All Blog Posts from Public Eye

Los Angeles Times reporter and columnist Patt Morrison has a column this morning entitled “His Story Won’t Die” – which picked up the story of the murder of Oakland Post editor Chauncey Bailey. For background on the case, check out Newsweek’s story from a few weeks ago, or for a boiled down summary, here’s how the Oakland Tribune reported the breaking news early this month:

In what police called a targeted killing, longtime Bay Area journalist Chauncey Bailey was ambushed and fatally shot Thursday morning at 14th and Alice streets in downtown as he walked to the Oakland Post, where he recently had been named editor.

Bailey had been investigating the possibly corrupt practices of Your Black Muslim Bakery in Oakland. The handyman of the bakery has already confessed to the killing.

Morrison makes the point that when you kill a journalist you’re not just killing one individual – it’s more an assault on a symbol. As she writes:

Killing a reporter is akin to killing a judge or a police officer. You're not just murdering the person, you're attacking the role: the robe, the badge, the notebook, the camera…

Reporters groups are organizing the same thing for Oakland and the bakery. So although you didn't hear a lot about Bailey's murder, you may, in the end, hear a lot more about his story. In death, Bailey might expose more corruption and malfeasance than he ever could have as just one guy with a notebook.

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Our friends over at Eat The Press have flagged a fantastic story in Radar about freelancers in Iraq and the marketing of former hostage Jill Carroll.

Carroll, you may recall, was a Christian Science Monitor freelancer when she was kidnapped in Iraq last January. When she was released, she was transformed from lowly freelancer to CSM staffer, award winner, and Harvard fellow. Carroll's rewards somewhat embarrassed her: "I didn't do anything great, and being kidnapped is not worthy of praise," she wrote in a CSM Q&A.

So why was she so showered with praise? According to Tony Dokoupil, it had something to do with the guilt many media companies feel over their poor treatment of freelancers, who risk their necks in extremely difficult circumstances for little reward. "Carroll's story is indicative of a broken news business where media companies—under ever-growing pressure to cut costs—shave the salaries and benefits of freelancers grateful for work and too conscious of competition to protest," writes Dokoupil.

Journalism now faces a supply and demand problem: Between 1992 and 2002, the number of available journalism jobs decreased for the first time in thirty years. Journalism schools, meanwhile, continue to churn out students. So young wannabe journalists turn to freelancing, and many go where they feel they can make a splash: war zones. The problem is that media companies, facing declining revenues, don't want to spend much money on them. And the freelancers, fearful that they will be replaced, don't want to make requests for security that they fear could hurt their chances for a byline.

"It may be crazy and reckless and foolhardy to pick up and rush headlong into a war zone, but when these people do it, we all get the benefit," writes Rachel Sklar. "Investing in them is a smart move for news orgs — witness NBC's Richard Engel — but also, it's pretty obviously the right thing to do. There are places to cut costs, but this isn't one of them."

Covering Your World Enough?: It's something many a Public Eye Outside Voicer has complained about: the continued lack of investment in foreign coverage by U.S. news outlets. Now Christian Science Monitor reporter Jill Carroll (who was held hostage in Iraq for more than 80 days last year) has entered the fray by authoring a report for Harvard's Shorenstein Center. In it, she argues that by closing foreign bureaus and limiting foreign correspondents, news outlets are "making a financial miscalculation and missing an opportunity to capitalize on an asset that they appear to undervalue."

In particular, reports Editor & Publisher, Carroll also "points out that the number of foreign bureaus at the three major networks had 'dropped significantly since 9/11.' ABC, NBC and CBS all had six foreign bureaus by the summer of 2003, according to American Journalism Review, after ABC and NBC cut seven and CBS cut four bureaus since the 1980's." While such cutbacks might save money in the short term, Carroll argues that "higher quality employees, greater credibility and exclusive stories are all a result of having one's own staff providing good quality foreign news coverage. These benefits strengthen the medium as an organization and when factored into a cost-benefit calculation, the costs associated with producing good quality foreign news coverage begin to seem like a bargain."

Courtroom Drama For News Addicts: As the Scooter Libby trial drags on, the New York Times notes this morning that the case has already shaken the unofficial rules of engagement among reporters and confidential sources. One law school dean told the paper that the CIA leak investigation "has undercut the assumptions that existed for several decades that a reporter’s promise of confidentiality is not only sacrosanct as a matter of journalistic ethics but relatively secure as a matter of law."

And with that, the Los Angeles Times reports that two New York Times reporters are being asked to reveal their sources in a trial. Attorneys for the co-defendant in the trial of indicted private investigator Anthony Pellicano are asking a U.S. District Court to demand the identity of the reporters' sources for an article published earlier this month.

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The kidnapping in Gaza of Fox News journalists Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig entered another disturbing chapter today, when the group claiming responsibility released a videotape of Centanni and Wiig to Al Jazeera. It’s a development that has seemingly already elevated the story’s prominence – it’s getting top billing at several news Web sites today and continuous attention on cable news.

The video appears as many (including us) have begun to wonder
why this kidnapping doesn’t seem to be garnering the same amount of media attention as similar events -- such as the kidnapping of Christian Science Monitor reporter Jill Carroll. Carroll’s 11-part series recapping her experience is currently generating record traffic for the Monitor’s Web site and is running on various other news Web sites, including CBSNews.com (where it’s one of the site’s most popular stories today.)

The video’s emergence makes it pretty likely that Centanni and Wiig’s story will get some sort of mention on tonight’s evening newscasts. In the meantime, the most comprehensive coverage is being updated constantly at TVNewser.

