All Blog Posts from Public Eye

On Friday, we mentioned that two Iraqi ABC News journalists had been murdered in Baghdad. Along with the news, we posted a picture of the two men that had been released by ABC News.

Late Friday evening, a producer informed us via email that the picture had been pulled both from our post and from the story about the murders on CBSNews.com. According to the email, the families of the dead men had informed ABC News that they were receiving death threats, presumably because it was now known that the men had worked for an American media outlet. ABC News asked CBSNews.com to take the photos down, and producers here agreed.

The "Evening News" discussed the murders on the Friday broadcast, but anchor Katie Couric did not use the names or photos of the men on the air. CNN also declined to use their names and pictures; Howard Kurtz cited the fact that "the families of those killed have been receiving threats, and CNN is seen internationally" as the reason. ABC News, in its extensive coverage of the killings on "World News" on Friday, did use their names and photos.

"After approving the release of the photos of Alaa and Saif on Friday morning, the families later in the day grew concerned for their own safety," ABC News spokeswoman Cathie Levine told Public Eye. "From that point on, we limited our use of the pictures, recognizing that we live in a digital age and the photos had been distributed electronically."

According to Levine, "World News" normally airs in the Middle East, but Friday's edition was not put on the air there.

As for the decision to remove of the pictures, it ultimately might not have made much difference, as the proverbial genie was already out of the bottle. (And, of course, the men's names remain all over the Internet.) But ABC News (and, ultimately, CBSNews.com) did the right thing by honoring the family's request, if only for the outside chance that doing so might have made them safer.

The situation with the photos drives home how perilous it can be for Iraqi journalists to work for American media outlets: Not only can they be killed for doing so, but their families can be at risk if they are found out - even after they are murdered. Without the work of these journalists, the quality of the coverage out of Iraq – and our understanding of the war – would be greatly diminished.

"They are really our eyes and ears in Iraq," ABC's Terry McCarthy said after the attack. "Many places in Baghdad are just too dangerous for foreigners to go now, so we have Iraqi camera crews who very bravely go out … without them we are blind, we cannot see what's going on."

Check out this Richard Roth report from last night's "Evening News" about a new memorial in France for journalists who have been killed on the job. It's an important reminder that journalists who risk their lives to cover high-risk areas – among them CBS News' own Paul Douglas and James Brolan – sometimes pay a fatal price. Click on the video box to watch.

One issue we've been keeping our eye on here is the implications of the increasingly blurring lines between regular citizens engaged in reporting and traditional journalists. Josh Wolf, who calls himself a journalist as well as an activist, spent more than seven months in federal prison for not turning over videotape of a San Francisco street protest. Student Jamal Albarghouti's cell phone footage of the Virginia Tech tragedy, which was played on CNN repeatedly, had us wondering whether citizen journalists might someday put themselves at risk in their quest to cover a story.

Now comes news that journalists were beaten by police at the Los Angeles immigration protests – and part of the reason may be that police couldn't distinguish between traditional journalists and citizen journalists who were also there as activists. Via Lost Remote, here's some pretty amazing video of journalists, both traditional and self-styled, fleeing baton-wielding officers, some of whom struck those holding video cameras.

The police are being investigated for their conduct in the case, which L.A. Police Chief William Bratton has called "inappropriate."

"Our national anchor was being pushed by the batons," Reporter Marcia Garcia of the Spanish-language Telemundo 52 told KCAL-TV, according to the Associated Press. "Our TV set was destroyed — monitors, cables, everything on the ground — it was like a surrealistic nightmare."

Here's a bit more from the AP story:

KPCC radio reporter Patricia Nazario said she was hit in the back and ribs with a baton, then hit her head and twisted her ankle while falling from a blow. She described an interaction with an officer who was hitting her.

"'Why did you hit me? I'm a reporter?'" Nazario recounted Wednesday during an interview on her station. "And he hit me again, harder that time, and I fell; and I fell on the dirt and my phone flew like about 12 feet in front of me."

According to the L.A. Times, some news organizations are considering legal action.

Jill Leovy's excellent eyewitness account of what happened may shed some light on why police acted as they did towards journalists.

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The Asian American Journalist Association is calling on news outlets "to avoid using racial identifiers unless there is a compelling or germane reason" when identifying the Virginia Tech suspect.

Says the Association: "There is no evidence at this early point that the race or ethnicity of the suspected gunman has anything to do with the incident, and to include such mention serves only to unfairly portray an entire people. The effect of mentioning race can be powerfully harmful. It can subject people to unfair treatment based simply on skin color and heritage."

We now know the suspect was 23-year-old Tech senior Cho Seung-Hui, who yesterday was being identified only as a "young Asian male." In a press release, CBS News initially referred to him as Sueng-hui Cho. The discrepancy comes from the fact that Korean surnames are listed first, while in America they appear at the end of a name. CBS News is now referring to the suspect as Cho Seung-Hui, which follows the Korean tradition.

As the Libby trial has induced a flood of ink discussing the increasing number of reporters confronted with subpoenas, the case of jailed blogger Josh Wolf continues to draw attention.

Today, his story lands in the Washington Post, where Howard Kurtz looks at the question at the very core of Wolf's case: Is a blogger a journalist?

He's spent the last six months in a California prison for refusing to comply with a court order to turn over a video he shot of a violent San Francisco protest during a G-8 summit meeting. Wolf posted a portion of the video on his blog and sold some of it to local television stations. And his rationale for withholding it "is less than crystal clear," writes Kurtz, since he isn't really protecting any confidential sources, as was the case with Judy Miller of the New York Times or the San Francisco Chronicle reporters who recently avoided a prison sentence after their source came forward.

