Watergate and the True Believers

I just came across this outstanding piece by Jim Hougan:

On the New Inquisition

It is a wonderfully scathing and perfectly on-point indictment of the MSM and Watergate:

The real issue, which in the end may be even more important than the who-shot-who of Watergate, concerns the arrogance of media such as the Washington Post, which pretend to an infallibility they do not have. For decades, the Post and its cousins have refused to tolerate (much less undertake) a re-examination of the Watergate affair---or any other major story in which they may be said to have a stake.

Watergate, after all, was journalism's finest hour. Courageous editors and intrepid young reporters risked everything in a brave effort to save America from a White House ruled by Sauron and the hordes of Mordor. To question the received version of the story is, therefore, a kind of heresy. And so the Post becomes the Inquisition, labelling its critics "conspiracy theorists" while warning the public against the "danger" of such thinking. Clearly, the Post would rather its readers let the newspaper do their thinking for them.

RTWT.

Hougan’s point was on display a few days back on CSPAN. They rebroadcast a 1994 panel discussion put on by the Discovery Channel to promote a five hour mini-series on Watergate and the companion book by Fred Emery.

Among the participants was John Dean, James McCord, and Daniel Schorr. The documentary hewed carefully to the Standard Account (i.e. John Dean’s story) and the discussion initially followed this well trod ground.

Before too long, unexpected challenges appeared. Critical questions were raised. Each one of them threatened to undermine the documentary and the narrative it promoted. In each case, the questions were not answered; they were simply brushed aside.

The most electric moment occurred when a gentleman in the audience introduced himself as John Barrettone of the police officers who arrested the burglars in the DNC’s offices. He could not understand why the documentary made no mention of the key that one of the burglars, Eugenio Martinez, tried to hide during the search. Barrett stated that he had photocopies of the key, the notebook it was hidden in, and FBI reports that confirmed that the key opened the desk of Ida “Maxie” Wells, a DNC secretary.

As readers of Silent Coup or Secret Agenda know, Wells is central to the revisionist accounts of Watergate which all posit that John Dean was involved in the break-in as well as the cover-up. (See Hougan’s article for a concise synopsis).

Barrett’s question pointed to a grievous hole in the documentary. How could it ignore such an important item?

Norma Percy, one of the producers, blithely dismissed his concerns. “We looked into that” and “Martinez does not corroborate your story”. The panel quickly moved on.

It was a stunning demonstration of how the True Believers do history. Percy clearly believed that she debunked a pernicious myth. Her evidence, however, was the word of a convicted felon. Moreover, her team seems not to have spoken to a critical witness (Barrett) or to have looked at his evidence. For all her cool confidence, her work sounds less like research and more like grasping at straws.

Of course, Barrett’s question had to be ignored. It completely undercut the documentary’s status as the “definitive history”.

The next two challenges came from one of the panelistJames McCord. Both were pointed comments to John Dean that were ripe with hidden meaning.

McCord’s first question related to the promise of presidential pardons. All the defendants came to believe that they would receive them. However, the Nixon tapes show that the president was only willing to consider a pardon for Hunt.

As McCord emphasized, it was the phantom promise that convinced the burglars to shut up, plead guilty, and receive long prison sentences.

Daniel Schorr, who moderated the session, was completely uninterested in this subject and moved on before McCord received a satisfactory answer.

The question is potentially explosive. If we accept McCord’s version of the story, someone at the White House pushed the cover-up far beyond what Nixon authorized. It would be good to know who this eager beaver was and what motivated his lies.

Again, the True Believers were uninterested in enlightening the public and simply repeated their catechism: “Nixon bad, Nixon bad.”

The final, and funniest moment of the discussion, came in response to the great, unanswered Watergate question: What were they looking for?

The consensus answer was the same old same oldcorrupt paranoid Nixon was worried that the DNC had damaging information about Nixon’s dealings with Howard Hughs. (NB: A panel that began by praising the documentary for its meticulous and exhaustive search for the facts was now proffering only theories, speculation and rumor.)

Dean, however, had to answer and answer carefully. Twice questions from the audience had hinted that he might be responsible for instigating the break-in. His response was solemn and judicious and artful.

Of course he had no inside knowledge and he could only answer as an honest truth-seeker: “talking to people after the fact.” He then gave a tremendous non-answer- “they” (who?) “were on a fishing expedition.”

If Dean had offered a motive, then some one might have wondered if his own motive was a better explanation than Mitchell’s or Colson’s or Nixon’s. But Dean’s answer is that there is no answer. If there is no answer, then we should just forget the question.

