Seduction of Secrecy - A Discussion of Anonymous Sources

“The Seduction of Secrecy: Toward Better Access to Government Information on the Record”

Symposium at the National Press Club, Washington, D.C. March 17, 2005, 9 to 11 AM

Co-sponsored by the National Press Club and the Missouri School of Journalism

Moderated by Geneva Overholser, Curtis B. Hurley Chair in Public Affairs Reporting, in the Missouri School of Journalism’s Washington bureau.

Geneva Overholser: When I came up with the notion of this symposium, I tried to think about who could do the virtually impossible. Who could try to crystallize in a brief opening statement, the most important truths about the Seduction of Secrecy. The truth about why some in government like it so much -- and about why some in the PRESS like it so much. A person who could remind us of the absolute NECESSITY -- even the virtue -- of anonymity sometimes. And also the damage done when anonymity becomes commonplace. One name came to my mind. Thank goodness he accepted.

Anyone introducing Bill Kovach is presented with a terrible dilemma: How to choose among all the compliments that come to mind. Bill is wise, honorable, just, passionate, fearless. Funny. Hell, he's even handsome. But there is one characteristic that commends him to me above all: For all the heights to which he has risen, Bill has never lost track of the fact that the powerful are no more important than the people whom we in the media exist to serve. His love of this democracy is pure and true, as is his love of journalism. Bill, please start us off.

Bill Kovach: The one true thing she said was, she asked me to be brief, and I’m going to try to do that. As usual, Geneva has worked pretty hard, awfully hard, to bring together a group this size. I couldn’t believe that this many people would show up in Washington – journalists – to discuss this issue. It wouldn’t have happened 20 years ago, 30 years ago. I guess the truth is George Bush really is a uniter on some issues.

I’m sure you all remember from your history readings that anonymous source reporting and our national government were born together, that in George Washington’s first administration Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson were financing newspapers so they’d have someone to leak to.

The practice took root and thrived as the first three presidents found it necessary in their maneuvering to shape and establish the new government. Since then every president, especially the most powerful, extended and perfected the art of leaking information to favored outlets. Some might even suggest the current president has found it useful to control the flow of information to the public from time to time.

They have done so, as Lincoln pointed out, because they need public sentiment to succeed – a true fact that President Kennedy reconfirmed in his own words 100 years later when he described the “ship of state” as the only ship he knew that leaked from the top.

The advantage to the government of reaching the public mind behind a cloak of anonymity seems pretty obvious. But what’s the advantage to the press? I’m sure your own reading of history – maybe even your own experience – has answered this, too. Leaked information has proven a sure road to personal career advancement.

But in fact the mutual-interest nature of the relationship – the kind of relationship in which Franklin Roosevelt called the White House press into the Oval Office for a not-for-attribution seminar on what economic change was good for America; or Eisenhower provided a detailed policy briefing to a national columnist – was breaking down even as Kennedy spoke.

It was breaking down because, after World War II, Washington had become the most important source of daily news in the country, if not the world. The size of the Washington press corps had exploded as the government provided the new medium of television a convenient center around which to attract its national audience. And a new wave of Cold War secrecy shut down access to whole agencies of government.

In this new atmosphere officials at all levels in all departments – some of whom had never seen a reporter before – were regularly visited by several reporters as government news became a cauldron of competition for career-making stories. American journalists eagerly accepted British press baron Lord Northcliffe’s dictum that real “news is something that someone, somewhere wants to keep secret; everything else is advertising.” Inside information was no longer limited to the head of state and trusted columnists but available to diligent reporters who worked the lesser corridors of power to break important news.

The best of whom, like Murrey Marder, were developing techniques to tease out a bit of inside information here and a bit there to create a rough mosaic of previously secret policy initiatives. Others like Izzy Stone were meticulously reading obscure official documents to refute government claims and assertions with its own words.

Government response was to create more categories of classified information and institute group “backgrounders” – a practice that appealed to print reporters because “no-camera” rules stripped the upstart television reporters of their biggest competitive advantage.

The power and the public service impact of the anonymous-source Watergate reporting shaped the next generation of journalists, and anonymous-source reporting followed by expanded secrecy became the conditioned reflex that has defined life in Washington.

How the two are related, whether one results from the other, are questions on the table here today. And in that connection my experience when I came to Washington after the 1972 election may be instructive. News reports then were liberally sprinkled with reports provided by an unidentified briefer at a “backgrounder,” or stories with anonymous pejorative quotes, even ridiculous unidentified self-promoting quotes of the don’t-use-my-name-on-this-but-I-think-the-president-is-doing-a-good-job variety.

Much of the work of the Washington Bureau of the Times then was governed by a need to recover from our embarrassing competitive weakness, which the Post’s Watergate work had exposed. Investigative reporting was our new watchword and we were digging deeper and deeper for anonymous sources.

But this reporting came in conflict with another of our goals: To help readers learn more about how Washington worked. We did this on a new “Washington talk” page, and came face to face with this problem: To explain how Washington worked, we would have to explain how the press worked in Washington. The more we looked at that, the more we realized that anonymous source reporting put us in the position not just of withholding information from our readers, in the sense of withholding the source, the source’s access and possible bias in some stories, but sometimes giving them misinformation from these sources. As we tried to correct this problem, we learned the hard lesson that I suspect the Washington press corps still confronts today.

One example: We found an anonymous source had given us misleading information that we published and decided it provided a good look at how the Washington press worked. So we wrote about the leak and named the leaker. As a courtesy, we called three other reporters who had written a similar story to ours from the same source. They all agreed the leaker should be exposed, but they were not going to do it.

Administration officials up to the vice president and the counsel to the president tried to stop the outing. One of the arguments they used was that the other three reporters had called them and assured them they would protect the leaker’s identity. We ran the story and, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, the word was put out among White House staff not to talk to the Times.

Another example: Shortly after, we learned that some industrious foreign reporters, including reporters for the TASS News Agency, were reporting the name of government officials doing briefings that we published on a background basis. This posed the obvious problem: If foreign leaders and foreign audiences knew the names, how could we justify keeping our readers in the dark? A few other reporters joined us at first, when we asked that the briefings be kept open, and left the room if they were not. But the support didn’t last long. The main argument from other journalists was that they would surrender their independence if they took part in such group actions.

Instead, we were ridiculed for “showboating.” Support that beat reporters in the bureau had given the idea began to erode. Our competitive disadvantage began to have an effect. In the end, concern over a loss of independence made coalition-building to keep briefing rooms open too tough a nut to crack, and I was brought into line.

But that was then and this is now, and we are deep into another turn of the competitive wheel. The situation you face today has been made even more acute by the greatly expanded outlets for information, the accelerated competition and the post 9-11 national security atmosphere.

As for the secrecy aspects of this discussion, we’re fortunate to have on the panel experts who can speak to that issue from deep knowledge and experience. But on the issue of journalistic independence that has served to limit previous efforts to discuss our contribution to the culture of secrecy, I’d like to just take a minute to remind everyone how radically the world in which we operate has changed.

For openers, we have now helped create a world in which Lord Northcliffe’s dictum is standing on its head. No longer can we feel so sure that what we expose is truly news. As we’ve all seen to our regret, much of what has been reported from anonymous sources as news was, at best, nothing more than advertisement and, at worst, designed to mislead public opinion with deceptive and even false information.

Tom Rosenstiel and I reported on the growth of this problem in some detail in our book, “Warp Speed” “In the new world of competition and a never-ending news cycle,” we wrote, “we are turning over our most trusted value – our independence – to anonymous sources who are gaining power over journalists to assume the role of editors in deciding when and often in what form information will be published.”

That reporting described Washington press coverage during the Clinton-Lewinsky affair. The record since then suggests that we have failed, both as individual journalists and as an industry, to recognize the degree to which we have allowed ourselves to be controlled by the people we report on. And we have failed to accept the fact that the independence we fear to “lose” is not really ours to lose in the first place. It is given to us by the people. Time after time, the courts have told us that while we have the constitutional right to publish freely, we do not have any constitutional right to access to the news. That right of access flows from the people.

It’s time we asked ourselves whether each time we publish an anonymous source story that maybe we are forcing our public to read a code when they don’t know what the code is. Worse still, as anonymous source stories become more routine, do we routinize and even de-legitimize the source stories that will truly be vital to the public?

I think any fair assessment of press behavior would conclude that some elements of the culture of secrecy are in part a thing of our own making. How much anonymous source reporting has worked to the benefit or the detriment of our journalism and of the American people? We may rightly argue that some of the very best anonymous source reporting is of the highest public service value. But how do we explain that to a public that can at any time withhold its support of our access to the seats of power because they no longer trust or value what we do?

Given the depth of knowledge and experience in the room here today, we have an opportunity to seriously address these questions and others they may suggest. And perhaps we can come out of this with some new ideas that can re-open closed doors in Washington; some new ideas that will allow us to show and not just tell the public how the government is working. And maybe if we’re lucky, we can find that cooperation and collaboration are not threats to our independence, but are the key to strengthen the value and the appeal of a journalism of verification to the American people.”

