser Robert G. Kaiser spent more than half a century as a reporter and editor at The Washington Post before retiring early this year. He covered local politics, served as a correspondent in London, Moscow and Saigon, covered Congress and national politics, and spent sixteen years as a senior editor, seven of them (1991-98) as managing editor. He is the author or co-author of eight books, including The News About The News, American Journalism in Peril, written with Leonard Downie Jr. These firms were created by a new generation of young people whose self-interest may lead them either to realize the importance of the legacy institutions, or figure out how to create new ways to do what the old news organizations did in the past. Financially, it would be easy for Google to rescue The New York Times. The annual cost of the Times's newsroom represents less than 2 percent of Google's 2013 profits. Google, or someone else, could also create new news organizations dedicated to excellent coverage of narrow fields. The future, in Mort Sahl's wise words, lies ahead—but remains invisible. News as we know it is at risk. So is democratic governance, which depends on an effective watchdog news media. Both have been undermined by changes in society wrought by digital technologies—among the most powerful forces ever unleashed by mankind. We have barely begun the Digital Age, and there is no point in trying to predict just where it will take us. News certainly has a future, but what that will be is unclear. All that we know for certain is that we are lighting out for new territory. Join the conversation on Twitter using #BrookingsEssay or share this on Facebook . This Essay is also available as an eBook from these online retailers: Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble, Apple iTunes, Google Play, and on Kobo. Like other products of the Institution, The Brookings Essay is intended to contribute to discussion and stimulate debate on important issues. The views are solely those of the author. Graphic Design: Marcia Underwood and Jessica Pavone Research: Fred Dews, Thomas Young, Jessica Pavone, Kevin Hawkins Editorial: Beth Rashbaum and Fred Dews Web Development: Marcia Underwood

The Decline of Journalism from Watergate to 'Dark Alliance'

Sad but true that some of the only real journalism is coming from not national news sources but independent international one. For example:OPINION(LEFT) PAUL ANDREW HAWTHORNE / WIREIMAGE / GETTY IMAGES (RT) PAUL ANDREW HAWTHORNE / WIREIMAGE / GETTY IMAGES The decline of journalism from Watergate to 'Dark Alliance' What if Ben Bradlee had overseen Gary Webb's investigation into the CIA, Contras and crack cocaine? October 25, 2014 2:00AM ET by Nick Schou @NickSchou There’s a great scene at the end of “All the President’s Men,” the 1976 Hollywood version of Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s years-long unraveling of the Watergate scandal. It features a teletype machine cranking out headline after headline, with the last one reporting the resignation of President Richard Nixon. The ceaseless tapping hammers home an unspoken message in the movie, which ends two years before Nixon stepped down, with editor Ben Bradlee famously telling his reporters to “rest up 15 minutes, then get your asses back in gear.” The work of a watchdog never ends. The fragility of the whole investigation into the break-in and the subsequent cover-up shows how much the veracity of the news depends on the guts not only of reporters but also of their editors and publishers. “Woodstein,” as Woodward and Bernstein were jokingly known, never would have nailed Nixon had they not had the support of an editor with an iron backbone willing to stand up to the White House, which used both anonymous leaks and on-the-record denials to try to kill the story. That editor, Bradlee, passed away on Oct. 21 at the age of 93, which is too bad, because America needs the type of journalistic guts he embodied, now more than ever. A case in point involves another movie now in theaters, “Kill the Messenger,” which is based in part on my 2006 biography of investigative reporter Gary Webb. In 1996, Webb unloaded a three-part series for The San Jose Mercury-News alleging that the Central Intelligence Agency helped spark America’s crack cocaine epidemic by enabling drug traffickers tied to the Nicaraguan Contras to ship into the country and use the proceeds to fund their insurgency against the Sandinista government. Published on the Mercury-News’ website, thereby making it available to all, the series, “Dark Alliance,” became one of the first viral news pieces of the Internet era. As with Watergate, the story led to furious denials from anonymous government sources — only this time The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post rallied strenuously to defend the feds. All three papers published lengthy rebuttals to Webb’s stories, dismissing them as the work of an irresponsible journalist who bent the facts to fit his thesis, thus empowering conspiracy theorists, particularly in the African-American community, which long suspected the U.S. government of complicity in the crack trade. Never mind that a subsequent report released by the CIA at the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal admitted to much wider collaboration with agency-affiliated Contra-sympathizing coke peddlers than Webb ever claimed. “Kill the Messenger,” which stars Jeremy Renner as Webb, depicts the withering media attacks that forced Webb from journalism