Then, Dean tried for a bridge too far. “Jim McCord,” he informed the audience, told him that Spencer Oliver’s office was just “a target of opportunity.” The team had an extra bug; they had to put it somewhere; and Oliver’s office was nearby.

Brilliant! McCord’s own words get Dean off the hook. If Oliver’s office was not targeted, then there is no reason to ask what happened in that office.

And then Honest Jim McCord, the man who blew the lid off the cover-up, slapped John Dean silly.

Instead of supporting Dean’s recollections, he almost blew derailed the proceedings.

“John, you have an interesting memory.” McCord described it as “slippery”. It slides over things” and “omits things that are key.”

He went on to describe how Dean once offered to testify on his behalf in a civil trial if McCord would give him dirt on CIA.

We never got to hear all of what McCord had to say. Other panelists intervened and herded the discussion back to safe topics like Nixon’s paranoia and the righteous work of the Ervin Committee.

Our loss; Dean’s gain. Par for the course in Watergate history.

Some might ask if any of this matters. The break-in happened over 36 years ago. Nixon is gone and so are most of the other principals.

The simplest answer goes back to Solzhenitsyn’s admonition: “Live not by lies.” Watergate triggered the greatest constitutional crisis since the Civil War. Our understanding of it should be based on the “best obtainable version of the truth” rather than self-serving stories by interested participants.

An event as big as Watergate should be a fertile subject for historians. By now, there should be competing schools interpretation, relentless digging in the archives, and a bookshelf of heavily-footnoted monographs examining every angle of the affair.

Instead, what we see are historians mechanically ratifying the first rough draft of a narrative set down in 1973-74.

James Rosen, now of Fox News, was present at the conference and tried to get the producers explain why they backed away from the Silent Coup thesis. He did not get a respectable answer then but he has never stopped asking questions. He just recently published his biography of John Mitchell which adds to our understanding of the break-in and its cover-up.

In a recent interview with Hugh Hewitt, Rosen underlined a gross dereliction of both journalists and historians:

What I did want to mention was two sets of archives that no other researcher had every before asked to see, which I was quite shocked. One was the internal files of the Watergate special prosecution force.

This is a terrible indictment of both the MSM and professional historians. Here we have two groups who pride themselves on their curiosity and skepticism. Yet both are almost willfully blind when it comes to researching one of the most important events in our past. But, as Hougan points out, that does not prevent them from telling us how we should think about Watergate.

Keith Olbermann

The New Yorker has a pretty good article on MSNBC's star who has become the face of NBC News:

One Angry Man

It's not a puff piece, but the writer does go easy on KO.

This older article from New York Magazine is a little tougher:

Limbaugh for Lefties

As i read them, i kept asking myself-- How did such an obnoxious, pompous ass get so many chances? Time after time KO cratered his career and burned his bridges. Yet, there was always a network willing to give him another show.

Wow! Isn't blowing a confidential source a grave journalistic sin?

David Graham, former editor of the Duke Chronicle, broke a pledge of confidentiality to John in Carolina . His main justification seems to be spite and wounded ego . Little whiny boy did not like the criticism JiC had of his handling of the Duke lacrosse case.

Four smart guys look at the future of newspapers

David Warsh is somewhat optimistic:

Traditional print journalism, rooted in newspapers’ semi-monopolies on advertising and information, has been teasing apart, becoming dis-integrated, for nearly a century ever since the first radio station broadcast the news and accompanied it with “commercials.” The advent of television was another inflection point, but posed no threat to newspapers’ help-wanted and classified advertising; the advent of the Internet has been quite another matter. The best newspapers seem certain to survive the onslaught of the World Wide Web. Probably they will retain their primacy at the top of the explanatory chain their presentation can’t be beat; they come out only once a day; paper-and-ink corporeality means they can’t be changed; and printing presses, delivery networks and reputation all form formidable barriers to entry against competition. But newspapers of the future will be slimmed-down versions of their former selves, web-savvy, their print editions aimed mostly at elites.

Nicholas Carr is more pessimistic:

As soon as a newspaper is unbundled, an intricate and, until now, largely invisible system of subsidization quickly unravels. Classified ads, for instance, can no longer help to underwrite the salaries of investigative journalists or overseas correspondents. Each piece of content has to compete separately, consuming costs and generating revenues in isolation. So if you’re a beleaguered publisher, losing readers and money and facing Wall Street’s wrath, what are you going do as you shift your content online? Hire more investigative journalists? Or publish more articles about consumer electronics? It seems clear that as newspapers adapt to the economics of the Web, they are far more likely to continue to fire reporters than hire new ones.