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Geneva Overholser: Thank you so much, Bill. You’ve certainly set us off with a lot of food for thought. I am going to turn first to Mike McCurry. I should tell the audience that you all have on your seats, at least those who are present, a list of roundtable participants, and if I neglect to give people’s titles, you may find it handy. Mike McCurry, I am going to say, of course, has been a White House Press Secretary. One question, I think follows from Bill’s remarks. Does the White House have enough power that it can simply dictate to us all the terms?

Mike McCurry: Well apparently, now, yes. I used to think that if I ever tried to control the message as effectively as the current White House did I would have been run out of the White House press briefing room, but clearly I misjudged the temperament that exists. If you are disciplined and if your view of the press is that they are caged animals brought out once a day to be fed appropriately and digest whatever it is that you have to say and send them back into the little cages that they live in at the White House, then you can do a pretty effective job of keeping control of the story line in the face of all the blizzard that is out there in the world. To be coherent, some would argue you almost have to do that in order to communicate effectively about the story line of what a presidency is about today. So you have to say that the answer to the question is yes, they have enough power if they are disciplined enough to control themselves and not to talk off the reservation. And this White House, I think, is very effective at that. Of course, that’s a contrast to the previous White House, which I would say leaked like a sieve most of the time.

Geneva Overholser: Jack Nelson, you have been looking at this topic for a long time. I wonder if you could give us a sense of history. How do White House off-the-record briefings these days look compared to when you first became involved in the issue?

Jack Nelson: Well, I am not covering the White House now, so what I know about the White House today is what people have told me, but I think Mike McCurry is exactly right. This White House is so tight-fisted with their information and put out information of their own which is propaganda and seem to be able to get away with it. It varies over the years. It varies with the president. I have to say, President Carter, for example, ran a very open White House. You could be walking down the hallway from one office to another in the Carter White House without being bothered by anybody. It wasn’t long after that, when you had President Reagan come in, or first President Bush, who was also fairly tight with reporters, but he also talked to reporters much more so than the current President Bush. He held—the people in his administration held—many background briefings. It did leak. It leaked sometimes officially and sometimes unofficially. President Reagan’s administration, again, was much more open then the current one. This administration, I have to say--and I have been a reporter for over 50 years and an investigative reporter much of that time—this administration is by far the most secretive administration I have had any experience with at all. They have no shame, in my opinion, in doing things in the dark, and I don’t know how we really combat that, except to just keep battering away and filing Freedom of Information suits, talking to people on the Hill, talking to every lower official we can get to talk to us who is interested in the people knowing what their government is doing. And I think what we need to do is to emphasize that this isn’t just a Republican administration. This is your government. This is your government which happens to be controlled, all three branches, by one party, which I think makes it even more of a responsibility of the press to try to delve into it.

Geneva Overholser: Paul McMasters, on this theme of “are we worse off than we have been,” you have said Washington today is awash in secrecy. (I think you have a portable mike. Or no, Pete Weitzel has a portable mike for you. And meanwhile Susan Tifft and Alex Jones, do you guys want to join us up here? There are two seats with your names on them.) Paul, is it worse than ever? Not just briefings, but secrecy. Talk about Washington being awash in it.

Paul McMasters: I do think that secrecy is much worse today, and it’s the result of a combination of things. Obviously every administration since Johnson has resisted the Freedom of Information Act and has installed as much secrecy as they think they can get by with, but because of 9/11 and some of the officials that came in with the Bush administration, it really became something that had to be done. The implementation memo for the Freedom of Information Act that the new attorney generals usually issue was already in the works before 9/11 and it turned openness, the presumption of openness, on its head. It’s gone from there through (unintelligible). That predisposition for secrecy today, which I think is the worst since the Freedom of Information Act was passed in 1966, has been compounded by what Bill and Jack have pointed out, as sort of a real sophistication of news management by public officials. It started real well in the Reagan Administration with Michael Deaver, but it’s been perfected more and more by each administration, and this one has really perfected it.

Geneva Overholser: Tom Curley, we’re going to get back to hoped-for solutions, but speaking now of the situation as it stands, does the Associated Press feel manipulated by all these powerful forces of secrecy.

Tom Curley: Well I wouldn’t say manipulated, but obviously there is a lot of pressure. Obviously people have gotten more sophisticated at getting the message out, and there is no question, in the aftermath of 9/11, there are a number of things that have occurred. A couple of points I would like to make, though, in following up from Bill, one of the reasons I think this presentation this morning is so important is that we do have to understand that we have a credibility problem and there are a number of things that we have to do. We have to be able to walk out of a room when somebody wants to go off the record. We have to have the courage to hold the story, perhaps to get it on the record, perhaps to get a fuller context. We can’t rush to print, rush to hit the send button at the AP. And we have to shine a spotlight on this issue. We have to cover it more aggressively. We have to understand that there are people out there with agendas, with motives, who are trying to advance their cause, and we have to put that under a spotlight. We have to cover it, and frankly we have done a poor job at that in recent years.

Geneva Overholser: In order to put it under a spotlight, I do think we have to understand that it’s a fact. One thing I’d like to do is ask Charles Davis: This matters, not only in Washington, but obviously has an effect on secrecy issues throughout the country. Can you tell us something about that impact?

Charles Davis: Yeah, I have seen in the last few years a modeling, I guess is what you would call it, of federal behavior at the state and local level. I think all of us who are in the FOI game I think would say that, not only in terms of official secrecy in terms of records and meetings -- and surely that is a problem that we confront every day -- but in terms of acts of official intimidation of the press. The sorts of things which Mr. Curley has fought in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, for example, when Justice Scalia’s marshals confiscated a tape recorder, we see more and more of those instances at the local level. I have had calls in the last two or three days, and I think Lucy can talk to this eloquently, where local officials are centralizing communication, for example, by issuing edicts that look a lot like the governor of Maryland, whom we all are aware is in sort of an immature little match with the Baltimore Sun. That behavior is trickling down. I think it is a model of the behavior we see in Washington. There are at least five American cities in the last week that have centralized communications. In other words, they have issued an edict that says all city employees will speak to our public-relations people first, and our public-relations people will clear the story, and then we’ll speak. To me that is a muzzle. It’s a direct gag order on taxpayer-funded employees, and it’s a huge problem. I’m glad we are talking about this, because I think we do have to initiate some solidarity on this issue.

Geneva Overholser: Pam Johnson, when you were editor in Phoenix, I wonder if you found something I found as ombudsmen at the Washington Post--and Michael Getler can tell us if this continues—I had editors calling me and saying, “You know the fact that you guys are doing all this terrific reporting, but that it relies so heavily on anonymous sources, is a real problem for me.” I know when I was at the Des Moines Register, I found that. Did you experience that, and did your readers question the credibility?

Pamela Johnson: Certainly, I mean this isn’t just a problem in Washington. For editors at papers across the country, they are in a period of communicating and trying to connect with their readers and have more transparency about the coverage they have in their papers. So, they may have a very sincere discussion with their community and then see all the anonymous sources that are being used in wire stories or supplementals coming out of Washington, and it looks like the editor is talking out of both sides of his or her mouth. So, it hurts the credibility and even handling of that discussion, but I think, as Charles said, this really isn’t only a Washington problem. The context, in a serious sense, is that our journalism isn’t trusted, and that one of the levels of activity that is so important to rebuild that trust is that local connection to the community. Whatever we talk about today, I think one of the issues is what kind of leadership are we going to display to begin to get at the root of this problem.

Geneva Overholser: Ted Gup, you’re writing about the culture of secrecy. Tell us something about why what Mike McCurry was describing happens.

Ted Gup: Well, I just want to pick up on one point that was just said and that is this notion of trickling down and modeling at the state level. It isn’t just at the state level. It isn’t just at government. It’s in corporations. It’s in HMOs. That is, it creates a permissive society. It grants a license and an attitude and a kind of preemptive willingness on the part of the public to reduce their expectations and lower the bar. So, it really is ubiquitous. I mean, I know we are focusing on government, but at least from my view, it is more far-reaching than that. To use that cliché, I think it represents a kind of paradigm shift within the context of a democracy in which everything is predicated on the willingness of the citizenry to assert themselves.

Geneva Overholser: All right, let’s get some facts into the deal—not that you all have been not factual. But both Gene Policinski and Tom Rosentiel are giving us some information. I think handouts have been put on our chairs. Maybe start with Tom, who I think can give us a sense of what you found in looking at the usage of anonymous sources. Since you are going to be directing remarks, perhaps you could stand and face the audience.

Tom Rosentiel: Well, we just came out this week with our sort of encyclopedic report on the State of the Media, and it included some information on the level of anonymous sourcing. Overall, we examined 16 newspapers of varying sizes. In that sample, seven percent of all the stories contained at least one anonymous source, and that is down from 29 percent of a similar sample a year ago. If you look at the front page, its thirteen percent of these stories, which is also down from last year. The bigger the paper, not surprisingly, the more prevalent anonymous sourcing is. I think that if you were to just have examined Washington stories, my hypothesis is that the number would be even higher. Now, if you look at some other media, there is something interesting there. In network television, more than half of the stories contain anonymous sources, and if you look at packages on TV—you eliminate the anchor reads which are very brief—the number goes up to 68 percent. Now, is that because those stories are more investigative and include more secret material? I’m not sure that that’s the cause. We’ve been told by people in network television that often times they eliminate attributions simply because of the compression of time. It’s convenient to just say, “Administration sources say…” If we went back and looked at those tapes, I suspect that a lot of these references to anonymous sources would not be on stories where the information was somehow closely held. In cable, interestingly, which obviously has a lot of time to tell and is a more extemporaneous medium -- in other words very few packages, most of the time is spent in live interviews where anchors are interviewing experts about things -- only nine percent of the stories have anonymous sources. I’m not sure that that is a reflection on more transparency, necessarily, as much as the kind of storytelling. On the Internet, where the stories are largely from print sources—in fact it’s very heavily wire copy—we looked just at lead stories, four or five stories on the webpage and nineteen percent of the stories there [contained anonymous sources]. What I think this tells us is that the format, and not always the journalism, determines how much transparency there is about sourcing.

