Shining a Light
( AFP/Getty Images
)
Transcript
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD:
And, I'm Bob Garfield. And here is our president.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH:
My personal opinion is it was a shameful act for someone to disclose this very important program in a time of war. The, the fact that we're discussing this program is helping the enemy.
BOB GARFIELD:
That shameful act was The New York Times story on the National Security Agency’s secret domestic wiretapping program in 2005 - words like “shameful,” “unconscionable” “treasonous” often a reply to investigative reporting, usually by embarrassed politicians.
Publishers, on the other hand, may be more included towards words like “exorbitant” or “extravagant” or just plain “unaffordable,” because investigative pieces can consume years of labor and mountains of cash, not including legal fees, an investment few newspapers can afford to make.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
We're devoting this hour to investigative reporting, which has blossomed and faded and bloomed again across the decades. Veteran investigative reporter Lowell Berman says it thrives best in a particular political and regulatory climate. That’s why the 1970s provided perfect weather for investigative work.
LOWELL BERGMAN:
It wasn't ‘til the confluence of the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement and the turmoil that became Watergate that in-depth investigative reporting was unleashed in major-market newspapers, like The New York Times.
The other part of what went on during this period of time is that the FCC, in the broadcasting area, set certain standards like the right of reply, fairness and one very particular one, which is they declared that 7 o'clock on Sundays was a protected time period.
And it just so happened that CBS had a fledgling magazine program called 60 Minutes. It became a huge hit because nobody could run anything against it other than other public interest broadcasting. And the public interest was basically defined as what the public needed to know.
That public interest standard, which still is in the law, is now defined as what the public wants to know. The result is the whole definition of news in broadcasting was transformed in the 1980s, and by the time you got into the 1990s you had a race to the bottom.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Berman has investigated stories both for print and broadcast. The film The Insider was based on his tobacco industry investigation for 60 Minutes. He says that once upon a time, a time that ended almost 20 years ago, newspapers made lots of money, money enough to float all those pricey investigations. But, he says, those days are gone. Now those stories are the province of just a handful of elite outlets.
LOWELL BERGMAN:
Go look at your Pulitzer Prizes and you'll see that there are more and more Pulitzer Prizes being won by fewer and fewer newspapers. So the result is what you see at a place, let's say, like The Los Angeles Times, where there are big cutbacks going on and where the future has been written large on the wall by the new owner.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
And they're still winning award after award.
LOWELL BERGMAN:
But their reporters are fleeing to places like ProPublica, this new nonprofit organization, because they can see where the future – well, there is no future where they are.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Do you think you could report the big stories that you've reported in your career, now?
LOWELL BERGMAN:
I'm not a good example. I can have a lot of opportunities that younger people don't necessarily have. You'll see, when you go around the country and talk to graduates, let's say, of this journalism school, and reporters in general, they're getting fewer and fewer resources, less and less airtime or less and less space in the newspaper to get into subjects in depth, to really cover them.
We're not talking about stenography here, which is a certain kind of reporting that goes on all the time. We're talking about having the resources to get deeply into what’s really going on.
Back 40 or 50 years ago, some of us did it for nothing. Remember that when Sy Hersh did the My Lai story, which is a Pulitzer Prize-winning story about massacres in Vietnam, he had to go to the only existing nonprofit organization at the time, the Fund for Investigative Journalism, and get a grant to cover his expenses. It’s the same place I went to in those days.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
So [LAUGHS] it sounds like it’s the same thing all over again.
LOWELL BERGMAN:
Yeah, it was deja vu all over again in many ways. Technological change is going on, just like it was 40 years ago. The difference today is, is that the economy and the model for producing journalism is going south, as opposed to going north.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Lowell Bergman is a professor at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism and a consultant to the investigative journalism nonprofit, ProPublica.
BOB GARFIELD:
As Bergman mentioned, ProPublica has become a sanctuary for orphaned investigative reporters. Its executive editor Paul Steiger, former managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, will preside over an envy-inducing budget of 10 million dollars annually for the first three years. ProPublica recently partnered with our producing station, WNYC, on an investigation into safety concerns surrounding natural gas drilling in New York.