Speaking before the Online Publishing Association in 2006, the head of the New York Times’s Web operation, Martin Nisenholtz, summed up the dilemma facing newspapers today. He asked the audience a simple question: “How do we create high quality content in a world where advertisers want to pay by the click, and consumers don’t want to pay at all?”

The answer may turn out to be equally simple: We don’t.

R. S. McCain is extremely gloomy:

You can talk about online news until you're blue in the face, but it won't change the fact that Americans now read much less than they once did.

What is happening to newspaper circulation is simply this: As older readers die off, they are not being replaced by younger readers.

The reason for that is that young people -- and by that, I mean, people under 40 -- don't read nearly as much as do their elders. And it has nothing do with print vs. online. If you are under 40 and reading news online, you are an exception, a rarity, among your peers.

Why has the reading habit declined among those under 40? First it was cable TV, then it was the VCR, now the DVD -- and you could add video games to that list -- the increased availability of on-demand video has accustomed young people to process information that way. Just as reading is habit-forming, TV is also habit-forming, and the TV habit has flourished at the expense of reading.

American Digest is as gloomy as McCain, but also wildly happy:

Of course, the real elephant drooling in the room of newspapers like the Seattle Times these days is "the forgotten reader." These are the potential readers who, because of the unremitting liberal tone and slant of the Times in both the news hole and on the editorial page, loathe the Times and the whole sector of Seattle society it represents.

Now you may say, in a town as overwhelmingly liberal as Seattle, "Screw those troglodyte, Republican morons!" Well, you can say that but then you will, sooner or later, fire 200 of your employees. And that will be only the start.

Why? Because in an "overwhelmingly liberal town" you are talking about, at most, around 55% of the potential readership that agrees with you. This means you are leaving about 45% of potential readership out of the equation altogether. King County has about 2 million people. That means that 45% of potential readership is not at all a trivial number, and yet the Seattle Times takes every opportunity to alienate them. Result: Mass sackings and many millions lost.

And yet the Seattle Times, as well as numerous other newspapers now dying in the US, never ever cops to its point of view as the reason why it is failing.

FWIW, I hope Warsh is right, but I fear that McCain is on to something when it comes to the death of reading.

I do disagree with one point he makes:

Having been in the newspaper business since 1986, I have unfortunately had a ringside seat to watch the industry's decline. And the reason I know that liberal bias is not a sufficient explanation for this decline is the fact that small "hometown" newspapers -- which have never reflected the liberalism that plagues the major metro dailies -- have suffered equally, if not worse, from the decline.

I’ve lived in a bunch of different places over the years. Some were liberal communities (Madison, Wisconsin) while others were conservative (Carlisle, Charlotte). In every city and town, however, the local paper was and is more liberal than the community it serves. In Madison, the papers were very liberal, Here in Carlisle the Sentinel is only a little to the left of center. This is a striking stance, though, in a community that voted for Bush 60/40 in two elections.


The fact that newspapers tilt left is not the only reason they are declining. For a large part of the market, however, it is a net negative. It is one more hurdle that they have to clear in order to convince the non-reader to buy their product.

The biggest problem is that technology and social trends have destroyed their raison d’etre. Much of the “news” that fills their pages is not NEW when the reader gets to it. It has been on cable TV, radio and the Internet for hours. The headlines are familiar while the wire copy adds little depth.

A newspaper might have value as a trusted aggregator of stories. It could deliver value by providing more depth than competing media. Both “solutions” run into internal barriers in newspapers, as they exist today. Their liberal tilt undercuts their trustworthiness so that many readers do not trust their news judgment. The endless rounds of cut backs in the newsrooms leave them with few resources to upgrade the quality of their content.

Perhaps their greatest weakness is that there are no great editors trying to create something new and better.

Readers are important, but advertising revenue is the key to newspaper viability. There are two areas the industry could address in order to shore up their long-term position.

1. Develop better online advertising. One reason that web revenue cannot offset losses from the print side is that many advertisers cannot use it for brand marketing. The click-through, direct response model works great for cheap car insurance and male enhancement supplements. It is less effective for cars, beer, clothing, etc. As readers move to the web, some of the biggest advertisers cannot follow: they have to advertise in other venues.


It is incumbent on newspaper publishers to find and promote online advertising method/styles that will work for a wide range of products. Agencies will not do it because they are agnostic when it comes to media platform. If newspapers want better advertising they have to find and promote it on their own.

