Category Archives: Journalism

Story in CJR on weblogs, credibility and Jayson Blair

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Just a quick pointer. The _Columbia Jour­nal­ism Review_ devoted its lat­est issue to alter­na­tive media. The chair­man of NYU’s jour­nal­ism depart­ment and, full dis­clo­sure, now my boss, offered Emerg­ing Alter­na­tives: Terms of Author­ity to try to make some sense of what’s hap­pen­ing in the world of jour­nal­ism today. Back​-to​-Iraq​.com is a cen­tral part of his arti­cle, but it’s more inter­est­ing because of his explo­ration of the inter­ac­tion between the pub­lic and the reporter. It’s a good — if lengthy — read.

Mea culpa on Paul Moran

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I’d like to apol­o­gize about the Paul Moran piece below. I don’t know that Paul Moran was work­ing for Ren­don Group at the time of his tragic death and I should not have said or insin­u­ated that he did. I stepped over the line from valid crit­i­cism of gov­ern­ment and pri­vate firms to smear­ing a man who can’t defend him­self, and that was wrong.
A com­menter, call­ing him­self Eric Camp­bell, who was the reporter with Moran at the time of his death, wrote in and said this:

I am the ABC reporter who was work­ing with Paul Moran when he was killed. The immense grief his fam­ily is suf­fer­ing has been com­pounded by the unend­ing rep­e­ti­tion of false claims about him on the inter­net.
It is prob­a­bly too late to repair the dam­age, but in the inter­ests of decency, peo­ple should recog­nise the fol­low­ing:
Paul’s assign­ment for the ABC in north­ern Iraq Iraq was as my cam­era­man. He was not the reporter. It is absurd and wrong to say there was a con­flict of inter­est.
Paul was not work­ing for the Ren­don Group at the same time. He was never any employee of the Ren­don Group. Like many free­lance jour­nal­ists, he did occa­sional audio visual pro­duc­tion work Ren­don and other PR com­pa­nies.
His work was never pro­pa­ganda. It was cor­po­rate videos, news webs-sites, and in the case of his orig­i­nal work in Kur­dis­tan, pro­duc­tion and train­ing work to help the Kurds set up a TV sta­tion.
He rightly felt sym­pa­thy for the plight of Kur­dish civil­ians after see­ing the suf­fer­ing they had been through under Sad­dam Hus­sein. He felt the media should do more to report this, as well as many other issues he felt strongly about such as the plight of refugees and asy­lum seek­ers. There is no con­tra­dic­tion between that and his work as a cam­era­man or reporter for such broad­cast­ers as the BBC and ABC.
He obtained the inter­view with an Iraqi defec­tor through a con­tact at the INC he had worked with in Kur­dis­tan. That is not sin­is­ter. It is how jour­nal­ists get sto­ries.
Paul never made any secret about his free­lance pro­duc­tion work. He sim­ply did it to pay the bills betwen broad­cast assign­ments, like any other free­lancer.
He was a man of great integrity who was widely loved. The fact that John Ren­don came to his funeral in Ade­laide, along with dozens of oth­ers from around the world who had worked with him, is sim­ply a reflec­tion of that.
Go ahead and crit­i­cise the INC, the CIA, the Pen­ta­gon, who­ever. But do not make Paul the vil­lain, because he wasn’t.
He took on a risky assign­ment to work for the ABC dur­ing the war Kur­dis­tan because he believed the Kurds were an impor­tant part of the story. He was dis­dain­ful of jour­nal­ists who just got news from press brief­ings, believ­ing they should always go to where the story was. He paid for this with his life.
Eric Camp­bell
Reporter
ABC TV

The IP num­ber that showed up with the com­ment tracer­outes back to a machine in Aus­tralia, so I’m going to accept that Camp­bell is the author of this note.
I’d like to extend my apolo­gies to Moran’s fam­ily and to his friends. But most of all, to my read­ers. It was shoddy jour­nal­ism.
How­ever, I should have made it more clear that I did not con­sider Paul a “vil­lain” in this. I felt that the most sting­ing crit­i­cism was right­fully aimed at Ren­don and the Pen­ta­gon. I still con­sider it ques­tion­able for a jour­nal­is­tic enter­prise such as ABC to hire some­one with ties to a PR firm so closely tied to the Wash­ing­ton power struc­ture, but that should not be read as a crit­i­cism of Moran. As Camp­bell pointed out, he took jobs to pay bills — some­thing every free­lancer has to do. Includ­ing myself. (Never for a PR firm, but for mag­a­zines that don’t con­tribute to my for­eign pol­icy aspi­ra­tions.)
My sin­cer­est apolo­gies to Moran’s friends and family.

When is a reporter not a reporter?

