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Folkenflik leaves 'The Sun,' Heads to NPR

By E&P Staff

Published: November 01, 2004
David Folkenflik is leaving The Sun in Baltimore behind for National Public Radio.
Folkenflik most recently served the Sun as TV/radio reporter. It is not known what his new title will be at NPR.
Regarded by Sun Editor Tim Franklin as one of the top national media writers in the newspaper business, Folkenflik officially left the Sun on Oct. 22.
Editor and Publisher

Sinclair fires D.C. chief who spoke out

Political correspondent criticized network's plan to air anti-Kerry program

Copyright © 2004, The Baltimore Sun

From Wednesday's Sun

Journalist finds himself on other side of the news

Jon Leiberman gained national attention when he was fired Monday for published comments about Sinclair Broadcast Group

On Monday, Leiberman was fired from his post as Sinclair Broadcast Group's Washington bureau chief for criticizing as biased his company's decision to air a controversial news program based on allegations against Sen. John Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee.

The comments brought national attention to the Westminster native who has wanted to be on television and in the spotlight since age 4. Now he is 29 and out of a job, after his remarks were published in The Sun. Leiberman said he finally spoke out after a painful, months-long journey of disillusionment with an employer that he said has strayed far from objective reporting.

"It was the daily struggle to get fair news on the air," he said. "I've been raising red flags for months. I didn't just fly off the handle. This is an agonizing process."

The Maryland-based corporation owns or operates 62 stations in 39 markets that reach about 24 percent of the American viewing public. In creating a centralized newscast for many of its stations, produced at its Hunt Valley headquarters, Sinclair sought a new tone to distinguish it from many of its local competitors. It was flashy and fast-paced. It was edgy.

But Leiberman said that tone took on a clear ideological bent, and it came directly from CEO David D. Smith and vice president and editorialist Mark Hyman: Stories had to be positive for conservatives and Republicans, he said, and negative for Democrats and liberals.

Last weekend, Sinclair executives began finalizing plans to air an hourlong special built around charges that Kerry's anti-war activism had led to the prolonged torture of U.S. prisoners of war by their North Vietnamese captors. After months of internal protest, Leiberman spoke out.

"I didn't do this for attention,"he said. "I didn't do this for my 10 minutes, because I know that in a week from now this will all be gone -- all the attention -- and I'll still have to live with my decision. I think I can do that."

Messages left Tuesday for four top Sinclair executives were not returned. But earlier in the week, Hyman called Leiberman a "disgruntled" employee who had violated company policy by criticizing Sinclair publicly and revealing its editorial processes.

Tuesday, Sinclair announced that it will air the program on one station per market; that means 40 of the company's stations will show the program. Sinclair said the special will focus in part on the role of documentary films in this year's election, in addition to allegations against Kerry.

In a statement Tuesday, the company's vice president for news, Joseph DeFeo, defended the program: "We are endeavoring, as we do with all of our news coverage, to present both sides of the issues covered in an equal and impartial manner."

Smith said in the same statement: "We cannot in a free America yield to the misguided attempts by a small but vocal minority to influence behavior and trample on the First Amendment rights of those with whom they might not agree."

Over the course of a 45-minute lunch in Baltimore Tuesday, Leiberman's cell phone rang five times -- but no job offers yet. Reporters and producers were looking to put him on the air to talk about his decision. He has appeared on CNN, MSNBC, and several local radio and television stations.

He also heard from his wife, Michele, a producer at WBAL- TV in Baltimore. She urged him to get hot tea and throat lozenges and told him, "If you lose your voice, you won't be able to get your message out."

An early start

Leiberman, an Owings Mills resident, learned how to get his message out a long time ago. When he was 4, his family would go to Sunday brunch at Baugher's Restaurant in Westminster. A precocious child, Leiberman would read the sports section to the diners. He loved being the deliverer of news, and he loved the attention.

In elementary school, he read the weather report over the public address system every morning. He was president of his class at Westminster High School and he interned at the local cable channel. While a student at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., he interned for CNBC. He later worked at local stations in Topeka, Kan., and Albuquerque, N.M., before returning to Baltimore in the summer of 2000. He quickly made his mark as an investigative reporter and last year was made chief of Sinclair's Washington bureau.

"In terms of being diligent about getting things right, he stood out early in his career," said Ava Greenwell, an associate journalism professor at Northwestern who is still in touch with Leiberman. She said his stand this week took courage, especially in an industry where young reporters are most concerned with their careers. "It's a hard decision to make when you're in his position."

But speaking out seems to run in Leiberman's family. His mother, Shelley Sarsfield, wrote letters to the editor of The Sun as a child. His stepsister, Jennifer Sarsfield, told police investigators about three Westminster High classmates who sold heroin to a 15-year-old who died of an overdose. She was forced to withdraw from school.

"I was determined that they would have the courage of their convictions," Shelley Sarsfield said of her children. She said she expected Jon, who was raised in the Jewish faith, to become a rabbi because he loved ceremony and speaking before the congregation. But he went into journalism instead.

"I think deep down he felt, why should he have an audience once a week, when he could have an audience every night?" his mother said.

History of complaints

During several recent interviews, Leiberman described the journey he took that led to his pointed remarks -- and his firing from Sinclair this week.

By last winter, Leiberman said he was privately complaining to his bosses about the blurring of the line between the company's news stories and the conservative, pro-Bush editorials of Mark Hyman. It came to a head when Hyman and Leiberman were sent to Iraq in February to find positive developments missed by the rest of the mainstream media, which Sinclair executives said were focusing too narrowly on the unstable conditions there.

"Our mission really is to tell stories we think local news viewers aren't getting throughout the country," Leiberman told The Sun at the time.

Cameramen accompanied Leiberman, who was to report stories, and Hyman, whose assignment was to tape editorials about conditions in Iraq under the U.S.-led occupation. But the difference between the two became tough to discern, Leiberman said. "The commentaries were being presented as news," he said.

In separate interviews, two former Sinclair producers -- Lisa Modarelli and Dana Hackley -- gave similar accounts of Leiberman's struggles with his news bosses, in Iraq and back at home.

"Mark Hyman had his own agenda, which was to [produce] stories that he envisioned to be commentaries but that the average viewer would see as news,"said Hackley, who has since left the company for a job at a Pittsburgh university.