2. The self-referencing “professionals” in the advertising industry overvalue people like themselvesyoung, urban, single, childless, iconoclastic. They undervalue those who are different. Advertising spending is shaped by this prejudice. Marketers believe that commercials have to target young, hip influentials while older suburban consumers are a lost cause.

Newspapers and broadcast television are penalized because their readers/viewers are discounted. Agencies expect to pay less to reach an older audience.

There is very little hard data to bolster this advertising conceit. It makes sense for newspapers to attack this idea and demonstrate that their print readership is a valuable target market for a vast array of products.

They cannot expect the advertising industry to do it for them. That runs counter to the industry’s self-image. Further, it would also reveal the fact that the typical agency is a one-trick pony that hasa no idea how to reach people over 40.

See also:

The newspaper: Today and tomorrow

UPDATE: R.S. McCain comments further here.

Debunking a rumor can make it seem more true?

This is fascinating yet discouraging at the same time:

Rumor’s Reasons

By FARHAD MANJOO

The psychologists expected that seniors would mistakenly remember some false statements as true. What was remarkable, though, was which claims they most often got wrong the ones they had been exposed to multiple times. In other words, the more that researchers had stressed that a given warning was false, the more likely seniors were to eventually come to believe it was true. (College students in the study did not make the same mistakes.)

To understand this turnabout, says Norbert Schwarz, a psychologist at the University of Michigan who worked with Skurnik on the study, it helps to know how our brains suss out truth from fiction. To determine the veracity of a given statement, we often look to society’s collective assessment of it. But it is difficult to measure social consensus very precisely, and our brains rely, instead, upon a sensation of familiarity with an idea. You use a rule of thumb: if something seems familiar, you must have heard it before, and if you’ve heard it before, it must be true.

This helps explain why the JFK conspiracy theories persist. Debunking them makes them more familiar which causes some people to believe them.

This is an area where Fox News could do good work. It is also perfect for their tabloid tastes and methods. Imagine if they tackled this mother lode of conspiracy theories. Skip the question “was there a conspiracy?”. That question has been answered definitively by Posner and especially Bugliosi. The unexamined angle is the beliefs and actions of the rag tag band of loons and frauds who represent the critics of the Warren Commission.

It is a wonderful story of lying leftists, UFO believers, comsymps, intellectual wannabees, KGB money, and wacky charlatans. There are even connections to John Kerry, O. J. Simpson, and Hollywood.

Like I said, it is a story right in FNC’s wheelhouse.

The great thing for Fox News is that all the hard digging has been done for them. It is sitting out here in the internet and in books. Hugh Aynesworth could fill an hour just telling stories about his encounters with the “CT community.”

Bad journalism is more than liberal bias


As a conservative, I am put off by the relentless liberal preening you see on CNN. As a thinking human being I’m revolted by the grotesque circus that is the Nancy Grace Show. Nonetheless, it is a sad fact that when CNN is good, it is very good. So good, in fact, that it leaves the cheap tabloid prime time of Fox News in the dust.

Their recent program on the Martin Luther King assassination was a great case in point. In telling the story, they let the conspiracy theorists make their charges. Then, at the end, they demolished them with photographs, police reports, and witness testimony. For a brief moment, truth prevailed over tabloid gossip.

Contrast that with FNC’s appalling Greta van Sustren who keeps promoting the idea that a royal conspiracy had a hand in the death of Princess Diana. There is no evidence to support such speculation, but Fox allows (encourages?) her to keep beating that same dead horse.

The Duke lacrosse case was another instance where FNC’s addiction to cheap sensation left it eating the dust of its liberal competition. Its talk radio model gave a forum to hoax enablers like Georgia Goslee and Wendy Murphy where they spewed their lies and bile. It was “60 Minutes” that investigated the case and laid out the many misrepresentations of Mike Nifong. No one at Fox had the courage of Ed Bradley.

Why Cass Sunstein is wrong

Free to Browse


Sunstein shows little awareness that the dominance of the general-interest intermediaries he has in mind -- mass media outlets that large majorities of the citizenry were exposed to -- was a historical curiosity of the 20th century that had never been seen before and will, in all likelihood, never be seen again. The Founding Fathers lived in a polarized and fragmented media environment dominated by pamphleteers and partisan newspapers. To hear Sunstein tell it, republican virtues are imperiled by the emergence of a media market that is becoming more, not less, like the one that flourished when our republic was founded. This is counterintuitive, to say the least.