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I just started read­ing Weapons of Mass Decep­tion, by Shel­don Ramp­ton and John Stauber, of the Cen­ter for Media & Democ­racy. For those who don’t know who these guys are, they’re two of the few watch­dogs of the PR indus­try, and their lat­est book looks at the PR cam­paign to sell the Iraq war to the Amer­i­can peo­ple and the world. Through metic­u­lous doc­u­men­ta­tion and witty ver­biage, Stauber and Ramp­ton — unlike Ann Coul­ter — doc­u­ment instance after instance in which the drive to oust Sad­dam Hus­sein was pack­aged, mar­keted and sold. With no return pol­icy.
I’m still early into the book, but in the sec­ond chap­ter, I came across a star­tling rev­e­la­tion.
moran_boat2.jpgWho remem­bers Paul Moran, a tele­vi­sion cam­era­man on assign­ment for the Aus­tralian Broad­cast­ing Cor­po­ra­tion in north­ern Iraq? He was killed March 22, 2003 by a sui­cide car bomb at a PUK check­point by an alleged mem­ber of Ansar al-Islam.
It seems there may have been more to Moran than meets the eye. In addi­tion to his work as a cam­era­man, he was also “a self-described cru­sader for the Kur­dish peo­ple in north­ern Iraq.” He helped an Iraqi sci­en­tist and his fam­ily defect. And most impor­tant, as the obit­u­ary in his home­town paper, the Ade­laide Adver­tiser, notes, he was also involved in work for the Ren­don Group, an Amer­i­can pub­lic rela­tions firm.
Who is the Ren­don Group? Stauber and Ramp­ton reveal that in Octo­ber 2001, the Pen­ta­gon awarded the Ren­don Group a $397,000 con­tract “to han­dle PR aspects of the U.S. mil­i­tary strike in Afghanistan.” They fur­ther write that in Feb­ru­ary 2002, the New York Times reported that the Pen­ta­gon was using the Ren­don Group to help it with the Office of Strate­gic Influ­ence (OSI). You remem­ber that office, don’t you? It was the the office the DoD hastily — and nois­ily — dis­banded after the _Times_ reported that it would pro­vide for­eign reporters with “news items, pos­si­bly even false ones.” The Office was met with out­rage by jour­nal­is­tic orga­ni­za­tions around the world.
Why the out­rage? Because it would have endan­gered jour­nal­ists by taint­ing them with Pen­ta­gon dis­in­for­ma­tion; it would have under­mined the fledg­ling media in other coun­tries; because it was almost a fore­gone con­clu­sion that the Amer­i­can media would have picked up a false story intended for the for­eign press; and because it’s just damn unde­mo­c­ra­tic.
Rendon’s con­tract wasn’t can­celled, how­ever, the authors say. “Let me just say that we have a confidentiality/nondisclosure agree­ment in place” with the DoD, said com­pany spokes­woman Jeanne Sklarz.
Get­ting back to Moran, the _Advertiser_ points out that “Com­pany founder John Ren­don flew from the US to attend Mr Moran’s funeral in Ade­laide.“
“A close friend, Rob Buchan, said the pres­ence of Mr Ren­don — an adviser to the US National Secu­rity Coun­cil — illus­trated the regard in which Mr. Moran was held in U.S. polit­i­cal cir­cles, includ­ing the Con­gress.“
Oh, and another, minor, point that Stauber and Ramp­ton point out: In 1992, the Ren­don Group helped orga­nize the Iraqi National Con­gress. The PR firm, in fact, came up with the name and chan­neled $12 mil­lion in CIA funds to the group between 1992 and 1996. In Octo­ber 1992, John Ren­don chose one of his pro­tégés, Ahmed Cha­l­abi, to head the group.
Just to be clear: Paul Moran, a “jour­nal­ist” who was killed in north­ern Iraq was work­ing for the same peo­ple who helped found the INC _and_ an office of dis­in­for­ma­tion that was “dis­banded” but appar­ently kept con­tracts going long enough to hire Moran and get him into north­ern Iraq — more than a year after the Office was offi­cially shut­tered.
My point is not to dis­par­age Moran or to some­how insin­u­ate he deserved to die. I’m not at all. But I have to admit that I cast a very skep­ti­cal glance at his con­nec­tions to Ren­don and his activism for the Kurds — so much that PUK Prime Min­is­ter Barham Salih said in a let­ter that a statue would be erected in Moran’s honor. I have to won­der why a seri­ous jour­nal­is­tic orga­ni­za­tion such as the Aus­tralian Broad­cast­ing Corp. would hire some­one with ties to _any_ PR firm, much less one with such tight ties to the U.S. gov­ern­ment and the war effort. (Inter­est­ingly, the ABC story on Moran makes no men­tion of his involve­ment with Ren­don.)
I have to won­der why the founder of the Ren­don Group would come to a freelancer’s funeral — in the mid­dle of a war, no less. But most of all, if Moran was work­ing for Ren­don Group at the time of his death, as John Rendon’s visit strongly sug­gests, does that mean the sus­pi­cions held by many in the blo­gos­phere that the OSI was never shut down at all were right? And if that’s true, who else in the field might be work­ing for that “dis­banded” Office of Strate­gic Influ­ence?
*UPDATE:* Hm. Found this tran­script from the DoD dated Nov. 18, 2002. It was made while Rums­feld was en route to Chile for a hemi­sphere defense meet­ing. The sec­tion that per­tains to this issue reads thusly:

And then there was the office of strate­gic influ­ence. You may recall that. And “oh my good­ness gra­cious isn’t that ter­ri­ble, Henny Penny the sky is going to fall.” I went down that next day and said fine, if you want to sav­age this thing fine I’ll give you the corpse. There’s the name. You can have the name, but I’m gonna keep doing every sin­gle thing that needs to be done and I have.
That was intended to be done by that office is being done by that office, NOT by that office in other ways.