By late spring, Leiberman was thoroughly disillusioned. (He provided copies of e-mailed correspondence this week to The Sun to bolster his account.) In early May, he forwarded to DeFeo, the news vice president, a copy of a complaint from a viewer who said that the company's newscast was biased. Leiberman added a note saying he agreed.

Hackley said Hyman and Smith routinely gave story ideas to news executives, who usually sought quick reaction by reporters.

On June 10, Leiberman asked to be released from his contract with Sinclair. In an e-mail to DeFeo, Leiberman wrote: "I am miserable in this position. We don't have the resources to cover the news, and the resources we are given are always driven toward conservative agenda stories. We are not balanced and I have a problem with it."

DeFeo responded soothingly, according to the correspondence given to The Sun: "I like having you on board with me as we build this. We will, and have, made some mistakes in this complex process."

Leiberman complained to DeFeo and Carl Gottlieb, managing editor of Sinclair's corporate news division, about a series of story selections. They were skewed toward stories that would make Kerry look bad, he argued. Many of them were defensible on their own terms, Leiberman said. But at a time when the bureau was typically producing one story a night, story selection was everything.

In response to one such lament, Gottlieb replied by e-mail, "Jon, all news is agenda driven."

Leiberman said he was crushed by that message and others like it: "They want to brand the product as being different -- but this message and this image comes from the top. I'm fine with being different -- but let's be fair about it. People joked in the newsroom that Sinclair was called 'GOP-TV.'"

On Oct. 11, he wrote to Smith, the CEO, beseeching him to reconsider the plans to run the excerpts of the anti-Kerry documentary Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal as part of an unprecedented hourlong special. He asked, again, to be allowed to search for jobs. "The problem is the public perception that we are the 'far right wing' media," he wrote to Smith. "I feel I can not be a true journalist in this capacity because our company is not viewed as fair by many of our subjects."

According to Leiberman, he never heard a response.

On Sunday, the reporter reflected, took a deep breath, told his bosses he didn't want to work on the project. And then he spoke out -- transforming himself, however fleetingly, from the reporter covering the news into the story itself.

Copyright © 2004, The Baltimore Sun

Sinclair employee decries planned program on Kerry

D.C. bureau chief calls it 'biased political propaganda'

Copyright © 2004, The Baltimore Sun

Media Man

Lurching from celebrity trials to natural disasters to recycled political scandals - many news organizations fail to illuminate the world around us. Yet the media are finding ever more ways to deliver their version of the news and with more immediacy - around the clock, at home, at the office, online, in our cars, through our cell phones, in stores, elevators, airports, taxicabs.

Two recently released books hint why. Ken Auletta, a longtime chronicler of the news industry, offers an insightful treatment of the television magnate who founded the first 24-hour-a-day news channel in Media Man: Ted Turner's Improbable Empire (W.W. Norton. 187 pages. $22.95). An outgrowth of a New Yorker article, Auletta captures Turner's compulsive business genius and deep-seated insecurities - intertwined traits that figure in Turner's rise and his ultimate overthrow as corporate boss.

With a combination of bluff and vision, Turner transformed his father's billboard and radio company into an entertainment juggernaut. Most Americans, though, remember Turner for the creation of CNN, which confronted and ultimately confounded the lions of CBS, ABC and NBC. National news no longer had to wait until 6:30 p.m. As its ambition expanded, and that of its network competitors waned, CNN emerged as, by far, the most consistent sponsor of foreign coverage of any American television news operation.

As Auletta observes, "Turner understood, in a way that many corporate leaders did not, that building a brand can be expensive. He understood, before his contemporaries did, that audiences would want to consume news differently - would want to watch it unfold live."

Yet CNN's rise was often done on the cheap, in cost and in deed. There was - and is - a reflexive reliance on true crime stories, weather patterns and three-alarm fires in mid-sized American cities that caused few deaths but produced diverting visual footage. Meanwhile, the existence of CNN - and that of its younger competitors, Fox News and MSNBC - enabled network news divisions to rationalize their retreat from serious news. Web sites have proliferated that provide news up-to-the-moment, further rattling the establishment news outlets.

But the last new thing got swallowed up by the next new thing. Internet giant AOL took over Turner's parent company, Time Warner, to make the largest media conglomeration in history, promising Americans news and information faster, from a broader range of sources, from television, to magazines, to specialized Web sites. (After the Internet bubble burst, the Time Warner contingent wrested back control of the company and dropped the AOL name.)

If the march of human history represents clear-cut progress, well, then, all that consolidation would be swell. But it's hard to be buoyed by the current state of the media. Some innovations, even in the corporate press, are welcome. A broader array of political viewpoints are heard on television, thanks to the yak-and-attack shows on Fox, CNN and MSNBC - but they shed heat, not light. Time Warner's Entertainment Weekly shows that new titles can be profitable as well as smart - even if they focus attention on popular culture to the exclusion of all else. Meantime, mainstream news organizations, suffering from dwindling ratings and circulation, traffic in endless tales of celebrity suffering, true crime, health fads and can't-miss diets - all indulgences that, like empty calories, fill us up without giving sustenance. Many of the stories we might need to function as citizens - or might give pleasure, inspiration or unexpected pause - go undiscovered.

It is chilling to see how closely the values of the mainstream media verge on those of supermarket tabloids, at least as they are depicted in The Untold Story: My 20 Years Running the National Enquirer (Miramax. 314 pages. $24.95). Former Enquirer Editor in Chief Iain Calder's memoir spins tales of exploits as a scandal-chasing newshound who hungers for widespread respect.

When the right amount of money changed hands, Calder's staffers usually found a way to insinuate themselves into almost any celebrity circle. (The role that Tom Arnold played in leaking the details of the personal life of his wife-to-be, Rosanne Barr, is particularly astounding.) But Calder also ordered up pieces on heart-warming stories of human uplift, and the magazine sponsored (and publicized) charity drives so readers could feel good about the Enquirer, which became a runaway success.

Calder takes pains to denounce what he claims is the hypocrisy of his supposed betters. After recounting incidents in which CNN and CBS paid sources for videotapes, Calder writes, contemptuously, "These were the high-principled newsmen who criticized the Enquirer when we openly paid sources for exclusives."