and may have contributed to his eventual suicide in 2004. In response to the film, The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times recently published stories acknowledging that, in hindsight, their attacks on Webb were overkill and that history had vindicated his basic premise. The Washington Post, on the other hand, published a scathing op-ed asserting that Webb was a fraud and commending his editor at the time, Jerry Ceppos, as “courageous” for pulling Webb off the CIA beat and authoring a letter to readers backing off the story. We are trying to follow in Gary Webb's footsteps not only because the reporting he did was so important and fearless, but how vindictive the way the CIA and media reacted underscores how urgent it is to shine a light on what they are doing. Glenn Greenwald Journalist and co-founding editor of The Intercept As a reporter who covered Webb’s story and the controversy that followed, I happened to be in a position to investigate the drug ring he exposed. One of its members was Ronald Lister, a cop-turned-arms-merchant who sold guns to crack dealers who flew to Central America at the behest of ex-CIA agents, who hired him to provide security services to the Salvadoran military and death squad founder Roberto D’Aubuisson. One of Lister’s business partners at the time was Bill Nelson, a retired CIA deputy director of operations. I had to go to court to force the agency to hand over files on Nelson’s relationship to Lister, most of which remain classified to protect U.S. national security. And that was just the findings of one reporter working for a small alt weekly in Southern California. Imagine what even three of the 17 reporters The Los Angeles Times assigned to destroy Webb could have done. It gives cause to wonder what would have happened if Bradlee rather than Ceppos had been Webb’s editor. For one thing, most of the flak Webb caught involved hyperbole that had been aided and abetted by his editors — chief among them the story’s logo, which featured the image of a crack smoker superimposed on the CIA’s official seal. Had Ceppos stood by Webb and permitted him to continue his work and had other newspapers objectively worked to advance his reporting, the true flaw of “Dark Alliance” — that it radically understated the extent of the CIA’s ties to Contra drug traffickers —wouldn’t have come out only when the CIA decided to confess its sins. But of course, Ceppos, who somehow managed to win an ethics in journalism award from the Society of Professional Journalists for throwing Webb under the bus, was no Bradlee. Investigative reporting is difficult, dangerous work, and it has become something of a lost art form in mainstream American reporting, which is why whistleblowers such as former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden don’t trust American media institutions to report their secrets. Instead, Snowden looked abroad to find a reliably gutsy journalist, then–Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald, to help bring to light what he knew. I recently reached Greenwald by telephone (after four mysterious click-click-click disconnections) at his home in Brazil to ask him if he saw a similarity between what happened to Webb and more recent media attacks on whistleblowers like Snowden and Julian Assange of WikiLeaks fame who came under fire from U.S. officials for sharing government secrets. “The established media in the U.S. is extremely close to the government and will react the same way the government does,” he told me. In the wake of Greenwald’s reporting on Snowden’s revelations, he, like Webb, was subjected to scathing personal attacks in the press, most notably from The Washington Post’s Walter Pincus, who authored the most egregious assaults on Webb’s credibility after “Dark Alliance.” “The government doesn’t even have to carry out the attacks, because the media will do that for them,” Greenwald told me. “You saw that with Gary Webb — going after him personally and ganging up on him — and you see the same thing happening today.” Greenwald recently co-founded The Intercept, an independently funded investigative reporting enterprise. Webb is an “inspiration” for a new generation of whistleblowers and muckraking reporters, according to Greenwald. “We are trying to follow in his footsteps not only because the reporting he did was so important and fearless,” he says, “but how vindictive the way the CIA and media reacted underscores how urgent it is to shine a light on what they are doing.” Unfortunately, America cannot afford to depend on anarchist hackers like Assange or the occasional disillusioned spook such as Snowden to protect our democracy from corruption or abuse. Instead we need a well-functioning and -funded press that employs journalists as fearless as Webb and editors like Bradlee who are willing to carry water for their reporters rather than for the government. Nick Schou is an award-winning investigative journalist whose articles have resulted in the release from prison of wrongly convicted individuals; and in the federal indictment, conviction, and imprisonment of a Huntington Beach, California mayor. He is the managing editor of OC Weekly, the alternative news publication for California's Orange County and Long Beach communities. He is also the author of "Kill the Messenger: How the CIA’s Crack Cocaine Epidemic Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb." The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera America's editorial policy.

