Reed Irvine - Editor
The executive editor of The Washington Post, Benjamin C. Bradlee, rejected an ad that Accuracy in Media sought to place in The Washington Post for publication on May 8 because it began with a statement. The statement was taken from a UPI story of April 16, which reported AIM chairman Reed Irvine's demand that The Post reveal the identity of "Deep Throat" in the wake of the "Jimmygate" scandal.
The UPI sought a reaction to this demand from Mr. Bradlee. According to the UPI story, Bradlee, a Harvard graduate, said they could go ---- themselves." AIM used that as the headline for its half page ad, which was first run in The Washington Inquirer. The ad explained the reasons why AIM believed The Washington Post had an obligation to come clean about the identity of the confidential source that helped guide Woodward and Bernstein in their investigation of Watergate. A copy of the ad, reduced in size, is reproduced on the back page of the "Notes from the Editor's Cuff" in this issue.
UPI sent out a story about the rejection of the ad, giving this explanation that they obtained from The Post: "Virginia Rodriguez, Post Public Relations Manager, said Bradlee's language 'is unacceptable to the advertising standards of The Washington Post. It was rejected on the basis of regular acceptance standards. We are a family newspaper. We are not going to have that kind of a headline in an ad or in the body copy, 'she said."
The Post told AIM that the ad would be accepted--at a cost of $6,200--if the Bradlee quote were dropped. They would not accept it if the quote appeared anywhere in the ad. We asked if it wasn't true that The Post had previously used dashes to represent obscenities in its news stories. The advertising representative we spoke to said he didn't know. The fact is that The Post goes even further than the UPI in this respect. In Janet Cooke's Pulitzer Prize-winning story, "Jimmy's World," they used the word "fu--." using the first two letters of the word to help the reader deduce the meaning of the dashes. In a story about a controversial commercial aired by minor presidential candidate Barry Commoner last October. The Post twice used the word "bullshit," spelled out in its entirety. Commoner had used the word in his TV ads.
Obviously, The Washington Post has higher standards for its ads than it does for its news stories. This is true not only for language, but also for accuracy. We have always found that the advertising department wants documentation for factual statements in the ads we have submitted. If Janet Cooke's story had only been run through the advertising department rather than the news editors, The Post would have been saved the embarrassment of having run a piece of fiction as fact.
Virginia Rogriguez told the UPI that there is "a direct separation like church and state between the news and advertising departments at The Post." What this means is that there is one standard for Ben Bradlee and his staff and a much stricter standard for those who have to buy their way into the paper.
We fully agree with Virginia Rodriguez that Ben Bradlee's language is crude and offensive. But if it is fair for The Post to print the vulgarisms of everyone else, ranging from the mythical "Jimmy" to Richard Nixon, why should Ben Bradlee get special treatment? The Post carried a story about our demand that they reveal the identity of "Deep Throat," but it did not include Mr. Bradlee's comment. We thought that the readers and shareholders of The Post might like to know that despite the humiliation suffered by the paper over "Jimmy's World," the man responsible for that debacle is just as arrogant and crude as ever. He may have been humiliated, but he hasn't been humbled.
We were not surprised to find that The Washington Post withheld from its readers the news that its advertising department believed that Bradlee's language was not fit to print. We called the UPI story on this matter to the attention of the national news desk at The Post, but they discreetly ignored it. The Washington Star also refrained from running the story. However, there was not a total blackout in Washington. The story was aired by radio, and Cable News Network found it sufficiently interesting to interview Reed Irvine on the subject on May 9. In that interview. Irvine explained why AIM felt that The Post's claims that it was turning over a new leaf could not be taken seriously unless it came clean on "Deep Throat." He also said that in refusing to print Bradlee's statement, The Post was obviously more interested in protecting Bradlee's image than in shielding its readers from his vulgarity.
The New York Times on May 6 reported that Ben Bradlee, at a meeting at the Columbia School of Journalism, had been asked if he knew the identity of "Deep Throat." He responded, "Yes." Asked who it was, he said, "It's none of your business."