Geneva Overholser: Thanks a lot. Gene, you have more of a sense of what the reporters themselves think, right?

Gene Policinski: Well, we’ve done a couple things. We’ve taken samplings through our annual State of the First Amendment reports since 1997 to take a look at how the public feels about the use of confidential sources. Then we’ve taken some specific surveys, and we did an informal survey, so not the same kind of scientific sampling, but we, in cooperation with IRE and RTNDA, asked reporters a few months ago to fill out a form about how they used sources and some of the percentages. Some interesting things that we will just throw into the mix here, and of course all this is against the backdrop of the Bush v. shield law, which is an interesting counterpoint to some of the things today, but what we found is that the public support for the right of reporters, the right journalists do have, as part of their toolkit, for use of the confidential source, remained very high—70 percent. We even did an additional sampling after the summer when a lot of the attempts to force the reporters using confidential sources to disclose them and CBS News problem with the confidential story came up, and that number basically was unchanged among the public from May to the 1^st of October. So we have about 70 percent of the American public saying reporters should have, at some point, the right to use a confidential source. That’s down from 85 percent when we began the surveys in 1997. Of this informal survey, we had 711 journalists, reporters, editors, news directors, television journalists responding. Fifty-nine percent told us that they had used (confidential) sources in less than 10 percent of the stories that they had written. Now, there’s an interesting point there. They however strongly say when they needed to use those sources, when they were required to use those sources, stories that would have not come to their attention in any other way, they saw that number going way up. So we were hearing from journalists, again, they would like to reserve that right. But it’s interesting, nationwide as opposed to Washington, the number of stories using those sources may be less. That may be hopeful for those people who would like to limit that use -- that the problem isn’t as big across the country as it may be in Washington. Reporters did say that, 60 percent of the stories in their career that they got from a confidential source would not have come to their attention had that source not felt they had had that protection. It doesn’t speak to whether government secrecy is creeping up. I also wonder whether those numbers will change up as the state and local governments model themselves more on the federal government and insist on that kind of behavior. But those are some of the numbers from reporters and editors in the field.

Geneva Overholser: Thank you both, Tom and Gene. I want to hear from both Ken Paulson and from Phil Taubman about responses to those numbers. Do those numbers hearten you?

Ken Paulson: Well, I think it’s always valuable when the American public recognizes the watchdog role of the American press. That’s one of the things that’s gone unsaid here. We’re all kind of decrying the seduction of secrecy, but the bottom line is that some things have to come to you in secret, that we have an obligation to keep an eye on government and serve as a watchdog, and some information needs to come to you confidentially. People who are going to be whistleblowers are not going to go on the record. What we strive to do at USA Today is have a policy that says we use confidential sources but for all the right reasons and with all the right safeguards. I think that combination, the judicious use of confidential sources, allows us to live up to our constitutional responsibility, but also enhances our credibility.

Geneva Overholser: How many stories do you miss because of that remarkably stringent policy? You’ve got a terrific, well-connected White House reporter. I bet Susan Page could give you lots of leaks if you would take them.

Ken Paulson: You know, I’ve asked Susan Page that question. The policy at USA Today basically says that if you want to use a confidential source, you have to go to an M.E., you have to identify that source to the M.E., explain why the information is valuable, why that source is trustworthy, and why we can’t get it on the record. And if all those tests are met, the M.E. simply has to answer the question, does the value of the information outweigh the issues involved in anonymity? And what that has meant is that the big stories, the important stories, get in the paper. We lose some color, we lose some dimension occasionally, but Susan Page, actually this morning I asked her, “Have you ever known us to lose an important story?” “We lose a paragraph or two, and that’s ok.”

Geneva Overholser: Phil Taubman, what about your response to the statistics we’ve being hearing?

Phil Taubman: Well, I would respond by talking a little about what we at the Times are trying to do and just say that the USA Today policy is a model for a lot of institutions. I think in doing a reexamination of our own practices, which we are doing again this year to try to tighten up in some areas, it’s been a major focus of what we are trying to do. I am involved in a sub-group of this effort that’s looking at how the New York Times can rely less on anonymous sources. We understand that it is eroding our credibility, as it is the rest of the American press, and that it is a particularly acute problem in Washington. So we are developing some new practices that we are going to be proposing to Bill Keller with an expectation that within a month or two we’ll kind of move on to the next phase of our effort which in retrospect, the first year of the New York Times sort of rearticulated policy about anonymous sources. The policy’s great, the execution has been very erratic. So we are trying to crack down in this area.

Geneva Overholser: So Stephen, when they crack down, do you dread the crackdown or look forward to it?

Stephen Labaton: Well, I just file the story, if they don’t want to run the story that’s OK. I mean, my experience, having been at the paper for almost 20 years, is one in which the principles are often well-intentioned and well-articulated but then in the practice, is when you get into some really difficult areas. And in this area it’s great to talk in the abstract, but you have to really weigh both the quality of the information and the nature of the information, which I think is what both the USA Today policy rightly tries to do and what I think we’re struggling to do. And I think of instances, just to give you some real live examples, when we wrote in the thick of enormous competitive pressures, during the Clinton impeachment proceedings, the Betty Currie story about how Monica Lewinsky had turned over the president’s gifts to Betty Currie just as the investigation was going on, we got that from confidential sources. And the reporter and I who worked on that story, while we couldn’t reveal and even had a hard time characterizing the nature of where it was coming from, made it very clear and, unsolicited, called up the executive editor and said, “Listen, these are who our sources are and you need to know this because it’s going to be possibly attacked, it’s a very potentially explosive story. And you need to know this so that you can defend this story, you need to know this because if you don’t want to run it, that’s your decision. But you need to know it.” And I find that often the best reporters will do that in order to get the institutional support they need to get for those stories. There are obviously other times in which it’s thoroughly inappropriate to use anonymous sources. But I do think that they’re vital in certain instances. And I think most thoughtful news organizations do, in the current climate at least, do strive in most instances try to balance those interests.

Geneva Overholser: Well, moving from balance to where anonymous sources are a scourge, Jack Shafer you’ve been writing in Slate about anonymice and trying to rat them out. Before we get to ratting them out, can you give us some particularly awful examples of anonymous source use?

Jack Shafer: Well, I’m glad you asked, because I want to puncture the pep-rally quality of this morning’s session by pointing out that we in the press are not quite as scrupulous and combating of anonymous sources as we’d like to say. We’re not always victims. In many cases we’re collaborators. Today’s New York Times has a news analysis piece by Todd Purdum. Now I single out Purdum not because he’s a hack but because he’s one the better journalists working in Washington. And The New York Times is one of the better papers available in this town. In this piece he writes – this is a brand new anonymous source description, and I’ve looked at a lot of them—he writes, “One of Mr. Wolfowitz’s”—this is about the nomination of Wolfowitz to the World Bank—“One of Mr. Wolfowitz’s associates, speaking on condition of anonymity so as not to steal the spotlight, said he expected Mr. Wolfowitz would continue the anti-corruption efforts of the departing president, James D. Wolfensohn, and demand fresh accountability from governments that receive aid.” And then there is a long quote from this anonymous source basically that says that Wolfowitz is going to stamp out corruption and do fantastic things. And this is really quite cute here, “One of his first passions”—this is the anonymous source speaking in quotation—“One of his first passions was development, and when he was ambassador to Indonesia in the Reagan years, he was out there with the chicken farmers, and he’s kind of made for this job in some way.” No one put a gun to Todd Purdum’s head and said you’ve got to run this. Presumably an editor at the New York Times read this as well. Why this person was given anonymity, why Todd even wrote this story and made the source anonymous, I’d like one of the learned editors in this room to explain to me.

Geneva Overholser: Let’s hear from learned Phil.

Phil Taubman: And in fact, I edited that story.

Geneva Overholser: We turned to the right guy.

Phil Taubman: So, I’ll say a couple of things. First of all, unrelated to that story, I also looked at the rest of the package on Wolfowitz yesterday, and what you don’t know, which there is no reason that you would know it, is that actually we eliminated a number of anonymous sources and information and quotes in that package. I just excised them out and went back to the reporters and said that there is really no reason to include this and if we are going to live by our own policy we are going to have to do better. And in terms of Todd’s piece, my own feeling about that comment was that as self-serving as it was in terms of Wolfowitz and his reputation, it enlightened me a bit about what his plans were for the World Bank, and that was an important piece of information, to understand that he was going to emphasize combating corruption and some of the other things. So to me, it was not an example of a useless, trivial anonymous source that added nothing to the story.

Jack Shafer: Do you mind if I quarrel with you?