Calder is far from a convincing narrator, but his influence is hard to miss against the backdrop of the larger media landscape. The Enquirer's news diet would fit seamlessly into many television newscasts and even on the front pages of many reputable newspapers today. And he sounds like an old-fashioned newsie when he laments the sale of the Enquirer to new corporate owners who just wanted profits.

Turner himself may have earned the final word on that topic. He is the nation's largest landowner, says Auletta, and a man who pursued vertical integration in the media landscape with a vengeance. But in an article in the July/August edition of the Washington Monthly, "My Beef With Big Media," Turner argues the government has failed to ensure that the explosion of new media outlets fosters more viewpoints.

"When all companies are quarterly earnings-obsessed, the market starts punishing companies that aren't yielding an instant return. This not only creates a big incentive for bogus accounting, but also it inhibits the kind of investment that builds economic value," he writes. "When CNN reported to me, if we needed more money for Kosovo or Baghdad, we'd find it. If we had to bust the budget, we busted the budget. We put journalism first, and that's how we built CNN into something the world wanted to watch."

Turner denounces the degradation of broadcast news. He could have been speaking also of the purchase of newspapers by large chains equally intent on the bottom line. Surely some news organizations were rescued from mediocrity by their purchase by larger companies with rigorous professional standards. But, judging from visits to cities across the country, not enough of them.

And it's a tough time to boast about those standards, given the recent run of journalistic scandals at the New York Times, USA Today, and, most recently, CBS News, with its discredited piece on President Bush's military record. At several major newspapers, such as Newsday, a Tribune Co. newspaper based in Long Island, the Chicago Sun-Times, and The Dallas Morning News, circulation levels were found to have been wildly inflated, leading to threatened lawsuits and causing losses of tens of millions of dollars in revenue for each paper.

Turner's words come from a man who desperately wanted to do well and wishes also to have done good. It may come as no surprise that he wields little influence at his old corporation's headquarters - now in New York City, rather than his hometown of Atlanta.

David Folkenflik covers media for The Sun.

Copyright © 2004, The Baltimore Sun

Americans say media less believable

Gallup Poll comes in wake of scandals

Copyright © 2004, The Baltimore Sun

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nationworld/bal-te.cbs23sep23,1,5129251.story?coll=bal-nationworld-headlines

CBS News appoints 2 to conduct outside review of report on Bush

'60 Minutes' aired story based on Guard memos network now disavows

Copyright © 2004, The Baltimore Sun

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/elections/bal-te.cbs22sep22,1,2604308.story

CBS producer urged Kerry aide to call source of memos on Bush

CBS confirms contact, denies any payments to former Guard officer

CBS News producer Mary Mapes prodded a senior aide to Sen. John Kerry to speak to the retired National Guard officer who provided now-discredited documents on President Bush's military service, according to the Kerry aide and CBS.

In an interview yesterday, Kerry strategist Joe Lockhart said Mapes called him Sept. 4, four days before the report was broadcast on CBS' 60 Minutes. According to Lockhart, Mapes told him CBS was ready to "move the National Guard story forward" on Bush, whose service record includes significant gaps. Lockhart said she told him she had documents to back her story.

"She didn't tell me what was in them, and I didn't ask," Lockhart said yesterday. Lockhart said Mapes did give him the telephone number of a source on the story - retired Texas National Guard Lt. Col. Bill Burkett, a vociferous Bush critic - and told him that Burkett hoped to receive a call from the Democratic campaign.

Lockhart said he called Burkett the next day, Sept. 5, and got an earful about how the Kerry campaign had failed to fend off attacks by a group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Kerry was put on the defensive in August by the group's accusations that he had inflated his combat record. The conversation lasted three or four minutes, Lockhart said, and it was typical of the comments of many veterans sympathetic to Kerry, the Democratic nominee for president. He said they did not speak of Bush's National Guard record or the documents.

Mapes did not reply yesterday to messages seeking comment, and Burkett, by e-mail, declined to comment.

The network conceded yesterday that Mapes had contacted Lockhart on Burkett's behalf.

In an interview with USA Today, Burkett said Mapes had promised to help him get in touch with the Kerry campaign as part of an arrangement.

CBS News President Andrew Heyward has announced that he will commission an outside inquiry into how the flawed story reached the air.

"It is obviously against CBS News standards, and those of any other reputable news organization, to be associated with any political agenda," said network spokeswoman Kelli Edwards. "To the best of our understanding, there was no deal, but this is one of many issues the independent review will be examining."

But the journalist's involvement in coordinating the call between Lockhart and Burkett could further damage public trust in the network's objectivity during a heated political campaign.

"I'm really heartsick she made that call. It has the air of some kind of conspiracy behind it to help Kerry," said Sandy Socolow, a former executive producer of the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather and his predecessor, Walter Cronkite. "She was trying to manipulate the political process in some way that's not clear to me."

Burkett had expected CBS to pay him for his collaboration on the Bush story, according to Dennis Adams, a retired lieutenant colonel who served with him in the Guard. Burkett was angered by what he saw as the network's failure to do so, said Adams, who said he spoke to Burkett on Sunday.

"He had a contract with them," said Adams, although he said he did not know whether it was a verbal or written agreement. "He's had to pay a lot of money out of his own pocket. He has felt that strong about what he was doing."

CBS said no such payments were made or contemplated. "From the start, it was made clear to Bill Burkett that we do not compensate - in any way - the source or the subject of an interview," Edwards said.

The report broadcast Sept. 8 alleged that Bush had received preferential treatment in entering the Texas Air National Guard in 1968 and in avoiding his military obligations in 1972 and 1973. Documents said to come from the personal file of Bush's squadron commander appeared to verify that he had been disciplined but was protected by pressure from powerful patrons in the Guard.

On Monday, CBS News and anchor Dan Rather apologized for relying on documents provided by Burkett. Rather told viewers he could no longer vouch for the authenticity of the records after Burkett acknowledged misleading the network on how he obtained them.

For the 10-day period leading up to that admission, CBS endured a barrage of criticism for relying on the memos. Experts interviewed by other mainstream news outlets picked apart inconsistencies in the memos which indicated that they had been created on modern computers, not typewriters in use at the time they were allegedly written.

Prior to its apology on Monday, however, CBS had vigorously defended the story. And Rather had been particularly dismissive of "partisan political operatives" whom he said were its chief critics.

