Volunteers for a Better America

Roll Call Votes

One of the key functions of the media is to serve as a source of information to ordinary citizens about their representatives in Congress.  We cannot all spend time to ferret out details of representatives stances on particular issues or figure out exactly who voted for what in which situations. The media should help us to find out what issues are important and how our Senators and Congressperson vote on those issues.

Byron Calame, the ombudsperson for the New York Times (called the "public editor" now) has noted an increasing failure of one of our most cherished newspapers, the ones that serve as papers of record for millions of readers in the United States, to provide critical information on roll-call votes.  See The Case of the Missing Roll-Call Votes in Sunday's New York Times.  He notes that "[g]iven a newspaper's fundamental role in helping readers hold lawmakers accountable, providing lists of roll-call votes on majmor legislation should be an essential ingredient in The Times's Congressional coverage." 

Although the Times has long covered such information, recent trends have moved in the opposite direction, without even substituting readily accessible information on the Times's online site.  Examplesl include the two votes on Alito's (lamentable) confirmation to the Supreme Court--72-25 on cloture to end the filibuster, and 58-42 to confirm.  (Note that if the 42 "nay" voters had had the courage to vote to use the filibuster, they could have successfully blocked Alito's confirmation or forced the Republicans to use their so-called "nuclear option".)

The Times's explanation?  Space, it claims, is too tight.  One has to wonder about that assertion.  There are considerable filler items still in the paper, and there is almost always the possibility of cutting a few uninformative lines of text from a story in order to put a fine-print sidebox with the key information about votes next to the story.  One wonders if the reluctance to provide such information stems from space considerations or from a failure to understand the media's role in providing this sort of information for citizens.  As journalistic values decline, it follows that those running the paper, with their focus on the bottom line, might be more willing to make "space" decisions that compromise the integrity of the paper as a paper of record.

Kudos to Byron Calame for bringing this issue to the fore.  I read the Alito stories with an eye for the expected roll-call vote box and was amazed that it wasn't there.  Now we know that commercial considerations  are encroaching even more strongly on the role of journalism as a check on the power of government (after all, "space" is just shorthand for the number of ads that can replace informational text).

Surveillance and Disappearances: How Many Others?

When we first learned that Hamdi and Padilla were being held in military brigs inaccessible to their lawyers, most of us here in America were shocked.  These are U.S. citizens who were arrested and detained as "enemy combatants" and denied the ordinary due process rights that we had always thought we were entitled to under our Constitution.

Like many others, I wondered what would happen if there were some foul up of information in the White House and an innocent person was caught in their dragnet.  We have seen this White House's incompetence in handling so many other things-- information that was available to them before 9/11 that 9/11 would occur, the bungled invasion and occupation of Iraq, their mishandling of Afghanistan where the Taliban still roam freely, their awful failure in handling the rescue effort connected with Katrina, their inability even to set up a transition of their prescription drug program so that needy seniors would not be stuck without medicines.  About the only thing this group does well is create networks of cronies and crony companies that rip the government off and get waivers for not providing what they've been paid to provide.  (Halliburton, anyone?) 

What if they declared somebody an enemy combatant who is entirely innocent?  What if that person were shipped off to a prison in some country that looks the other way when torture takes place?  How often has that happened, in all those people imprisoned in Abu Ghraib and tortured, sometimes killed?  How often in Guantanamo, where people have been held for years?  How often in this country?  How many other U.S. citizens have been seized and carried off to a military prison on the say-so of Mr. Bush and Mr. Gonzales?  Do we know about all of them? 