Phil Taubman: Yes, please.

Jack Shafer: Why wouldn’t he be against corruption? I mean it would have been news, I think, it would have been worth my fifty cents for the paper this morning if he had said he expected Mr. Wolfowitz would encourage corruption.

Phil Taubman: No, but look, you know I know I am going to be on the losing end of this exchange, but I will plunge ahead anyway. I think that’s a little glib, Jack. You know, the question of what the new head of the World Bank will emphasize, not all heads of the World Bank by any means, have made an effort to combat corruption. Corruption is a huge issue in the development world. It may be the single biggest problem in getting development aid out in effective ways to the people who need it. So to me, you know, it’s not a kind of, “Well, it’s so obvious, why did you bother putting it in?” I think I would have much preferred to have had it on the record, but I do think the whole comment from that particular person told me something, and I hope it told our readers something about what his priorities would be, and that’s all I would add.

Jack Shafer: And to be less glib, why should a tongue bath, someone who is giving a tongue bath, be given anonymity? I mean, this justification that “as not to steal the spotlight,” doesn’t seem to me to be that urgent, that credible of a reason to give a source anonymity.

Geneva Overholser: I do think reporters say, “Look, you know, if this is what you want to say, and you want to brag about your boss, that’s fine, but I’ve got to have a name by it. I mean, how hard is it to ask for a name, when you’re bragging about your boss? Ron Hutcheson, you represent all White House correspondents, we’ll dump that on you.

Ron Hutcheson: This is something I’m really interested in because, you know, it’s easy to say that the Bush administration has taken all this secrecy and anonymous sources to a new level, because it has. But we’ve let it, and we in the media have let this whole thing become institutionalized, and a good example – last year, I led a spectacularly ineffective walk-out at a background briefing, ineffective because I walked out, turned around and there was nobody behind me. And my seat was filled before it was even cold. So, but lately – and this shows how you can make a difference, and you can give both the New York Times and the AP credit, they’ve been pushing hard on this deal, and we’ve recently hard two – what were supposed to be background briefings, end up on the record, because they got sick of people saying, “Why is this on background? Why can’t you talk to us on the record?” So, if you push back, I think you can get results, and we need to push back more collectively.

Geneva Overholser: Well, “collectively” is a key word, and I read recently that Anne Marie Lipinski, editor of the Chicago Tribune, said, “Realistically speaking, unless all the major papers – or the TV networks most importantly – decide to shun these briefings, they’re not going to go away.” Janet Leissner, are the TV networks going to – would CBS decide – maybe Bob Schieffer wants to make his mark – will you shun these briefings?.

Janet Leissner: Bob Schieffer’s making his mark. But, for television, there is an added burden or, helpmate if you will. We – and this White House has been very good about it. We have to have a camera in that room, yes – but we have as networks taken a stand saying, “Unless you let an editorial person in there as well, whether this is an Oval Office photo op, whether this is a background briefing – we don’t do them.” We have historically and much more so with this White House, fought with them over the fact that they will let print reporters in and then they’ll say, “You can send a camera.” Now, our cameramen are very good journalists, but for us to have something on the record and this may speak to some of Tom Rosenstiel’s numbers, people have to see it, people have to hear it, that’s what they expect from television. So this is something that we “push back on” on a daily basis.

Ron Hutcheson: And that has worked, too, hasn’t it?

Janet Leissner: It has worked. We’ve also had similar situations in foreign countries, where the president goes on a foreign trip, and there are ground rules for the White House press corps, and there are ground rules for the foreign press corps, and lo and behold, we’re again told to send a camera, and the foreign press can send a camera and an editorial person, and I think Mike McCurry knows about this – we have fought over this on the spot on trips – that we have to have our reporters or our producers or someone, in addition to the cameraman that will just basically roll on what’s being said without putting it in context.

Geneva Overholser: ABC-TV also represented, John Cochran, what is your response?

John Cochran: Well, it’s always bargaining. We bargained, one year ago, I was only at the White House a day or two a week, and I happened to be there one day, got a call from the press secretary about four o’clock in the afternoon, “Could you come up to my office in about 15 minutes, and would you wear a coat?” This was a tip-off that something was up. Went up and was joined by four of my other broadcast colleagues, from CBS, NBC, Fox and CNN, and we were escorted into the president’s office. And we were informed we were going to have an off-the-record session, with the president, and while the president is sitting there, we go into bargaining. It’s, they say, off the record. The best we could do was deep background. And that went on, with Dan Bartlett, the president’s communications director, for about five minutes. The president of the United States just sits there and twiddles his thumbs. I can talk about this because apparently only a few minutes after we walked out of there, one of my colleagues went back to a friend of his at the Washington Post, I think it was Mike Allen, and the next morning, the next morning, the Post reported everything that was in the backgrounder. I still don’t know the motivations for – and I don’t know which one of my colleagues did that. I don’t know if he was trying to say, “You can’t get away with this,” or what. You can take the contrary view that he didn’t keep the promise that we’d made. But regarding the use of senior administration officials, I think there is a little less of it now than there was 30 years ago, when I came to this town. And, Woodward and Bernstein have a lot to answer for, when I was here, I think as a young broadcast reporter, because Woodward and Bernstein were doing it, it was cool to talk about senior administration officials or officials or to have anonymous sources. I honestly can remember doing stories where I’d say -- late in the afternoon, “I think we can get somebody to say this on camera, it won’t be somebody in the administration,” but – and somebody would say, “It sounds better if we just say, sources.” It was cool during that period, I really do believe that. I honestly think you could go on the air or get in the paper easier if you had an anonymous source. I think it’s less so now, I don’t think it’s nearly as cool, I think it’s an admission of failure when we have an anonymous source.

Geneva Overholser: I believe some still feel that it’s cool, I must say. We’ve been talking about collective efforts….There have been terrific efforts over the years, but doing it all together seems absolutely key. And I’m going to turn to Mike Getler now, who’s ombudsman at the Post, and I’m going to read from Len Downie, the executive editor of the Post. I told him I’d like to read his response when I invited the Post to join in. He said, fine: “Geneva, I’m sorry, but we just don’t believe in unified action, and would find a discussion aimed at reaching agreement with others on ‘practicable steps’ or even agreement on when not to agree to various ground rules uncomfortable and unworkable. We can’t participate in a discussion of the kind you are proposing.” How do we do collective action? Len’s not alone. I think John Carroll at the LA Times may feel this way. So tell us, this feels like an impediment to me to collective action. What do you think?

Michael Getler: I have some sympathy for Len’s position. I think a lot of news organizations know what’s wrong and are clearly capable of acting themselves. I think this has been a very good discussion, and I think the Post has walked out of these things, they published Kissinger’s picture as “a senior administration official” and all that, to no real effect, but I do have some sympathy. There’s some sort of slope of collective action in news organizations that ought to be avoided. But that can be accomplished through individual organizations if people follow them. Just like nobody followed you out of the room – that can happen.

Geneva Overholser: If people had followed Ron out of the room, wouldn’t that have been a collective action?

Ron Hutcheson: Except that the problem is, when they walk out – and I had that lonely feeling walking back to the bureau – OK, am I going to have hell to pay here? If you know your bosses are 100 percent behind you – and I wasn’t 100 percent sure – I came back and said, “Boss, let me tell you why I’m standing here and not at the briefing,” and he says, “Well, do you think you reclaimed just a shred of your dignity by doing that?” And I said, “Yeah.” And he said, “Well, you didn’t but if you feel that way, OK.” But you really need some support from the bosses to make it work or else you think, “What am I doing?”

Geneva Overholser: Tom, you have been a leader in this and your Washington Bureau chief, Sandy Johnson, has been a leader. How important does unification of the troops seem to you?

Tom Curley: It would be helpful. But I think all of us have been in this town long enough, and in this game long enough, to know that this is a difficult group of cats to herd. It’s always difficult to get consensus. There is judgment, and other people are working on stories. They may have additional information, so you’re going to have to make your decisions on what you know and what you feel. If you have three-quarters of the information you need for a story, and someone then tries to take you off the record, every reporter who is in that position should immediately leave the room. Most of us have been in those positions. Most of us have walked out, and most of us know how to do it. I think, though, as John Cochran has just said, the rules of engagement are changing, and the incentive system used to be to get the scoops, to get the beats. In this white-hot competitive environment, why not use an anonymous source and get on the front page, get on the air and get the lead story on the air. And now most of us are at a different point. We’re saying it is a failure. It is wrong. It’s not right. There’s a bigger issue here. We have a credibility problem. We have to understand it. And in most cases we know we can get that story 24, 48 hours and in some cases two weeks. I think The Times was picked on so I want to say something very nice today. I think they do as good a job as any news organization I’ve ever seen at having the courage to wait and develop a story fully. And more of us – and even at a news agency where we are driven to hit the “send” key first, we have to have the ability to say, “Wait. We want to get more. We want to do more reporting. We’re not going to take the easy way and go with the source. Fortunately for us, Sandy believes strongly in this, and that a role model that we need. And we’re pushing that throughout the bureau and throughout the AP.

Geneva Overholser: Andy Alexander, you believe strongly in this, too, and you’ve been talking with Sandy and with Ron and others. What specific steps do you think we might take that could be fruitful?