White House aides stayed quiet on the subject yesterday, after several days of questioning whether the Democrats had been involved in putting together the 60 Minutes story. In comments to CBS, Ed Gillespie, chairman of the Republican National Committee, suggested that there might be ties between the Kerry campaign and the network.

In yesterday's interview, Lockhart said he did not know Mapes before the call. Asked why he would call Burkett at her request, Lockhart said: "I would hate to wake up Nov. 15th" - two weeks after the election - "and find out this guy had had useful information."

Sun staff writer Ellen Gamerman contributed to this article.

Copyright © 2004, The Baltimore Sun

CBS apologizes, says it can't vouch for military documents

'60 Minutes' story on Bush's Guard service relied on unsubstantiated material; Rather regrets 'mistake in judgment'

Copyright © 2004, The Baltimore Sun

CBS agrees to try to resolve document dispute

Republicans call for probe into papers in Bush story

By David Folkenflik
Sun Staff
September 16, 2004

Acknowledging crushing public criticism, CBS News President Andrew Heyward said yesterday that his network would seek to resolve questions about disputed documents relied on in a story a week ago to allege that President Bush had used well-placed connections to avoid fulfilling his military duties while in the Texas Air National Guard.

Some leading Republicans on Capitol Hill denounced CBS yesterday, calling on the network to characterize the unnamed source of the papers. Rep. Christopher Cox, a California Republican, called for a congressional investigation, saying there was a "growing abundance of evidence that CBS News has aided and abetted fraud."

The network continued to maintain yesterday that its documents are real based on a "preponderance of the evidence." But on the CBS Evening News last night, Heyward said: "Enough questions have been raised that we're going to redouble our efforts."

The original story, narrated by Dan Rather and broadcast Sept. 8 on 60 Minutes, featured an interview with Ben Barnes, a powerful Texas Democrat who said he intervened to secure a slot for Bush in the Texas Air National Guard. He said he was acting at the behest of a friend of Bush's father, then a congressman, to protect the younger Bush from serving in combat in Vietnam. But Rather told viewers new revelations were contained in "a number of documents we are told were taken from [Lt. Col. Jerry B.] Killian's personal file." Killian, then Lieutenant Bush's squad commander, complained that Bush had refused direct orders and used connections to avoid fulfilling his duties, according to the documents.

Elements of the story quickly came under withering fire. Independent document experts questioned the style and spacing of the type on the supposed memos. Family members of Killian, who died in 1984, said they doubted the memos were real. And Marion Carr Knox, Killian's former secretary, told newspapers and CBS that they were not genuine, although she said his reported feelings toward Bush had been reflected in similar documents that she had typed at the time.

Referring to the records obtained by CBS, Knox told Rather: "I know that I didn't type them. However, the information in those is correct."

Last night, CBS seized on Knox's characterization to bolster its case for the memos.

CBS also identified the four experts it had consulted to authenticate the Killian papers. In recent days, Linda James and Emily Will, two analysts who said they were asked by CBS to review the documents before the broadcast, have stepped forward to say they raised questions about the memos before the broadcast, but the network brushed their doubts aside. In a statement, CBS said that the two had misstated their involvement, adding that the two women "played a peripheral role in the authentication process" and had deferred to the judgment of San Francisco-based document examiner Marcel Matley, who has defended the authenticity of some aspects of the memos. A fourth examiner, James J. Pierce, also continues to support the documents, the network said.

But in interviews with The Sun, both women said they had not deferred to Matley.

"That is untrue," James said yesterday by telephone. "I did not authenticate them. This keeps on getting more and more involved."

Instead, James, a document examiner from Texas, said that she had been asked by CBS to look at several apparent Killian documents five days before the broadcast and that she made clear her reservations about them.

Will, a North Carolina-based documents consultant, said she was sent two copies of memos to review by the network three days before the broadcast. One, a document dated August 1972 that was used on the air, contained only initials, not a signature.

Before the broadcast, Will said, she told the network she could not vouch for the authenticity of the initials and also expressed reservations about some of the typewriting features - for example, a superscript "th" next to the number 111, which is more common to papers produced on modern word processors than typewriters of the early 1970s.

In an interview yesterday, Will said she called a journalist at CBS the night before the broadcast - she declined to name the person - to ask whether the network was pressing on with the story. When she learned it was, she repeated her concerns, telling them: "If you run that on the air Wednesday, you're going to have problems with people like me on Thursday."

Will said the network's reliance on photocopies made it difficult to speak with any certainty on the documents' validity.

CBS also produced two experts after the first broadcast who said it was possible such documents dated back to the early 1970s because typewriters with such features did exist. And the network also said that, in addition to the now-disputed papers, it relied on corroborating interviews from Killian's Air National Guard colleagues to support the depiction of his views.

Until last night, CBS had declined to release the names of the experts it relied on to review the documents. Will said that that confidentiality came at the direction of the network and that she felt they were abusing that agreement to misrepresent her stance.

"The statements they were issuing made it sound like they had no reason to doubt the documents at all - that the experts all backed them up," Will said. "Considering the things they were continuing to say, I felt morally released from that agreement."

Rather's involvement in the politically charged story has led some Bush allies to challenge the network's general credibility.

The conservative talk show host Sean Hannity questioned the legitimacy of photographs obtained by the same 60 Minutes producer, Mary Mapes, that led to the Abu Ghraib prison scandal this year. Yesterday, CBS called Mapes "a well-respected, veteran journalist whose credibility has never been questioned [and who] has been following this story [on Bush] for more than five years."

Some other observers argued that CBS has been too slow to respond.

"CBS was had," an editorial in the Los Angeles Times said yesterday. "Who fed a seeming ringer to CBS, and why did the network fall for it?"

Copyright © 2004, The Baltimore Sun

Gingerly handling Kelley's Bush book
Writer's sources a bit of a muddle

Media: David Folkenflik

September 14, 2004

According to Kitty Kelley, George W. Bush abused drugs while his father was president and George H.W. Bush was a philanderer.

These are among the claims made in The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty (Doubleday, 2004). It's the newest book by Kelley, an author known more for the best-seller status of her celebrity biographies than the precision of her reporting. Though the book is being released today, it already has been denounced by the White House. And it's already reached second place on Amazon.com's best-seller list.