Now we know of one more.  Read this story in the Washington Post.  It tells how U.S. citizen Shawqi Omar was arrested in his home in Baghdad on October 24, 2004.  He has been held, without charges and without seeing a lawyer, for 15 months in various military prisons in Iraq, including Abu Ghraib.  When his American lawyers finally filed legal papers to contest the government's right to arrest and hold an American citizen, without acknowledgement that they were doing so, in military prisons in a country that we are occupying by miltiary force, the U.S. government announced that it had decided to transfer U.S. citizen Omar to the Iraqis to hold.  This decision was made even though we have been informed directly that the Iraqi-run prisons use torture.  The U.S. military informed Mr. Omar's attorneys that he would have a hearing in the Central Criminal Court of Iraq and that the attorneys would not be able to be informed any further about it.

In Argentina, such actions were called "disappearances."  We scorned the lack of constitutional protections for citizens or foreigners, and prided ourselves on our system, which could never allow something like that to happen.  Mr. Bush has changed that, with his imperialism and his "enemy combatants" categories of U.S. citizens.  This nationalistic fervor that claims hegemony by might shows little understanding of what it means to claim hegemony by right.

Luckily, there is at least one district court judge who still thinks the Constitution counts for U.S. citizens.  Judge Urbina stayed the transfer and asked both sides to brief the issues, including the Constitutional ones.   

I wonder that it has been so easy to get Americans to give up the precious writ of habeas corpus.  To have us allow an imperialistic executive to tell us that we no longer have privacy rights even within our homes, even to our children's information if the military wants it for their database, even to our telephone calls with friends, families, and random strangers.  We now know that Mr. Bush decided, on his say-so, to authorize domestic surveillance of U.S. citizens by the National Security Agency. 

Who else has been imprisoned?  Who is being spied on tonight? Whose conversations are they listening to?  Could it be me?  Could it be you? 

What are the media doing about these stories?  Not much.  Apparently ratings and dollars go up when they cover weeks and weeks of a sordid murder story, but they don't get much commercial value out of covering American liberty interests.   The story of Shawqi Omar didn't make the Cable News 12 times in 12 hours and consistently from day to day, not like Gary Condit or the bridegroom lost at sea from the cruise ship.  One has to wonder why not?  Surely when our own government is the culprit it is worth talking about  and pursuing the facts until we know and understand what is happening.  This stuff should be covered relentlessly.  After all, next time it could be you or me who is stowed away for years in a military brig.  With this gang of incompetent bunglers, why should we think they're getting this right?  That's why we have those Constitutional protections, checks and balances, and separation of powers.  The whole idea is to prevent a president from acting like a monarch. 

So where is the media on this stuff, anyway?

Medical Journal GhostWriting

We have come to expect spin from the Bush Administration.  We've had, after all, five years of distorted information, beginning with Bush and Cheney's assertions of certainty about Saddam's possession of weapons of mass destruction and the likelihood of mushroom clouds over Manhattan if the country did not go along with their desire for waging war on Iraq.  We learned about payments of tax money to Armstrong Williams to tout the Administration's "No Child Left Behind" Act and letting Jeff Gannon pose as a real journalist in the White House press room to loft easy questions Bush's way to extricate him from any real journalistic questioning that might (on very rare days) take place.  We learned about video news releases with paid PR performers distributing the White House's views of itself to local news channels and aired without attribution as though they were independent reporting.  We learned about an Iraqi press bought and paid for by the Pentagon, that likely quoted its own stories to show what great progress had been made. 

But did you know that medical journals were publishing pharmaceutical companies' paid propaganda under the guise of research?  Anna Mathews reported on these activities in a story entitled "At Medical Journals, Writers Paid by Industry Play Big Role: Articles Appear Under Name of Academic Researchers, But They Often Get Help," Wall Street Journal, December 13, 2005, A1.   She reports that articles that appear under the names of academic scientists may well have been written entirely by pharmaceutical hired hacks. The companies in some cases even have the articles already written and listed in their database, waiting with a blank for the yet-to-be-selected academic "author."   There's a handy graphic in the printed edition--a drug company at the top sends money to an academic research whose name appears on a medical journal article; the drug company also sends money to a communications firm to prepare an article, and the firm hires a medical writer to actually write the article.  The drug companies claim that authors "have to sign off on everything" and the result is just "a way to more efficiently make the transition from raw data to finished manuscript." 