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Each week we invite someone from outside PE to weigh in with their thoughts about CBS News and the media at large. This week, we turned to National Review Online’s Jim Geraghty, who writes the TKS blog on National Review Online, and contributes to another group blog, OnTapblog.com. Below, he discusses where progress in the blogosphere has been achieved, and where it hasn’t. As always, the opinions expressed and factual assertions made in “Outside Voices” are those of the author, not ours, and we seek a wide variety of voices. Here's Jim:

Détente With Mordor

Back in the really fun days of blogging, summer 2004, a bunch of folks typing on the Internet had a bone to pick with a particular network news division over a quartet of memos that had inspired a wee bit of controversy. At that time I wrote, "Sure, the Sauronic Big Eye of CBS is on the verge of being toppled by the Pajamahadeen…"

("Sauronic Big Eye" was a reference to the network's logo and the villain from “Lord of the Rings,” and “pajamahadeen” was my attempt at an intimidating moniker based on former CBS executive Jonathan Klein's comment that the bloggers questioning the memos were just "a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas.")

At the time, the network had earned its comparison to a giant flaming embodiment of evil because of its stubborn refusal to acknowledge that it's memos allegedly from 1972 had a striking resemblance to Microsoft Word from 2004, as well as anchor Dan Rather's on-air dismissal of his critics as mere "partisan political operators." CBS ultimately admitted it could not verify the origin of the documents, and revealed that their source had misled the reporters on where he had obtained them.

It's about a year and a half later, and we've seen two differing trends in the antagonists in that fight. One is that CBS News has gotten a bit better and more responsible; and the other is that a significant portion of the blogosphere has, I humbly suggest, gone sour.

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A slew of bloggers were quick to criticize former hostage Jill Carroll’s statements in a propaganda video created by her captors – before she released a statement explaining that her comments were made under duress and are not an accurate reflection of her views. Ever The Moderate Voice, Joe Gandelman has an exhaustive look at some of the knee-jerk reactions, which he views as a big black eye for the blogosphere.

The era of the shoot-your-keyboard-first and see-if-its-accurate later (and do it in a way that makes a political point you make on your site so it fits in with your ongoing narrative) is upon us.

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As the consistently excellent Editor & Publisher reminded us yesterday, it's now been a month since the abduction of Christian Science Monitor freelancer Jill Carroll, and her fate continues to be unknown. A large poster of Carroll has been hung outside Rome's city hall, and a Paris demonstration urged support for her release. "We continue to explore every avenue that we can think of," David Cook, the Monitor's Washington bureau chief, told E&P.

In China, meanwhile, an editor died after a beating inflicted by police. Wu Xianghu's newspaper had accused the police of charging illegal bicycle fees. He was attacked by 50 policemen in October, and succumbed Thursday to liver and kidney problems reportedly exacerbated by the beating. His death "is a cruel reminder of the new dangers faced by Chinese journalists," Ann Cooper, executive director of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, told the BBC.

As protests continue over the Mohammed cartoons, the debate within the journalism community over whether they should be reprinted rages on. Four editors from the New York Press resigned when told to pull the cartoons from an issue devoted to them. "We have no desire to be free speech martyrs, but it would have been nakedly hypocritical to avoid the same cartoons we'd criticized others for not running," wrote now former editor in chief Harry Siegel. As he noted, editors in Jordan and France have been forced out for running the cartoons. He added: "We have no illusions about the power of the Press (NY Press, we mean), but even on the far margins of the world-historical stage, we are not willing to side with the enemies of the values we hold dear, a free press not least among them."

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One of the most oft-heard complaints we’ve heard about the media these past months is that there is a lack of positive news about the state of affairs in Iraq. While suicide bombings and U.S. military casualties are reported, we don’t hear about all the good happening, the critics say. In the fall, we looked at the reasons we don’t hear more good news and heard some varying opinions. But this week’s abduction of Christian Science Monitor stringer Jill Carroll underscores what CBS London producer and sometime Baghdad bureau chief Randall Joyce told us in September -- that Iraq was a dangerous place for journalists. “We didn't come to that conclusion frivolously. We did it because people were getting killed, and getting kidnapped. We are, unfortunately, experts at calibrating risk, and this is a place that is extremely dangerous,” Joyce told PE.



Today’s papers offer a good roundup of Carroll’s abduction, the efforts to find out who has taken her and the media’s joint cooperation to withhold the details of the story for the first several days.



According to The Washington Post account, Carroll may have been one journalist who felt rather comfortable in Iraq:

“Unlike most Western reporters in Baghdad, Carroll spoke Arabic well enough to easily talk to ordinary Iraqi people and interview Iraqi officials. She had picked up the language while working as a business reporter in Jordan and, in the days before her abduction, had renewed a plea to her Iraqi interpreter and driver to speak only Arabic to her as they traveled so she could improve her fluency, colleagues said.



In a scholarship application filled out shortly before Saturday's kidnapping, Carroll outlined proposals for reporting projects in Iraq. In them, she showed a keen understanding of the country.



She wanted to spend six months of the fellowship making her Arabic better still, she wrote in the application. ‘In this poorly understood region, where so much is at stake, important stories are lost everyday because the foreign press corps doesn't speak Arabic,’ Carroll wrote. ‘Journalism is a public service and readers are best-served if I and the people I am writing about speak the same language.’”

Even so, Iraq remains a dangerous place for reporters.

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