Look at the right hand so you don’t see what the left hand is doing.
Distract from the real issues. That’s what the story line advanced about my departure from CBS News was designed to do.
Anonymous sources at the network falsely claim in media reports that I specifically cited “liberal bias” in my resignation to CBS management. The fabricated quote is picked up and passed along like urban lore until it becomes widely accepted as fact. It’s too scrumptious to resist. For many liberals, it continues a convenient narrative that attempts to undermine my independent reporting. For many conservatives, it makes me the ultimate insider giving up the family secrets.
Once I left, some of my former colleagues gleefully advanced the assumption that, naturally, I had already cut a deal with FOX News. That would put a delicious period at the end of their delectably false thesis: that all the fuss was caused by my irrational devotion to right-wing stories.
After a few weeks, during which I got outside the beltway and dealt with my father’s terminal illness, I agreed to a fraction of media requests I received to talk about journalism or my ongoing coverage of news stories. I consented to appear on FOX, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, ABC, Al Jazeera, C-SPAN, RealClearPolitics, Sinclair Media, and Reason, to name a few. But the propagandists frantically publicized the FOX events, excluding the others. Their storyline was that the FOX appearances proved I’m conservative.
They’re nothing if not inconsistent.
They didn’t similarly cast my appearance on MSNBC as proof that I’m liberal. They don’t argue that well-known liberal commentators Juan Williams, James Carville, Mara Liasson, Marc Lamont, or Bill Richardson are conservative because they showed up on FOX. Same with dozens of journalists from various news outlets who discuss their stories on FOX News, such as ABC political director Rick Klein and former New York Times reporter Judith Miller.
Continuing in the same vein, though I contributed reporting to a variety of outlets, the same propagandists selectively publicized my work for the conservative Daily Signal without noting that the subject matter, an allegedly unethical federal study on premature babies, had great appeal to liberal interests, quoted a Democratic congresswoman, and largely pulled on research from the liberal-leaning watchdog group Public Citizen.
As with the news stories and images they manipulate, these expert spinners craft their preconceived narratives in isolation from the facts. Much like the news managers who order up stories and prewrite them regardless of the fact-finding in the field, the propagandists wait to fill in the blanks, selecting those they can twist and shape to their liking, discarding the inconvenient facts that fight the chosen narrative.
Periodically, a few friends and colleagues send me copies of blogs and articles filled with misrepresentations so wild and provably false, they advise me to step up and correct them. One article called me “admittedly conservative,” as if I had identified myself as such. A second used shamefully inaccurate figures to try to contradict and controversialize my recent definitive report on the status of HealthCare.gov, though my reporting relied almost entirely on the government’s own statistics and sources. And a third made the slanderous, false claim that my Benghazi reporting had been discredited and retracted by CBS. There wasn’t even a grain of truth hidden in that statement.
Why don’t I jump into the fray in each instance? There’s little point in trying to get the truth across to those who are on a mission that doesn’t involve the truth. It would only feed them. It’s a bit like tossing scraps to hungry puppies from the dinner table in hopes that will keep them quiet. It just encourages their bad habits.
One media writer came up with the brilliant implication that maybe my decision to leave CBS was a well-thought-out career path on my part—“cry bias” to get a lot of attention and money.
Points for creativity but a big deduction for lack of accuracy.
The truth is, I never explicitly raised concerns about bias during my separation discussions with management. Not in 2013, when I first proposed leaving ahead of my contract, and not in March 2014, when I finally did. It doesn’t mean there weren’t issues. Most everyone I rubbed shoulders with inside CBS, including management, had privately verbalized worries about the strong-arm tactics of the current New York Evening News managers and some on other broadcasts, often—in our view—forcing their proclivities, sometimes ultraliberal, sometimes otherwise biased, into story decisions and scripts like never before.
Before I asked to leave, a number of well-regarded veteran correspondents had already gone to the top to complain about various aspects of the CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley. And more than one found themselves so disgusted with the state of the Evening News under Pelley and his executive producer Shevlin that they sought to negotiate contracts under which they wouldn’t have to appear on the broadcast.