Now, that cer­tainly _sounds_ like Rums­feld just admit­ted that the OSI was still alive in func­tion if not in its old office. And it means Moran was likely _not_ act­ing as a jour­nal­ist when he died, but in some other func­tion. I don’t know what it was, but if he was pre­sent­ing him­self as a jour­nal­ist while work­ing in some other capac­ity, he was endan­ger­ing every other jour­nal­ist in Iraq. This was — and is — a cen­tral argu­ment to mak­ing it ille­gal for the CIA to recruit jour­nal­ists as spies. Terry Ander­son, for­mer Beirut bureau chief for the Asso­ci­ated Press, was held hostage in Lebanon for nearly seven years because Islamic mil­i­tants falsely accused him of being a spy.
This cyn­i­cal use of jour­nal­ists is wrong. Jour­nal­ists, when they’re doing their job, are not only agents of their read­ers, wrig­gling their way into sit­u­a­tions like Iraq where their read­ers can’t or won’t go, but they’re also agents of the body politic when they demand answers of the pol­icy mak­ers. Truth mat­ters. Lying to a jour­nal­ist or using jour­nal­ists as spies or dis­in­for­ma­tion con­duits is wrong and it sub­verts democ­racy because it clogs the media out­lets — the cir­cu­la­tory sys­tem of the body politic — with crap.
But jour­nal­ists aren’t off the hook either. Moran should not have worked for Ren­don and ABC at the same time. He should have cho­sen whether to be a Ren­don employee and a Kur­dish activist or a jour­nal­ist. The ABC should not have hired him, frankly. At the very least, the broad­caster should have made his ties to Ren­don Group pub­lic so his view­ers could make up their own mind as to his cred­i­bil­ity. Jour­nal­ists should flatly refuse to accept money or work for any group that could lead sources to sus­pect the reporter is not what he or she seems. It’s one thing for a reporter and a CIA bureau chief to swap infor­ma­tion — that hap­pens all the time and it’s prob­a­bly not so bad. It’s quite another to be on the CIA’s or the Pentagon’s payroll.

The Way We Were…

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Man, I gotta get back to Bagh­dad. (New title for the site?) The rea­son I post this is because I finally got around to post­ing the link to one of the sto­ries I did for Scholas­tic while I was over there in April.
DSC00703.jpg
Bagh­dad res­i­dents greet me in April. (® 2003 Christo­pher Allbrit­ton)How opti­mistic the Iraqis (mostly Kurds, frankly) sounded!

“Every­thing will be OK,” said Wuria Ahmed Ameen, a Kur­dish trans­la­tor and pro­fes­sor in the north­ern Iraq city of Arbil. “There is still cer­tain resis­tance, but even those that belonged to the Ba’ath Party [Sad­dam Hussein’s party] are very, very happy about the sit­u­a­tion.” The only rea­son Saddam’s sup­port­ers backed him, he said, was because they feared him. Now that he’s gone, “They will accept what happened.…even the Arabs will real­ize how oppressed they were.”

Obvi­ously things haven’t worked out quite that smoothly. I won­der what they think now, really. I read the _Times_ and the _Washington Post_ and much of the cov­er­age focuses on the neg­a­tive. This is to be expected and it’s how news works. It’s not an anti-American bias or any­thing like that — it’s a bias every reporter has that defines news as any­thing that goes against the expected grain. Full dis­clo­sure: I do it, too. Thir­teen years of jour­nal­ism and two degrees in jour­nal­ism die hard.
This bias is, of course, one rea­son peo­ple like to call their local papers and demand less empha­sis on “bad news.” Well, things in the Amer­ica are gen­er­ally expected to work out OK. When they don’t, that’s news — by def­i­n­i­tion. And “bad news” is gen­er­ally more impor­tant than “good news.” Who wants to read a paper that tells read­ers, “everything’s cool,” when things aren’t cool at all?
And in par­al­lel, for­eign media in Iraq are focus­ing on the hor­ri­ble stuff because _that’s news._ That’s what they do. But is there a silent Iraqi major­ity that sup­ports the CPA? Or are the angry and resent­ful peo­ple quoted in the papers truly rep­re­sen­ta­tive of pub­lic opin­ion? I don’t know the answers to those ques­tions, but I’d like to find out.
Any­way, my book pro­posal is in my agent’s hands, and I’m wait­ing to hear now. Here’s hop­ing a decent advance is forth­com­ing and it will be enough to allow me to set up shop in Bagh­dad for two or three months to fin­ish up the research.