Dan Froomkin: Fool Me Over and Over and Over Again

by Dan Froomkin, Niemanwatchdog.org

Our elite media has been repeatedly suckered into trumpeting glaringly unsupported assertions about the number of Guantanamo detainees that have “returned” to the battlefield. This was quite a week for it.

The most blatant and distressing previous object lesson came early last summer, when New York Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt appropriately spanked reporter Elisabeth Bumiller and her editors for a top-of-the-front-page story in late May that was “seriously flawed and greatly overplayed.” Hoyt wrote that the story, which appeared under the headline 1 in 7 Detainees Rejoined Jihad, Pentagon Finds “demonstrated again the dangers when editors run with exclusive leaked material in politically charged circumstances and fail to push back skeptically.”

Entirely by coincidence, of course, Bumiller’s article, based on a secret Pentagon report, provided a handy talking point for former vice president Cheney later that day, when he snarlingly attempted to rebut President Obama’s major address on national security speech later.

Bumiller’s reporting failure also earned her an editor’s note appended to her story, and a scolding op-ed.

And yet, amazingly enough, eight months later – now in the midst of attempts by Gitmo dead-enders to turn the aborted Exploding Christmas Underpants plot into a political cudgel – Bumiller is at it again, though this time chasing Bloomberg, et al., rather than leading the pack.

This time it’s one in five former detainees who have “engaged in, or is suspected of engaging in, terrorism or militant activity.” And here’s the sum total of what Bumiller learned from her previous experience:

Civil liberties and human rights groups sharply criticized the May 2009 report and earlier Pentagon reports during the Bush administration concluding that substantial numbers of former Guantánamo detainees had engaged in terrorism or militant activity. The groups said that the information was too vague to be credible and amounted to propaganda in favor of keeping the prison open.

But it’s not just that the Pentagon’s assertions are suspicious on their face. As it happens, a series of studies directed by Seton Hall Law Professor Mark Denbeaux has been effectively picking them apart for years. (A response to the latest spate of stories will be coming out on Monday.)

Among the other (little, inconsequential) things the Seton Hall reports have pointed out is that the Pentagon, in all the times it has leaked on the topic, has nevertheless consistently refused to provide names that would allow anyone to actually verify most of its claims. There’s the issue of how they define “returning to the fight” – it apparently includes detainees speaking out publicly against their incarceration. There’s the fact that officials, if you press them, acknowledge they don’t really track former detainees – so this is largely speculative. And there’s the specious use of the term “return” – given that most of the detainees who were released weren’t found on the battlefield in the first place and were never formally charged with anything.

From Denbeaux’s December 2007 report:

The Department of Defense has publicly insisted that “just short of 30” former Guantánamo detainees have “returned” to the battlefield… but to date the Department has described at most 15 possible recidivists, and has identified only seven of these individuals by name. According to the data provided by the Department of Defense.. at least eight of the 15 individuals alleged by the Government to have “returned to the fight” are accused of nothing more than speaking critically of the Government’s detention policies.

From his January 2009 report:

The Department of Defense does not keep track of released detainees nor does it follow their post release conduct.

Denbeaux calls this week’s outrageous Pentagon assertions the latest example of what he calls “numbers without names and trends without numbers.” He told me he’s outraged it’s been so widely picked up — including by the Times.

“I don’t see what the point is of a public editor criticizing a story for the New York Times if they’re going to republish it a year later,” he told me.

Gullible, amnesiac journalists are a dangerous thing. Is our profession really incapable of learning anything from its mistakes?

A Publisher Stumbles Publicly at The Post

By DAVID CARR

Katharine Weymouth, the relatively new publisher of The Washington Post, is a lawyer who worked for the company for 12 years and was educated at the Harvard School of Business, so she is hardly a naïf in running a business.

But she has never worked in a newsroom, a gap in her résumé that may have contributed to her current problems.

As first reported in Politico, The Washington Post had sent out a brochure offering sponsorships — a fee of $25,000 for one, or $250,000 for an entire series — for an exclusive “Washington Post salon” at Ms. Weymouth’s home in which officials from Congress and the administration, lobbyists and, yes, the paper’s own reporters could have a quiet, off-the-record dinner, discussions to be led by Marcus Brauchli, the newspaper’s editor. Theoretically, you can’t buy Washington Post reporters, but you can rent them.

I guess it sounded like a good idea at the time. Access, and its very close cousin, influence, define the Beltway. Millions of dollars are spent on having the right lobbyists, flacks and lawyers so that you can end up in a room with people who control your destiny.

And in some respects, the now-canceled salon on health care seems like an attempt to replicate a golden era for the newspaper in which a seat at a dinner hosted by Katharine Graham, the legendary publisher of The Washington Post and Ms. Weymouth’s grandmother, was the hottest commodity in the Beltway.