You know there’s a problem when reporters are trying to stay off your flagship news program rather than get on it.
But for me, there were additional concerns and challenges. More on those in a moment.
Some of the managed response to my departure tended to prove a thesis of this book. The liberal opinion blog Media Matters revived its trademark propaganda campaign to smear me and my reporting.
Predictable.
Most people in the country have never heard of these inside-the-beltway blogs and battles. But it’s common knowledge among those whom Media Matters has attempted to disparage that the left-wing blog is little more than a paid surrogate for Democratic interests, including Hillary Clinton, the Obama administration, and those close to them, at times in direct consultation with Obama officials.
Together, these interests employ a range of bully tactics and strategies to systematically attack journalists and undermine reporting that they view to be effective and, therefore, damaging. The content of what they write is so riddled with silliness and fact errors, it’s not taken seriously by any informed neutral party. Their audience is a small but influential group of news media and politicos. If they can just get a bit of their propaganda to cross over and be discussed in a forum that resembles what Americans consider the real news media, then they’ve earned their money. Sometimes, it works. They strategically exploit partnerships, such as the liberal blog Talking Points Memo, which report on and codify each other’s false claims in an effort to build the perception that there’s a groundswell of grassroots sentiment on their side.
But it’s astroturf all the way.
Perhaps my CBS departure set off panic in their ranks. Maybe they sensed that with no fearful news executives in my chain of command to intimidate, with no ideologues at a network attempting to filter my output, with no corporate master, some of my reporting could prove more dangerous than ever to their interests.
They have every right to advance their cause in any legal way they see fit. But as journalists, it’s our job not to allow them to improperly influence our reporting. For me, that’s easy. It’s only when one is encumbered by corporate tethers or ideological managers that it can become difficult.
Naturally, interests like Media Matters aren’t paid by their ideological donors to bark at parked cars. When they target me, it means I’m on to something. Usually, something big. The more apoplectic and accusatory they become, the closer I know that I am to reaching truth.
EXHIBIT A Three major topics of my reporting that prompted the most vitriolic response by some on the left are Fast and Furious, the green energy debacle, and Benghazi. Each was singled out for national excellence as judged by independent peer journalists and news management professionals; each was nominated for or received Emmy and Edward R. Murrow awards. It becomes clear that the volume with which these special interests squawk is directly proportional to the significance and credibility of the story and reporter they seek to discredit.
Therefore, treating a group like Media Matters as if it’s a serious arbiter of good journalism is akin to letting a defendant evaluate the prosecutor who put him in jail. It defies logic. We’re left to wonder why so many in the media routinely do this. A number of media critics ask me if I’m concerned about Media Matters–type criticism, as if I should be moved by it.
Aren’t you playing into their hands by appearing on conservative news outlets? they ask.
I mentally play the Substitution Game: These same critics don’t ask similar questions about my many appearances with other outlets, including liberal-leaning ones. In fact, they ignore those entirely. Additionally, I don’t see them treating seriously the opinions of right-wing media watchdogs. They aren’t seeking balance by treating the conservative equivalents with the same deference.
So some in the media choose to ask the jailed convict what he thinks of the prosecutor. Various reporters and bloggers embrace the charged rhetoric of Media Matters as if it were an esteemed journalism organization providing neutral observations. They use the partisan blog as a primary source for their background research on me in much the same way that I might rely on THOMAS, The House [of Representatives] Open Multimedia Access System at the Library of Congress, to research the Congressional Record; or the Lexis database to research legal cases.
Media Matters has called your reporting shoddy and inaccurate, say these reporters, as if it’s an accusation to be considered seriously.
If they were to think it out, they might realize how absurd it is to ask why I’m not trying to please special interests like Media Matters (or its right-wing counterparts), or whether I’m upset by their attacks. It’s as if these reporters are suggesting I should bend to propaganda rather than independently pursue the facts wherever they lead. If I were to decide my actions based on avoiding attacks by special interests, I’d be doing stories on the weather and features on animals.