Andy Alexander: Several. I think a starting point is to have a dialogue with the White House, which Ron does, and when these episodes arise, whether you call it group action or not, to quickly react. For instance, Sandy has been very good when we see that a backgrounder is coming, many of us bureau chiefs will get an alert. And a lot of us get on the phone to the White House and say, “Why are we doing this?” And occasionally we’ve turned them. Now, on that point: I’m not at all hopeful with this White House. What we see as public interest, they see as self-interest. And they’re all about spin. I don’t think they have the same view of the role of the press in society as we do. I find it very disheartening. I think we can make marginal progress… (Tape change.) I do think we need unified action, but I’m intrigued by the definition of what that is. If Len and others are upset or uncomfortable with the idea of all of us signing a letter, that’s OK. I think individual editors need to be able to run their papers that way. But I’m more concerned with The Times and the Post and LA Times, which are very important players in this town, in how they conduct themselves on a daily basis. And for me, unified action can be having standards and holding your ground individually, that contributes to the collective good. So I think we need to do that. I think we can get only so far with meetings at the White House. And also, it’s very complicated. It’s easy to say everybody get up and walk out. But it’s a difficult thing for TV. In the past year we’re had some print victories and we’re all high-fiving each other, but you look over at the TV people. They’ve put somebody on the record, but they don’t allow cameras in. That’s no good. We haven’t won anything when we do that.

Geneva Overholser: (To Janet) In many ways this is a fight that would be quite helpful to you all, that you’ve been trying to fight alone.

Janet Leissner: It is. We’ve had endless meetings at the White House. We’ve sat down and discussed it. They’re not going to give. The only time they give, I think, is when they need us. Basically, when the president is going to speak to a nationwide audience and Ari Fleischer or someone calls us to say, “We want airtime,” we have to make a decision on whether this is newsworthy or not. And there’s a very fine line, and they know it. It’s like a tree falling in the forest. If it’s not going to be on television, they’ve lost. And we have used some of that in a bargaining situation. But we can only push them so far. And some of the times they’ve come to us, especially regional speeches when they simply collected an audience at some auditorium to say, “You should take this. This is really going to be news.” We’ve turned them down. Unless you can really tell us what this is, and why this is news, and let us cover it, we’re not going to give you air time.

Geneva Overholser: Mike McCurry, do you see leverage that we’re not talking about, and not just with this White House, which is particularly difficult, but in general?

Mike McCurry: I feel I am the one lone voice on the other side of the adversarial relationship on this panel, so I want…

Geneva Overholser: And your heart is really with us.

Mike McCurry: Well, yeah. But I want to speak some truths here. I want to speak some truths here. And I want to get at what my high school friend Tom Rosenstiel writes about when he and Bill write about the culture of assertion vs. the culture of verification. I have had probably thousands of conversations with reporters in 25 years as a press secretary, and I’d say 80 percent of the time I am offered anonymity and background rather than asking for it. I rarely have to ask for it, and don’t ask for it because I prefer to keep on the record as often as I can. And I think if you’re going to get on a hobby horse about this you better be very careful in how you are going about it. First of all, I’d teach your reporters that they shouldn’t offer background. And they should only get background when they really need it. And sometimes you do need it. I was making a list of reasons that I think of that sources would want to go on background and would need background in order to deal with you. Sometimes, genuinely, they believe in the public’s right to know and they want to get more information out to the public. We’ve got a lot of people who do that but when you’ve got particularly a White House that’s very stringent in the way in which you can talk to the press, the only way in which you can engage in the conversation is to be granted some anonymity. And you better figure out how you’re going to protect that as you all clamor for everybody going on the record. Second, if you want to provide any kind of nuance beyond the talking points that exist, you have to be able to flesh things out sometimes, and put a little bit of context in the picture. And I think that’s very important. I’ll give you one example. Because those of you who work with me in the White House know that I was a very strong advocate of doing most of our briefings there on the record. We did put Cabinet and sub-Cabinet people out routinely on the record. Martha Kumar, can I assert that and be honest?

Martha Joynt Kumar: Absolutely.

Mike McCurry: This is our historian who really tracks these things. But there are times when you just can’t do that. A good example is Ambassador Dennis Ross told me – we always wanted to provide some kind of briefings around Middle East peace process meetings – and since Dennis was sitting in the room when President Clinton was meeting with an Assad or somebody like that, his information was very valuable. But he taught me I can’t brief on the record because if I brief on the record I am then speaking as an official of the United States government, and that has diplomatically much different meaning than a senior administration official that’s speaking. So you better preserve some rights so that the government can function as governments need to do when they’re conducting diplomacy. And then, lastly, we need to separate out, I think, moments of real drama at the White House, in which there are times in which a White House does need to come out and provide additional information, from what is more routine. If you focus your efforts on the routine briefings and say, “Look, we’re never going to detract from the words of the president,” it will help us to identify and know who these individuals are who are speaking. I think it makes the information coming from government more authentic. I think when you see a sub-Cabinet quoted who’s an expert on a subject, I don’t believe that has ever taken away from the ability of the administration to articulate its side of the story. And I think that if you help the White House understand that, you might make some progress. But at the heart of it, going back to the assertion vs. verification, you’ve got to get back into the hard-news business, reporting facts to the American people. The Todd Purdum example is simply because you all in the face of the accelerated news cycle, the blizzard of information, the competitiveness, have moved so much radically over the last 25 years to analysis. You pick up the front page of The New York Times now and look at it and see how much different it is from 20 years ago in the number of facts vs. interpretive analysis. And I think that’s a change in the culture of journalism that really has nothing to do with evil people in the government trying to be secretive.

Geneva Overholser: But speaking of secrecy, it occurs to me there’s one way to leverage concern about secrecy. I think it was Walter Mears who said recently that, in fact with increased leakage, and more and more pressure to keep things secret, we don’t reduce the danger of releasing a really dangerous secret, we increase it. Do you think that’s true, Tom Blanton, and is there a way in there to persuade people in government that they need to be less secretive?

Tom Blanton: I think they know it – but the culture of secrecy is so strong, and there are so many interests pushing for it. As I read this “rising tide of secrecy” – more national security secrets stamped last year than ever in American history since we’ve been keeping the data -- it’s an amazing thing, but it’s a tide that’s being drawn up by multiple moons. There is the moon of the normal law of bureaucracy, this is how you protect your turf. There’s the moon of the agenda of the Bush administration to recoup presidential power. There’s the moon of actual war and terrorism alerts. Some of that secrecy is very reasonable, and that’s driving the process. What I’ve heard today, there’s a spectrum of secrecy on sources, and some of it’s necessary to protect whistleblowers, and some of it’s really indefensible, which is the regular routine briefings that government officials give, that the press by colluding is robbing the public of knowing who’s saying what. And it’s in the middle that you’ve got the toughest job. Because I think the policies that people are talking about are the right direction, but I would even suggest a further step. Which is an obligation of the media to actually report about the process. I mean I would love to have seen in the Todd Purdum story: What’s the campaign like to get Wolfowitz approved? Who’s putting out the talking points? Are there copies of talking points you can get and you can publish? Who is being sent down to brief? Which White House counsel lawyers are coming down to talk about the Executive Order on Secrecy in Presidential Records? Who’s really responsible? C-Span has become the most credible journalism outlet because it shows us the process. And the way news is defined today in the Washington process is, you all don’t show the process. And you need to show more of the process.

Geneva Overholser: Tom Curley, are you guys showing the process?

Tom Curley: Geneva, we absolutely have to. We are looking at any number of things to make sure that at every jurisdiction, state and local and especially around here, that this gets more coverage and has to be part of the overall story. There are some fascinating things taking place, and Sunshine Week has done a great job of showcasing them. One in particular, Pennsylvania, as some of you might know, does not have a lobbying law. In this era of votes for sale, that’s pretty amazing, and it stands unique among the states. The Allentown Morning Call has now seemingly taken that on as a project and put the spotlight on some of those issues. So, we’ve really got to get into the process. We’ve got to pick those fights that we want to go with and let the people know, and I bet we get a lot of support.

Geneva Overholser: Martha Joynt Kumar, as Mike McCurry mentioned, you are really the historian on this. You’ve been watching the process. What would you advise people in the media who are attempting to open up the process to do to work with the White House?

Martha Joynt Kumar: I think one of the things to look at is, is to look back and see over time what are the areas of change, particularly in covering the White House. In 1896, the dean of the White House Press corps, which numbered three including him, was a man named William Price. William Price wrote about the beat in 1902, and he talked about anonymous sources. “While it is pleasant to the newspaper reporter thus to have the confidence of the chief executive of a cabinet officer or member of congress, he frequently regrets that he is the custodian of facts that he is prevented from using. It is some other man, who has not been placed in a similar position, who is often at liberty to write the story whenever he has secured from a source that has not placed the inhibition of confidence on him.” So he was frustrated that even if he got a story that was similar to the one Theodore Roosevelt had given, he could not use it, because he didn’t want to incur Roosevelt’s wrath.