Reed Irvine promptly sent a letter to Katharine Graham, the chairman of the board of The Post, explaining why it was in the best interests of both The Post and the public that the "Deep Throat" mystery be cleared up. The public's interest has been reflected in the widespread agreement with AIM that the failure of The Post to require Woodward to tell his superiors the identity of "Deep Throat" set the course that led to Jimmygate. If that course has truly been reversed, then it should be reversed with respect to "Deep Throat."
Irvine suggested to Mrs. Graham that the first step should be for her to find out if "Deep Throat" was a single identifiable person, as Woodward claimed. If he was a composite, as many now believe, that fact should be made known. If he was a single person, Mrs. Graham should (a) interview him to establish his authenticity, and (b) ascertain what it is that keeps him from wanting to be publicly identified. She should especially seek to learn if his shyness relates to any illegality that may have tainted his service to Woodward. Was he a member of the grand jury, violating his oath of secrecy? Or was he a part of a "second Watergate conspiracy," a plot to set up Nixon in order to bring him down? If his continuing reticence is related to some illegal or dishonorable conduct that should be made known to the public.
However, we do not believe that it is enough for Mrs. Graham or Mr. Bradlee to simply satisfy themselves on these points. Irvine suggested in his letter to Mrs. Graham that if she succeeds in finding "Deep Throat," and if, for some reason, it still seems necessary to keep his identity secret, the facts should be given to a respected third party for verification. If there was a second Watergate conspiracy it is quite possible that people at The Post were aware of it, if not part of it. That might explain why Mrs. Graham told Woodward that he didn't need to tell her who "Deep Throat" was "because she really didn't want to carry that burden around with her," to quote Woodward.
In the last AIM Report we said that the ambition of Ben Bradlee and Bob Woodward, Metro editor at The Post, had blinded them to the responsibility they owe to their readers. They wanted that Pulitzer so badly that they failed to take elementary steps to check Janet Cooke's story. We find confirmation of this judgment in a report in the May 15 issue of National Review. The report, signed "Winston," a pseudonym for a careful and accurate reporter, is about a conversation with a friend inside The Washington Post. "Winston's" friend explained the refusal of The Post's editors to cooperate with the authorities to find and perhaps save "Jimmy." the 8-year-old heroin addict, in terms of fear that the story might be exposed as false.
"Obviously the editors were in a contradiction." Winston writes. "Each had to act as if he thought the story true; yet each had to withhold himself from the actions he would have taken--or at least considered--if he really thought it was true. Perhaps they would have become aware of their bind if they had discussed the situation candidly among themselves. But this was impossible. In case the story was questioned, each of them had to be in a position to say that no doubts had ever entered his mind. That way, they would only he guilty of a lapse of competence, not turpitude."
This is why ombudsman Bill Green's report on Jimmygate was so fuzzy in dealing with the question of why Bradlee and the other senior editors took no action to check out the "Jimmy" story even though many in the newsroom believed it to be phoney. "Winston" says of the editors, "They did not hear the ringing alarm bells because, figuratively, they had stuffed their ears. No higher-up was willing to raise questions that might have spoiled a story which they had tacitly agreed should go forward."
These editors disgraced The Washington Post and the profession of journalism. "Winston's" friend noted: "Nobody got fired. Even the miscreant girl was allowed to resign. If other heads had rolled there might have been some regenerative impact. But that is getting into fantasy. You can't imagine anything like that happening at The Washington Post.'
Why not? If it were any other institution--government. business, labor--The Post would be clamoring for the heads to roll. There have been some harsh criticisms of The Post from a few in the media, but we haven't heard any of Bradlee's journalistic colleagues asking why he is still riding high at The Post after having disgraced the profession. If there is to be pressure, it will have to come from the public.
"DALYGATE" AT THE N.Y. DAILY NEWS
Hard on the heels of Jimmygate, we now have two other serious journalistic scandals that threaten to sink the credibility of the press even lower.