Major television news programs, far from recoiling in disdain, have competed to snag Kelley for their shows. The resulting coverage resembles a smoke-and-mirror act in which the author's sensational charges materialize through mainstream media outlets without the news organizations themselves having to take responsibility for the reporting.

Yesterday, the most-watched morning show, NBC's Today, broadcast the first of three scheduled interviews with Kelley. And you can find her other places, too. She is supposed to appear on sister cable station MSNBC tonight and Sept. 20. CNN's NewsNight is also scheduled to feature her tonight. Newsweek, however, turned down a proposal to publish an excerpt from the book.

Max Frankel knows the dance all too well. He was executive editor of The New York Times in 1991, when the newspaper gave front-page advance treatment to Kelley's unauthorized biography of Nancy Reagan. The book portrayed the former first lady and Hollywood actress as duplicitous, scheming and unfaithful. The article reflected the thrust of the book - which relied extensively on anonymous sources. "I was very unhappy with that article," said Frankel, who said he had no role in the decision to run it. "I didn't see the evidence or the reliability of her sources in our story."

Want evidence? Watch Court TV. For second- or third-hand gossip with breathless dish about surpassing celebs - Liz Taylor, the Reagans, the British Royals, Jackie O - Kelley's the one. Kelley's publisher, Doubleday, insisted the new book could not circulate until today because it was "so explosive and re[v]ealing." But parts of it were leaked - first on Sept. 5 to a London tabloid, the Mail. Its slender account was soon picked up online by the Drudge Report and quickly relayed in other outlets, including the Boston Herald, The New York Times and The Washington Post. The Times, which looked at the Republican response, had obtained a copy of the book. The Post, which looked at the likely media coverage, had not.

"It may be some things that Kitty Kelley says about Bush will turn out to be true," said James Fallows, a former editor of U.S. News & World Report who is now a Washington-based correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly. But he said publishers often abdicate their presumed responsibility to verify that what they are publishing is true: "For better or worse, the difference between books and blogs" - the often ideological Web sites that traffic in rumor and speculation - "are disappearing."

For journalists, Fallows offered this advice: "Follow the leads that seem verifiable - then publish those."

In the book, Kelley does list literally hundreds of sources, but it is still difficult to determine the precise origins of her richly detailed anecdotes and allegations.

Kelley's publisher stands behind her reporting. "The book was vetted by four different lawyers. The legal review is comprehensive," said David Drake, a spokesman for Doubleday. "Fact-checking was certainly part of the editorial process, as well."

NBC's Matt Lauer yesterday challenged Kelley on her political leanings, her sources and her motives - though he didn't mention her multimillion dollar book contract. And he pinned her down on what has emerged as the most charged accusation - that President Bush snorted cocaine at Camp David while his father was president.

Kelley cites both Sharon Bush, the former wife of George W. Bush's younger brother Neil, as a source, as well as a second, unnamed person. Sharon Bush has denied recounting any such behavior, though her former publicist, who attended the interview, has confirmed the gist of her remarks. (NBC had an "exclusive" interview with Sharon Bush yesterday; CNN's Paula Zahn had one, too.) Kelley replied that her editor spoke with Sharon Bush and verified those remarks. But Lauer seemed skeptical that Kelley had not taped such a pivotal interview, as many of her interviews were taped.

"My standards are my standards," Kelley told Lauer. "I write the books the same way every good reporter writes books, and that is to abide by the laws of libel and the laws of invasion of privacy."

Not every reporter. Some journalists take exception to the way she translates what she gathers during interviews - recollections, suggestions, even gossip - into seeming fact on the page.

"Despite her wretched excesses, Kelley has the core of the story right. Kelley's problem is in the details," Newsweek's Jonathan Alter wrote in 1991 after the publication of her Nancy Reagan book. "Her account is a mishmash: something old, something new, something borrowed something true. Mostly, Kelley collates and embellishes the dozens of stray rumors and anti-Reagan stories that have floated around for years."

In a 1986 profile published by The Sun, the author conceded that she had based an anecdote about movie star Ava Gardner on a single quotation from the wife of a cameraman. In that account, Kelley alleged that Gardner, the former wife of Frank Sinatra, had said she had gotten an abortion because "I hated Frankie so much."

Toward the end, former Sun reporter Alice Steinbach asked: "So you really only had the say-so of one woman. And you accepted it at face value?"

Kelley: "Oh, no, no, no. I tried with Ava Gardner. I sent a letter with that part in it, among other things."

Steinbach: "But when you got no answer and couldn't corroborate the remark, you decided to go ahead and print it, trusting that the information given you by one source was true."

Kelley: "Yes, I did."

That was 18 years ago.

Bush's Republican allies last week sent out warnings to radio talk show hosts, trying to blunt Kelley's publicity drive by recounting problems with the facts as presented in her past biographies. But with each new book, Kelley re-enters the limelight - and even the skeptical coverage is coverage. Officials for NBC and the Today show would not comment for this article. But they did issue a brief statement that read, in part: "This was a very competitive interview that all the morning shows were after."

Copyright © 2004, The Baltimore Sun

Rather's doubters unmoved

Verifying papers at center of issue

Dan Rather's forceful defense last Friday of a CBS News story about gaps in President Bush's service in the Air National Guard does not appear to have assuaged those who doubt its accuracy.

The report relied upon documents whose authenticity was immediately challenged by Bush supporters. It also threw professional document analysts into an uproar and sparked intense debate among journalists about how CBS News handled both the report, which aired last Wednesday on 60 Minutes, and the ensuing furor.

"What steps did they use to authenticate the documents?" asked Brian Ross, chief investigative reporter for ABC News. "It's good reporting to show off how much you know."

In Wednesday's broadcast about Bush's military service, for which Rather served as the on-air correspondent, three main sources were cited:

• An interview with former Texas House Speaker Ben Barnes. The long-time politician said that at the behest of a friend of Bush's father (then a congressman), he had pulled strings to ensure that Bush received a slot in the Air National Guard in 1968 to avoid combat duty in Vietnam.

• Newly disclosed documents from Bush's squad commander in the Texas Air National Guard, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, who died in 1984. In what CBS has characterized as coming from a "personal file," Killian described rebuking and suspending Lt. Bush from flight status in 1972 because he had refused a physical. In addition, in a memo dated 1973, Killian complained about being pressured by superiors to treat Bush lightly, CBS reported.