'New York Times' Journalist James Risen Prepared to "Pay Any Price" to Report on War on Terror

This is what real journalism is about: 'New York Times' Journalist James Risen Prepared to "Pay Any Price" to Report on War on Terror Risen, who could face prison time, says that "without aggressive investigative reporting, we can’t really have a democracy." 12 COMMENTS 12 COMMENTS A A A Email Print October 16, 2014 | In an interview with Democracy Now!, New York Times journalist James Risen talked about the investigative reporting surrounding the NSA that has put him in the center of a major press freedom case. The Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, who had just released a new book titled "Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War," told Amy Goodman: "You cannot have aggressive investigative reporting in America without confidential sources — and without aggressive investigative reporting, we can’t really have a democracy. I think that is what the government really fears more than anything else." Risen also detailed revelations he makes in his new book about what he calls the "homeland security-industrial complex." Below is an interview with Risen, followed by a transcript: AMY GOODMAN: Today we spend the hour with the journalist at the center of one of the most significant press freedom cases in decades: veteran New York Times investigative reporter James Risen. In 2006, Risen won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting about warrantless wiretapping by the National Security Agency. His story would have come out right before the 2004 presidential election of President Bush over John Kerry. It might have changed the outcome of that election. But under government pressure, The New York Times refused to publish the story for more than a year, until James Risen was publishing a book that would have had the revelations in it. He’s since been pursued by both the Bush and Obama administrations in a six-year leak investigation into that book, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration. James Risen now faces years in prison if he refuses to testify at the trial of a former CIA officer accused of giving him classified information. In June, the Supreme Court turned down his appeal of a court ruling forcing him to testify in the criminal trial of ex-CIA analyst Jeffrey Sterling, who prosecutors believe gave him information on the agency’s role in disrupting Iran’s nuclear program. In State of War, Risen showed that instead of hampering Iran’s efforts, the CIA effectively gave Iran a blueprint for designing a bomb. James Risen has vowed to go to jail rather than testify at Sterling’s trial, which is set to begin in January. In a story broadcast Sunday, General Michael Hayden, who led the CIA until 2009 and, before that, led the NSA, told Lesley Stahl on 60 Minutes he does not think Risen should be forced to divulge his source. MICHAEL HAYDEN: I’m conflicted. I know the damage that is done. And I do. But I also know the free press necessity in a free society. And it actually might be that I think, no, he’s wrong, that was a mistake, that was a terrible thing to do, America will suffer because of that story. But then I have to think about: So, how do I redress that? And if the method of redressing that actually harms the broad freedom of the press, that’s still wrong. The government needs to be strong enough to keep me safe, but I don’t want it so strong that it threatens my liberties. AMY GOODMAN: Well, the Obama administration must now decide if it will try to force James Risen’s testimony and risk sending one of the nation’s most prominent national security journalists to jail. President Obama has already developed a reputation as the most aggressive in history when it comes to targeting whistleblowers. His Justice Department has brought eight cases so far, more than all previous administrations combined. On Friday, federal prosecutors hinted they may decide not to press for Risen’s testimony, under new guidelines issued earlier this year that make it harder to subpoena journalists for their records. James Risen’s answer to this saga has been to write another book. Released today, it’s titled Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War. He writes the book is his answer to how, quote, "to best challenge the government’s draconian efforts to crack down on aggressive investigative reporting and suppress the truth in the name of ceaseless war." James Risen, welcome back to Democracy Now! JAMES RISEN: Thanks for having me. AMY GOODMAN: It’s great to have you with us. JAMES RISEN: Thanks. AMY GOODMAN: So, your new book is Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War. You’re quoting John Kennedy here. JAMES RISEN: Yes, yes. And I think that’s what we have done since 9/11. We’ve paid an enormous price in the name of what we—we started this war after 9/11, this global war on terror, in order to seek justice or retribution or whatever you—however you want to characterize the attitude of America right after 9/11. But today it’s become essentially a search for cash, and there’s lots of people involved in the war on terror today who are doing it because they’re ambitious, because they want status or power or money. And I think of it kind of in the historical sense. The historical context is kind of like in the Middle Ages when you had the Thirty Years’ War or the Hundred Years’ War in Europe, where you developed a whole new class of mercenary soldiers, who all they did their entire careers is go from one country to another to fight wars for money. AMY GOODMAN: Well, as you expose a great deal in Pay Any Price, you yourself are under, as I just documented, enormous pressure. JAMES