An interesting double standard

From Patterico:

The Interesting Ethics of Chuck Philips: Protecting His Own Dishonest Sources While Risking the Lives of Law Enforcement Informants

Is this really journalism?

A peek behind the curtain of how the "experts" make it onto the Nancy Grace show

At noon on April 4, Dittrich said she will be e-mailed a copy of the show's topic for the day, and will appear on the show at 8 p.m.

Dittrich said her portion will be filmed from Cleveland. The show is based in New York City.

"It's very exciting and a little intimidating," she said. "I think what scares me the most is not knowing the topic until that day.

Now there is a fine example of the "journalism of verification".

I know that Nancy Grace is the worst sort of tabloid dreck. OTOH, it is part of the CNN family. During the show the screen crawl frequently reminds viewers that CNN is the "most trusted name in news."

An entertaining and important book

From the foreword by Wes Pruden

No one ever wanted to find the conspirators in the assassination of John F. Kennedy more than Hugh Aynesworth. No one ever searched with more diligence, more determination,or with more dogged dedication to expose the plot and identify the plotters.

But Hugh, like every good reporter, learned early to follow the facts. The good reporter loves the surprise of finding where the facts lead, if not to a conspiracy to something more interesting and more unexpected, to a tangled story of unlikely men and women caught up in malice, misfeasance, and murder.

No one knows more about malice and murder than Hugh, who has stalked politicians, movie stars, wayward preachers and priests gone bad, mad men, crazed widows and serial killers, for more than half a century. No one knows as much about this particular tale of malice and murder than Hugh, who through the coincidences of a day fraught with coincidence and happenstance, was the only person in Dallas present at the assassination of Kennedy, the scene immediately following the slaying of Officer J. D. Tippit, the capture of Lee Harvey Oswald, and the murder of Oswald by Jack Ruby.

But was it coincidence? Or was it skill? Journalists will tell you that good reporters are taught but great reporters are born, that instinct is what gives great reporters the ability to sense where the story goes next, the talent for being in the right place at the right time when "news happens."

Newspapers, mental blinders, and business models

My local paper is making some radical changes in what they do. The accent is on “local” with national and international news a secondary offering.

The editor put it this way in her Sunday column:

Starting Monday, local news leads off the paper, and national/world news will take the back seat.

Overall, that seems like a smart idea. It’s a solution media bloggers have been promoting for several years. It lets newspapers compete in an arena where they have a comparative advantage over cable TV and the internet.

Basic marketing stuff; reposition your product so you can leverage a competitive advantage. So far, so good.

If there is a worm in the apple, it lies in the mental blinders journalists wear, blinders that are rooted in the myths that adhere to journalistic culture. Simply put, what journalists do differs sharply from what they think they do.

That divergence shows up later in her column, in a throwaway piece of self-congratulatory boilerplate:

It’s not for nothing that some wise person said a long time ago that publishing a newspaper means inventing an entirely new product from scratch every single day. A car manufacturer can’t say that and could you imagine what it would be like to drive a vehicle produced that way? But you can’t imagine publishing a vital newspaper on an assembly line.

That sounds nice, but it is clearly untrue. Putting out a daily paper involves a lot of rote activity. Nor do readers expect an “entirely new product” each morning.

On the latter point, McLuhan said it best:

People don’t actually read newspapers. They step into them every morning like a hot bath.

On the production side, Scott Shane of The New York Times offers a decidedly unheroic view of his craft:

A typical daily reporter on deadline calls a couple of people and slaps something into the paper the next day.

From this perspective, the problem for a local newspaper editor is very similar to those faced by a manager of an industrial concern. In a nutshell, how do you manage a group of employees doing boring work for low pay so that you can make a product customers will pay for?


See also:

The newspaper today and tomorrow

UPDATE:Robert Stacy McCain lays out the grim economics of the modern newsroom:

Honing the ax

JFK: The conspiracy puzzle

The vast majority of Americans believe that JFK was murdered by a conspiracy that may or may not have included Lee Harvey Oswald. This has been true for decades.

That is sad on many levels. It is also puzzling. The belief in conspiracy took hold at a time when the MSM was powerful and trusted and the MSM initially defended the Warren Commission.

For example, CBS News and Walter Cronkite (“the most trusted man in America”) did a four part special report on the assassination in 1967. They rebutted the charges made by Mark Lane and other “critics”, yet the conspiracy train kept moving on and gathering steam.

In that same year, NBC News and The Saturday Evening Post ran big stories that were harshly (and rightly) critical of Jim Garrison and his so-called “investigation”. Once again, the conspiracy theories kept finding adherents.