On May 8, Michael Daly, a young columnist for The New York Daily News, resigned after a column he had written about a clash between British soldiers and youths in Belfast, Northern Ireland, had been branded "a pack of lies" by The London Daily Mail. The Daily Mail said the column was "calculated to stir up American public opinion against Britain" and that it was "a work of pure imagination." It compared it to "Jimmy's World." The British paper added: "The importance of this is that this article, not necessarily the most extreme version of its type, is typical of the kind of writing which has appeared in many publications in the United States for many years but which has reached a crescendo of dishonesty in the past few weeks."
Daly's column was about events in Belfast following the death of hunger striker Bobby Sands. An army patrol came under attack by youths throwing gasoline bombs. The patrol fired plastic bullets, but the youths still closed in. The commanding officer shouted warnings, but to no avail. The officer determined the patrol to be in mortal danger--a condition required in Ulster before soldiers are allowed to use real bullets--and he ordered the use of live ammunition. Two soldiers fired one round each, and one of the assailants was wounded in the leg. Those facts were released by the British army and were widely published.
Michael Daly dramatized this incident by implying that he had been riding in an armored car with the soldiers at the time of the clash. When the order to use real bullets was given, Daly said one of the soldiers said, "Go for the heads." Daly also told of an officer reprimanding a soldier for shooting an unarmed civilian in the presence of a reporter, and he said the soldier had merely laughed and said, "If I'm lucky, the little Fenian will die."
Daily Mail editor David English was in New York when the column ran on May 6. He immediately contacted his staff in Belfast, which checked out the story with the British army. The following day The Daily Mail ran two pages exposing the Daly column as fiction. A key figure in Daly's story was a British soldier named Christopher Spell. It turned out that there was no Christopher Spell in Northern Ireland or anywhere else in the British army. Daly had told how Spell had seen a fellow soldier shot in the head and killed in February. The Daily Mail said no British soldier had been killed by a head wound in February. No soldier matching Spelrs description could be found in the patrol that clashed with the youths. Moreover, the soldiers in the patrol said that at no time did they come into contact with any American journalist.
Daly met with the editors of The Daily News to discuss the charges. According to a statement issued by editor Michael J. O'Neill, he admitted that he had invented the name "Christopher Spell," saying that the soldier did not want his real name used. O'Neill said Daly insisted that the incidents he had described "were essentially correct." However, in his letter of resignation, Daly admitted that he was "unable to substantiate the story with independent sources." He said he was resigning to save the paper further embarrassment. O'Neill said that Daly "never claimed he was on the army patrol or was in an armored car." He did not explain how that was consistent with his detailed description of the activities and remarks of the soldiers on the patrol. O'Neill did not specifically admit that the story was fabricated and that the quotes were fakes. He said, "We do not subject columnists to the same rigorous demands of objectivity and factual checks that we apply to news coverage. But. Even in the case of columnists, we cannot condone the use of techniques that imply some things are fact when they are not. Specifically, we do not approve the use of pseudonyms. The writer never signaled the reader it was an anonymous source..." O'Neill said that in the absence of independent corroboration of disputed points and the misleading techniques used, Daly's resignation was accepted.
Daly got off somewhat easier than Janet Cooke, who was at least asked to produce her source, her notes and her tapes. Published reports do not indicate whether Daly admitted to his editors that he could not produce the real "Christopher Spell," but that would seem to be the meaning of "the absence of independent corroboration." The most specific charge the News made was that Daly had used a pseudonym, which is a very strange way of putting it if he could not produce the man that the "pseudonym" was attached to.
Beware of Brilliant Journalists
O'Neill said that he had acted with "extreme regret," saying, "It is a tragedy that so brilliant a career should be marred by this unfortunate incident." That is reminiscent of The Washington Post's tears over Janet Cooke. Daly had been with The News only since 1978, having previously written for The Village Voice and the Courier-Life newspaper chain in Brooklyn. He was reportedly a 1974 graduate of Yale, and only days before his resignation, he had received the Meyer Berger Award for distinguished reporting from Columbia University. His father is Charles U. Daly, the director of the Joyce Foundation in Chicago and a former Harvard University vice president.