RISEN: Right. AMY GOODMAN: How do you continue to write these front-page pieces for The New York Times, write this book, Pay Any Price, as you face the possibility of years in jail? JAMES RISEN: Well, it’s what I do. It’s my job. You know, it’s what keeps me sane, is to keep going. If I just gave in to them, then I would be, you know, failing in what I want to do. I want to keep finding out the truth. It’s the thing I’ve tried to do my whole life, is be a reporter and be a writer. It’s the only thing I know how to do. AMY GOODMAN: Well, in a moment, we’re going to talk extensively about these stunning revelations in Pay Any Price, but if you could go back to what you revealed, before Edward Snowden, and how it eventually came into The New York Times, that won it and you a Pulitzer Prize? JAMES RISEN: Yeah, well, the—I guess you mean the original NSA stories. We, in 2004, Eric Lichtblau and I, had a number of different sources who began to tell us early on in 2004 that they were very—they knew something really big, they knew the biggest secret in the government, but they couldn’t tell us, because they were so nervous. They were very tortured by what they knew. And it took months of kind of patience and talking and reporting for Eric and I to figure out exactly what it was that they were talking about, and finally we were able to piece it all together. And in the fall of 2004, we had the story ready to go. I had a great confrontation over the telephone with Michael Hayden, who you just saw, where I read him the—I got him on the phone kind of by bluffing the PR person at the NSA and said, "I need to talk to him right now." And I was shocked that he got on the phone. And I read him the top of the draft of the story, and he goes, "[gasps]." And that’s when I knew we had it. And so, we had the story ready. But then, by, you know, then, Hayden and the government started to crack down on The New York Times and pressured them to hold the story ’til—even though it was ready about two or three weeks before the election, in mid-October 2004. And then, after the election— AMY GOODMAN: Well, wait. JAMES RISEN: Yeah. AMY GOODMAN: Can you just explain, what does it mean when the government pressures, you know, the leading newspaper in the United States? JAMES RISEN: Well, they— AMY GOODMAN: What does that look like? Do they march through the offices of The New York Times into Bill Keller the executive editor’s office? JAMES RISEN: No. Well, usually what they ask is for us to go to them. The first meeting was between—I think it was probably early October, late September of 2004, between me and the Washington bureau chief at the time, Phil Taubman, and John McLaughlin, who was then the acting CIA director, and his chief of staff, John Moseman. And we met at the CIA director’s downtown office at the old executive office building. And it was a very funny meeting, because at that time they didn’t want to acknowledge that the story was right. They didn’t want to officially acknowledge. And so, they had all these hypothetical—we had this very weird hypothetical conversation, where they kept saying, "Well, if you were to—if the government was doing what you say they were doing, it would be very bad for you to reveal that." And then they—then, that was just the beginning of a whole series of meetings with the editors and us, the reporters, in which they said that this is the crown jewel of the U.S. counterterrorism operation, and that if you reveal this, this will damage national security. And so, that was essentially the argument that they used then and they used throughout the entire process. AMY GOODMAN: Well, it went higher than you and the Washington editor. JAMES RISEN: Yeah, it kept going higher and higher and higher. AMY GOODMAN: And the election is coming closer and closer and closer. JAMES RISEN: Yeah, yeah, and they met with Taubman and Keller. And then we had—you know, we in the newspaper, the editors and reporters—met to discuss the story, and Bill Keller decided to hold it. And then the election—you know, so he decided to not run it before the election. And then, after the election— AMY GOODMAN: I mean— JAMES RISEN: Yeah. AMY GOODMAN: Do you think it could have changed the election? I mean, explain the nut— JAMES RISEN: Yeah. AMY GOODMAN: —of your revelation. JAMES RISEN: Basically, the story was that we found out that the U.S. was spying on Americans—the NSA was spying on Americans electronically, listening to their phone calls, international phone calls, back and forth with people overseas, and gathering lots of—doing lots of data mining on their phone and email, and also getting the content of their email, and doing that without court approval. They were going around the FISA court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, which had been set up specifically for that purpose of providing secret warrants for spying on—for eavesdropping on spies and terrorists or suspected spies and terrorists. And the government had decided to go around the law, go around the courts, and not tell anyone else that they were doing that, except a couple hand-picked people in Congress, who were like the chairmen of the intelligence committees. And they were keeping this secret from everyone so they could do it on a vast scale. And we believed that what we were—the people who talked to us about it believed that it was unconstitutional. And that’s why we were pursuing it. AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn to Bill Binney for a minute, who we had on Democracy Now! William Binney was the National Security Agency whistleblower, spent nearly 40 years at the NSA, but retired about a month after September 11, 2001, due to concerns over unchecked