It is astounding when you think about it. A handful of cranks, frauds, and charlatans managed to convince a majority of the public that there was a conspiracy in Dallas. For some reason, they were more persuasive and more influential than the MSM at the height of its power.

What is killing newspapers?

Great piece in Slate by Jack Shafer:

Simple Simon

What the auteur of The Wire doesn't (and does) understand about the newspaper business.

See also:

The newspaper today and tomorrow

Failing upward

Editor Melanie Sill is leaving the Raleigh News and Observer

Melanie Sill is named The Bee's new top editor

Of course, the PR flacks and internal spin-meisters want to put the best face on it:

Sill was in the thick of one of the most explosive stories to hit North Carolina in recent years, the accusations of rape against a group of Duke University lacrosse players.

After the players were eventually exonerated, the national media were roundly criticized for taking the rape allegations at face value

.That may be how it looks inside the media bubble. For those of us who followed the case, The N&O’s performance was abysmal on many, many levels. In fact, I’d argue that the paper’s performance won it the coveted title of “most embarrassing screw up in the annals of daily journalism.”

Previous high-profile scandals (Janet Cooke, Jayson Blair) involved individual malfeasance and slipshod editorial oversight. The Washington Post and New York Times also deserve credit for how they handled their screw-ups. When questions arose about their stories, the bosses investigated, took action, and told the public what went wrong.

Contrast that with how the N&O handled the lacrosse case. Their attacks on the players was not the work of a single rogue reporters. The editors pushed the story hard and flooded the zone to trash the team. In short, the paper failed to get the story right when they were trying very hard to get the story.

What really hurts the N&O is not that they made mistakes. Rather, it is their obstinate refusal to acknowledge those mistakes. Unlike the Times and the Post, they have refused to give a full explanation of what went wrong and how they intend to prevent future errors.

It is understandable that a young reporter got conned by a sob story. It is embarrassing that her editors bought the same story that ignited the firestorm. It is ludicrous that the paper still defends their early reporting and tries to shift the blame to “national media.”

OTOH, it paid off for Sill who gets a nice promotion and a ticket out of Raleigh.

Two other points:

We see again how “public editors” work mainly as PR flacks for their paper:

The News & Observer's public editor said the paper did a far better job than most of digging beneath the surface but committed some "serious missteps" in the first few weeks, including making references to the accuser as "a victim."

Once again, they praise themselves with faint damns.

Also, this is worth a laugh to those who followed Sill’s blog and her testy relationship with internet readers:

Hailed as a risk taker who will push the newspaper further into the Internet age

Debunking some myths about the Jena 6

Media myths about the Jena 6

There's just one problem: The media got most of the basics wrong. In fact, I have never before witnessed such a disgrace in professional journalism. Myths replaced facts, and journalists abdicated their solemn duty to investigate every claim because they were seduced by a powerfully appealing but false narrative of racial injustice.

I should know. I live in Jena. My wife has taught at Jena High School for many years. And most important, I am probably the only reporter who has covered these events from the very beginning.

Sounds like another case where the media picked a narrative before they established what the facts were.

The old boys club at work


I'll admit that I don't have high expectations for ombudsmen or "public editors". An interesting example of the problems inherent in the role shows up in this story:

Schreiber Keeps an Eye on ESPN 'Monolith'

Schreiber actually has a good grasp of the basic problems at ESPN:

Schreiber has been quite critical of ... the loud, talking heads who shout too much
***
Schreiber criticizes some of the anchors of the "Sports Center" shows throughout each day, complaining that those people make themselves more important than the news.
***
Schreiber wrote a strong and excellent column claiming that sportscasters doing a game should "keep their eye on the ball."
***
She said, "The most consistent complaint I get from viewers is that the announcing team is not sufficiently focused on the game." She explained that game announcers often digress from the game "by discussing topics near and far from the game at hand".

So far so good. But how can she believe such things and then do something like this?

Throughout her critiques, Schreiber lauds some ESPN talking heads such as Tony Kornheiser...

Come on now. Kornheiser is one of the most high profile figures at ESPN and he is guilty of every talking head sin that Schreiber condemns. He is loud, lazy, ill-informed, and self-indulgent. His primary role on Monday Night Football is to divert attention away from the game and onto some subject he like more.

Maybe i am the suspicious sort, but i wonder if this is the reason Kornheiser gets a pass:

Throughout her critiques, Schreiber lauds some ESPN talking heads such as Tony Kornheiser, for his work on "Pardon The Interruption." Tony was on the Times sports staff as a reporter with me when Schreiber was the sports editor.