• An interview with Robert Strong, an administrative officer with the guard unit and a colleague of Killian's. Strong said the memos reflected Killian's thinking and the politicized atmosphere of the time.

  On the air Wednesday, Rather said CBS News had the memos examined. "We consulted a handwriting analyst and document expert who believes the material is authentic," he said.

  However, 60 Minutes did not say how it obtained the memos - and did not characterize its source in any way. (The White House has not challenged the validity of the documents, but aides have said Bush's honorable discharge proves he fulfilled his obligations. )

  Any news organization broadcasting or publishing potentially highly charged reports - particularly in an election year - must make sure the information is accurate and that the public understands why it can be believed, said experienced reporters.

  "That's the kind of thing that you really have to do when you have a controversial topic - endless shoe-leather [reporting]," said Donald L. Barlett, half of a prize-winning investigative reporting team for Time magazine. "That kind of work just takes a lot of time. There are no shortcuts."

  There is a particularly heavy responsibility for news organizations that rely upon anonymous sources, reporters said. Typically, any news organization that grants anonymity to a source will then go to exceptional lengths to keep that promise. "We're going to protect our source, every way we can," CBS spokeswoman Sandy Genelius said yesterday.

  But the genesis of the information can provide valuable clues in evaluating its worth. "If this came from somebody who was inside the Pentagon records center and said, 'Here's some documents,' then it's better than somebody who's a partisan Democrat," said Ross of ABC. "Your level of skepticism would rise, the more a person has to gain."

  "I've never thought that simply relying on a source got you off the hook for your own credibility," said Brooks Jackson, a former investigative reporter for the Wall Street Journal and CNN. Jackson now runs FactCheck.org, a Web site dedicated to reviewing claims made by politicians.

  According to Genelius, CBS stands by the story. The network interviewed "several" handwriting and documents experts on the record to ensure the memos' validity before last Wednesday's broadcast. None was interviewed in the Wednesday report. One was described on air to viewers - but not until last Friday when Rather was defending the network.

  Barlett of Time said yesterday that he and his partner, James B. Steele, had two rules of thumb when evaluating documents of uncertain provenance. First, he said, they consult, at minimum, three or four analysts with expertise in typewriting or handwriting. Second, they would not consider documents that were "10th generation" - that is, photocopied so many times that they could not be credibly examined.

  Marcel Matley, the analyst who was interviewed by Rather during Friday's broadcast, said that many who were skeptical of the validity of the Killian memos were led astray because they relied upon reproduced copies. But Rather acknowledged Friday that his network also was using copies, not originals, of the documents. "That's a real issue," Barlett said.

  Authenticating documents is not an academic exercise. Last year, the Christian Science Monitor apologized to a British Member of Parliament after it published a story based upon falsified papers. The story had alleged that the lawmaker had profited from humanitarian efforts to aid Iraqi civilians. And in 1997, ABC News planned a report based on documents that seemed to show that Marilyn Monroe had been paid to keep quiet about an affair with President John F. Kennedy. Experts hired by the network exposed the papers, provided by a consultant paid to help ABC, as a fraud.

  "Any time an investigative news operation puts something out like that, they're putting their own credibility behind it," said longtime investigative journalist Jackson. "It doesn't look good for CBS - at least at the moment."

  Copyright © 2004, The Baltimore Sun

CBS, Rather stand firm on Bush story as furor swells
Critics call into question cited memos' authenticity

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ABC putting news at your fingertips

Network using Web to expand coverage of the conventions

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Director Moore stirs up delegates

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Getting to the point
Conservative commentator Mark Hyman has always gone his own way, seeking positive stories in Iraq,
and this week, bringing his own spin to the GOP convention in New York.

Copyright © 2004, The Baltimore Sun

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Swift boat attention creating confusion
Controversy drowns out other news

Copyright © 2004, The Baltimore Sun

Media awash in its own wave of Phelps hype

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'Outfoxed' filmmaker takes aim at Fox
NewsChannel is said to lean to the right
Media: David Folkenflik
Sun Staff
July 13, 2004


A new documentary, paid for by liberal advocacy groups, is stirring the media pot by contending that the Fox News Channel is not only conservative but explicitly slanted in favor of Republicans.

Called Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism, the film, which was unveiled yesterday at a New York news conference, is intended as a direct assault on the credibility of Fox News. The network has blended reporting and high-decibel political talk shows to become the nation's highest-rated cable news station.

"It's fine to have news organizations with points of views," says Robert Greenwald, the director and producer of Outfoxed. "Fox News sells this line that it's 'fair and balanced' and they're reporting news on all sides. That's not the case."

Executives at Fox News, created in 1996 as an antidote to what founding CEO and chairman Roger Ailes has characterized as the overwhelmingly liberal mainstream media, dismissed the criticism that their network is conservative. During primetime hours, an average of 1.4 million viewers watch the network.

"We've heard this before," said John Moody, Fox News' senior vice president for news. "We look to cover the two [presidential] candidates approximately the same amount of time over the course of the day. That's standard operating procedure for us."

Greenwald, a veteran producer of television movies, has also produced documentaries that sharply question the handling of the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election and the Bush administration's push to invade Iraq. In this latest project, he has embraced the filmmaker-as-activist stance of Fahrenheit 9/11 director Michael Moore to score points against his target - in this case, a news network rather than a president. "Fox is not a conservative channel - it's a Bush-Republican Party channel," Greenwald said in a telephone interview.

Outfoxed relies upon interviews with former Fox News employees and liberal press critics as well as footage taken from satellite feeds without the network's permission.

It is backed financially by the liberal MoveOn.org, a group that seeks to rally public sentiment against Bush and the invasion of Iraq, as well as the left-of-center Center for American Prog- ress, a think tank led by prominent Democrats. The film will be sold via the Internet, rather than distributed in theaters. On Sunday, MoveOn.org is also sponsoring screenings around the country.

Fox News executives, who were not asked to comment in the documentary itself, said Greenwald is distorting the nature of their internal editorial decisions. "If any news organizations decide to make this an anti-Fox News story, then all of their material becomes fodder immediately for possible out of context and biased documentaries," Fox News said in a statement released yesterday.