Like the Bush administration propaganda, this medical propaganda often appears without proper attribution.  The Journal article indicates that only 10% of articles on studies sponsored by drug companies disclosed the help of a medical writer.  In some cases (perhaps a significant number), the supposed academic researcher has had very little to do with the actual scientific research. Even so, the Journal reporter notes, "[a]cademic scientists can more easily pile up high-profile publications, the main currency of [academic] advancement."

Why is this story only in the Journal?  Why isn't it on CNN and other news broadcasts?  How can CNN in particular spend hours on end interviewing lawyers in connection with the latest conspicuous crime or airplane crash but find not a minute to devote to exposing this crass misuse of ghostwriting? 

Et Tu, C-Span?

FAIR has conducted a study of C-Span's popular Washington Journal, available here.  The program format provides for a number of guests and call-in comments and questions from the audience.  The show has long claimed to be politically neutral in its selection of guests, so as to provide a format for useful dialogue that is informative and helpful.

FAIR's report shows that the claim of political neutrality is, alas, much like Fox News' claim of being "fair and balanced."  The study examined the party affiliations of government guests and others for whom affiliation is relevant, gender, ethnicity and occupation.  It found a consistent pattern of favoring dominant groups and conservative ideology. 

• Republicans outnumber Democrats two to one
• Whites outnumber minorities 85% to 15%
• Men outnumber women four to one
• Journalists and special interests outnumber citizen-based groups more than 10 to one

One more piece of evidence that concentrated corporate ownership of media in the country is limiting the perspectives offered and ensuring that conservative views are given dominance.  It has to change, but it is unclear how change can take place when the media is saturated with slanted commentary and information that misinforms Americans about the range of views on issues.

Pentagon Propaganda (2)

As more information comes out about the Pentagon's efforts to control the news in Iraq, it is leading Americans to question further the claims made about the war and the pre-war intelligence.  See this latest Chicago Tribune story on buying access to news in Iraq.

After the domestic propaganda episodes and the revelations of the White House attempts to manipulate the press in the Plame story, the information about the Pentagon's use of tax money to plant stories in the Iraq press creates even more difficulty in separating PR spin from truth.  These planted stories may well have been picked up in U.S. newspapers and broadcast media on the assumption that they reflect true Iraqi sentiment.   Has Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld or Bush relied on a planted story about Iraq to bolster their case for the "success" of the Iraqi war effort?  Can we trust anything that comes out of the White House or Pentagon now?

There is an old saying:  once bitten, twice shy.   

Pentagon Propaganda

There was a good bit of attention in the media when it first came out that the Bush Administration had been seeding local news programs across the country with "video news releases" that could be presented as though they were reported by independent journalists without attributing the stories (often praising the Bush White House programs) to the Bush White House.   Read this exhaustive report at the Center for Media Democracy.

Then we learned that the White House had been paying journalists to take the White House position on issues, without advising readers that the opinions and information they were receiving was covert propaganda. See this story in USA Today and here.

Next the sordid details of Judith Miller's long period of being embedded with the White House in the run up to the Iraq war came out in the aftermath of her serving time to avoid naming the Vice President's chief of staff as the source of her information on Valerie Plame, the CIA agent outed by Robert Novak.  It was clear that Miller's reporting was tainted by her closeness to her subject--she essentially ran with the story  her handlers were feeding her.  See, e.g.,  this article in Slate, this one in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, and this one in The Nation.

Now we learn that Bob Woodward, having built a reputation as a dogged outside journalist willing to risk disfavor of the highest officials of the land, was so star struck by his access to power that he kept secret for two years the fact that a senior White House official had also informed him about Valerie Plame.  Worse, he participated in talk shows denigrating Peter Fitzgerald's investigation into the affair, without mentioning his own involvement.  He himself became the story, as noted in this Alternet article and this Village Voice one.  The Washington Post, see here,  covered that story fairly well, leading to a rebuke by the Post's ombudsperson, here. 

