When I call the Coast Guard, media officials there confirm that video of the undersea disaster exists but they tell me that I can’t have it because it belongs to BP. I argue that the video qualifies as public information and quickly file a demand for it under the federal Freedom of Information Act.
I might still be waiting today if it weren’t for three Democrats in Congress who were on the same trail: Congressman Ed Markey of Massachusetts, Senator Bill Nelson of Florida, and Senator Barbara Boxer of California. I discover that they, too, are seeking the video. With combined efforts, I hope the cumulative pressure will force the video’s release.
It works.
Fewer than two days after I start covering the story, three weeks into the spill, the CBS Evening News airs the world’s first underwater glimpse of BP’s catastrophe (May 18, 2010). Shocking black plumes of oil gushing from the uncapped well at a rate that surpasses all estimates. The video engages and galvanizes viewers around the world. Even more outrageous, as far as I’m concerned, is that we learn the Coast Guard—the very agency paid by the public to protect our interests—has been watching video of this disaster in real time but keeping it secret from the public and Congress from the start. It’s not surprising that the company might seek to keep the video hidden, but the government shouldn’t be helping the cause. In subsequent days, the CBS Evening News and Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer continue airing my reports exposing BP’s and the government’s wildly lowball estimates of how much oil is leaking. (It’s three million gallons a day rather than the 42,000 gallons initially claimed, or the 210,000-gallon figure later provided to Congress.) I also catch the U.S. Interior Department giving interviews and issuing press releases that misrepresent its own experts’ opinions for the purpose of understating the scope of the disaster.
This is the first time I witness what will become a recurring observation under the Obama administration. Normal political and news media relationships seem to be turned on their head.
Substitution Game: If a corporate environmental disaster had occurred under a Republican administration, the lines would be clear. Democrats and most in the media would fault Republicans and their hostility toward the environment, aversion to regulation, and cozy relationship with industry. But under a new, popular, African-American, Democratic president, few are as eager to point fingers.
Some Democrats in Congress privately confess to me that they can’t risk criticizing the government’s response to the oil spill for fear that it would look like a criticism of the Obama administration. Some in the press seem to have similar concerns. Their heart just isn’t in it—which is evidenced by the fact that three weeks into the spill they hadn’t even bothered to ask: where’s the video?
In November 2012, BP pays a record $4.5 billion fine for, among other crimes, lying about how much oil was spilling from the Deepwater Horizon wreckage. The government officials who marched in lockstep with BP the whole way are not held similarly accountable.
| THE POLITICAL-INDUSTRIAL PR MACHINE
As they’ve melded into one, the government has adopted and perfected many of the public relations and crisis management strategies employed by big corporations. It’s a natural outgrowth of their incestuous relationship. The big difference is the government is using your tax dollars to promote itself and advance its propaganda.
One way they do this is by self-producing videos and building their very own television production facilities where the upper echelon give interviews and speeches, controlling everything from content to lighting. While the nation has descended into unprecedented debt, Congress and federal agencies ranging from the Department of Health and Human Services to the National Institutes of Health have been using millions of your tax dollars to build or expand their television studios. The Food and Drug Administration’s facility boasts “a number of mobile and fixed sets, as well as various configurations, to allow for a studio audience of over 100.” The Transportation Security Administration sports a studio with “Hitachi high-definition cameras, Fujinon lenses and LCD based teleprompters mounted on Vinten Vision studio pedestals and Vision 20 fluid heads.” And when top officials with those federal agencies appear on camera, naturally, they have to look good. So your tax dollars may kick in for the cost of their hairstylists, makeup artists, and wardrobe consultants. One insider told me the head of a federal agency even had her fashion “colors” analyzed at taxpayer expense (are you a winter, spring, summer, or fall?).
In addition, the Pentagon has its own twenty-four-hour channel, which features military news, interviews with top defense officials, and programs such as The Grill Sergeants. While the Pentagon frets over sequestration cuts, and the troops listen to talk of cutting their pensions, your tax dollars pay to produce programs such as a cooking show competition that features mess hall cooks and aides to generals battling it out over dishes such as seared ahi tuna and lamb with blueberry wine sauce.
Both the Defense Department and the Centers for Disease Control provide taxpayer-funded advisors to television and Hollywood entertainment producers to promote accuracy—or propaganda—depending on your view.
Some of the public interest justifications for these assets are dubious.
In 2013, Congress catches the IRS making Star Trek and Gilligan’s Island parody videos to “educate” federal employees at a conference. When Secretary of Energy Steven Chu resigns from the Obama administration, the federal agency that he led produces a slick photo tribute to him—using your money. It touts Chu’s incredible “successes,” but forgets to mention any of his scandals, such as his failed efforts at playing venture capitalist with tax dollars in green energy initiatives like Solyndra. And by its own admission, the Pentagon’s Film Liaison Office gives for-profit filmmakers free use of taxpayer assets, from tanks to jets, but only if the film portrays the positive images the Pentagon wants. If not, the assets are withheld. According to the documentary Hollywood and the Pentagon: A Dangerous Liaison: “Scripts are cut and sometimes watered down. Characters are changed and historical truth, sometimes fudged. One director might be loaned combat ships and jets. . . . Another director, whose script displeases the army, may be refused any kind of support. . . . Few great war films have escaped the influence, or even the censure, of the U.S. Army.”
