Clay Burell's Library tagged journalism →  View Popular

BILL MOYERS: THAT MEANT ASKING QUESTIONS ABOUT THE SOURCES OF INFORMATION THE PRESS AND GOVERNMENT WERE RELYING ON, INCLUDING, NOTABLY, THIS MAN, AHMED CHALABI.
AFTER THE FIRST GULF WAR AMERICANS HAD INSTALLED CCHALABI AS THE LEADER OF IRAQI EXILES SEEKING REGIME CHANGE IN BAGHDAD. NOW HE WAS ALL OVER WASHINGTON, AS THE ADMINISTRATION'S AND THE NEO-CONSERVATIVES' STAR WITNESS AGAINST SADDAM.

AHMED CHALABI: Hello... Yes, very well.

JOHN WALCOTT: Chalabi's motives were always perfectly clear in this and understandable. He was an Iraqi. He didn't want his country run by a thug and a murderer, a mass murderer, and a crook. And everything he said had to be looked at in that light, and scrutinized in that light.
And why anyone would give him a free pass, or anyone else a free pass for that matter, on a matter as important as going to war, is beyond me.

JAMES BAMFORD: Chalabi was a creature of American propaganda to a large degree. It was an American company, the Rendon Group, that - working secretly with the CIA - basically created his organization, the Iraqi National Congress. And put Chalabi in charge basically.

BILL MOYERS: JAMES BAMFORD IS AN INDEPENDENT JOURNALIST WHOSE SPECIALTY IS THE INTELLIGENCE WORLD.

JAMES BAMFORD: From the very beginning Chalabi was paid a lot of money from the US taxpayers. The CIA paid him originally about 350,000 dollars a month, to Chalabi and his organization. The CIA finally caught on in the mid-90s that Chalabi was a conman basically. And, they dropped him.

BILL MOYERS: CHALABI'S HANDLERS IN WASHINGTON WERE NOT DETERRED BY THAT STAIN ON HIS CREDIBILITY. HE CHARMED CONGRESS OUT OF MILLIONS MORE DOLLARS FOR HIS CAUSE, AND HAD THE PRESS EATING OUT OF HIS HAND.

JAMES BAMFORD: He made a lot of friends in the media. And, he convinced a lot of people that he was legitimate even though the CIA had dropped him.

BILL MOYERS: WHEN CHALABI MADE SELECTED IRAQI DEFECTORS AVAILABLE TO THE PRESS IT WAS A WIN-WIN GAME: THE DEFECTORS GOT A PLATFORM. JOURNALISTS GOT BIG SCOOPS.

MICHAEL MASSING: There was a big effort, in fact, to find people who seemed to have credible evidence about what was going on inside Iraq. Because, in fact, if you could find somebody who was credible talking about a nuclear program in Iraq or chemical weapons, that would be a big story.

BILL MOYERS: AND IT WORKED. THE NEW YORKER. USA TODAY. THE WASHINGTON POST. THE NEW YORK DAILY NEWS. THE NEW YORK TIMES. AND ON PBS JUST TWO MONTHS AFTER 9/11, FRONTLINE AND THE NEW YORK TIMES TEAMED UP FOR A DOCUMENTARY ON THE DEFECTORS.

FRONTLINE NARRATOR (FRONTLINE, PBS, 11/8/01): Captain Sabah Khodada is a former army officer who defected from Iraq. He made a crude drawing of what he says is a terrorist training camp on the outskirts of Baghdad.

BILL MOYERS: THERE WERE CAVEATS...

FRONTLINE NARRATOR: And a further caution: these defectors have been brought to FRONTLINE's attention by one group of Iraqi dissidents, the INC, The Iraqi National Congress.

BILL MOYERS: BUT THE CAVEATS COULDN'T COMPETE WITH THE SPECTACULAR TALES TOLD BY DEFECTORS.
BEFORE THE INVASION THE NEW YORK TIME'S JUDITH MILLER WOULD WRITE SIX PROMINENT STORIES BASED ON THEIR TESTIMONY.
JUDITH MILLER: Ahmed Chalabi is a controversial leader of the Iraqi opposition...

BILL MOYERS: AND STILL ON THE WEB, A REPORT ABOUT THE DEFECTORS, NARRATED BY JUDITH MILLER AND PRODUCED BY NEW YORK TIMES TELEVISION FOR THE NEWSHOUR ON PBS...

