“But [the car company] says there’s not a problem,” she retorts. “So why are we doing this story???!?!”
I’m puzzled. Why would she take the PR claim of the automaker that’s accused of the wrongdoing as gospel? Why would she imply that’s justification to keep us from doing the story?
I reply with an analogy.
“Well, Ford and Firestone said their tires on Explorers weren’t dangerous,” I point out. “It doesn’t mean they’re telling the truth.”
There’s a succession of similar meetings over a period of months and the message is clear. My producer and I should steer clear of stories that accuse corporations of doing anything wrong. At least that’s the message we infer.
Regardless, as long as Murphy wants the stories, and he does, we continue onward.
Then one day, my bureau chief calls my office and tells me she “wants to see my notes” on a story I’m preparing that raises questions about an American Red Cross disaster response. I’d never been asked such a thing in all my years as a reporter and hardly knew how to respond. Especially since, as I mentioned, the bureau chief traditionally had played no role in my reporting chain of command. I gather what I’ve scribbled on various notepads and papers and take the stairs from my third-floor office to the second floor, where the bureau chief resides.
“You can look at my notes on this or any story,” I tell her. “But there’s no way that will give you a total picture of what we’ve done during weeks of research. Frankly, I think it’s wholly inappropriate.”
She exhales and looks deflated.
“I know,” she tells me, sounding exasperated. “I don’t know what else to do.” Then she says something unexpected: the directive to discourage my stories had come from high up in the news division.
“We must do nothing to upset our corporate partners,” she confesses she’s been told.
I’m temporarily dumbfounded. Who are our “corporate partners”? Advertisers? Somebody else?
“For how long?” I ask.
“Until the stock splits,” she answers.
“Well, when is that supposed to be?”
She names a date a few months down as the time period when the stock is expected to split. In the end, it didn’t. But the episode leaves no doubt in my mind that there are corporate pressures behind the effort to discourage my hard-hitting reporting.
When it comes to our coverage of the terrorist attacks on Americans in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012, I don’t know about all the pushback CBS News received. But I do know I’m the target of some of it.
For example, on April 30, 2013, I write an article for CBSNews.com about Benghazi whistleblowers who are still working in the government. They want to speak to Congress but feel that the Obama administration is blocking them from doing so.
Shortly after my story is published, my mobile phone rings. It’s CBS News Washington bureau chief Chris Isham. He says White House spokesman Jay Carney is trying to reach him.
“I haven’t called him back yet,” Isham says. “Any idea why he’s upset?”
“I’m sure he doesn’t like the Benghazi story,” I answer. I’m used to the routine.
“It’s fair and accurate,” I tell Isham. “It also quoted a State Department spokesman and the president directly from his press briefing today.”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought. It looks pretty straightforward. I just wanted to know the story before I call him back.”
The next day, Isham reports to me that he had followed up with Carney, who was, indeed, “very upset.”
“What did he say was wrong with the article?” I ask.
“He didn’t really have anything specific,” Isham says with a chuckle. “He just didn’t like the whole thing.”
Even absent a legitimate complaint, those who spin the media know that pushback tends to aggravate news managers. It forces them to deal with uncomfortable phone calls and nagging emails. It’s time consuming. It follows them home. They’d rather avoid it. That’s the whole point—and it’s one reason why pushback often works. There’s nothing better than news managers who stand strong and resist pushback. They listen to the complaint, consider it, and if it lacks merit, politely tell the complainer to fuck off. As a result, frivolous complaints lessen over time.
I’ve heard more stories than I can possibly recount about the Obama administration’s unique brand of pushback and retaliation against any pesky media that prove uncooperative. There’s no better example—all wrapped up in one—of what’s wrong with this government misbehavior than what happened when the White House press gang became angered by a national television outlet in 2010. An outlet that refused to go along with the Obama agenda like others had.
What outlet? you ask. FOX? CBS? The New York Times?
No. It’s C-SPAN. The cable television network that has to be considered by more Americans to be fairest of them all.
It’s summer of 2010. C-SPAN wants to add footage of President Obama to a White House documentary it produced in the final years of the George W. Bush administration.
President Obama agrees to tape a brief interview in the Oval Office on August 12 with Brian Lamb, founder and executive chairman of C-SPAN’s board of directors. The nine-minute interview, conducted with both men standing, is innocuous.
“What have you changed in this room?” Lamb asks.
“We have not redecorated yet,” answers the president. “Given that we are in the midst of some very difficult economic times, we decided to hold off last year in terms of making some changes.”
All is well until about two weeks later when a C-SPAN official gets a call from Obama’s director of broadcast media, Dag Vega. Vega tells C-SPAN that in two days, the Washington Post will be breaking the story of the president’s reported multimillion-dollar renovation of the Oval Office. Vega is calling to make sure C-SPAN won’t follow up the news by running its interview with the president. The one taped just days before in which President Obama had implied that, in the spirit of austerity, there would be no Oval Office redecoration.