It's easy for Schreiber, with her "postgraduate degree in literature" and her tenure at the NEW YORK TIMES, to chastise ex-jocks and reporters from lesser papers. But she just can't quite say a mean word about litle Tony who worked with her at THE TIMES.

As with most public editors, Schreiber is, first and foremost, a member of the journalist s guild. Further, she is a member of its most exalted order-- New York Times alums. That shapes her thinking and her criticism. What she calls "perspective" we in the gret unwashed call "blinders."

Duke lacrosse: The News and Observer hopes we are stupid

They apparently want credit for being "the first major publication to pick apart the prosecution’s case".

That claim is laughable to anyone who read what the N&O was printing in the summer of 2006.

In this post from January, i wrote:

But the truth is, they ran alot of stories on the Duke lacrosse travesty, however their coverage has not been fair, accurate, comprehensive, or exhaustive. They began with vicious attacks on the lacrosse team , a sanitized interview with the dancer/escort, and a docile acceptance of Nifong's statements. Since then they have made grudging attempts to cover the new developments fairly (Joseph Neff has done stand-out work) but they have also made many missteps. Most importantly, their coverage has not been comprehensive because they have never "exhaustively" examined their coverage nor owned up to their mistakes.

I think that is still a fair assessment.

If you read through these posts, you can see that the N&O was a Nifong-enabler long after they claim that they became an important critic.

Their culpability continues to this day. They know that the DPD lied in the early days of the case. Yet, they are unwilling to address those lies for the record. The reason is simple: those liars were important sources for the N&O.

Richard Jewell (III)

I came across this outstanding article from 1997.

AMERICAN NIGHTMARE- THE BALLAD OF RICHARD JEWELL (.PDF)

It deserves to be read in its entirety. Here are a few points that caught my eye:

A. Louis Freeh might not have told the whole truth in his memoirs. (gasp!). He portrays himself as disengaged from the investigation. Brenner found that some FBI agents thought differently:

The case became an investigative catastrophe, which laid bare long-simmering resentments of many F.B.I. career professionals regarding the micromanagement style and imperious attitude of Louis Freeh and his inner circle of former New York prosecutors, who have worked together since their days at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District. Within the bureau, the beleaguered director now has a new nickname: J. Edgar Hoover with children.

AND

In November and December, the Office of Professional Responsibility conducted an exhaustive investigation into the Jewell affair. Responding to an attempt by headquarters and certain officials to distance themselves, according to F.B.I. sources, several agents, including a senior F.B.I. supervisor in Atlanta, have provided the O.P.R. with signed statements insisting that Freeh himself was responsible for "oversight" during the crisis. These agents "shocked the investigators" because they reiterated, when asked who was in charge of the overall command of the investigation, that it was the director himself.

Moreover, Freeh acts as though leaks were something he deplored but had to live with (“That’s Washington”). Brenner, in contrast, shows that Freeh and those around him were masters at leaking and using the press to make themselves and the Bureau look good.

B. The immolation of Richard Jewell was not something that just happened. The Bureau lit the match and poured the gasoline. The first tip to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution naming Jewell came from an FBI agent. Brenner’s reporting suggests that the leak may have been part of the G-men’s strategy to break Jewell and that Freeh was partly responsible for setting the plan in motion:

Freeh made a decision: however experienced Montgomery, Fuentes, and Mawn were, this investigation would be run by Division 5 of the F.B.I., the National Security Division, a former counterintelligence unit that has been looking for a purpose since the Cold War ended. Trained in observation, division members rarely made a criminal casetheir strength was intimidation and manipulation rather than the deliberate gathering of evidence to be presented in court. The F.B.I. promptly declared the bombing a terrorism case and placed it under the authority of Bob Bryant, head of the division. David Tubbs of Division 5 was sent to Atlanta to be the spokesman and to augment Woody Johnson, the Atlanta special agent in charge (S.A.C.), who had been trained in hostage rescue and who was awkward in press briefings. Tubbs was not as experienced in criminal cases as Mawn or Montgomery, who returned to Newark and Quantico, respectively, "to get out of the line of fire," according to numerous F.B.I. sources. But Bryant and Freeh were reportedly micromanaging the S.A.C.’s and, later, the case agents Don Johnson and Diader Rosario.

The FBI intimidation of Jewell was by no means subtle. They followed his every move in three and four car caravans. They questioned his friends at their job sites. They sent 40 people to search his mother’s small 2-bedroom apartment.