domestic surveillance. Speaking on Democracy Now! in 2012, Binney explained what happened. WILLIAM BINNEY: After 9/11, all the wraps came off for NSA, and they decided to—between the White House and NSA and CIA, they decided to eliminate the protections on U.S. citizens and collect on domestically. So they started collecting from a commercial—the one commercial company that I know of that participated provided over 300—probably, on the average, about 320 million records of communication of a U.S. citizen to a U.S. citizen inside this country. AMY GOODMAN: What company? WILLIAM BINNEY: AT&T. It was long-distance communications. So they were providing billing data. At that point, I knew I could not stay, because it was a direct violation of the constitutional rights of everybody in the country. Plus it violated the pen register law and Stored Communications Act, the Electronic Privacy Act, the intelligence acts of 1947 and 1978. I mean, it was just this whole series of—plus all the laws covering federal communications governing telecoms. I mean, all those laws were being violated, including the Constitution. And that was a decision made that wasn’t going to be reversed, so I could not stay there. I had to leave. AMY GOODMAN: That was National Security Agency whistleblower William Binney. So he leaves, and he ultimately has a gun put to his head by federal authorities in his shower—he’s a diabetic amputee—his kid and his wife also being held at gunpoint. JAMES RISEN: Right, yes, unfortunately, and I have a chapter in my new book about the NSA whistleblowers early on, including Bill and Diane Roark and Tom Drake and some of the others. And it’s remarkable what happened to them at the NSA. What we found out, years later—I did not know Bill, I didn’t know Diane or Tom. They were never our sources. But what we found out was, the government thought that they were our sources for our New York Times story, and they were persecuted as a result, even though they had never come to the press. And I detail in the new book, Diane Roark, in particular, suffered amazing persecution. And she tried—even though she tried to go through the channel— AMY GOODMAN: Explain who she was—is. JAMES RISEN: Yeah, Diane Roark—along with Bill, Diane Roark was the House Intelligence Committee staffer in charge of oversight of the NSA, and right at the time of 9/11. And Bill, right after he found out about this new program, went to her, her house in suburban Washington, and told her what he had heard about. And Diane was outraged and shocked, and she couldn’t believe that it was authorized. She thought this must be some kind of rogue program that nobody really knew about. And so, she went to the chairman of the—she went to her bosses, the staff director of the House Intelligence Committee and the minority staff director, to warn them that they’ve got to tell the chairman and the vice chairman of the committee what’s going on. And then she gets this message back: "Don’t talk about this anymore. Don’t investigate it. And keep your mouth shut." And she realizes that the chairman and the vice chairman already know about it and are keeping it secret. And so, she then tries to—goes on this long odyssey within the government of going to all these powerful people that she knows inside the government to try to warn them about this illegal and unconstitutional program. And every time she goes to someone that she respects and who is very powerful, she realizes they already know, they’re in on the secret, and they’re keeping their mouths shut. And finally, about a year later—a couple years later, after our story comes out, the government thinks that she’s our source, and they raid her house, and they raid Bill’s house and a few other people, like Tom Drake. AMY GOODMAN: So, the piece doesn’t get published before the election. You try again right after the election. JAMES RISEN: Yeah, we convinced the editors, well, if you’re not going to run it now, let us try again after the election. And so, after the election, they said OK. And so Eric and I go start working on the story again. We get it re-edited by our editor, Rebecca Corbett, and we have it all ready to go again. You know, we do a lot more reporting. I remember we, Eric and I, knocked on doors, and we went to this one guy who we knew, at his house late at night right before Christmas—we knew he knew about this, and we knock on his door, and he just starts yelling at us for bothering him. And he was clearly scared. He didn’t want to talk. But we had the story ready to go by mid- to late December of 2004, and then the editors killed it again for the same reasons, that it’s national security. And so, by that time, the story was dead. I knew it was—they were not going to run it at all. And so, I had a previously scheduled book leave to work on my book, State of War, and so I decided I’m going to put it in my book. And so I did. And then, when I came back from book leave in the summer—spring or summer of 2005, you know, and I finished the book throughout the summer, and I think by late summer, I told the editors, "It’s going to be in my book, so you should think about running it." AMY GOODMAN: Let me go to Bill Keller in 60 Minutes with Lesley Stahl, when she asked him, then the executive editor of The New York Times, about a meeting he was summoned to at the White House that made Keller decide not to run James Risen’s story. BILL KELLER: The president said, you know, "If there’s another attack like 9/11, you know, we’re going to be called up before Congress to explain how we let that happen, and you should be sitting alongside us." It was, in effect, you know, "You could have blood on your hands." LESLEY STAHL: He was saying, if anything