Like Janet Cooke, Daly had a reputation for brilliance and had risen rapidly at The Daily News, having been promoted to columnist in 1980. Also like Cooke's "Jimmy," his Belfast story was apparently not just an aberration. According to the Boston Globe, he told a colleague at the paper that the technique he used on the Belfast column "was no different than that which he had used in 300 other columns."
Will the folks at Columbia University who gave him the Meyer Berger Award now take a closer look at those other columns? Will the award be rescinded?
When Cooke's Pulitzer for "Jimmy's World" was withdrawn, the prize for feature writing went to Teresa Carpenter of the Village Voice for several articles, including one about the murderer of former Rep. Allard Lowenstein and one about a man who killed his wife while he was on day leave from an asylum.
The Pulitzer jury recommended the latter story for the prize, but the board ignored that and listed several of Carpenter's articles, including the one on Lowenstein's killer. New York Post columnist James Wechsler has now challenged the accuracy of the latter story. Wechsler has filed a complaint with the National News Council charging that the article falsely implied that Teresa Carpenter had interviewed Dennis Sweeney, Lowenstein's killer, when, in fact, no such interview had ever taken place.
The New York Post rep. Replied that Carpenter had arranged for an interview with Sweenev on Riker's Island. But Sweeney had cancelled it. The Post accused Carpenter of spreading false and malicious gossip about Lowenstein. She had Sweeney saying in her story that the former Congressman had once "made a pass" at him. Carpenter acknowledged that she had not heard this from Sweenev himself, but she had no doubt that he had said it. However, others who know Sweeney, who has suffered serious psychiatric problems, have rejoined that Sweeney is crazy and that one can't believe anything he says.
Faced with Wechsler's charges, the Pulitzer Prize Board's spokesman, Richard T. Baker, has said they will have to take another look at the award to Carpenter.
With three journalistic awards decisions coming under a cloud in rapid succession, perhaps those responsible for these awards will now give serious attention to AIM's long-standing proposal for reform of the process of judging entries for these prizes. We were shocked back in 1971 when a Peabody Award was given to CBS for its badly flawed documentary, "The Selling of the Pentagon." We looked into the Peabody awards at that time and found that the people at the school of journalism at the University of Georgia who administer the awards admitted that oftentimes the prestigious jurors who approved them hadn't even seen the programs they were voting on.
We later found that while the juries do presumably read all the newspaper stories nominated for prizes, they have little time in which to do so, and they have no means of verifying the accuracy of the stories or the validity of the claims made for them by the publication that nominates them.
This means that stories which have actually been exposed as badly flawed can win prestigious prizes simply because the jurors know nothing of the flaws. For example, in 1969, Nick Kotz of the Des Moines Register won the Robert F. Kennedy award for his series on life on the farm owned by Senator James O. Eastland in Mississippi. The Register did not inform the judges that they had been compelled to run a front-page correction of two serious errors in the stories. Kotz had charged that Eastland was charging a poor old black woman "two-bits on the dollar" for a loan he had made to her. The paper admitted that was false and that Eastland charged no interest on loans made to his employees. Kotz had also incorrectly said that the county in which the farm was located provided no free medical services for the poor. Senator Eastland had demanded and obtained correction of those errors. If the judges had known of them, it is difficult to see how they could have given Kotz a prize for exemplary journalism.
In 1978, Des Moines Register reporters James Risser and George Anthan won the Raymond Clapper Award for a series of stories charging that a major supplier of hamburger to the school lunch program was putting out dirty meat. Accuracy in Media had previously published as strong criticism of the inaccuracy of these articles in the AIM Report. Our criticism had been based in large part on the testimony of Department of Agriculture inspectors and officials who had told a congressional committee that the Register's charges were with out foundation. (See AIM Report, June 1977, Part I). In spite of this, the series was submitted for the prize and it won. We surveyed the jurors responsible for the award. All but one, who refused to discuss the matter, admitted that they were unaware of our criticisms. They agreed that knowledge of those criticisms would have been helpful to them in judging the articles.