Steve Engelberg is the managing editor of ProPublica, and he joins us. Steve, welcome.
STEPHEN ENGELBERG:
Thanks very much.
BOB GARFIELD:
When we think of investigative reporting we often think of The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal. Have they evinced any interest in this new model of cooperation with the nonprofit?
STEPHEN ENGELBERG:
I think everybody at the major newspapers has a kind of theoretical interest in this, but they have a balancing act, and we understand that. They have a very still-hardworking large staff at each of those places.
And in terms of dealing with an outside organization, they are setting, rightly, a high bar, which is to say we should be bringing in something of extraordinary nature.
BOB GARFIELD:
I want to ask you about the “S word,” S standing for Sandler, the benefactors of ProPublica. They have a history of affiliation with progressive political causes. What is the firewall that ProPublica has between them and their political ideology and the kind of reporting you do?
STEPHEN ENGELBERG:
Well number one, the board of ProPublica, which is chaired by Herb Sandler, has formerly said that it will not and does not want to be notified about ongoing journalistic efforts. So there is a kind of formal wall between the Sandlers and what we're doing.
But it goes well beyond that. I think the Sandlers understand that if we are viewed as the tool of one political party or another, it almost entirely destroys our ability to report on both sides of an issue.
BOB GARFIELD:
I understand what you’re saying but I also understand P.R. You have many potential stories. Maybe a story comes in that could be embarrassing to the political left. Would your management team lean towards it, as opposed to one that might embarrass someone on the political right for the purpose of establishing your own independence?
STEPHEN ENGELBERG:
Well, I personally wouldn't, and I think once you go down that slippery slope of making editorial decisions on the basis of what you think your image is going to be, I think you've kind of lost your footing as a journalist.
BOB GARFIELD:
Let me ask you one more thing. I think obviously the opportunities for a group like ProPublica and other nonprofits is extremely bright but that’s substantially because the world of newspapers is in such a shambles. Isn't there something just heartbreaking about this whole environment?
STEPHEN ENGELBERG:
What is heartbreaking is, in part, and understandably, you necessarily feel that the difficulties the enterprise is in, on some level, reflects the quality of the journalism. And I think there is some truth in that. It’s not a total coincidence that people sort of aged 25 to 45 are dropping off in readership. So I'm not saying we're not in some way responsible.
But in large measure, what we have here is a broken business model, and we have the effect of a recession piled upon the effect of losing all that classified ad revenue. And that, in general, is not the journalist’s fault. And yet, if you work in a news organization today, you feel terrible.
BOB GARFIELD:
I appreciate your time. Thanks an awful lot.
STEPHEN ENGELBERG:
My pleasure. Thanks, Bob.
BOB GARFIELD:
Steve Engleberg is the managing editor of ProPublica.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
If nonprofits are one model for the future of investigative journalism, the potential fundraising, audience-directing, wisdom-of-crowds power offered by the Web is another. As newspaper circulation sinks, the number of people logging on to newspaper websites rises.
Jeff Jarvis, director of the Interactive Journalism Program at the City University of New York, says the Web also is home to a new kind of reporting.
JEFF JARVIS:
The classic example is Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo, and Arianna Huffington says of him that while big media has ADD and can't ever stay on a story, he has OCD and he dogs the story ‘til it’s done. So that’s really his value, is that even if he doesn't report it – and he often does – he also keeps big media on the story, and it’s a great new pressure.
But we're also seeing something new online, which is the ability to collaborate. Porkbusters did a great job of getting bloggers of all stripes; it’s really a bipartisan, with libertarians, tripartisan group. And there was a secret hold on a bill in the Senate that was going to open up data online. Well, it’s secret.
So what Porkbusters did, they said, hey, folks, call up your senator’s office. Find out whether or not they are the hold. And they asked senator after senator after senator, and they ticked them off one by one. They got down to three and found out there were two senators who had the hold. They were outed; the hold was taken off, the bill passed.