At the same time, he liked getting that information from Roosevelt, and at that time, the only way that you could get information from him was off the record. If you look over time, that really has changed. The president today really is on the record. In the press conferences that started in Wilson’s administration, they were off the record. They went off the record until 1953 when Eisenhower put them on the record, and then television came in, in 1955. Then, in addition to having press conferences, presidents started developing short question-and-answer sessions, and they do multiple interviews. If you look at Bush’s first term, you see a president on the record. He had 89 press conferences. If you divide those up into solo and joint, he had 17 solo press conferences, 72 joint. He had 356 interchanges with reporters—those are short Q&A’s, like people come into the Oval Office when a visiting head of state comes in, and he takes a couple of questions from the wires. He did 270 interviews with reporters, and those are television, print and roundtable. So, you really do see today, I think, a presidency that is on the record. Where you have anonymous sources is really at the staff level. I would say one of the problems here is not that there are so many briefings that take place, background briefings in the briefing room. I’d say during the Clinton administration it was a regular feature. You could have officials come out and explain policy. It was done on the record. In this administration, you haven’t had those briefings. You’ve had an increasing number of them since the election, for example there was a background briefing on the Iraqi election, and then Steve Hadley came out and spoke on the record about the European trip. So, I think you’ve seen now, a little bit of an increase. What I think one of the problems was that those background briefings didn’t even exist for reporters as a whole. But one of the things to look at, in press conferences since the election the president has had a press conference—a solo—every single month.

Geneva Overholser: This sounds pretty optimistic. Pete Weitzel, you’re an FOI champion. Does it sound optimistic to you?

Pete Weitzel: Not really. There clearly has been an increase in secrecy in the government, and the question I think which we are wrestling with today, is to what extent are journalists complicit in that process? To what extent do we contribute to it, allow it to continue and perpetuate it in some way? What kind of a dialogue can we begin among ourselves that might change this? We might not be able to reach a formal agreement of some kind, but can we agree that we need to elevate our standards? Can we take some of these best practices and spread them more broadly through our newsrooms and enforce them in our newsrooms and create a standard that journalists who are involved in the coverage can live with? Part of the problem, I think, is that we are dealing with this a little bit like our criticism of our publishers, if I could use that analogy. We’re looking at the short term. We are not looking at the long term. We’re taking a very bottom line to today’s story approach to it, rather than saying, “What is the long-term good for our own industry, our own profession, and what is the long-term good for our own readers and our audience? How do we work toward that in a way that still allows us to do our jobs every day?” It’s a very difficult problem but I think part of it is saying, “We’ve got to set higher standards for ourselves if we believe that we are headed in the wrong direction.”

Geneva Overholser: That’s in fact the discussion that I want to move towards, but in fact, I want to bring in one more important domain and that is First Amendment law. It seems to me, Lucy Dalglish and Jane Kirtley, that part of what happens in the field of Freedom of Information in this era of anonymity and secrecy is that we in journalism are captives of this but also are the problem in many ways. We go and we use these anonymous sources, and then we come to our lawyers and say, “Help us. Help us.” And in fact the First Amendment bar has an interest not only in protecting us and in protecting our sources, which is absolutely essential to all of us, but also in helping rein them in. So, is that true Lucy?

Lucy Dalglish: There is no doubt, I think, that we would have an easier time convincing judges and members of the public and members of Congress about the need to protect anonymous sources if there were fewer of them to protect. It has run amok, and I got a kick out of what Mike McCurry said, because he’s right. In the last several months, when these issues have come to the forefront, reporters are calling you, and the first thing out of their mouth is, “You want to go off the record?” You know for a while there, in one week I got probably half a dozen phone calls from very prominent reporters in town saying, “I want to ask you off the record, has Bob Novak been subpoenaed?” “Well, I don’t know.” “Well, you can be off the record.” “No, I’m on the record. I don’t know.” And it was kind of startling actually.

But we are fighting right now to protect these sources and to protect these journalists. We’re fighting very hard, and the media bar, we don’t make the judgments, we kind of clean up afterwards. We can give advice. We can say, “You really shouldn’t promise this,” and we can make recommendations, but we are always out there cleaning up the aftermath. At the Reporters Committee, one of the first things I learned when I took over from Jane, was, at the Reporters Committee, we don’t really do ethics. And that’s not to say every legal problem stems from an ethical problem. But the point is, somebody out there has to be available to use the law in ways to protect the flow of information to the public. I think what media lawyers have been striving to do for the last several months is to convince the journalism community, the political community and judges that this is not about journalists’ rights to have special privileges. This is all about maintaining a mechanism so that, in certain circumstances, information can continue to flow to the public.

Geneva Overholser: Absolutely. Jane Kirtley, I welcome your answer more generally, but what advice would you give us that you wish would stick?

Jane Kirtley: Well see, now that I am not at the Reporters Committee, I am allowed to do ethics. In fact, that’s what my title is, so I supposedly know something about it, and one of the things that Bill said in his opening remarks that I thought was an important thing for journalists to note was this discussion about the rationale that a journalist may use when he or she decides it’s time to burn a source—“I’ve made the promise, but now I have decided I don’t want to keep it anymore.” I’m not talking about under compulsion. I am talking about the situation where, “The source lied to me, the source misled me. That means the source is bad. So I no longer am bound by my promise.” Judges don’t understand this. Judges are people who are members of a regulated profession which has very strict canons that can lead to disbarment or losing your appointment or God knows what if you don’t follow the rules. If your client is a criminal, you still have to honor your promise to protect that client’s confidentiality. So I guess the one plea that I would make in this discussion, as I am listening to this very thoughtful analysis of sources and whether anonymity should be promised or not, is to think a little bit about what the ramifications are on a judge, on whose mercy you are throwing yourself to try to uphold your rights. It isn’t going to be terribly persuasive to say, “Well I’m going to keep this promise unless I decide I don’t want to keep it anymore.” It goes to the point that many people have made -- that the promises shouldn’t be made in the first place. I would certainly agree with that. But it is an issue that I don’t think should be discounted. It’s profoundly important. The last thing I want to say very quickly--and maybe it’s because I don’t live here in DC anymore--but I find this discussion a little quaint, and let me tell you why. Jack, I am sure can speak to this. The other media that are out there, the bloggers of the world, would be laughing to listen to this discussion, because they are delighted to be the recipients of leaks. They are delighted to be those who promote the agenda, as Tom Curley said. And in fact, many of the general public would say, “Why shouldn’t the Bush administration have an agenda?” I mean, Tom said people with an agenda want to use this, and many of the public would say, “Well of course they do. Why is that wrong?” So to the extent that we fail to address what’s really pernicious about this and are emphasizing only the thought that secrecy per se is bad, I think we are losing our audience, and we are losing the competition with those in this new media who do not have the standards that we traditionally have.

Geneva Overholser: Well I want to pick up on one point about the new media. It’s true that bloggers have done all kinds of outing of this or that. But if the new media is so hot, I don’t get, Jack, why you haven’t been able to “out” every briefer? When reporters pledge they won’t use their names, they don’t pledge they won’t tell anyone else.

Jack Shafer: I think it’s an implied pledge.

Geneva Overholser: You know, bloggers have found out a lot harder things than who some senior administration official is. Why aren’t you finding this out?

Jack Shafer: I think, and I am really disappointed, I found out reporters are more honorable than I thought they were. I have an e-mail address, , and if any of you go to such a briefing and you want to out the briefer, send me that mail, and I’ll be happy to out the individual. I think that, once again I am going to restate what I said earlier, that reporters are not victims here. They are largely collaborators, and part of the seduction is that I think a lot of reporters and editors assume that an anonymous source is delivering a higher truth value to the reporter and therefore to the story, and that’s why in many cases publications publish anonymous information, so-called anonymous information. I think that more newspapers should take the USA Today pledge. I did a Nexus dump of the coverage of the president’s European tour, and charted the number of times each one of what I consider the top six dailies cited a senior administration official. The LA Times finished first, or last depending on how you look at it, with seven such stories. The New York Times was second with five, the Washington Post three, Chicago Tribune two, the Boston Globe one, USA Today zero. And I read all these stories, and coming away from it I thought that the USA Today’s coverage was at least as good as any of the other papers’. It’s not as though they missed an important aspect of the story because they didn’t quote such stirring statements as, “We are hopeful, but until we know exactly what the Egyptian government is embracing, it is too early to declare that it is a major change.” I mean, there is no information content there, yet the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times and the LA Times are all carrying these anonymous quotations. So, I would really steer us away from, “Woe, woe. Pitiful journalists, so put upon, so pushed around by these briefers,” and say “No, reporters, this is a great way for reporters to fill numerous column inches.”

Geneva Overholser: Susan Tifft, do you have any sense of whether the public gives a dog about this? Do you think it matters to them?

Susan Tifft: I think the public knows very little about all the things we are talking about here today. I mean, despite the cheerful poll results that we heard about or read about, about how the public, in fact, is perfectly OK with some of our practices. Like many of you who may have gone from journalism to teaching as I did, I am always kind of astounded when I talk to the younger generation about what they know and don’t know about the press. For instance, when I talk about the Freedom of Information Act, my students are actually astounded that it is not just for the press--that it is, in fact, for the public. I think that disconnect is something that we’ve got to fix. We talked a little earlier about modeling behavior and about the Bush administration and that trickle-down effect to the state level having to do with open records and so on, but there is a modeling behavior going on as well about distrusting the press. Now we have, of course, helped that along, to a certain extent, ourselves. But, I think that what’s happened with the trickle-down effect has been that the public doesn’t trust us. They’ve taken their cues from the top, and we’ve really got to make a much better case. I think that some of the things that have been suggested here today, for instance, ripping back the veil on the process, doing stories on how news actually gets to you. When the New York Times did this piece recently on the front page about VNR’s, there was some sarcastic stuff on Romenesko about, you know, “New York Times discovers VNR’s.” But in fact, the very fact that it was on the front page meant that it was picked up by television. I saw a long piece on Peter Jennings and elsewhere. I mean that kind of stuff does have a trickle-down effect, and I think it will help.