Fox News staffers attended yesterday's news conference where they distributed materials noting that two of the former employees who appeared in the documentary worked for WTTG, the Fox-owned Washington channel that is run separately from Fox News, not the network itself. A third former employee was characterized in the Fox leaflet as a "weak field correspondent."

In Outfoxed, Fox News political correspondent Carl Cameron is shown in 2000 footage that never aired chatting amiably with then-presidential candidate George W. Bush about his wife's work on behalf of the Republican's presidential bid. "She's a good soul. She's a really good soul," Bush says.

Anchors are shown on the air blistering leading Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. The film also discloses daily memos sent by Moody, called the "Editorial Note," in which he steers coverage away from criticism of President Bush or prevents coverage from dwelling on the costs of the war in Iraq. Such material demonstrates the clear bent of Fox News, several former staffers said during the documentary.

"You got marching orders, you got talking points, you got what the theme of the day was," said former Fox News commentator Larry Johnson, who had previously served as a CIA agent under President Ronald Reagan and as a State Department counter-terrorism official under President George H.W. Bush. "They would shape the news, and it was being one in a coordinated fashion with the [George W.] Bush administration."

Fox News executives have described the daily memos as an important part of making news judgments, setting the tone for a 24-hour-a-day cable news channel. Some excerpts of Moody's notes published yesterday on the Cablenewser.com did not reflect uniform bias against Democrats.

"We pay [journalists] to think for themselves, but there has to be a unifying theme to our coverage," Moody said. "A network has to look and sound approximately the same to viewers throughout the day."

Copyright © 2004, The Baltimore Sun

http://www.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/tv/bal-to.media21jul21,1,5889289.column

Man with a mission takes on newspapers
Finding journalists' political donations
Media: David Folkenflik
July 21, 2004

Michael Petrelis has been angry at The New York Times for a long, long time. Since the 1980s, Petrelis, a Green Party volunteer and longtime AIDS activist now based in San Francisco, has felt that The Times is insufficiently attentive to what he believes are the government's shortcomings in fighting the disease. Since March, however, Petrelis has become an online gadfly, seeking to force The Times to reveal what he says are its political entanglements and sympathies toward the Democratic Party. And he is beginning to get noticed.

How did it start? Jay Blotcher, a friend of Petrelis' and former fellow activist with ACT-UP, a confrontational AIDS advocacy group, was fired in February as a free-lancer for the Times because his prior political life was seen by editors to have compromised him.

"They said he had a number of conflicts [of interest] that they said called his integrity into question," Petrelis said in a telephone interview. "To a large degree, in American journalism, we're basically told that journalists are impartial, above the political fray. If you go and look at the federal records, I'm not so sure that's the case."

Petrelis began by investigating Times medical correspondent Lawrence K. Altman, who has written extensively about AIDS, to see if he could find evidence of political activity. He couldn't. So he went online to read The Times' ethics guidelines, adopted in January 2003, and found this paragraph on page 19:

"Staff members may not themselves give money to, or raise money for, any political candidate or election cause. Given the ease of Internet access to public records of campaign contributors, any political giving by a Times staff member would carry a great risk of feeding a false impression that the paper is taking sides."

By his account, Petrelis was inspired. He expanded his Internet search of campaign contribution records, first to all employees of The Times, and then to 50 newspapers and news agencies. And he found a trove of contributions in recent years, including those from journalists and other employees at Time magazine, Newsweek, The Times, and two Sun journalists.

The gifts were largely, though not exclusively, to Democratic causes and candidates. His findings, are posted on his Web log: mpetrelis.blogspot.com.

Catherine Mathis, a spokeswoman for The Times, said in an e-mail interview that Petrelis' observations were welcome at the newspaper, and that he is not the only person to draw its attention to potential violations of ethics rules. And, she wrote, The Times newspaper itself occasionally trolls Web sites that track campaign contributions to see if employees' names surface. (Two such sites are www.tray .com and www.opensecrets.org.)

"Most of the Times people Mr. Petrelis found on such lists were not on the news staff and thus not bound by our rules," Mathis wrote. "The handful of journalists who turned up were unaware of the rule and highly contrite when it was pointed out to them."

But Petrelis is more persistent than most. "He's been a regular component in my life," said Daniel Okrent, the Times public editor who fields complaints from readers.

The 45-year-old Petrelis, who has AIDS, supports himself with Social Security disability payments. A supporter of Ralph Nader and the Green Party, Petrelis finds the U.S. media to be hypocritical. If reporters support Democrats and presidential candidate John Kerry, as his findings indicate, then they should do so openly, Petrelis argues.

Petrelis' survey is not comprehensive; it fails to examine television companies and misses some employees of newspapers and magazines. He does not distinguish between non-journalists who work for media companies, those who cover hard news, and those who write commentary. Nor does his Web-style reporting - capturing data and publishing it online without additional checks - match that of the conventional media.

The study found two donations to Kerry's campaign totaling $900 from Hendrick Hertzberg, of the New Yorker magazine. Hertzberg has written commentaries favorable toward Kerry and critical of President Bush. Hertzberg has also criticized Nader for drawing support away from Kerry.

In an interview, Hertzberg said he sees no conflict between his role as an opinion journalist and his contributions to Kerry. "I don't see it as a true ethical problem," Hertzberg said. "The idea that someone expressing an opinion about a political race is not biased, but giving a contribution is biased - I don't get it. I don't see how you're compromised." Hertzberg said he asked the magazine's top editor, David Remnick for permission before making his gift.

But that's too fine a distinction, some media experts said. "My belief is that while opinion writers should, in fact, bring their own opinion to what they represent, they should still be guided by journalistic independence as a principle," said Robert Steele, a senior ethics scholar at the Poynter Institute, a journalism think tank in Florida. "They should be observers, not participants, in the political process."

Georgia Marudas, a deputy business editor at The Sun, was listed as having given $1,000 last year to the presidential campaign of Democrat Richard Gephardt. The contribution came from a checking account held jointly by Marudas and her husband. He made the gift without her knowledge, Marudas said yesterday. The check bears his signature. Editors accepted her explanation, and no action was taken.