So it’s a combination then of crowd-sourced reporting and advocacy, which is another interesting trend here.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Well, let's talk about advocacy, then, because we try and draw a clear line in mainstream old-style reporting between advocating for a position and reporting it. That distinction is blurry, nonexistent, irrelevant - perhaps online?
JEFF JARVIS:
It’s always been blurry in mainstream media, because when you decide we're going to go after the bastards, that is a position of advocacy. You've decided they're bastards, and you’re gonna get ‘em.
Well, that’s been true in big media all the time. There’s a victim and there’s a victimizer. And you’re taking a side when you do investigative journalism, most times.
Online, I think what we have is a little more transparency. We could admit that I'm a part of this group and I've got an axe to grind, but even so, I have found the facts to prove that the bozo is a bozo.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
And there’s an ethos to reporting online. This sense of competition doesn't seem to exist there.
JEFF JARVIS:
Online is about connections and collaboration. Bloggers rely on the resource that mainstream media puts into this, but they also can collaborate. They can help push the story, they can help add facts to the story. They can do lots of things.
The important ethical issue online is that we've got to support journalism at its source. When The Washington Post did those great stories about the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, other newspapers, the old way, would have replicated that story.
But what we should do in the new way is send all of our traffic to The Post and let them monetize that, let them support that journalism.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
And, obviously, traffic to a newspaper website translates into revenue.
JEFF JARVIS:
Exactly, and it’s their job to monetize that. The actual dollars that are spent on investigative journalism in America are not as great as we think. If you look at a metro market and see how much is actually being spent today on investigative journalism, I believe that could be supplemented by ProPublica, by foundations and by individuals.
A bright young guy named David Cohn has started something called Spot.us where individuals will be able to donate to get a journalist to do a story. Is that going to support whole newspapers? No. But could it support a journalist doing a story? Yes.
So I think we have new opportunities to support investigative journalism in new ways online. The whole business is still in trouble and investigative journalism is in peril, but I think that if we put the attention on this crisis, I think that we'll realize how important it is to support investigative journalism in the new ways we can.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Jeff, thanks so much.
JEFF JARVIS:
Thanks.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Jeff Jarvis is director of the Interactive Journalism Program at the City University of New York.
From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD:
And, I'm Bob Garfield. And here is our president.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH:
My personal opinion is it was a shameful act for someone to disclose this very important program in a time of war. The, the fact that we're discussing this program is helping the enemy.
BOB GARFIELD:
That shameful act was The New York Times story on the National Security Agency’s secret domestic wiretapping program in 2005 - words like “shameful,” “unconscionable” “treasonous” often a reply to investigative reporting, usually by embarrassed politicians.
Publishers, on the other hand, may be more included towards words like “exorbitant” or “extravagant” or just plain “unaffordable,” because investigative pieces can consume years of labor and mountains of cash, not including legal fees, an investment few newspapers can afford to make.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
We're devoting this hour to investigative reporting, which has blossomed and faded and bloomed again across the decades. Veteran investigative reporter Lowell Berman says it thrives best in a particular political and regulatory climate. That’s why the 1970s provided perfect weather for investigative work.
LOWELL BERGMAN:
It wasn't ‘til the confluence of the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement and the turmoil that became Watergate that in-depth investigative reporting was unleashed in major-market newspapers, like The New York Times.
The other part of what went on during this period of time is that the FCC, in the broadcasting area, set certain standards like the right of reply, fairness and one very particular one, which is they declared that 7 o'clock on Sundays was a protected time period.
And it just so happened that CBS had a fledgling magazine program called 60 Minutes. It became a huge hit because nobody could run anything against it other than other public interest broadcasting. And the public interest was basically defined as what the public needed to know.
That public interest standard, which still is in the law, is now defined as what the public wants to know. The result is the whole definition of news in broadcasting was transformed in the 1980s, and by the time you got into the 1990s you had a race to the bottom.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Berman has investigated stories both for print and broadcast. The film The Insider was based on his tobacco industry investigation for 60 Minutes. He says that once upon a time, a time that ended almost 20 years ago, newspapers made lots of money, money enough to float all those pricey investigations. But, he says, those days are gone. Now those stories are the province of just a handful of elite outlets.