“You’re going to save the interview for the documentary [set to air a few weeks later], right?” Vega reportedly asks the C-SPAN official. If the public sees the president’s interview now, they might wonder whether he’d been clueless or intentionally misleading about the impending makeover.
From C-SPAN’s viewpoint, this is a problem. There was never any agreement as to when the president’s interview would air. And it would be foolish to hold the relevant material only to air the inaccurate interview later in the documentary.
Discussions go back and forth with the White House saying that the agreement was for the president’s interview to air in the future, around the release of the updated documentary. But with the turn of events, C-SPAN decides it has no choice but to air the interview sooner, when the story breaks about the Oval Office redecorations. The White House follows by pressuring C-SPAN to change its mind, and suggests the cable television network will be punished with lack of access if they do air it.
On August 31, as Vega had foretold, the Washington Post breaks news of the president’s Oval Office facelift. C-SPAN airs the president’s interview the same day.
That night, Josh Earnest, then-White House deputy press secretary (now White House press secretary) reportedly fires off an angry email to C-SPAN. The biggest surprise is that he sends it in the middle of the president’s live address to the nation about the drawdown of U.S. troops from Iraq. You’d think he’d have bigger fish to fry.
In the email, Earnest accuses C-SPAN of being egregiously unethical and of violating terms of the interview. Though there’s no evidence of the existence of any prior agreement, he continues to insist the White House would not and did not agree to an interview with the president without specifying the terms under which it would air. Earnest says no other news organization has done such a thin
g to the Obama White House. And he threatens to withhold future access.
For its part, frustrated C-SPAN officials feel they’re the ones who have been wronged. After all, the president gave an interview containing incorrect information, in which the content was almost immediately invalidated.
Like a bad-tempered child stomping his foot against the exercise of logic and reason, Earnest accuses C-SPAN of a violation of trust and says they’ll be unlikely to see any further cooperation from the president as long as he remains in office.
One can only guess whether the Obama White House has made good on that threat to withhold cooperation. But C-SPAN’s programming since that date reflects no interview with either the president or the first lady.
The message? Don’t cross the White House even if it involves the simple act of airing an on-the-record, on-camera, unedited interview with the president of the United States—the consummate public official. This White House gets to direct its coverage and the terms. Good behavior will be rewarded with access. Dissenters will be punished.
I hate to say it, but I think many news organizations would have agreed to the White House demand to hold the president’s interview, no questions asked.
There’s nothing more heartening than confident news managers unintimidated by pushback. Conversely, there are few things more disheartening than weak news managers who succumb to pushback. You can tell when it’s happening. No matter how solid the sources, no matter how fact-based and proven the reporting is, no matter that it’s been cleared by the network law department: you can pretty much kiss it good-bye.
News managers who hate pushback the most tend to be most affected by it. The irony is that it ensures they’ll be the target of even more. The complainers smell blood. They have a sixth sense for the weak, for those seeking the path of least resistance. Word gets around. Succumbing to pushback begets more pushback.
And if you, the reporter, push back against the pushback? You just might be labeled a troublemaker. Bosses who don’t like you pushing them to defend a story might turn on you. They might whisper that you hang on to unanswered questions too long. They might accuse you of having an agenda. Otherwise, they mutter, you’d just move on to something else and make things easier on everyone. You’d believe your government when it says a story isn’t true. You’d relinquish your mojo. Voluntarily.
Without so much as a whimper.
| “IT’S TOUGH ALL OVER”
Not long ago at a reporting conference, a colleague from another news division discussed among a small group the disturbing trend away from investigative reporting.
“Do they want your investigative stories at your network?”
“Nope,” I answered. “Yours?”
“Nope. Nobody wants them anymore. We just end up posting most of them on the Web.”
“That’s what I do!”
Later, a network news colleague remarked about how weather stories had never been so popular as they were in the 2013–2014 winter season. You don’t tick off powerful people by reporting on the weather. It fills the broadcast. And the ratings go up. (Of course, I could argue that the ratings would go up if we had topless female anchors presenting the news. Or I could argue that the ratings might go up more if we devoted ourselves to putting on an original, fearless newscast.) In any event, resorting to weather stories so often became such a shameless fallback position, some in the CBS New York fishbowl took to calling it “weather porn.”
It happens in local news, too. In some cases, reporters are outright told to stay away from certain topics or industries. Sunshine, the longtime Miami reporter, recounts a meeting he attended years ago where he says he overheard a top station manager tell the head of an auto dealers’ association that his newsroom wouldn’t be doing any “negative car stories.”
“I sat at the table stunned,” Sunshine says.
And years earlier, when Miami was seriously plagued by drug-related violence, Sunshine says local news management told him his continued reporting on drug seizures and murders was “bad for local tourism.”