It’s “pure propaganda,” according to the documentary. And you’re paying for it.
Like big corporations, each federal agency and all 535 members of Congress have teams of taxpayer-funded media and communications specialists to advance their messages. A few years ago, a well-placed insider at the U.S. Department of Agriculture confessed to me that even he was surprised to learn that his own agency supposedly had more than 1,200 employees working in some sort of media relations capacity nationwide. (And on a given day, exactly zero of them may provide information requested by the media on a timely basis.) Your tax dollars pay their salaries, but many times they’re little more than private publicity agents for their bosses: spinning, avoiding, and obfuscating as expertly as any of their corporate counterparts.
Too often, we let them get away with it.
If the news media were to collectively hold public officials accountable, the officials wouldn’t be able to run and hide. At least we could make it more difficult. But it seems that there are a relative few journalists doing all the chasing and more who see all that as—well, unnecessary and perhaps a bit rude. They don’t seem to share the view that public officials are answerable to the public. They make it easy for politicians to believe that the public serves them rather than the other way around.
Combine complacency in the news media with the incredible publicity forces behind the political-industrial complex and you begin to understand how little of the truth you sometimes get. They often have unlimited time and money to figure out new ways to spin us while cloaking their role in doing so.
| BLURRED LINES
If you’re confused about all the influences behi
nd what you see on the news and how they affect the product, there’s good reason. At times, there’s a liberal political bias in the mainstream media that tilts toward stories favoring liberal social issues and philosophies. But there’s also a competing conservative, corporate bias that favors specific companies, industries, and paid interests. Unfortunately, the result isn’t an ideal balance of complete information about the world; it’s often a distorted and perplexing mix. This trend has become more predominant in the last couple of years as powerful interests have mastered their methods of influencing us, and some of our managers have embraced the influence believing that they’ll keep their lucrative jobs by going along, rather than resisting.
The capitulation to special interests may preserve these news managers’ jobs in the short term, but in the big picture they’re ensuring a quicker demise of the entire platform by alienating and eroding the audience that we supposedly serve. While the network evening newscasts brag that increasing numbers of people are watching, the total television broadcast network news audience compared to that which is available remains minuscule. Many in the public believe that we’re feeding them a lot of pabulum. I’ve never before heard so many people say so—liberals, conservatives, and people who define themselves as neither.
In February 2014 I’m at 524 West Fifty-Seventh Street, the main CBS News offices in New York, when a couple of colleagues happen to strike up a conversation that veers into the issue of corporate conflicts of interest. One CBS News producer who predates me at the network by at least a decade discusses how corporate interference has long been a hard reality in the news business. Several of us share our various war stories on the subject. All agree it’s worse now.
So what is the mysterious process behind the decisions as to which stories make the news on a given night? Some stories are carefully chosen and edited by a small group of broadcast news managers because they serve a specific set of agendas.
In Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky state that commercial news organizations disseminate propaganda on behalf of dominant private interests and the government.
“The U.S. media do not function in the manner of the propaganda system of a totalitarian state,” write the authors. “Rather, they permit—indeed encourage—spiritual debate, criticism, and dissent, as long as these remain faithfully within the system of presuppositions and principles that constitute an elite consensus, a system so powerful as to be internalized largely without awareness.”
I agree with the observations. We routinely convince ourselves that we’re questioning authorities and approaching news stories with open minds. In fact, our discussions usually take place within the confines of the narrowest parameters preset by our own—or our supervisors’—“system of presuppositions and principles that constitute an elite consensus.”
There are also other factors at play. Many story topics are selected by managers who are producing out of fear and trying to play it safe.
Playing it safe means airing stories that certain other trusted media have reported first, so there’s no perceived “risk” to us if we report them, too. We’re not going out on a limb; we’re not reporting anything that hasn’t already been reported elsewhere. But it also means we’re not giving viewers any reason to watch us.
Playing it safe can mean shying away from stories that include allegations against certain corporations, charities, and other chosen powerful entities and people. The image of the news media as fearless watchdogs poised, if not eager, to pursue stories that authorities wish to block is often a false image. Decisions are routinely made in fear of the response that the story might provoke. The propagandists’ heavy-handed tactics have worked: they don’t even have to pick up the phone and complain— news managers demonstrate a Pavlovian-style avoidance response when presented with a story they fear will bring about negative reaction. We’re weak and diffident when we needn’t be.