The difference? Mrs. Graham bestowed legitimacy (Richard M. Nixon never made the cut, even as president). Ms. Weymouth decided to sell it, with her paper’s editorial integrity apparently thrown in as a parting gift.

Perhaps Ms. Weymouth’s notion came up a year ago when she, along with senior Web and print editorial staff members went to Harvard to rethink The Washington Post brand. In response to questions about the salon, Ms. Weymouth sent a reply stating, “I take full responsibility. We will be publishing a note to our readers on Sunday.”

That might do a world of good for the paper. Initially, the salon controversy — we won’t give it a “gate” suffix out of respect for the newspaper that established the term — was explained away as the unfortunate result of an unvetted brochure sent out by an overzealous marketing employee (later identified as Charles Pelton).

But, as The Los Angeles Times pointed out, at least two of the invitations to political participants, Representative Jim Cooper, Democrat of Tennessee, and Senator Olympia J. Snowe, Republican of Maine, came from the personal e-mail address of Ms. Weymouth. Mr. Brauchli insisted that he had not realized the full implications of the events even though Mr. Pelton told The Post’s ombudsman that the plan was “well developed with the newsroom.”

The absence of a credible explanation, compounded a grievous wound to an important newspaper. The whole episode suggests a misreading of history that has been well covered by the paper but also, and perhaps worse, a tin ear to newsroom dynamics.

Let’s put this in context: Ms. Weymouth is confronted with the same crisis as every publisher in the country. The Web has robbed newspapers of paying readers and advertisers, the economic downturn is cutting into what is left, and smaller, nimbler Internet competitors are learning to slake the 24-hour news thirst on their own.

(The fact that it was Politico that broke this story only added to the sting. Started by two former Post reporters, Politico has become a serious competitor right on The Post’s inside-the-Beltway turf, and now has caught the paper on a fundamental lapse in the wall between church and state. In the increasingly heated race between the mainstream media and newer, digitally enabled ones, much of the remaining competitive edge for legacy media derives from a perception that they adhere to more rigorous publishing standards. Oops.)

So Ms. Weymouth and Mr. Brauchli are under tremendous pressure to innovate, both to cut costs and to increase revenue. Unfortunately, neither arrive at this critical point for the industry with much equity in the newsroom they lead, because they are both relatively new.

Ms. Weymouth has some inherited good will in part because she leads an organization that is not only family-owned but is also operated like a family. When Donald Graham was the publisher (and Bo Jones, who succeeded him) and Leonard Downie Jr. was the editor, they were both viewed as tradition-bound — boring even — but they both observed The Post tradition of winning over employees, not bossing them around.

Before the salon problem, however, Ms. Weymouth had made a series of decisions that had — fairly or not — kept her own newsroom at loose ends.

Her 17 months as publisher have been a period of upheaval, including rounds of downsizing that left the newsroom and other departments considerably smaller. She also oversaw the merger of The Post’s print and digital newsrooms after years of turf wars. She has made public comments praising The Huffington Post for its clever headlines, a compliment that did not endear her to reporters who see their own work splashed on or criticized on the Web site.

And she was widely seen as hastening the retirement of the longtime top editor, Mr. Downie. She then hired Mr. Brauchli, an outsider, to run a newsroom that had historically rewarded its own with the top job.

Mr. Brauchli with a deep, impressive résumé, including serving as managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, has worked hard to retrofit The Washington Post for a new era. Mr. Downie was viewed as something of a traditionalist in the Ben Bradlee vein, an editor who managed the newsroom by walking around, making friends along the way.

Mr. Brauchli is not a high-touch guy, unless you count his BlackBerry. He has had to oversee the sharp cuts in the newsroom — a task that falls on many editors — but he has done so while attempting a radical reorganization of the newsroom that may do wonders in the long run, but has been unsettling for many.

His explanation for the salon mess — I planned to attend but did not understand exactly what the party was — has not helped.

“I believe Marcus didn’t know that this was going out, I don’t believe he would have approved it,” said Deborah Howell, the former ombudsman for the paper who is now a consultant for Advance Publications. “But I don’t see anybody taking responsibility for it, either. I’d like to know, as a reader and fan of The Post, how exactly this happened and so far, I don’t know.” (Ms. Howell made her comment before Ms. Weymouth accepted responsibility.)

Ms. Weymouth’s initial explanation for the salon fiasco, also broke another Washington Post tradition: those who are handed the sword generally fall on it when trouble comes.

During Watergate, Mrs. Graham took a lot of heat — including outright abuse — from the Nixon administration. After the Janet Cooke affair, Mr. Bradlee, the former editor, took the blame himself.

Ms. Weymouth’s excuse — that the salon brochure “completely misrepresented what we were trying to do” didn’t track with many reporters, who have already been contending with cutbacks at the paper.

“Oh really? Then what were they trying to do?” said one reporter who did not want to be identified as criticizing the publisher. “Yes, we should be in the business of seminars and conferences, but the issue for us is fraught because we cover Washington.”