In 1980. Karen DeYoung of The Washington Post as' on the Society of Professional Journalists Award for her coverage of the revolution in Nicaragua in 1979. AIM had severely criticized De Young's coverage of Nicaragua. In the AIM Report for July II 1979, we said: "Karen DeYoung has been to the Marxist Sandinistas what Herbert Matthews of The New York Times was to Fidel Castro back in the 1950's--an ardent promoter and defender." We pointed out that The Post had managed to totally ignore a leaked CIA memo that detailed Castro's deep involvement in the Sandinista effort to topple Somoza. This as' as a banner-headline, page-one story in the Chicago Tribune, but it was spiked at The Post. DeYoung was careful to avoid telling her readers that the Sandinista leaders as' ere hardcore Marxist- Leninists, mostly trained in Cuba. For example, on July 6, 1979, she described Daniel Ortega as a Sandinista belonging to "the most moderate faction which advocates a pluralistic democracy." Two weeks earlier. The New York Times had more accurately described Ortega as "a longtime Marxist guerrilla leader, known to have been trained in Cuba."
One way to clean up the awards mess is to require that each nomination be accompanied not only by the praise heaped on the stories, but also by any known criticism of them. This would probably have blocked the Pulitzer Prizes for "Jimmy's World" and the Teresa Carpenter article. It should have blocked the awards to the other stories cited above. It would not guarantee against errors, but it would be an improvement over the present system in which jurors operate almost in the dark.
We urged last time that you support our demands for the disclosure of the identity of "Deep Throat" and the resignations of Bradlee and Woodward. We believe that AIM's 30,000 members can impress Katharine Graham. Write a letter or send a telegram. It doesn't have to be a long one. Just say that you support AIM's demands. Send it to Katharine Graham, Chairman, The Washington Post,
AIM Report NOTES FROM THE EDITOR'S CUFF
I HAD INTENDED TO REPORT TO YOU ABOUT THE CBS ANNUAL MEETING IN THE MAY I ISSUE, but the Jimmygate scandal filled all the available space. I decided to report on CBS and the RCA annual meetings in this issue, and again the journalistic scandals have taken over. Tomorrow I will be attending the Washington Post annual meeting, and the following week I plan to be in New York for the ABC annual meeting. Unless the scandals continue to crowd out the news of these events, I will get to them all in the next issue. However, I do want to report that our resolutions at the CBS and RCA meetings did quite well. We had submitted similar resolutions recommending that ombudsmen be appointed for CBS News and NBC News (NBC is owned by RCA). At CBS our resolution received 9.1 percent of the shares voted, and at RCA it received 9.5 percent. That means that we will be able to resubmit the resolutions to both companies next year, since we needed to get only 6 percent to qualify for resubmission. Next year, however, we will need to get at least 10 percent. We are obviously within striking distance of that.
WHILE THESE RESOLUTIONS WERE OVERWHELMINGLY DEFEATED, IT IS QUITE AN ACHIEVEMENT for a minority resolution to get this large a vote. This is really a moral victory, since management can almost automatically count on the votes of large institutional shareholders, shares held by bank trust departments, and the votes of many shareholders who don't bother to read the proxy material and just automatically vote as management recommends. If we can keep the resolutions before the shareholders and boost the percentage of our vote to, say, 15 percent, there is a good chance that management will recognize that the resolutions have a lot of grassroots support and accept them.