goes wrong, we’re going to blame you. BILL KELLER: Right. AMY GOODMAN: That was Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times. What was your answer to him? I’m sure he said that to you. JAMES RISEN: Well, we had lots of talks over about 14 months. And actually, their talks—you know, the talks we had, me and Eric had, with the editors were very high-minded. It was an interesting debate. And we debated kind of this issue of national security versus civil liberties in a lot of ways. I always thought afterwards, you know, you could have put those debates we had inside the paper on television. They were pretty interesting. But ultimately, what really, I think, convinced Bill was, in the fall of 2005, when they were—after I told them it was going to be in my book, and they decided to re-engage on the story— AMY GOODMAN: Well, that’s putting it politely. It’s going to be very embarrassing— JAMES RISEN: Yeah, right. AMY GOODMAN: —as their top national security reporter reveals his revelations not in the pages of the Times, but in your book. JAMES RISEN: Yeah, yeah. Well, what they said was, "We’ll think about putting"—after I told them it was going to be in my book, in the late summer of 2005, what they said was, "OK, we’ll think about putting it in the paper." But they weren’t committed to it. They wanted to negotiate again with the government. And so, there were a whole series of new meetings with the government, and which was very frustrating to me. What the government told them that fall was: "Risen and Lichtblau have it wrong. We’re not listening to anybody’s phone calls. We’re only getting the metadata, you know, the calling data." And when the editors came back and told us that, we told—Eric and I said, "They’re lying to you." And finally, after a while, Eric and I were able to convince them, you know, that they were being lied to, and I think that had a major impact on their final decision to run the story. AMY GOODMAN: And so, the story comes out, and you win a Pulitzer Prize for your book. But there is something else that the Times decided not to publish— JAMES RISEN: Yeah. AMY GOODMAN: —that is what you are being prosecuted for now. JAMES RISEN: Right. There was another story, a CIA operation involving the Iran nuclear weapons program, in which the CIA had used a Russian defector to give nuclear blueprints to the Iranians. And the idea was that they were supposed to be flawed blueprints that would then send the Iranians down the wrong track on building a bomb. But the Russian told them immediately, "Oh, I can see the flaws," because he was a scientist, he was a nuclear scientist. He says, "I can see the flaws. The Iranians are going to see the flaws." And then he sent a letter. When he gave the blueprints to the Iranians, he gave a letter to the Iranians saying, "You’re going to see that there are problems in these blueprints." And so, it’s quite possible that the Iranians were able to—by being tipped off, were able to find good information in them and ignore the bad information. And that was in my book. I had written that for the paper in—before, and the editors had decided not to run it because the White House asked them not to on national security grounds. And after my book came out, the government began leak investigations of both the NSA story and other things in my book, including that story. I think they finally decided not to come after The New York Times on the NSA story, because it would have meant a major constitutional showdown. And I think they decided to find something else in my book to come after me on, to isolate me from The New York Times. And they picked the Merlin operation. AMY GOODMAN: And they want to know your source. JAMES RISEN: Yeah, they want to know who my sources are for that story. AMY GOODMAN: Did it surprise you that it went from the Bush administration to the Obama administration? JAMES RISEN: Yes. I thought that once the Obama administration came into office, that the whole thing would be dropped. And I was very surprised that the Obama administration continued to pursue the case, when, in 2009, they issued a new subpoena. And they’ve continued to pursue this ever since. AMY GOODMAN: You told New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, President Obama is "the greatest enemy of press freedom in a generation"? JAMES RISEN: Yeah, I think that his record speaks for itself. He’s gone after—he’s prosecuted more whistleblowers and gone after more journalists than any president in history. He’s done—I think that record is going to be a major part of his legacy, of trying to erode press freedom in the United States. AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist James Risen. He has just published a new book—it’s out today—called Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War. When we come back, we’ll talk about what he calls "the homeland security-industrial complex." Stay with us. [break] AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. We’re spending the hour with James Risen, investigative journalist with The New York Times, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. His new book, just out today, is Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War. You’re being pursued by the U.S. government. Will you reveal the name of your source? JAMES RISEN: No. AMY GOODMAN: Because? JAMES RISEN: I just think that the—you know, you cannot have aggressive investigative reporting in America without confidential sources. And without aggressive investigative reporting, we can’t really have a democracy, because the only real oversight for the government is an independent and aggressive press. And I think that’s what the government really fears more than