JAMES BAMFORD: Well, Judy Miller had been an old friend of Chalabi. Did a lot of the stories on Chalabi. Was very favorable to Chalabi.

BILL MOYERS: JAMES BAMFORD FOUND OUT THAT IN 2001 CHALABI HAD ARRANGED FOR MILLER TO MEET IN THAILAND WITH A DEFECTOR FROM IRAQ NAMED AL-HAIDERI.

JAMES BAMFORD: So, Al-Haideri was in Bangkok. Judy Miller flew there to interview him.

JAMES BAMFORD: The NEW YORK TIMES ran a front page story basically confirming everything the administration had been saying about Iraq.

MICHAEL MASSING: THE NEW YORK TIMES remains immensely influential. People in the TV world read it every morning, and it's amazing how often you'll see a story go from the front page of the day's paper in the morning to the evening news cast at night. People in government, of course, read it, think tanks, and so on.

JONATHAN LANDAY: There were some red flags that the NEW YORK TIMES story threw out immediately, which caught our eye, immediately. The first was the idea that a Kurd - the enemy of Saddam - had been allowed into his most top secret military facilities. I don't think so. That was, for me, the biggest red flag. And there were others, like the idea that Saddam Hussein would put a biological weapons facility under his residence. I mean, would you put a biological weapons lab under your living room? I don't think so.

WARREN STROBEL: The first rule of being an intelligence agent, or a journalist, and they're really not that different, is you're skeptical of defectors, because they have a reason to exaggerate. They want to increase their value to you. They probably want something from you. Doesn't mean they're lying, but you should be -- journalists are supposed to be skeptical, right? And I'm afraid the NEW YORK TIMES reporter in that case and a lot of other reporters were just not skeptical of what these defectors were saying. Nor was the Administration...

FOX NEWS ANCHOR (8/1/02): A former top Iraqi nuclear scientists tells congress Iraq could build three nuclear bombs by 2005.

CNN NEWS ANCHOR (12/21/01): Well, now another defector. A senior Iraqi intelligence official tells VANITY FAIR in an exclusive interview that Saddam Hussein has trained an elite fighting force in sabotage, urban warfare, hijacking and murder. David Rose wrote the story; he joins us now from London.

BILL MOYERS: IN VANITY FAIR'S DAVID ROSE, DEFECTORS FOUND ANOTHER EAGER BEAVER FOR THEIR CLAIMS. THE GLOSSY MAGAZINE, A FAVORITE OF MEDIA ELITES, GAVE HIM FOUR BIG SPREADS TO TELL DEFECTOR STORIES.
THE TALK SHOWS LAPPED IT UP.

DAVID ROSE: (MSNBC 12/21/01) What the defector Al-Qurairy, a former brigadier general in the Iraqi intelligence service, told me is that these guys, there are twelve hundred in all and they've been trained to hijack trains, buses, ships and so forth...

JONATHAN LANDAY: As you track their stories, they become ever more fantastic, and they're the same people who are telling these stories, until you get to the most fantastic tales of all, which appeared in VANITY FAIR Magazine.

DAVID ROSE: The last training exercise was to blow up a full size mock up of a US destroyer in a lake in central Iraq.

JONATHAN LANDAY: Or, jumping into pits of fouled water and having to kill a dog with your bare teeth. I mean, and this was coming from people, who are appearing in all of these stories, and sometimes their rank would change.

LESLIE STAHL (60 MINUTES, CBS 3/3/02): Musawi told us that he has verified that this man was an officer in Iraq's ruthless intelligence service the Mukhabarat .

JONATHAN LANDAY: And, you're saying, "Wait a minute. There's something wrong here, because in this story he was a major, but in this story the guy's a colonel. And, in this story this was his function, but now he says in this story he was doing something else.

Wikipedia may be a fantastic resource, but any savvy Internet user is aware of its limits. Edit wars, entries made and modified for PR purposes, hoaxes, and basic inaccuracies all creep into (and back out of) the system, meaning that any use of the information there for purposes that might be considered significant should require some serious fact-checking. And, accordingly, many academics don't accept references to Wikipedia, and its entries have been rejected as evidence by US courts. So, it's a bit of a surprise to find out that one Wikipedia hoax, perpetrated by a sociology student, managed to appear in a variety of news reports, and has stayed there even after the hoax was revealed.