C. The fruitless and vicious pursuit of Richard Jewell had other consequences. First, the real bomberEric Rudolphwas free to commit other crimes including a fatal bombing in Birmingham. That is a point often overlooked when a case of wrongful prosecution or a police rush to judgment takes place. The innocent suffer while the guilty are free to commit more crimes.

Second, AG Janet Reno and her deputy Jamie Gorelick became concerned with the FBI’s treatment of Jewell and their overall handling of the case. Did the Atlanta bombing and the FBI’s tactics influence subsequent policy for terrorism investigations? It’s hard to tell, I’ve seen no reporting that looks at this point. But it seems like an interesting question.

When it comes to “The Wall” and FISA, we usually tell the story backwards. We start at 9-11-01 and look for the “mistakes” that let it happen. The Jewell story offers us a different perspective. Unfortunately, at this time, no one has dug into the question of how the FBI mingled intelligence and investigation functions in the Atlanta case. Nor have they looked at the internal DOJ reaction to that part of the fiasco.

Brenner does provide us with one telling passage:

But the local U.S. attorney, Kent Alexander, insisted that their phones were not tapped. "There are no wiretap warrants," he said.

Maybe I am just the suspicious type, , but that denial is sounds almost Nifongesque.

D. Brenner is quite good at showing the harm done by the unholy alliance of cops and police reporters. When it comes to crime stories, the press is not the guardian of our rights; they are the compromised junior partners of police. At worst, they become the willing accessories of rogue police and prosecutors.

The page-one story had a double byline: Kathy Scruggs and Ron Martz. Walter had told these two early on that they would be the reporters assigned to any Olympic catastrophe. Martz, who had covered the Gulf War, had been assigned the security beat for the Olympics; Scruggs routinely covered local crime. Scruggs had good contacts in the Atlanta police, and she was tough. She was characterized as "a police groupie" by one former staff member. "Kathy has a hard edge that some people find offensive," one of her editors told me, but he praised her skills. Police reporters are often "dictation pads" for local law enforcement; recently the American Journalism Review sharply criticized The A.J.C. for the scanty confirmation and lack of skepticism in its coverage of Jewell.

Finally, Brenner relates a small, but telling, anecdote about America’s Favorite Failing Newsreader. This takes place after Jewell has to cancel an appearance on the Today Show after he is exonerated by the DOJ:

That evening a very testy Katie Couric tracked Bryant down at Nadya Light’s apartment, where we had gone to watch the news. "I want you to know that I canceled interviewing Barbra Streisand in L.A. for Richard Jewell. Don’t think he is always going to be a news story. No one will care about him in three days," she said, according to Bryant.

So America’s Aging Former Perky Sweetheart is a bitch. She was right about one thing. No one cared about the wrongly accused hero. For weeks the press had made his life a living Hell and passed along every scurrilous rumor and vicious lie. That was called NEWS. The truth, however, did nothing for the ratings and Richard Jewell’s whole story never got the attention it deserved. That’s why they are called the drive-by media.

UPDATE: This is how Katie Couric reported the death of Richard Jewell:

Back in 1996, the FBI investigated Richard Jewell, an Atlanta security guard, in connection with the Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta. Richard Jewell died today of complications from diabetes. He was 44. Jewell was never charged with any crime. There is much more CBS… [FADE-OUT]

Sometimes the MSM just leaves you speechless.

Richard Jewell R.I.P

Richard Jewell found dead in home

Olympic security guard suspected but cleared in bombing

There will be a lot of passive voice in the retrospective stories. Very few will face up to the cold fact that the government and media, working hand in glove, ruined an innocent man's life.

See here for more on the injustice done to Jewell.

The sad thing is that the media did not learn from this. The Duke lacrosse case is just a recent, high-profile example.

Jewell still suffers from their reckless action ten years ago. I think this blog got it exactly right:

Two people died; what would the death toll have been had Jewell not discovered the bomb or not moved the crowd away? Yet because of overreaction by the Feds and the national/local media, Jewell is still remembered as "that guy who didn't set the bomb" instead of "that guy who saved all those people from the bomb."

Call me crazy

but i was pleased to see CNN's "God's Warriors" do well in the ratings. I know it was biased, but that is sort of given with CNN.

The encouraging point is that a serious news documentary crushed Fox News and their stable of talk radio rantfests and sleazy tabloid stories.

Let's hope that MSNBC and Fox see this as a wake-up call and decide to fight quality with quality.