anything else, is an aggressive investigative reporting in which we shine a light on what’s going on inside the government. And we can’t do that without maintaining the confidentiality of sources. AMY GOODMAN: Has President Obama, Eric Holder or anyone else in the administration signaled to you that they may not demand that you testify and reveal your source? JAMES RISEN: No. AMY GOODMAN: These reports that were in The Washington Post on Friday, and Michael Hayden saying, former NSA head saying, that perhaps you shouldn’t be prosecuted, do they encourage you? JAMES RISEN: Yeah, well, I’m glad to hear that, but we’ll see. I don’t know what’s going to happen. AMY GOODMAN: In June, Attorney General Eric Holder met with a group of journalists to discuss press freedom issues and was asked about the Justice Department’s subpoena of you, of James Risen, to testify in the trial of ex-CIA analyst Jeffrey Sterling. According to the Times, Holder said, quote, "As long as I’m attorney general, no reporter who is doing his job is going to go to jail. As long as I’m attorney general, someone who is doing their job is not going to get prosecuted." James Risen? JAMES RISEN: Well, we’ll see. I’m not sure what that means, you know, and it’s all still in the courts right now. So... AMY GOODMAN: And Holder is resigning. JAMES RISEN: Yeah, yeah. So, we’ll see. It’s very unclear what’s going to happen next. AMY GOODMAN: Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War, you have a series of stunning revelations. Why don’t you begin by laying them out? JAMES RISEN: OK. Well, you know, I set out to—to me, what the war on terror became, as I said earlier, this enormous search for power and status and cash. And I began to realize that what we had in the war on terror was we had deregulated national security. That’s essentially what Dick Cheney meant when he said the gloves come off. That means deregulating the whole national security apparatus, taking all the limits off of what we can do in national security. At the same time, we poured hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars into brand-new counterterrorism programs. And the FBI, the CIA and the new Homeland Security department, all the—and the Pentagon, they all had more money than they knew what to do with. And so, they began—to me, it’s kind of like the banking crisis. You had enormous money going into a deregulated industry, meaning the counterterrorism industry, and you had lots of unintended and bizarre consequences. And so, that’s what I’ve found, is the crazy programs that developed; the bizarre nature of the whole war on terror, if you pull up the hood and look inside of it, is just stunning. And I open the book with this, to me, kind of a metaphor for everything that we have, what’s going on now, is, in 2009, there was a small ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery in Section 60, which is where the dead of the Iraq War lay buried. And it was a small group of pro-war people who were celebrating the sixth anniversary of the fall of Baghdad, and which they—what they call Iraq Liberation Day. It’s the day that the statue of Saddam was pulled down in Firdos Square. And I saw Paul Wolfowitz there. And the woman who ran that—who was sponsoring that day’s ceremony was Viola Drath, who was an aging Georgetown socialite. And she was very pro-Iraq War. And then, two years later, she was found murdered in her apartment—in her house in Georgetown. And her husband, who had been going around Washington dressed as a general in the Iraqi army, was arrested for her murder. He had claimed that he had been named a general in the Iraqi army by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. And after he was arrested, the police found a receipt from a printing place in Washington where he had counterfeited the letter and the certificate of being a general in the Iraqi army. And he was a total fraud. He’s now been convicted of her murder. And I thought that was a metaphor for the fact that this war on terror is—a lot of it is just a fabrication, that we are now trying to unravel and deal with. And so, I began to look and to see all of the various things that have happened in this war. One of the first things I came across was how the United States had airlifted billions of dollars to Iraq for use by the Iraqi—the new Iraqi government, and billions had been stolen and moved to Lebanon by Iraqi leaders. Then I began to look at the case of Dennis Montgomery, who was a— AMY GOODMAN: But before you go to Dennis Montgomery— JAMES RISEN: Yeah, yeah. AMY GOODMAN: —the billions of dollars from the U.S. went from Iraq to Lebanon. JAMES RISEN: Right. It was stolen— AMY GOODMAN: Where? JAMES RISEN: It was stolen from Baghdad and moved secretly to a bunker in Lebanon, where it was being held by wealthy and powerful Iraqis, because they wanted to steal it and use it for themselves, and also probably with some Lebanese money launderers who were watching over it. AMY GOODMAN: So, this billion dollars of taxpayer, U.S. taxpayer, money is— JAMES RISEN: Well, it was actually Iraqi government money that had been held in the United States, but the U.S. government was airlifting it by the U.S. Air Force. So, it was just a—you know, no one was doing any oversight of any of these programs. AMY GOODMAN: Dennis Montgomery? JAMES RISEN: Dennis Montgomery is a fascinating character, who—he was a computer software person, self-styled expert, who developed what he said was special technology that would allow him to do things with computers that other people couldn’t do. One of the things that he developed was this imaging technology that he said he could find images on broadcast network news tapes from Al Jazeera. He