According to the AFP, the hoax traces back to Shane Fitzgerald, a student at Ireland's University College Dublin. Upon learning of the death of the Oscar-winning composer Maurice Jarre, the student modified his Wikipedia entry, adding a completely fictitious post that was nicely designed to fit perfectly into any obituary. "When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head, that only I can hear," the added material read in part.

Fitzgerald was apparently curious how far his hoax would spread, and expected it to appear on a variety of blogs and similar sites. Instead, to his surprise, a search picked it up in articles that appeared at a variety of newspapers. Fitzgerald eventually removed his own fabricated quote and notified a variety of news outlets that they had been tricked, but not all of them have apparently seen fit to publish corrections or to ensure that their original stories were accurate, even though fixing a webpage shouldn't be a challenging thing.

Of course, it shouldn't be a surprise that journalists use Wikipedia as part of their research—especially in this case, as Jarre's entry comes out on top of the heap in a Google search for his name. However, the discovery that so many of the writers apparently failed to find an additional source on that quote comes at a rather awkward time for journalists in traditional media, who are facing a struggle to stay above water as the newspaper industry is sinking and the line between traditional journalism and casual reporting gets ever blurrier.

A key part of the argument for maintaining traditional journalism is that its trained reporters can perform research and investigations that the untrained masses can't, and the content they produce is run by editors and fact-checkers. The revelation that their research is often no more sophisticated than an average Web surfer's, and that the fact checking can be nonexistent, really doesn't help that argument much.

My own experiences have convinced me that today, the vast majority of students are unable to practice true journalism at their high school papers. For the past six summers, I have directed a program for about 20 high school journalists at Princeton University. All the students are talented writers and thoughtful intellectuals. Yet, by and large, they work for newspapers that are either explicitly censored or restrained by the looming threat of official disapproval -- newspapers that read more like school-sponsored news releases than true journalism. Many have been taught to write fluffy profiles of teachers and to celebrate the achievements of their sports teams; fewer have been encouraged to challenge, to criticize or to investigate. Perhaps the most important part of our program's curriculum is to help students unlearn the instincts they have acquired at their high school newspapers.

No high school principal would dream of telling the basketball team that it could run drills but not play games, or permit the drama club to rehearse but never to stage shows. Yet, thanks in part to Hazelwood, many high schools train their students in journalism without allowing them to truly practice it.

Journalism as we know it is in crisis. Daily newspapers are going out of business at an unprecedented rate, and the survivors are slashing their budgets. Thousands of reporters and editors have lost their jobs. No print publication is immune, including the mighty New York Times. As analyst Allan Mutter noted, 2008 was the worst year in history for newspaper publishers, with shares dropping a stunning 83 percent on average. Newspapers lost $64.5 billion in market value in 12 months.

Similar information should also appear on the hardcopy of the script. The script should have a line break to indicate when a cart is to be played, and information on the speaker, the outcue and the duration should be given. Here's an example of what the script accompanying the previous cut might look like:

• .... CRITICS SAY THE PROPOSAL IS A WASTE OF TAX MONEY, BUT SMITH DISAGREES.
  
  
  #4 PARKING
  
  OQ: "...DOWNTOWN."
  
  CART RUNS 0:10
  
  
  
  CITY COUNCIL WILL DISCUSS THE MAYOR'S PLAN AT TONIGHT'S MEETING.



Having this information on the cart label and in your script will help ensure you play the right cart at the right time.

Sound ideas for the digital newsroom

Many newsrooms are now tapeless, using digital sound files for actualities, voicers and wraps. Most computer audio-editing programs automatically assign a file number to each sound file, but the file still requires a slug for further identification. The slug should contain a word immediately followed by a number indicating which particular story uses that file.

For the story about the proposed parking garage, let's say this actuality is the second of three actualities taken from the interview with the mayor. One of the actualities will be used by the reporter in a wrap, the other two in scripts to be read by an anchor. So there are three scripts to be created from this story, and this particular script and its accompanying actuality should be slugged parking02 to distinguish it from the other scripts and sound files (which would be slugged parking01 and parking03).

Computer programs may allow further identifying information, such as outcue and length of cut, to mark each sound file. The more information in your script, the better. This will help ensure that the sound file you select to accompany the story is the correct one.

How significant is the story?

Story selection is one area where listeners are quick to perceive bias.

High story count

A 90-second cast should aim for seven stories.