John Scholz, a copy editor on the business desk, gave $250 this year to the Democratic National Committee, and, in an interview, acknowledged making such gifts in the past. "I was unaware of any policy" prohibiting such gifts on ethical grounds, Scholz said. Because he did not work for a political desk, he said, "it just seemed like I was almost dealing with the abstract." Scholz, who has been with The Sun since 1982, is retiring from the newspaper on Friday; until then, he has been assigned to stories that do not involve the presidential race or partisan politics in the business section, editors said.

The Sun does not have a formal ethics policy in place; a proposed policy is the subject of negotiations this summer between the paper and The Newspaper Guild, which represents several hundred Sun journalists. Petrelis' findings point out the need for explicit ethics policies, said Timothy A. Franklin, The Sun's editor and senior vice president. "Journalists should not be giving campaign contributions to political candidates or political causes because it creates the appearance of a conflict of interest," he said. "Right now, the issue of bias in the media is a bigger issue than I've ever seen it in the 22 years I've been in the business."

Petrelis has been angry at the media before. During the 1990s, he participated in a campaign of telephone calls to journalists at the San Francisco Chronicle whom he felt were covering AIDS unfairly. The Chronicle pressed harassment charges against him and he ultimately pleaded guilty to a series of lesser charges. The California newspaper still has a restraining order in place against him, he said.

This time around he's fighting for different coverage through blogging - an imperfect, evolving form of journalism that is nonetheless forcing the establishment to take notice.

Questions? Comments? Story ideas? David Folkenflik can be reached by e-mail at david.folkenflik@baltsun.com or by phone at 410-332-6923.

Copyright © 2004, The Baltimore Sun

Doubts bubbling to surface
Media: David Folkenflik
Reasons for war get more scrutiny

Originally published Jun 23, 2004

It took less than a day after the release of the staff report of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission for accusations to start flying between opposite sides of the aisle.

In this fracas, however, the adversaries weren't Republicans and Democrats - they were the Bush administration and the media.

Some of the press corps appear to have looked at the report and found utter repudiation of President Bush's assertions that there were meaningful ties before the September 2001 attacks between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein's regime - a reason given for invading Iraq last spring. And it seems to have uncorked long-simmering doubts within the media about the Bush administration.

Here's how John Roberts, CBS News' White House correspondent, started his report last Wednesday: "It is one of President Bush's last surviving justifications for war in Iraq, and today, it took a devastating hit when the 9/11 Commission declared there was no collaborative relationship between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden."

The next morning, the four-column headline atop The New York Times' front page was even more stark: "Panel Finds No Qaeda-Iraq Tie." Article after article hammered home the point that the administration's linkage of Hussein to active support of terrorism by al-Qaida could not be substantiated.

Bush rejected the coverage of the report, saying he had never explicitly blamed Iraq for the terror attacks in the United States. On Sunday, The Times published a series of quotations from Bush administration officials that crept close to making just such claims. As former Times political reporter Adam Clymer said dryly in an interview, The Times made "the conscious decision to confront [the White House] with what Churchill called 'terminological inexactitude.'" Normal people, he added, might call them lies.

That acerbic assessment by Clymer may be at the heart of the severe nature of the latest coverage, which calls into question the Bush administration's credibility on issues involving Iraq. Months ago, Bush's own choice as chief weapons inspector concluded that there were no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that could have threatened the United States - which had been a key element for the invasion. Now, there seems to be a bipartisan report declaring there was no consequential relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida. (Roberts and other journalists appear to have overlooked another reason for the invasion invoked by Bush - to uproot Hussein's brutal and dictatorial regime.)

David Gergen, a former aide to presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, sounds a note of caution. "The report is written so carefully that it lends itself to more than one interpretation," Gergen said in an interview. But he said the media are running out of patience with the Bush administration's shifting justifications for war. "The press has moved from a position of almost cheerleading," Gergen said. "The pendulum's swung the other way."

But Bush administration officials say last week's report merely acknowledged that the commission had not found evidence of strong links, while noting many intersections between Iraqis and al-Qaida figures. On Sunday, Vice President Dick Cheney called the Times headlines "outrageous," saying the newspaper was wildly overstating the commission's findings.

"What they've done is, I think, distorted what the commission actually reported," Cheney said on Sunday on CNBC in an hourlong interview with Gloria Borger.

Take the question of Mohammed Atta, the ringleader of the 9/11 hijacking plot who was said by the administration to have met a key Iraqi operative in the Czech Republic in April 2001. The commission's staff report stated that it did not believe that any such meeting had occurred, as the media reported. Cheney said it simply could not tell. "We have never been able to confirm that nor have we been able to knock it down," he said. "We just don't know."

Borger attempted to challenge Cheney on what she remembered as his earlier use of the supposed Atta meeting in Prague to demonstrate close ties between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida. But Cheney appeared to set her straight.

Borger: You have said in the past that it was, quote, "pretty well confirmed."

Cheney: No, I never said that.

Borger: OK.

Cheney: I never said that.

Borger: I think that is ...

Cheney: Absolutely not.

So that seems to clear that up.

Until you read the transcript of the Dec. 9, 2001, edition of Meet the Press, that is. In the interview with NBC News' Tim Russert, Cheney is describing Atta's activities:

Cheney: It's been pretty well confirmed that he did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attack.

So, perhaps not so definite.

On The Daily Show, satirist Jon Stewart placed Cheney squarely in the "pants on fire" camp. But The Times editorial board wrote that Bush owes an apology to the nation for "inexcusably, selling the false Iraq-Qaeda claim to Americans." The editorial continued: "There are two unpleasant alternatives: either Mr. Bush knew he was not telling the truth, or he has a capacity for politically motivated self-deception that is terrifying in the post-9-11 world."

Much of the mainstream media has undergone a period of introspection about its coverage of key issues leading up to the war in Iraq - particularly repeated and heated reports about the existence of weapons of mass destruction. CBS News' Leslie Stahl apologized to viewers, saying she had been misled by her sources. The New York Times expressed misgivings to readers, saying it had not been scrupulous enough in verifying its reports and adequately airing the views of skeptics of the Bush White House's statements.

Now, the media appear to be taking the opposite tack - much to the chagrin of the administration.

Questions? Comments? Story ideas? David Folkenflik can be reached by e-mail at david.folkenflik@baltsun.com or by phone at 410-332-6923.
Copyright © 2004, The Baltimore Sun