THE AD THAT THE WASHINGTON POST REJECTED BECAUSE OF BEN BRADLEE'S FOUL LANGUAGE has been accepted for publication by The Washington Star. It will run tomorrow, May 13. It will have the word "CENSORED" in large type above the Bradlee quote. Below that, we will explain that The Washington Post rejected the ad, saying that Bradlee's language was unfit to print. We will also point out that The Post spiked the UPI story on their rejection of the ad. We have also called a press conference tomorrow morning in front of the Post building, just prior to the shareholders' meeting. We will criticize The Post for rejecting the ad and not telling its readers anything about it. We will also distribute copies of the ad and copies of my letter to Mrs. Graham suggesting that she tell us who Deep Throat is or why his identity cannot be revealed. We will also distribute copies of our "Jimmygate" AIM Report and advance copies of this issue also. The ad reproduced on the back of this page is what we originally submitted to The Post. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ IF YOU HAVE BEEN WONDERING WHAT HAPPENED TO OUR CONFERENCE, HERE'S THE ANSWER. WE postponed it until June 29 and 30. It will be held at the Dulles Airport Marriott, which is near Washington. The theme will be "Confrontation PR." We hope to put together a program that will be both interesting and useful to corporations, organizations and individuals that feel they are not getting a fair shake from the media and want to know what they can do about it. We hope to have representatives of some of the big companies that have used the confrontational solution, i.e., fought back. We hope also to attract corporate representatives who may be interested in learning more about this approach. At the same time, we will try to make it interesting for all of you AIM members. We will also try to keep the registration fee for members at a very moderate level. To give us an idea of potential attendance, fill in your name, address, and phone no. And send this to AIM, 1341 G. St., N. W., Washington, D. C. 20005.
"THEY CAN GO -----THEMSELVES" --Benjamin C. Bradlee
According to the UPI, that is how the executive editor of The Washington Post responded to a suggestion by Accuracy in Media chairman Reed Irvine that The Post reveal the identity of "Deep Throat" to prove that this Watergate source was not a fabrication like Janet Cooke's 8-year old heroin addict, "Jimmy." The editors of The Washington Post have embarrassed themselves and have cast a cloud over the entire profession of journalism by their negligence in the "Jimmy" story.
Judith Crist, who was chairman of the feature writing jury for the Pultizer prizes this year, has said that she was "horrified" when she read the "Jimmy" story after her jury's decision had been overruledand the features prize was given to this story.
Interviewed on WRC's Beaden*Buchammn Show, Prof. Crist said: "It sounded like total fiction, I'm a life-long New Yorker. I know how-8-year old ghetto kids talk. Not one of those quotes would stand up for three minutes... I call it the new fiction. We got a lot of good feature stories that could just as well have been short stories or novellas. This whole business of making composite people has cheapened the profession. I have a personal skepticism when I approach a story like that.
"I can understand the jury's accepting it. I'm sure they felt that The Washington Post had the name and address and credentials of that 8-year old boy, as well, I may say, the credentials of their reporter, which they apparently never bothered to get."
"The Fatal Flaw" The editors of The Post had failed to get the identities of the people in the story of "Jimmy." They now excuse this saying that the reporter's life had been threatened if there was any disclosure. Columnist Carl Rowan has pointed out that should have been all the more reason for them to insist that the identity of this potential killer be revealed to them. Had they taken this simple precaution they would have discovered that "Jimmy" was a fraud. Ben Bradlee, executive editor of The Post, recently said on WRC radio: "There is no system that I know of that can be developed that is going to protect you from somebody who is IpMn8 to he a pathological liar." We beg to differ, Ben. The fatal error you made was not insisting on having the identity of "Jimmy" revealed to you. That would have stopped the lie dead in its tracks. A lot of people are now wondering about Bob Woodward's famous Watergate source, Deep Throat. Was that also a fabrication? A composite? If Deep Throat exists, why doesn't he come forward and collect the riches and acclaim that this society would heap upon him? Does Deep Throat live next door to "Jimmy?" Why did Bob Woodward "freeze" when he thought Katherine Graham was going to insist that he tell her who Deep Throat was? Is it possible that there is a link between Deep Throat and whoever it was that tipped off the Democratic National Committee in advance that the Watergate break-in was going to take place. Is it possible that there is a link between Deep Throat and whoever it was that planted a double agent on the burglary team to insure that the job was botched and the burglars caught? If The Washington Post really intends to reform itself, a good first step would be to insist that Woodward reveal the identity of Deep Throat to the editors of The Post. If he is a composite, then tell ns the truth. If he is linked to the second conspiracy, tell the truth. If there are legitimate reasons why his identity must remain a secret, tell us what they are.