Geneva Overholser: Alex, I am going to ask you one question, and then I want you all to think about what you all want to ask each other, especially on the idea of what we might do that might be productive. What have we not addressed in this discussion that we need to be addressing?

Alex Jones: My view is that talking about secrecy is talking about a facet of something that is much bigger and more pernicious and goes, in a way, to what Jack Shafer has been talking about. I think that secrecy and the effective control of information in terms of keeping it out of the media is just one part of a much larger and in fact more pernicious process of taking the principles and talents of very sophisticated public relations and using it in all kinds of ways. Secrecy is simply one piece of it. I think, for instance, the video news release article that the Times did on Sunday was an extremely important piece. It certainly was as far as I was concerned. I mean, I knew about VNR’s. VNR’s are a perfect modeling sort of image for what has happened over time to the principles of public relations, which began in a self-serving way. In a way that lawyers or advocates for clients, so are public relations people, and they have been the handmaidens, to a certain extent, of the media. But now, they are, I think, increasingly becoming so entwined with what we do report and what we don’t report, which I think is the same piece of the same issue. And secrecy is a part of that on the not-reporting side, but just as important is how much, especially outside the beltway, of these major news organizations—that are serious news organizations, but they are not where most people actually get their news—the power of public relations as it is sort of infused into the news report taken as a whole is a gigantic story that the media has simply turned its head away from, and in part, many of the news organizations represented at this table have interests in terms of television, have interest in terms of the distribution of VNR’s and things like that. These are very important things, and now you’ve got a president who is rejecting the idea that the General Accounting Office is saying the propagandistic VNR’s that are being used to drop in to news reports that look like serious news reports, even though the GAO says they are propaganda, the new Justice Department has said they are not, and therefore, as far as I can tell, intend to go do the exact same thing on and on, and I have heard very little screaming and crying and complaint. It seems to me that’s a hell of a lot more important than whether someone is off the record or on the record as far as the Washington Post is concerned.

Geneva Overholser: OK, the great virtue of this assemblage is that you represent so many different points of view, and speaking of collectivity, I mean, this is a place where speaking with one another would obviously be useful. So, I’m going to shut up, and we have fifteen minutes for you all to really talk to one another. Tom Curley, do you have a question for anyone? Is there something you’d like to hear that hasn’t been stated?

Tom Curley: To follow up on Alex’s point, I think one question out there is where is the sense of outrage? How does it get kindled or rekindled? One quick example—there are 550 people being held at Guantanamo Bay, 50 are in maximum security, 500 are not in maximum security. The government has said that none of them has intelligence value. There are two processes to determine their standing. We filed a FOIA Request. We’ve gotten nowhere. We’ve covered this, and our stories virtually have gotten no play. This is an important issue. The stakes are high. The world superpower is under a spotlight here. There have been known abuses. What do we do to get people’s attention?

Geneva Overholser: Anybody have an answer for that?

Andy Alexander: I’ll take a very small part of it, and we raised this yesterday at Paul McMasters’ National FOI Day. I think one thing in the fight against secrecy in and sourcing, especially on FOIA related stuff, I think we need to do a better job of identifying the specific people in the government who have made those decisions--not the agency, but the individual—not simply to rat them out, but to try to get them to explain why. I think that’s one way of engaging the public. You know we have, in a broader sense here, we really have a responsibility. It’s frightening to say that people look to us for setting the standards. When you’re on the inside of this, it can be pretty frightening to watch in this town. The example that Jack used of the quote in that story on a background basis, I can’t imagine any statehouse reporter at any of the Cox papers getting that in the paper. It’s so insipid and silly and all that. We need to do a better job on all levels of setting the standard here to prevent this culture from creeping throughout America.

Jack Nelson: You know what I think is that the media itself pays very little attention to secrecy, relatively little. If you look at it, if you want to know about secrecy in this country you don’t read it in the daily paper very often. You read it on the Internet. You go on the Internet and you see the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. You see the Federation of American Scientists and their Secrecy Project. They put out three or four instances every week of more secrecy in this administration, and we just don’t cover it in the main media. It just goes on, and as a matter of fact, you could have a reporter on the secrecy beat in this city, but we just don’t cover it. Tom, you say there is no sense of outrage. That’s one reason there’s no sense of outrage--we don’t cover the story. We’ve got a big forum here on it, and it’s important. I think it’s very important that C-SPAN is covering it, but basically, we just don’t cover it.

Lucy Dalglish: You know, we’ve talked a lot over the last couple of days about Freedom of Information Act issues and secrecy in the White House and everything. What we really have left out here is a major component and that is the secrecy that has overtaken the courts, particularly the federal courts. We have information that more than 200 criminal cases in DC Superior Court last year were conducted completely off the docket. We have people in this country who have been arrested and are sitting in jail, and there is no public track record of how they got there. Now, I always thought that it was a hallmark of a democracy and an open government that you knew who you had sitting in jail, that that was one of your rights in the United States -- that you didn’t get sent off to be punished secretly. But you know, over the last year and a half to two years, I haven’t been able to buy that story. I’ve been talking about it. I’ve talked about it probably four or five times in the last ten days at sessions getting ready for Sunshine Week. I’ve been talking about this issue for at least eighteen months, and the only reporter out there who has really covered it is a guy by the name of Dan Christensen from the Miami Daily Business News who is single-handedly covering this story. It just blows my mind.

Geneva Overholser: OK Washington reporters, bureau chiefs, why aren’t we covering that story? Tom, should the AP be on it?

Tom Curley: Absolutely. There is nothing more important than that right, and I think Lucy has a point, and I’ll make a phone call as soon as I get off the dais.

Geneva Overholser: Janet, you were going to say.

Janet Leissner: I agree. I think it’s a very, very important story. The problem, though, and as we talk about the process, I don’t really know whether the public is interested in this. And I don’t really know how we, seriously, raise it to the level of outrage that the networks cover it. The networks follow The New York Times, yes, and ABC did that story last night and they felt they could do it because it was on the front page of The New York Times. We as television people do a terrible job of addressing the process. And when we try to do it, it’s “boring TV.” I think that part of what television is trying to do and CBS, certainly, is trying to do is to become “more transparent.” We know we have to explain to people why we do certain things, why we didn’t do certain things, and we’re going to make an effort on it. But actually I’d love to hear ways of bringing this to the networks.

Lucy Dalglish: Well, you know, the reason I knew about The Disappeared in Argentina 30 years ago was because I saw a story on “60 Minutes.”

Janet Leissner: Yes, “60 Minutes” can do those kinds of stories. And “60 Minutes” can raise those issues because it’s got the audience, it’s got the resources, it’s got the money. And “60 Minutes” I hope will continue doing that.

John Cochran: I was stunned yesterday to find out that there have been in Afghanistan and Iraq, there have been among people held in custody by American forces, coalition forces, have been 24 deaths that have been regarded as homicides. That material has been out there for a long time. DOD wasn’t keeping it back. All you had to do was go get it. Finally somebody asked and they came up with the number 24. Sometimes that stuff is just out there and a lot of is we’re just lazy.

Geneva Overholser: Are we lazy? Should you have a secrecy reporter, Phil Taubman?

Phil Taubman: The answer I think is probably yes, and – I’m not sure I’m going to make a phone call when the session ends – but when I get back to my bureau we’ll talk some more. We have talked about that and it’s a fair idea. The problem that we all have, and I don’t offer this as an excuse, but it’s a reality, the competitive forces in Washington, the volume of news, I haven’t worked here quite as long as Jack has, but in the time I have been here, the competitive factor, the news cycle, the volume of news, they’ve all quickened to the point that it becomes, I think, destructive. And it’s because of issues like that it’s hard, even in a big bureau like The New York Times Washington Bureau – which, we’ve got 35 reporters based here – it’s very hard to say, “OK, I’m going to take one of them and assign him or her to do a secrecy beat.” But I’m going to think seriously about it.

Geneva Overholser: Pam and then Andy.

Pamela Johnson: I want to get back to editors around the country, and knowing that ASNE (American Society of Newspaper Editors) as well as the publishers’ association are jumping on board with this is very important. But I can tell you that as an editor that, for the last 15 years, there’s been this constant conversation about how citizens don’t care about process and newspapers are boring because we’re always doing process. And there’s been this determined conversation in newsrooms to avoid process, and to give readers what it is they want or that’s something interesting, rather than both important and interesting. And I think that’s a stumbling block in this discussion of reaching a better situation because newsrooms have been mired in this kind of conversation – that the kind of coverage we’re talking about just isn’t as important and we don’t have space. And we don’t have time, or the public doesn’t care. And that needs to be rectified in some way.