According to Wolf, "There was a trust established between people involved in the organization that I was covering and myself . . . that what I chose to release was what I chose to release, and that I wasn't an investigator for the state."

As far as the U.S. Attorney prosecuting him is concerned, Wolf needs "to come to grips with the fact that he was simply a person with a video camera who happened to record some public events."

But a classification as a journalist would probably not do Wolf any good anyway; his is a federal case and there are no federal shield laws for journalists.

Wolf has "repeatedly lost in the courts," including an appeal to the 9th Circuit, which upheld the grand jury's request for his testimony. Failing a solution from a mediation session today, "he will likely remain imprisoned at least until the current grand jury's term expires in July."

There are certain jobs that are dangerous by their very nature. Fireman. Drug smuggler. Bodyguard. And then there are jobs that really shouldn't be dangerous, and yet are – in some countries at least. In the latter category is the job of reporter, which, in China, is the third most dangerous profession, after miner and policeman.

Reuters reports that a Shenyang hospital has now set up a foundation to help injured journalists, who "are obstructed, scolded, even beaten during interviews" in China. Early this year, a newspaper editor died as a result of a beating he took from traffic police for exposing high fees for electric bicycle licenses.

Interestingly, Reuters wrote this report off of a dispatch from Xinhua, China's official news agency. One wonders if the agency's decision to publish news about the dangers faced by journalists will have consequences for those involved. It's also important to note that, for journalists, working in China isn't just dangerous – it also carries the risk of going to jail. According to Reporters Without Borders, the country, which monitors news closely and censors reports it doesn't like, leads the world in jailing journalists.

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Some news about Hewlett-Packard today has some business professors sounding a lot like journalistic ethicists. The company had hired private investigators to uncover the source of leaks to the press … and it turns out that the investigators also “accessed private phone records of nine journalists who covered the company, without obtaining their permission,” writes The Washington Post. According to The New York Times:

“The company said this week that its board had hired private investigators to identify directors leaking information to the press and that those investigators had posed as board members — a technique known as pretexting — to gain access to their personal phone records.

“In acknowledging Thursday that journalists’ records had also been obtained, the company said it was apologizing to each one. ‘H.P. is dismayed that the phone records of journalists were accessed without their knowledge,’ a company spokesman, Michael Moeller, said.”

Accessing personal records through computers without permission is a violation of California law, Attorney General Bill Lockyer, whose office is investigating, told The Washington Post. The paper noted that Lockyer “called the accessing of journalists' phone records ‘stupid cubed.’”
Lockyer told The Times: “‘A crime was committed.’ But he added: ‘It is unclear how strong the case is. Who is charged and for what is still an open question.’”

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Earlier today we told you about Israeli hostility to Al-Jazeera journalists. That hostility now appears to have boiled over: The International Middle East Media Center reports that a "cameraman for Al-Jazeera television was shot in Nablus, and a reporter with Al Hurrah television was also shot by Israeli forces today in separate incidents." (Hat tip Greenslade.)

From the story:

Wail Tanous was filming Al-Jazeera anchorwoman Guevara Albudeiri live in the northern West Bank city of Nablus early Wednesday afternoon when an Israeli military jeep pulled up and rammed the anchorwoman in the middle of her broadcast. The soldiers then proceeded to shoot the cameraman, Wail Tanous, in the leg. He was taken to a nearby hospital and is currently being treated, local sources reported.

Earlier today, according to IMEMC, "Israeli soldiers ransacked the offices of the main Palestinian News Agency, WAFA, damaging equipment and injuring reporter Mona Al Fares when they fired tear gas into her office."

Said Reporters Without Borders: "It is unacceptable that journalists should be treated as combatants when they are covering clashes."

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ABC News' claim that the government is tracing reporters' calls, first reported yesterday on an ABC News blog, just got a little bit stronger.

Former CIA counterterrorism chief Vincent Cannistraro told the New York Sun that "the FBI is monitoring calls of a number of news organizations as part of this leak investigation. It is going on. It is widespread and it may entail more than those three media outlets."

The three named outlets were ABC News, the New York Times and the Washington Post. "This leak investigation" seems to refer to an FBI investigation of leaks of information about secret CIA prisons.

FBI spokesman Bill Carter told the Sun that the ABC News report was "misleading," but he did not dispute the claim that the FBI had obtained journalists' phone records. "In any case where the records of a private person are sought, they may only be obtained through established legal process," he said.

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Yowza.

That's the reaction I had when I saw Brian Ross and Richard Esposito's report alleging that "the government is tracking the phone numbers [journalists] call in an effort to root out confidential sources."

Something to keep in mind: Since this is an early, incomplete report, it should not be treated as ironclad. It's tied to an anonymous "senior federal law enforcement official." Beyond that single source, it doesn't have much to it one couldn't infer from last week's revelations about NSA call monitoring. And, somewhat oddly, the story was reported on "The Blotter," an ABC News blog. Was that a signal that ABC News didn't think it had enough to put the report in a stand-alone story? This is a big story to treat so off-handedly. What, exactly, is going on here?

Still: Even if this isn't happening yet, the potential is there. The government is tracking the calls of tens of millions of Americans, and if someone wants to go into the database and find out who a reporter has been talking to, wouldn't the information be just a few mouse clicks away? I imagine that at least some reporters will start using disposable cell phones and, in the case of Ross and Esposito, "in person conversations" with sources for fear that the government will otherwise know to whom they have been talking. Is anyone else more than a little troubled that reporters might now have to embrace tactics favored by terrorists in pursuit of a story?

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