Many investigative reporters around the nation are experiencing the same thing. It’s a trend. Longtime Emmy Award–winning reporter Al Sunshine retired from the CBS owned and operated station in Miami, WFOR-TV, the summer before I left the CBS News network. Afterward, he made similar observations.
“Because of the recent lack of support and commitment for my investigations, I faced an almost daily battle to get the time to work my stories and had to fight harder than ever for airtime,” Sunshine told me. Though his brand of investigative and consumer stories was wildly popular with viewers, sometimes resulting in new laws being passed and criminals getting prosecuted, he says he was told his stories were “too negative.” Instead, he was often reassigned to day-of-air news coverage.
“Advertisers are dominating news judgment in news organizations all over the country. The public interest is being diminished in the interest of corporate advertisers and lobbyists. What’s almost universally accepted as ‘business as usual’ in Washington, corruption between lobbyists’ dollars and political favoritism, is slowly but surely becoming the norm for many news organizations as well,” Sunshine contends.
It may be growing worse, but historical narrative implies there’s always been an element of this conditioned avoidance response in the corporate news world. In his 1967 memoir, Due to Circumstances Beyond Our Control, CBS News president Fred Friendly expressed the discomfort that top management felt over its star reporter Edward R. Murrow: “During the 1954–55 season we did a two-part report on cigarettes and lung cancer, and both CBS and [CBS sponsor] Alcoa aluminum company felt the pressures of the tobacco industry, which buys both air time and aluminum foil. The attitude at CBS was: ‘Why does Murrow have to save the world every week?’ ”
In another instance, Friendly quoted CBS founder Bill Paley as telling Murrow, “I don’t want this constant stomach ache every time you do a controversial subject.”
These tendencies to censor topics that generate objections from their powerful targets aren’t necessarily spoken or even consciously addressed. Those of us who report on these sorts of subjects aren’t told that our original stories are undesirable because they’re not “safe” or because they challenge powers.
“News management manipulation is subtle,” observes Sunshine. He says it comes in many forms, like the withholding of resources such as cameramen and producers, and conveniently dropping investigative reports from the newscast when the timing of the show happens to run too long to fit it in.
We’ve figured it out.
Ironically, management’s avoidance response can result in absurd machinations that inadvertently generate the very liabilities that they’re trying to avoid.
Some of us have boiled it down to a saying: “They’re often worried about the wrong things; not worried about the right things.”
In one instance, I reported a story on a credit card scam that showed surveillance video of a suspect caught on camera allegedly using one stolen card after another at Target, Wal-Mart, and Macy’s. Neither the story, nor our use of the surveillance video, was precarious in any sense. The police had publicly released the video, it had already appeared on the local news, the suspect had been identified, and I had run my story through the CBS legal department for clearance. Even under the standards of the current skittish Evening News management, this story was “safe.”
But just prior to air, executive producer Pat Shevlin views the finished piece in New York, and rings the hotline phone to the Washington newsroom.
“We can’t show the suspect’s face,” she protests.
“Why not?” I ask.
“He hasn’t been convicted of anything,” Shevlin sputters back.
I take a breath. The idea that a criminal suspect’s face can’t be shown on television comes from someone who lacks the most basic knowledge of law. I’m having way too many of these conversations lately and I already know it means that she won’t listen to me: she’s scared of the story. What I tell her
from here on out won’t matter.
Nonetheless, I patiently explain that somebody doesn’t have to be convicted of a crime for us to identify him or show his face. Under Shevlin’s mistaken idea of the law, arrest mug shots would never be shown on the news. We wouldn’t have shown O. J. Simpson’s face when he was accused—but never convicted—of murder. We wouldn’t have identified any criminal suspects prior to conviction: Timothy McVeigh. John Gotti. Jack Kevorkian. Lorena Bobbitt. Tom Delay. Martha Stewart. Michael Jackson. Bernard Madoff. The Unabomber. Osama bin Laden. None of those stories would have been done if we were to consistently apply Shevlin’s warped view of the law.
Still, she balks. “Call his lawyer and ask for permission to show his client’s face.”
Another breath. I look at the clock. It’s nearly 6 p.m. The story is set to air at 6:30 p.m. The odds that I’ll reach the suspect’s public defender and get a yes from him in the next half hour are remote. But more important, the idea that we would set a precedent by asking the suspect for permission to use his image has to rank as one of the more preposterous suggestions I’ve ever heard. Even in a newsroom.
“Well, we don’t need his permission,” I reiterate. “And I doubt he’d give it. I wouldn’t if I were him.”
“Okay,” she says, still sounding unconvinced. We hang up the hotline phone. Within seconds, she sends a message telling me to blur the suspect’s face, anyway.
“Just wuzz it a little,” she says.
With time ticking, I rush back to the editing room and break the news to my producer, Kim Skeen, and our editor.
Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama's Washington Page 5