Hank Stuever, a staff writer, said, “Katharine should expect the journalists who work for her to be disappointed and upset about this and should also understand that the details so far have been unsatisfying.”

“The people I know in the newsroom are still waiting for a lot better answer to what the goal was here, what was really happening with this idea, and how it got so far along without raising red flags,” Mr. Stuever added.

The reporters, no doubt, are looking forward to the note in Sunday’s paper. But they are also staring down the prospect of serving as a punch line in Beltway circles for many years to come. The president’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, has already obliged by wondering aloud at a news conference whether he could afford to take a question from Michael Shear, a Post reporter.

Funny stuff, unless you are the reporter with your hand up.

“Even if this was just an unvetted marketing blunder, The Post’s reputation has taken a huge hit in terms of the optics. When you have Robert Gibbs joking about it, that’s hugely embarrassing for the paper,” said Richard Leiby, acting arts editor of the newspaper.

It is true that reporters and editors in every newsroom chronically complain about the business side of the operation and that their personal ethics meter is always on code red. But Ms. Weymouth has learned a hard lesson, one that every publisher and owner should study and take note of. Innovations are great, rethinking old ways is smart, and even conferences — properly vetted — are fine.

But the newsroom remains a paper’s biggest asset. And you cannot afford to lose them, even when it means admitting that you, not some guy over in marketing, made a mistake.

http://blog.niemanwatchdog.org/?p=1094

by Barry Sussman, NeimanWatchdog.org

Dan Froomkin, deputy editor for Nieman Watchdog, has just been fired from his main job as writer of the online White House Watch column for the Washington Post. Dan will do just fine. He is talented, immensely productive, has sharp insight, good ideas and is a total self-starter.

The unanswered question is, why was he fired? He loved his work and developed a very large following.

The Post hasn’t given any good reason. As editor of Nieman Watchdog I’ve worked closely with Froomkin for 5-1/2 years, and I certainly can’t think of one. The paper’s ombudsman, Andrew Alexander, wrote in his blog Thursday that editors wouldn’t comment and referred him to a PR person. She issued a statement that one of Alexander’s blog readers said was baffling, Stalin-like and Orwellian. It was all of those:

“Editors and our research teams are constantly reviewing our online content to ensure we bring readers the most value when they are on our Web site while balancing the need to make the most of our resources. Regrettably, this means that sometimes features must be eliminated, and this time it was the blog that Dan Froomkin freelanced to The Post’s Web site.”

Late Thursday the Post’s editorial page editor, Fred Hiatt, issued a statement that Alexander added to his post, saying, “With the end of the Bush administration, interest in the blog also diminished. His political orientation was not a factor in our decision.”

Froomkin is well-known online and his firing drew a quick, shocked reaction. By Friday morning more than 225 readers had appended comments to Alexander’s blog, the great majority of them infuriated with the firing.

Froomkin’s column is slated to run until late June or early July. He mentioned his firing in this morning’s piece, saying, “I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to all the readers who have e-mailed, blogged, commented, tweeted and left notes on my Facebook page. Your kind words and support mean the world to me.”

A Google search shows numerous articles on the firing.

The headline on Glenn Greenwald’s blog in Salon was, “The Post fires its best columnist. Why?”

“What makes this firing so bizarre and worthy of inquiry,” Greenwald wrote, “is that Froomkin was easily one of the most linked-to and cited Post columnists. At a time when newspapers are relying more and more on online traffic, the Post just fired the person who, in 2007, wrote 3 out of the top 10 most-trafficked columns.”

The Humorists Get It

From Dan Froomkin's WashingtonPost.com blog:

There's nothing funny about torture. And yet the most insightful -- and certainly most succinct -- views on the subject, as usual, come from the political "humorists".

Here are cartoons by Stuart Carlson, Ann Telnaes, Mike Luckovich, Steve Benson, Tony Auth, Rex Babin, Bill Mitchell, and John Sherffius.

Here's video of Comedy Central's Jon Stewart bitterly playing the game: "Cruel, Inhuman, Degrading or O-Tay."

Stewart also shows White House homeland security adviser Fran Townsend telling CNN on Thursday: "We start with the least harsh measures first. It stops after -- if someone becomes cooperative." But as Stewart points out, that's not a refutation of torture. "That's how you do it. It wouldn't work the other way around."

And John Oliver explains administration policy to Stewart: "If we do do those things, they must not be torture."

Stewart: "So words, in and of themselves, have no value?"

Oliver: "Wow. Wow. I'd have thought you'd at least support our words, Jon. . . . Our brave, fighting words who've been serving this country since this war on terror began, many of them making the ultimate sacrifice: Losing their definitions.

"Words like torture, victory, surge, mission, accomplished. Once filled with purpose, now signifying nothing."