Andy Alexander: We do have a secrecy beat in our bureau. We face the same problem every bureau does and we suffer because we have one person doing that full time, pretty much full time, dealing with privacy also. One of the early decisions we made as to how we cover secrecy is that we would try at all costs to avoid writing about it from a press standpoint. And we have been surprised at how we’ve connected with readers, by creating it as a citizen’s issue. Now, we’re just nearing the end of Sunshine Week and if you go on the sunshineweek.org Website you’ll see literally hundreds of stories written by newspapers large and small.

Geneva Overholser: Sunshineweek.org, it’s really an amazing site and it’s very heartening to see what people have done.

Andy Alexander: And the interesting thing about so many of these stories is that newspapers – and I’m sure most of them have not written about local secrecy in the past – but they have in so many cases gotten examples of citizens who either used the Freedom of Information Act to public good, or citizens who were denied information, or public officials who were good enough to give information, or public officials who denied it. And as we’ve looked anecdotally, and we haven’t had time to do a study yet, there are endless examples of community discussions that have grown out of this. I was saying yesterday that the Atlanta Journal Constitution, which did a really good job – I think as well as anyone in the United States on this – I was in Atlanta a couple of weeks ago, picked up the front page. And there’s a heckuva debate going on in the legislature over secrecy of records in the state, whether companies who are going to get incentives to relocate in the state, whether that information should be public. That’s the type of stuff that gets on radio shows, gets picked up on television stations and so on. So there is a way to write about it.

Tom Blanton: Yeah, I just want to answer Janet’s question of how you do this on TV. And do people care? Last night on NBC Nightly News, I think, there was a lovely little story playing off a study by Henry Waxman, where he found the audit report on how Halliburton had made off with tens of millions of dollars, and got to black out the report before it became public. Except Waxman went out and got the original report, and so you can go on Waxman’s Website and click on the black blotch and the white text comes out. They call it the “De-Redacto Machine.” It’s a phenomenal tool. We have on our site hundreds of thousands of pages exactly like that, that were blacked out at one time and were opened the other time. And what’s interesting to me is that on a daily basis at the National Security Archives Website, people are taking 210,000 pages a day from our Website, of previously secret documents, because it’s news. The government tried to hide it from you. Now you can see what it is. Aren’t you interested? And people are real interested. And that I think goes to Pam’s real point here, which is, Do people care about process? No, but people care that the government is hiding something from you, and when 50 percent of the energy of the top people who run our government is devoted to spinning the rest of us, and the other 50 percent of what they do is substantive, then we should pay attention to that part. I mean there are these stories about how they’re going to get Wolfowitz confirmed, how they’re going to make the World Bank happy… (brief microphone malfunction)… what the talking points should be on the front pages, and that is a story that people would care about.

Geneva Overholser: Paul McMasters, I bet you agree with Tom.

Paul McMasters: Absolutely, but it comes to one thing that hasn’t been uttered by this very discreet group, and that’s a five letter word, and it’s money. And that’s what it all boils down to. And when a bureau chief is asked to create a secrecy beat, as Phil indicated, that’s not just an editorial decision, that’s a money decision. And until the media organizations can find a way to do this, they can’t even combat the problem that John mentioned of reporters wanting to run with the big dogs. It’s the whole idea of competitiveness, which has to do with money also. So I think it also means investing in integrity, taking that long view. And that long view is like some people in this room, who know that they can’t cover their main subjects today because of privacy rules that are filed FOI requests for their background for the day they die.

Geneva Overholser: Tom, you might want to say what is really a very heartening development among publishers, and in many ways led by you, to really become backers of these secrecy concerns. And I must say, having watched NAA over the years it has not really been a forte of theirs. So, we should be optimistic?

Tom Curley: I’m not ready to say we should be optimistic. A number of organizations have come together and agreed to work together. There is strong consensus that NAA going forward is going to be in a lead role and elevate that. There is a group that has been put together under the NAA umbrella which is terrific and AP and others have put some money up. We’re fortunate with Gregg Jones as the leader of NAA this year and then Jay Smith of Cox next year and then Bo Jones the following year. So I’m pretty cheered about the next few years in terms of how much we can get done. At least everybody will be at the table. The notion is that this is a tough game, and we need to assert our rights and we need to put the spotlight on these details. And understand what’s at risk. Many of us have skin in the game in terms of reporters in jail or about to go to jail or that big threat. The issue of the shield is out there. HIPAA, the notorious health information portability act, is another one. The Patriot Act. There’s a lot to talk about.

Geneva Overholser: OK. Tom Rosenstiel and Mike McCurry and then we probably should end.

Mike McCurry: I want to make a brief point. While you’re all so concerned about secrecy, can I make an appeal for the information that’s in plain view? It’s amusing to hear you all shocked, shocked that there are video news releases going out from our government. Well, our government employs hundreds of people, spends millions of dollars trying to get you interested in the work the government does on behalf of the people who pay for it. And you don’t cover it. If Charlie Peters were here, he’d scold all of you for the decline in coverage of government agencies and the work of government over the last 20 years, as you go chase after stories that are hidden somewhere in the secret closets of the White House and other agencies. Why don’t you try covering the things that the government really does? And report on things that work? Instead of assuming that everything is waste, fraud and abuse, which is, by the way, what most Americans think. I think they’d be pleasantly surprised and find it newsworthy that sometimes government does exactly what it is supposed to do.

Geneva Overholser: We can’t end on such a logical note!

Jack Nelson: But, Mike, you are not defending what this administration is doing in sending out these videos that do not look like they come from the government, and look like they’re a reporter, and that some television stations are running without any acknowledgment that that’s the source? It’s government propaganda.

Mike McCurry: Jack, the news that was on the front page of The New York Times was that the local news stations were putting these things on the air unattributed, not that they were being developed and produced by government. I know exactly, I know and assume the Clinton administration, I mean we didn’t do it out of the White House, but I’m sure did out of agencies, made B-roll material available, we tried to give people access to interesting things that we think government has done to get them to do stories on it. And I think that is perfectly legitimate. Now it is up to you all on your side of the relationship to define how you use that material that comes from government, but it comes from our sense of desperation that a public out there doesn’t have a clue what it is that people are doing with tax dollars in government. We’re trying to get people interested in that.

Jack Nelson: Are you saying that in the Clinton administration it was not labeled that it came from the government?

Mike McCurry: I don’t know the answer to that. I’ll bet you we did… I know that we did video news releases, I know we did satellite feeds of B-roll material to try to get local stations to pay attention to the stuff because we should. If it’s public information. And we have a responsibility to get it out there in some fashion that it will get used. And if they did this to try to get someone to put it on the air so someone might know what these various agencies are doing, that’s because you all aren’t covering it yourselves.

Geneva Overholser: Tom Rosenstiel, you get one quick last word.

Tom Rosenstiel: Well, I would just say that the notion of sort of covering secrecy is fine, but I think you need to balance that attempt against two realities. One is the press’s credibility problem and the defensiveness and sort of loss of confidence that exists among news organizations, and the second issue, which has been brought up, is our complicity, our collaboration in the culture of secrecy. Your attempts to cover this as if it’s entirely the government are going to be undermined if we don’t acknowledge that role too.

Geneva Overholser: Thank you, Tom. There are going to be excerpts of this discussion in the Neiman Reports this summer, and there will be an audio tape available. We are delighted that C-SPAN is with us, and I will make sure that you all will know one another’s contact information unless you ask me not to. Thank you so much for being with us. What a terrific discussion.

ROUNDTABLE PARTICIPANTS

Hurley Symposium, “Seduction of Secrecy,” March 17, 2005

Bill Kovach Chairman, Committee of Concerned Journalists; former Washington bureau chief, New York Times

Head table

Andy Alexander Washington bureau chief, Cox Newspapers; FOI chair, American Society of Newspaper Editors

Tom Curley President and CEO, Associated Press

Lucy Dalglish Executive director, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press

Ron Hutcheson Knight Ridder; President, White House Correspondents Association

Pamela Johnson Executive director, Reynolds Journalism Institute, Missouri School of Journalism

Stephen Labaton New York Times; co-chair, National Press Club FOI committee

Janet Leissner Washington bureau chief, CBS-TV News

Mike McCurry Former White House press secretary; chairman, Grassroots Enterprise

Jack Nelson Former Washington bureau chief, Los Angeles Times

Ken Paulson Editor, USA Today

Jack Shafer Editor-at-large, Slate

Phil Taubman Washington bureau chief, New York Times

Front row

Tom Blanton Director, National Security Archive

John Cochran White House correspondent, ABC-TV News

Charles Davis Executive director, Freedom of Information Center, Missouri School of Journalism

Michael Getler Ombudsman, Washington Post

Ted Gup Professor, Case Western Reserve, writing a book on the culture of secrecy

Alex Jones Director, Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, Harvard

Jane Kirtley Director, Silha Center for the Study of Media Ethics and Law, University of Minnesota

Martha Joynt Kumar Professor, Towson University, writing on White House communication policies

Paul McMasters Ombudsman, Freedom Forum First Amendment Center

Tony Mauro Legal Times; co-chair, National Press Club FOI committee

Gene Policinski Executive director, Freedom Forum First Amendment Center

Tom Rosenstiel Director, Project for Excellence in Journalism

Susan Tifft Professor, Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy, Duke University

Pete Weitzel Coordinator, Coalition of Journalists for Open Government