LOWELL BERGMAN:
Go look at your Pulitzer Prizes and you'll see that there are more and more Pulitzer Prizes being won by fewer and fewer newspapers. So the result is what you see at a place, let's say, like The Los Angeles Times, where there are big cutbacks going on and where the future has been written large on the wall by the new owner.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
And they're still winning award after award.
LOWELL BERGMAN:
But their reporters are fleeing to places like ProPublica, this new nonprofit organization, because they can see where the future – well, there is no future where they are.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Do you think you could report the big stories that you've reported in your career, now?
LOWELL BERGMAN:
I'm not a good example. I can have a lot of opportunities that younger people don't necessarily have. You'll see, when you go around the country and talk to graduates, let's say, of this journalism school, and reporters in general, they're getting fewer and fewer resources, less and less airtime or less and less space in the newspaper to get into subjects in depth, to really cover them.
We're not talking about stenography here, which is a certain kind of reporting that goes on all the time. We're talking about having the resources to get deeply into what’s really going on.
Back 40 or 50 years ago, some of us did it for nothing. Remember that when Sy Hersh did the My Lai story, which is a Pulitzer Prize-winning story about massacres in Vietnam, he had to go to the only existing nonprofit organization at the time, the Fund for Investigative Journalism, and get a grant to cover his expenses. It’s the same place I went to in those days.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
So [LAUGHS] it sounds like it’s the same thing all over again.
LOWELL BERGMAN:
Yeah, it was deja vu all over again in many ways. Technological change is going on, just like it was 40 years ago. The difference today is, is that the economy and the model for producing journalism is going south, as opposed to going north.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Lowell Bergman is a professor at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism and a consultant to the investigative journalism nonprofit, ProPublica.
BOB GARFIELD:
As Bergman mentioned, ProPublica has become a sanctuary for orphaned investigative reporters. Its executive editor Paul Steiger, former managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, will preside over an envy-inducing budget of 10 million dollars annually for the first three years. ProPublica recently partnered with our producing station, WNYC, on an investigation into safety concerns surrounding natural gas drilling in New York.
Steve Engelberg is the managing editor of ProPublica, and he joins us. Steve, welcome.
STEPHEN ENGELBERG:
Thanks very much.
BOB GARFIELD:
When we think of investigative reporting we often think of The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal. Have they evinced any interest in this new model of cooperation with the nonprofit?
STEPHEN ENGELBERG:
I think everybody at the major newspapers has a kind of theoretical interest in this, but they have a balancing act, and we understand that. They have a very still-hardworking large staff at each of those places.
And in terms of dealing with an outside organization, they are setting, rightly, a high bar, which is to say we should be bringing in something of extraordinary nature.
BOB GARFIELD:
I want to ask you about the “S word,” S standing for Sandler, the benefactors of ProPublica. They have a history of affiliation with progressive political causes. What is the firewall that ProPublica has between them and their political ideology and the kind of reporting you do?
STEPHEN ENGELBERG:
Well number one, the board of ProPublica, which is chaired by Herb Sandler, has formerly said that it will not and does not want to be notified about ongoing journalistic efforts. So there is a kind of formal wall between the Sandlers and what we're doing.
But it goes well beyond that. I think the Sandlers understand that if we are viewed as the tool of one political party or another, it almost entirely destroys our ability to report on both sides of an issue.
BOB GARFIELD:
I understand what you’re saying but I also understand P.R. You have many potential stories. Maybe a story comes in that could be embarrassing to the political left. Would your management team lean towards it, as opposed to one that might embarrass someone on the political right for the purpose of establishing your own independence?
STEPHEN ENGELBERG:
Well, I personally wouldn't, and I think once you go down that slippery slope of making editorial decisions on the basis of what you think your image is going to be, I think you've kind of lost your footing as a journalist.
BOB GARFIELD:
Let me ask you one more thing. I think obviously the opportunities for a group like ProPublica and other nonprofits is extremely bright but that’s substantially because the world of newspapers is in such a shambles. Isn't there something just heartbreaking about this whole environment?