said that he could read special secret al-Qaeda codes in the banners on the broadcasts of Al Jazeera. And the CIA believed this. And he was giving them information based on watching hours and hours of Al Jazeera tapes, saying that "I know where the next al-Qaeda attack is going to be based—is going to happen." And the Bush administration and the CIA fell for this. AMY GOODMAN: And it was in the news zipper at the bottom of the Al Jazeera broadcasts? JAMES RISEN: Well, he says it was in the banner. But anyway. And so, it was this great—if you talk to him, he argues, well, they—that’s what they were looking for. You know, they convinced him to look for this. You know, it depends on who you talk to. But it was one of the great hoaxes of the war on terror, where they actually grounded planes in Europe, the Bush administration, based on information they were getting from Dennis Montgomery’s so-called decryption of Al Jazeera broadcasts. And then there’s a whole number of other things, like Alarbus, which was this covert program at the Pentagon where a Palestinian involved in that was actually trying to use the bank account set up by the secret program, Pentagon program, to launder hundreds of millions of dollars. And the FBI investigated this, but then tried to keep the whole thing quiet. AMY GOODMAN: How much did the U.S. government give to Dennis Montgomery? JAMES RISEN: Millions of dollars. And then he used—he was a heavy gambler and eventually, I think, had a lot of financial problems as a result of that. So, it’s a strange—to me, the Dennis Montgomery story is one of the strangest, because what it shows is, early on in the war on terror, as I said, the CIA and all these other agencies had so much money to spend on counterterrorism that they were willing to throw it at everything. They were so afraid of the next terrorist attack that they were willing to believe anybody who came up with some idea. And I called that chapter about Montgomery, you know, "The Emperor of the War on Terror," because nobody wanted to say that the emperor had no clothes. AMY GOODMAN: I mean, it had very real effects, aside from spending all that money. JAMES RISEN: Yeah. AMY GOODMAN: For example, planes being sent back. JAMES RISEN: Yes, yes. There were planes grounded. International flights between the United States and Europe and Mexico were grounded. There was talk at the White House even of shooting down planes based on this information. AMY GOODMAN: Because they could be used, as with September 11th, as weapons? JAMES RISEN: Yeah, as missiles or whatever. And so, it was crazy. It was absolutely insane. AMY GOODMAN: And it was only the French government who then did a study? JAMES RISEN: Yes, yes. Yeah, the French government finally—you know, the U.S.—the CIA and the Bush administration didn’t want to tell anybody what was really happening, where they were getting this information. You know, "This supersecret information about Al Jazeera, we can’t tell you." And finally, the French intelligence service and the French government said, "You know, you’re grounding our planes. You’ve got to tell us where you’re getting this information." And they got—they finally shared the information with them, and the French got a French tech firm to look at this, and they said, "This is nuts. This is fabrication." And after a while, the CIA was finally convinced maybe the French were right, and they stopped talking about it. They didn’t do anything else. They just like shut it down eventually, but never wanted to talk about what had really happened. AMY GOODMAN: Then Dennis Montgomery, revealed as a con man— JAMES RISEN: Yeah, yeah. AMY GOODMAN: —in jail for that? JAMES RISEN: Well, no, he’s not in jail. But it was a—he actually got more contracts after that, with the Pentagon and other agencies. And he continued to operate for a long time. You know, he kind of went from one agency to the other. AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to James Risen, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist for The New York Times. His new book, just out today, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War. When we come back, war corrupts, endless war corrupts absolutely. Stay with us. [break] AMY GOODMAN: We’re spending the hour with James Risen, the investigative reporter for The New York Times who won a Pulitzer Prize for his book, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration. It also won him, well, becoming a target, not only of the Bush administration, but of the Obama administration, for year after year, right through to today. He could face years in jail for not revealing a source on one of the stories that he has exposed around a program called Merlin and the U.S. giving flawed blueprints for a nuclear trigger to Iran. This issue of facing years in jail, how are you preparing for this? JAMES RISEN: Well, as you said, I’ve had a lot of time to think about it. And it bothered me a lot more at first. I was more nervous about it when it first started. But now it’s just like kind of background noise in my life, and so I’m just kind of used to it now, because I know exactly—I have no doubts about what I’m going to do, and so that makes it pretty easy. AMY GOODMAN: So, you’re covering the very people who could put you in jail. JAMES RISEN: Yeah, sometimes, yes. As I said earlier, that’s the only way to deal with this, is to keep going and to keep—the only thing that the government respects is staying aggressive and continuing to investigate what the government is doing. And that’s the only way that we in the journalism industry can kind of force—you know, push the government back against the—to maintain press freedom in the United States.