The latest revelation in the covert propaganda/embedded journalists story came in Iraq.  We learned that the Pentagon has been paying journalists in Iraq, essentially buying planted stories.  See (or hear) the stories on NPR, the New York Times, the Washington Post.  The Times reported that one of the planted stories claimed that Iraq was moving steadfastly towards democracy.   It is worrisome that the lessons from the VNRs and undercover journalists in the US did not cause the Pentagon to think twice about duplicating the strategy in Iran.  Even assuming that the military is well intentioned and sees its propaganda as an effort to counter misinformation from insurgents and other sources, it should have realized that its own misinformation (using Pentagon stories without attribution) can only lead to further problems.  We cannot talk about press freedoms and the values of democracy if we do not demonstrate them in everyday life in Iraq.

This last story has been just a blip on the media screen, hardly appearing at all on the regular news programs and vanishing into the netherworld of media has-beens on even the national papers and news broadcasts.  Reporters should continue to dig into these stories.  In what other ways is the Pentagon attempting to control the information about Iraq?  How long has the covert propaganda gone on, and how many journalists in Iraq have been involved?  Does the Pentagon produce stories for other markets besides Iraq and, if so, where and at what cost and concerning what types of information? 

The mlitary in the United States is an extraordinarilyl powerful organization, with men, weapons and sophisticated electronic equipment.  We can use the military for good or we can misuse that power and ultimately create greater instabiliaty in the country.  It is important that we understand the extent of the military's covert propaganda effort.

The Bush Propaganda Machine

We thought we had already learned about this Administration's disregard for the role of a free press in society when we found that it had hired journalists to appear at White House press briefings and deflect any hardball questions, hired journalists to write positively about White House programs without revealing that the praise had been bought and paid for with taxpayer dollars, and hired PR firms to produce and distribute video news releases to be used by television stations around the country without attribution to the source.  This government, in short, has been busy using taxpayer dollars to support its own spin on the facts.  For a good overview of the many ways this Administration has "dissed" the press, see the entries at Free Press.

A particularly egregious example was a VNR on the "No Child Left Behind" Act that was strongly praiseworthy about the resultsof the program.  The Bush White House had created the perfect spin machine:  hire-a-video, and then quote-the-video to show that all America agrees with the White House spin.

Now, however, we learn even more about the extent to which this Administration goes to distort the news.  The Pentagon has hired propaganda stories for distribution in Iraq and paid Iraqi "journalists" stipends to report the news the way we want it reported.  The Pentagon's hired journalists talk about how dastardly it is of unpatriotic Americans to question the war.  The Pentagon can then, I suppose, quote its own hired writers to prove to Americans that the Iraqis have a much clearer and more positive view of the war than we may think they do! 

The practice teaches Iraqi journalists how not to be a good press in a democracy, and it leaves Iraqi citizens with no way to trust their own press and broadcast media, which have now been shown to be toadies to the American occupation.  This is the way we demonstrate our democratic values?

  The practice of creating government propaganda to shape the truth the way the Bush White House wants to see it must be stopped, and it is up to Congress to do it.  Congress should demand an immediate, public hearing into the use of taxpayer dollars to influence, buy, produce or subvert the free press, whether here at home or abroad in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere.

More on Woodward's Embedding in the White House

In a sometimes scathing article prepared by Howard Kurtz without the benefit of an interview with Bob Woodward himself (he refused, choosing the softball setup of Larry King Live over the more probing questions of Post writer Howard Kurtz), today's Washington Post here examines the problem of journalists whose focus on profits (lucrative book deals for Woodward) and celebrity (access to the innermost offices of the White House, like an equal, for Woodward) can place forwarding their own career ahead of providing the public timely information on the workings of government.

