Posted from San Francisco on July 3, 2014
This past weekend, more than 1,500 investigative reporters from around the world descended on San Francisco to attend the annual conference of Investigative Reporters and Editors and hear from the best and the brightest about how to get better at their craft – including national security journalism.
Some may have gotten more than they expected from the keynote speaker, Lowell Bergman, including those who run IRE, the world’s largest grassroots organization for accountability journalism. (I’m on the IRE Board of Directors).
Lowell Bergman of the Investigative Reporting Program at University of California at Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism (Photo via Wikipedia)
That’s because Bergman, one of the best muckrakers of his – or any – generation, took us in the media to task for not doing more to help investigative reporters over the years. Without quibbling over our differences about what IRE has done for investigative reporting, and investigative reporters, I think Bergman made a lot of good and important points that are worth sharing with a wider audience.
Few journalists are in a better position to speak about the challenges of doing investigative reporting in today’s media environment, as well as yesterday’s – and tomorrow’s.
A former 60 Minutes and ABC News investigative producer, Bergman now teaches investigative reporting at the University of California, Berkeley, and does excellent work as a contributor to The New York Times, PBS’ “Frontline” documentary series and other media outlets through his Investigative Reporting Project. He also co-founded the Center for Investigative Reporting in 1977, and had a brush with fame when Al Pacino portrayed him in 1999 movie “The Insider,” based on his reporting on the tobacco industry and CBS News’ reprehensible treatment of a key whistleblower.
As Bergman, 68, noted at the outset of his speech, “I’m here today to tell you that we’ve been living under an illusion.”
“We thought that after the Bush-Ashcroft-Gonzales years that Barack Obama and Eric Holder were our friends,” said Bergman. “They are not. While the president has said he supports whistleblowers for their ‘courage and patriotism,’ his Justice Department is prosecuting more of them for allegedly talking to the press or ‘leaking’ than all the other presidents in the history of the United States.”
Nothing new or shocking there. But Bergman went on to speak eloquently about how such strong-arm tactics to control information are being cheered on by those who run multinational corporations involved in bribery, exploitation of workers and manufacturing deadly products. My IRE Board colleague David Cay Johnston did a great column about Bergman’s broader message about why investigative journalism is needed to hold those in power accountable.
Bergman also sharply criticized the media for not pushing back harder against the Obama administration and its war on national security reporting, and in particular for not coming to the aid of reporters like James Risen of the New York Times.
James Risen
Risen, as I’ve written about here before, is the star investigative reporter who is the subject of a prolonged Obama administration campaign to put him in prison for publishing classified information, in his case in a 2006 book, “State of War,” about a secret U.S. counter-proliferation against Iran’s nuclear program that went awry. The administration has subpoenaed Risen not once or twice, but three times in an effort to compel him to testify – and name the source of information he used in his book.
In each case, Risen has steadfastly refused, stating that he was merely doing his job trying to inform the public about critically important national security issues. (It should also be noted that everyone, especially the government, knows Risen’s source is former CIA officer Jeffrey A. Sterling).
Recently, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear Risen’s appeal of an earlier court ruling. That means he’s now in contempt of court, and a judge could order him off to prison at any time, and keep him there until he
Risen’s own paper had a good piece on the dilemma on the same day Bergman gave his speech, noting that while the high court’s decision “looked like a major victory for the government, it has forced the Obama administration to confront a hard choice. Should it demand Mr. Risen’s testimony and be responsible for a reporter’s being sent to jail? Or reverse course and stand down, losing credibility with an intelligence community that has pushed for the aggressive prosecution of leaks?”
The Times noted that the dilemma now facing the White House comes at a critical moment for an administration that came into office with the promise of putting a stop to some of the Bush administration excesses in the national security realm, especially excessive (and arguably illegal) surveillance and leak investigations targeting journalists and their sources.
The Times noted that whatever the Obama administration and its Justice Department does will send a powerful message – and a legal precedent – “about how far it is willing to go to protect classified information in the digital age.”
“If the government proceeds and pursues the subpoena, especially if Mr. Risen goes to jail or is fined at some intolerable level, it will deal a withering blow to reporting that runs against the government’s wishes,” Steven Aftergood, who studies government secrecy for the nonprofit Federation of American Scientists, told the paper.
During his speech before a packed lunchtime crowd at IRE, Bergman castigated journalism organizations, singling out IRE in particular, for letting their words speak for them when they should have been taking action – especially when the Obama administration conducts “the biggest dragnet in this nation’s history searching for our sources!”
Some of my IRE colleagues weren’t happy to hear that, and I don’t blame them. Some if not all, of the examples cited by Bergman were legitimate, but they date back years, or even decades, and include a largely unreported time when the organization allowed his 60 Minutes boss a platform to criticize him without allowing for his response.
But I know for a fact that recently, IRE as an organization has been trying to come up with ways to do more to protect reporters from Obama’s war on sources. That’s especially the case with Risen, particularly in recent months as his options appear to be increasingly limited.
But what is journalism organization to do? Bergman said it’s no longer enough to organize petitions, sign Friend of the Court briefs, make statements, meet with Obama administration officials and, of course, write impassioned articles about how wrong it is to go after a journalist like Risen simply for doing their job.
He told the rapt crowd that it’s time to “stand up’’ to the administration, in part by stopping the fawning coverage and refusing to attend the annual White House Correspondents Dinner. He also called on reporters to come to Washington to do another “Arizona Project,’’ like the one that Bergman worked on in 1976 that helped create IRE in the first place. Journalists came from far and wide to Arizona to finish the investigative project that Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles was working on about organized crime, which got him killed by a car bomb.
Afterward, I asked Bergman to elaborate. What could reporters in Washington do? He said they should thoroughly investigate the Justice Department and Attorney General Eric H. Holder’s running of it – including the selective leaks to reporters that go un-investigated, the selective prosecutions that let corporations off the hook and the department’s failure to go after organized crime, financial fraud and money laundering cases.
He said he’d particularly like reporters to investigate how Holder has empowered DOJ’s National Security Division to engage in all sorts of overreaching activities.
Such an “Arizona Project” for Washington may never come to pass, not in time to help reporters like Risen, at least.
But in the meantime, Bergman asked all of us in the room to not only think like Jim Risen and engage in acts of civil disobedience when it comes to pushing back against the administration, but to stand up for him – literally.
“And so I ask you to take one small step, one small act, and stand up now and send a message to Jim Risen back in Washington, D.C. Let him know that he is not alone.”
“Let the Justice Department, let the White House and let all our colleagues in the media know that we, the reporters, who have dedicated ourselves to protecting the public interest, to digging deep, that we will stand up for our sources, for freedom of the press . . . because we are all Jim Risen!”
Looking around the room, at the multitude of standing reporters, was inspiring. What comes next, no one can say. But Bergman’s comments and his exhortation — however symbolic – were much appreciated.
Josh Meyer is director of education and outreach for the Medill National Security Journalism Initiative. He spent 20 years with the Los Angeles Times before joining Medill in 2010, where he is also the McCormick Lecturer in National Security Studies. Josh is the co-author of the 2012 best-seller “The Hunt For KSM; Inside the Pursuit and Takedown of the Real 9/11 Mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,’’ and a member of the board of directors of Investigative Reporters and Editors. | Earlier Insights columns