“Suddenly, those stories got a lot less airtime. I was branded a troublemaker” for pushing the stories, Sunshine told me.
It’s tough all over. In 2012, I was in a New York hotel room getting ready to attend the Emmy Awards, where I didn’t yet know it but I was about to receive the year’s investigative reporting award for Fast and Furious. It had been a year and a half of me pushing an important story that few at my network wanted pursued. Some of them put a great deal of effort into marginalizing and ridiculing the reporting to try to discourage it. But I didn’t allow the resistance to interfere with what I saw as my job as a journalist. I was a troublemaker. Now, to have the series of stories recognized by esteemed, independent peers in the industry validated my instincts rather than the misguided efforts of some of my CBS managers. Anyway, I’m preparing for the award ceremony when I get a call on my cell phone from a number I don’t recognize. It’s from a colleague who works at a national publication. I don’t know this person terribly well. The colleague sounds extremely distraught.
“I didn’t know who else to call . . . I hope you don’t mind.”
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
“I just spent months investigating a huge story—and they’re blocking it. Keeping it out of the paper. It’s criminal.”
I stop getting ready and sit down on the bed in the hotel room to listen. Someone I am only acquainted with is calling me to share; to unload. The colleague goes on to explain—tearfully—the story and the obfuscation. It sounds familiar. I’ve been there, too. This person had done nothing more than to bring a terrific, well-researched story to the table. Something that should draw accolades. But as the story worked its way up the editing chain, somebody in the organization had deemed it to be untouchable material. The reporter began to be treated like an outcast for arguing that it was an important and valid story that the public should be told. That censoring it would be improper. The reporter came to be excluded from meetings about the story. Supervisors implied the reporter was uncooperative. Controversial. Colleagues began avoiding the reporter. The whisper campaign began. This is how whistleblowers in the government and at corporations often get treated. But it happens in the news business, too. Groupthink is a powerful thing.
In February 2014, a colleague at a competing news outlet emailed one of my coworkers. He was discouraged because he said that his organization was increasingly turning away from investigative reporting. My coworker showed me the email, remarking, “I hate to tell him—it’s the same way here.”
And in March 2014, another competing-network colleague shares with me a tale of frustration regarding a truly meaningful story that took weeks of research and prodding to get the original information. A story that I would have been proud to have dug up myself. But once completed, the story’s airing was postponed from one day to the next and ultimately died on the vine.
“I eventually just posted it on the Web,” says the colleague.
He continues by telling me that a short time later, the government released official statistics mirroring the information that he’d gathered weeks earlier. Only now was it considered real news—safe news—since the government was pushing it and other news outlets picked it up. Now it was widely reported. The colleague’s news organization could’ve had the story, exclusively, long before everyone else. But they’d taken a pass.
It’s tough all over.
And most network correspondents who do original reporting and have been around awhile will tell you this is the case. We’re supposed to be the ground-level newsgatherers who have the contacts, sources, and editorial judgment to bring unique ideas to the broadcasts. But more often than not, that’s not what the broadcasts want anymore.
| COPYCAT COMFORT
What they do want infuriates producers and correspondents far and wide. The broadcasts want what they see on
the competition.
It’s counterintuitive to the whole idea of journalism. When I attended the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications, there were two ways to ensure an automatic F on an assignment. One was by making a fact error. The other was by copying a story idea from the newspaper. That was strictly verboten for two reasons. First, it was considered ethically akin to plagiarism. Second, we were taught that the foundation of our mission as journalists is to find and develop stories that the audience isn’t getting on an alternate source. We learned to shun basic news conferences and press releases except as a starting point: they’re what somebody wants you to report. Now dig in: what is it you should report?
But today, too many of the broadcast producers lack a solid foundation themselves and don’t trust the judgment or skills of their own people. If it hasn’t been reported elsewhere, how can they be sure it’s news? In fact, it’s only news after somebody else reports it. Or after one of our relied-upon special interests, such as the government, says it’s news. These managers don’t trust that their own experts in the field can produce ideas as good as, and often better than, the competition. They desire what the others have. This means they manically monitor sources like the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Daily Beast, the Huffington Post, and Buzzfeed. They follow the Twitter accounts of their favorite bloggers and sources. They watch the cable news channels all day long and dispatch a relentless stream of notes and phone calls to the bureaus in the field.
Here’s a story from the New York Times. Can you do this for us tonight?
Buzzfeed is reporting (fill in the blank). . . . Can someone confirm?
Politico just tweeted out (fill in the blank). . . . Have we confirmed?
A colleague from a competing network told me, “Once it’s in the Huffington Post, you’ll get a call from a senior producer saying ‘we need you to do this story.’ . . . To them, it’s a fact because it’s in the Huffington Post. But if you provide the fact [from your original sources], it’s not a fact to them because they need to see it in the New York Times or the Huffington Post or whatever is the website of the moment. It’s just disappointing.”
Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama's Washington Page 8