Woodward, who in his youth won praise for his tenacious reporting on Watergate and the corruption in the Nixon administration, has lost his bearings in the midst of successful middle age.  His dependence on the powerful leads to rosy-glasses views of their thinking and their actions and a tendency to report it as they want it to be told rather than to peek under the carpet to find the hidden dirt.  Woodward claims that to get stories, he has to have the trust of the powerful.  Kurtz notes an inherent conflict as the bonds of trust with readers appear to be frayed and the consummate outsider reporter has become an insider protecting rather than exposing the current administration.  Granted "unfettered access" to the Bush administration, Woodward becomes subject of questions such as "Why does an administration not known for being fond of the press put so much effort into cooperating with Woodward?"  Id.

Why, indeed?  Kurtz notes that liberals consider Woodward a co-opted "enabler," a "court biographer."  Id. One wonders whether information that Woodward had squirreled away from interviews for his books might have better been used to inform the public in a more timely manner of the inner workings of the White House.  Sydney Schanberg's article in the Village Voice, All the Reporter's Men, notes that Woodward consistently grants confidentiality to his sources.

"[He] promises all his interviewees that he will make no immediate use of what they tell him and will publish it only much later, in the book, which means perhaps too late for the electorate or Congress to act upon it before the White House makes and carries out crucial decisions--such as sending troops into combat."  Id.

Schanberg gives an example on page 423 of Plan of Attack reporting on a long interview with Bush in December 2003.

"[Bush tells Woodward that he] wanted to make sure that his acknowledgment that no weapons of mass destruction had been found so far would not be published in The Washington Post until the book was released.  'In other words, I'm not going to read a headline, 'Bush Says No Weapons.'  'I promised he would not...'"  Id.

Woodward's pursuit of his own self interest thus appears to come at a hgh cost to the public right to know--his access denies others similar access, and his use of that access to write books and withhold information from press stories public restricts the public's knowledge.

What is clear from the Woodward affair is that we need journalists who are aggressive, tenacious, and interested in sharing with the public the information that they manage to ferret out from the secretive corners of government.  While the more detailed information that comes later from embedded journalists is historically interesting, we must always consider the source.  The tendency of hostages to become emotionally bound to their captors should serve as a warning against trusting too completely that a journalist embedded with his sources has been as forthcoming as required.

Maybe Woodward's loss of credibility and admission of wrongdoing will be a good lesson for other journalists.

CPB and Tomlinson, Times and Judith Miller, Post and Woodward

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is intended to be non-partisan--its purpose, in fact, is to shield PBS from political meddling.  In other words, it was to be a buffer between politicians and the broadcasters that would shield them from political interference. 

The inspector general of the Corporate for Public Broadcasting has now issued a report suggesting that Kenneth Tomlinson, former CPB Chairperson, violated both federal law and ethical guidelines by improperly using his position to interfere with PBS programming in an effort to turn it to the right.  One part of that effort was getting rid of Bill Moyers and cutting his highly regarded news documentary program to half the time.  Tomlinson funded a Wall Street Journal program to fill the freed-up half hour at an unusally high price tag of $4.1 million for the first season.  He also hired a "consultant" to investigate Bill Moyers' programming to determine how many of his guests were liberal or conservative.  Before the public release of the report and in connection with a preliminary presentation to the CPB board, Tomlinson resigned.  See the report in Media Matters here and the Washington Post here.

Even though the inspector general report also indicated that Tomlinson recruited Patricia Harrison, the current President of CPB, on a partisan basis, the board of CPB said it still supports her.  Harrison is a former co-chair of the Republican National Committee. And, according to the Post story,

"Despite his departure, the CPB remains firmly controlled by conservatives. Tomlinson's successor as chairman, Cheryl F. Halpern, is a longtime contributor to Republicans, including President Bush and Sen. Trent Lott (Miss.). Its vice chairman, Gay Hart Gaines, another Republican contributor, was a founder and former chairman of GOPAC, a powerful GOP fundraising group.  Tomlinson, a former editor of Reader's Digest, remains chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, a federal agency unrelated to CPB that oversees the government's international broadcasting services."