STEPHEN ENGELBERG:
What is heartbreaking is, in part, and understandably, you necessarily feel that the difficulties the enterprise is in, on some level, reflects the quality of the journalism. And I think there is some truth in that. It’s not a total coincidence that people sort of aged 25 to 45 are dropping off in readership. So I'm not saying we're not in some way responsible.
But in large measure, what we have here is a broken business model, and we have the effect of a recession piled upon the effect of losing all that classified ad revenue. And that, in general, is not the journalist’s fault. And yet, if you work in a news organization today, you feel terrible.
BOB GARFIELD:
I appreciate your time. Thanks an awful lot.
STEPHEN ENGELBERG:
My pleasure. Thanks, Bob.
BOB GARFIELD:
Steve Engleberg is the managing editor of ProPublica.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
If nonprofits are one model for the future of investigative journalism, the potential fundraising, audience-directing, wisdom-of-crowds power offered by the Web is another. As newspaper circulation sinks, the number of people logging on to newspaper websites rises.
Jeff Jarvis, director of the Interactive Journalism Program at the City University of New York, says the Web also is home to a new kind of reporting.
JEFF JARVIS:
The classic example is Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo, and Arianna Huffington says of him that while big media has ADD and can't ever stay on a story, he has OCD and he dogs the story ‘til it’s done. So that’s really his value, is that even if he doesn't report it – and he often does – he also keeps big media on the story, and it’s a great new pressure.
But we're also seeing something new online, which is the ability to collaborate. Porkbusters did a great job of getting bloggers of all stripes; it’s really a bipartisan, with libertarians, tripartisan group. And there was a secret hold on a bill in the Senate that was going to open up data online. Well, it’s secret.
So what Porkbusters did, they said, hey, folks, call up your senator’s office. Find out whether or not they are the hold. And they asked senator after senator after senator, and they ticked them off one by one. They got down to three and found out there were two senators who had the hold. They were outed; the hold was taken off, the bill passed.
So it’s a combination then of crowd-sourced reporting and advocacy, which is another interesting trend here.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Well, let's talk about advocacy, then, because we try and draw a clear line in mainstream old-style reporting between advocating for a position and reporting it. That distinction is blurry, nonexistent, irrelevant - perhaps online?
JEFF JARVIS:
It’s always been blurry in mainstream media, because when you decide we're going to go after the bastards, that is a position of advocacy. You've decided they're bastards, and you’re gonna get ‘em.
Well, that’s been true in big media all the time. There’s a victim and there’s a victimizer. And you’re taking a side when you do investigative journalism, most times.
Online, I think what we have is a little more transparency. We could admit that I'm a part of this group and I've got an axe to grind, but even so, I have found the facts to prove that the bozo is a bozo.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
And there’s an ethos to reporting online. This sense of competition doesn't seem to exist there.
JEFF JARVIS:
Online is about connections and collaboration. Bloggers rely on the resource that mainstream media puts into this, but they also can collaborate. They can help push the story, they can help add facts to the story. They can do lots of things.
The important ethical issue online is that we've got to support journalism at its source. When The Washington Post did those great stories about the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, other newspapers, the old way, would have replicated that story.
But what we should do in the new way is send all of our traffic to The Post and let them monetize that, let them support that journalism.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
And, obviously, traffic to a newspaper website translates into revenue.
JEFF JARVIS:
Exactly, and it’s their job to monetize that. The actual dollars that are spent on investigative journalism in America are not as great as we think. If you look at a metro market and see how much is actually being spent today on investigative journalism, I believe that could be supplemented by ProPublica, by foundations and by individuals.
A bright young guy named David Cohn has started something called Spot.us where individuals will be able to donate to get a journalist to do a story. Is that going to support whole newspapers? No. But could it support a journalist doing a story? Yes.
So I think we have new opportunities to support investigative journalism in new ways online. The whole business is still in trouble and investigative journalism is in peril, but I think that if we put the attention on this crisis, I think that we'll realize how important it is to support investigative journalism in the new ways we can.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Jeff, thanks so much.
JEFF JARVIS:
Thanks.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Jeff Jarvis is director of the Interactive Journalism Program at the City University of New York.
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