The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial Nov. 17 that was sharply critical of the CPB inspector general's report.  See PBS and Us, Wall St. J., Nov. 17, 2005, at A16.  The Journal claims that Tomlinson was merely carrying out the mandate of CPB to ensure there was balanced programming.  The Journal editorial implies that Tomlinson's view of a need of an injection of strong Republican viewpoints was necessary, calling Moyers' program at the top of the public-affairs programming a "satrapy." 

What isn't said in all this is just how skewed towards the right so much of the media is--even PBS.  On any Jim Lehrer News Hour program, guests from the right will tend to outnumber guests from the left.  Moyers' program was liberal in tone, but it was well-respected for its thoroughly investigated programs and its open and fair discussion of ideas.  Unlike the Journal's program laden with unreflective free market ideology, the Moyers' program engaged in open inquiry representing the best of what journalism should strive to be.

Remember that this episode takes place against a finding in late September by the Government Accountability Office, a non-partisan arm of Congress, that the Bush administration had illegally used goverment funds to support covert propaganda by hiring conservative pundits to promote its policies.  We also saw the disturbing pattern of government video news releases that have been provided to stations and broadcast as though they were independently produced without attribution to the government.  Propaganda in that fashion is what we associate with dictatorships and oligarchies like the USSR and China.  It has no place in a democracy.

The disturbing flip side of the propaganda coin is the increasing secrecy of this regime and related politicization of bureaucratic decisionmaking, from the FDA to the EPA, from FEMA to the FCC.  The December 1, 2005 issue of the New York Review of Books has an interesting article by Michael Massing entitled "The End of News?".  Massing notes some disturbing trends from a recent report on government secrecy by OpenTheGovernment.org, including an increase of 81 percent in the number of documents that are classified now compared with before 9/11, and a record 64 percent of federal advisory committee meetings in 2004 were closed to the public.  We all know that the Pentagon has banned television from photographing the return of bodies from Iraq.  Massing reports that even William Safire, a conservative pundit, has suggested "that 'the fundamental right of Americans, through our free press, to penetrate and criticize the workings of our government is under attack as never before."  Id. at 23. 

The pattern of behind-closed-door decisionmaking, without media attention and broad dispersal of information, has disastrous results for the public.  Take the example of the morning-after birth control pill, as described in the New York Times here and in the Chicago Tribute here.  A GAO report released November 14 indicates that the FDA rejection of the pill was problematic.  Top political appointees made the final decision, which is very rare.  In an unprecedented approach, the officials disregarded the recommendation of the independent advisory committee and the agency's own scientific review staff.  The rationale proffered contradicted past agency practice.  And the officials decided before the lower-level committees had even finished their review. 

This heightened government secrecy and control of perspectives is aided by the demise of the Fairness Doctrine, which--together with the increasing consolidation of media outlets in the hands of a few very wealthy corporations--has made possible a "disciplined and well-organized news and opinion campaign directed by conservatives and the Christian right."  Id.  Distorted perspectives can be spread easily through radios talk shows and websites, especially when targeted at audiences who are unlikely to read newspapers or keep themselves informed by reading widely across various media outlets.  The final blow is journalists who become insiders through close ties to particular staffers or officials, leading to reporting of White House perspectives with uncritical coverage.  Years after its reporting helped the White House make the case for its planned invasion of Iraq based on Saddam's (non-existent) weapons of mass destruction, the New York Times had to apologize for its inadquately sourced and researched stories.

The Valerie Plame outing is the perfect storm of hubris of the powerful, government secrecy, embedded reporting, disciplined conservative opinion creation, and smear campaigns reverberating through the talk shows of Rush Limbaugh, Pat Robertson, and others.  While Tomlinson's departure clears the air somewhat at CPB and the GAO reports at least brought the Bush use of propaganda into the open and called attention to the politicized decision-making at the FDA, the ongoing saga of Judith Miller and the Joe Wilson smear campaign continues to get foggier.  We now have significant evidence that indicates Bush's chief of staff Karl Rove, vice president Dick Cheney and Cheney's now-indicted former chief of staff Scooter Libby were engaged in multiple discussions with multiple reporters about Wilson's wife Valerie Plame and her connection with the CIA. 

Adding to the intrigue, we now learn that Bob Woodward at the Washington Post had talked with some senior White House official even before Libby spoke with Miller about Pflame.  Woodward kept his conversation secret for seventeen months, even appearing on media shows and disparaging Fitzgerald's investigation.  See this New York Times story.   He apparently revealed his knowledge now only because of the need to testify. The Los Angeles Times offers a scathing indictment of Woodward, here, as a journalist who was seduced by his access to the powerful.  Not only did Woodward keep secret the fact that he had been approached by a senior White House official about Plame while he trashed the investigation into the Plame affair on national media, but he also failed to inform his reading public that his interviews on his latest book had been conducted in the manner of spineless journalism in dictatorships--he had submitted his questions to Dick Cheney ahead of time for approval.  Id.  The LA Times has this to say about this access-needy style of journalism.

"It's a journalistic strategy style dependent on the cultivation of access to well-placed officials greased by promises of "confidentiality." It's a way of doing journalism that still serves its practitioners' career interests, but less and less often their readers or viewers because it's a game the powerful and well-connected have learned to play to their own advantage.  Whatever its self-righteous pretensions, it's a style of journalism whose signature sound is less the blowing of whistles than it is the spinning of tops."

Until journalists start to do their job again, we can expect to have more "spin" and less whistle blowing. 

To help prevent spin, the use of anonymous sources should be more restricted, so that government officials cannot so easily co-opt the press.  How about a rule that anonymous sources are fine when they are speaking against interest--in other words, a government official who is blowing the whistle on a government activity can be offered confidentiality because that official could not speak without confidentiality and the information that official offers is important to the American people's understanding of their government.  The corollary would provide that a government official who is merely offering selected gossip that the official wants to have disseminated should not be offered confidentiality.   There's simply no justification.  Confidentiality in that case only furthers government misleading of the public about its activities. 

Two other rules are necessary to deal with Judith Miller and Bob Woodward's mistakes.  No journalist should be able to mis-identify a confidential source (Miller's agreement to the misleading description "Hill staffer" for Libby) and no journalist should be permitted to maintain exclusive information about sources--there should be a memo to the file, accessible by appropriate superiors in editorial offices, that outlines all relevant information about the source, the source's control of interview format, and the information actually provided in the interview.

With a government like this one, that sets its policy based on ideology without the benefit of transparency and the informed discussion that open, public meetings can engender, we cannot afford a guillible press that merely feeds us the line it was fed.  It is time for the press corps to wake up and make a dash for the nearest exit.  Dis-embed and get to work.

CIA Prisons

In a related post on Volunteers for a Better America here, we noted the Washington Post's revelation on November 2 that the CIA runs "black site" prisons in countries around the globe.  Those prisons hold secret prisoners that exist in a never-never world of interrogations and indefinite detention without redress.  They may also be subject to torture.

While the Post devoted a large space to the story, and small town newspapers picked the story up as a filler in later papers, media broadcasts have hardly mentioned it.  It appears that stories about military and intelligence prisons in countries that may torture and even sometimes kill detainees is just old hat.

FAIR points out another element of this story--the fact that the Post acceded to the U.S. government officials' requests not to name the countries in which the CIA secret prisons are located.  By so doing, the Post became complicit with the White House and those countries in the illegal detention of prisoners in violation of their laws.  You can read the FAIR story here.