One day in April 2014, Media Matters somehow obtained my private contact information, and began calling and emailing to get me to respond to their criticisms. Within minutes, the liberal Talking Points Memo blog, which had also, coincidentally, somehow, obtained my private phone number and email address at the exact same time, began calling to ask what I thought of Media Matters asking me to respond to their criticisms. Within minutes of that, a Washington Post media gossip blogger began calling and emailing for my response to the calls by Media Matters and Talking Points Memo for me to respond to their criticisms. You begin to see how it works. A paid propaganda blog and its helpers work together to gin up a big controversy that’s actually the brainchild of a very small, special interest.
If I were still at CBS, they’d all be calling the network’s press office, trying to create the impression that there’s a giant grassroots movement against me. Exerting pressure. Making the PR officials at CBS uncomfortable. Causing them to notify management. Creating a hassle. It’s part of the plan: to controversialize me not only with the public but also at my job.
Now that I’ve left that job, their tactics are largely neutered. I have no boss for them to call. And I see right through them. But my colleagues left behind are still subject to the propagandist ploys.
In May 2014, the Huffington Post was somehow convinced to report on Media Matters’ letter to CBS News demanding that the network reinvestigate a Benghazi report done by a 60 Minutes correspondent. Substitution Game: Right-wing media watchdogs such as Accuracy in Media have launched complaints about the networks for years but there aren’t many news outlets reporting their complaints as news.
Politico picks up the Huffington Post report, furthering a nonstory, but at least that article includes appropriate skepticism. It notes that Media Matters’ founder is a “Hillary Clinton attack dog” and head of American Bridge Political Action Committee, “which has devoted itself to Hillary Clinton’s election in 2016.” It also states, “In the past year, [Media Matters’ founder] has served as Clinton’s public advocate against the media, combating NBC, CNN, the New York Times and 60 Minutes wherever and whenever there is even a whiff of anti-Clinton sentiment.”
Back to the efforts to controversialize me; whether it’s silly allegations by Media Matters or misreporting by other outlets regarding my departure from CBS, I can’t help but think of how easy it would have been, at any time, for media reporters to simply seek the facts themselves and divine some firsthand truth based on evidence rather than parroting what they read on blogs. But, as I’ve said, some reporters have come to value what they hear others report or say on the Web far more than fact-based, original research. Especially if it’s what they want to hear.
“People hear what they want to hear. They see what they want to see.”
So, as partisan interests slander my stories as “shoddy,” it goes unmentioned that that very reporting received national investigative Emmy Awards for the past two years straight. (The “shoddier” my reporting got, the more awarded it became.) Likewise, as critics hawk the claim that my reporting is inherently, gasp, conservative, few bother to conduct a superficial search that would reveal a balance in my news repertoire that de facto disproves allegations of an ideological bent. Here are just a few examples for the record.
I hit the George W. Bush administration on its secrecy and lack of Freedom of Information Act responses as hard as I pursued the Obama administration on related topics. I aired dozens of reports on the many controversies surrounding Bush’s Food and Drug Administration, Bush administration mismanagement at the National Laboratories, alleged fraud and abuse by federal war contractors such as Halliburton, and a hard-hitting series examining the Bush Treasury Department’s bait and switch on the Troubled Asset Relief Program bank bailout. That effort received the 2009 Emmy Award for investigative reporting.
I did dozens more reports on congressional shenanigans, including Republican Richard Shelby’s controversial hold on Obama nominees, Republicans who call themselves fiscal conservatives but embrace pricey pet projects, and questionable earmarks supported by Republicans Jerry Lewis, Virginia Foxx, Ted Stevens, and Don Young. And there was my undercover investigation into fund-raising by Republican freshmen, which received the 2013 Emmy for investigative reporting.
Perhaps the strongest, but now-forgotten, liberal endorsement of my work comes from MSNBC host Rachel Maddow. She built a seven-minute-long segment based entirely on my investigation into Republican congressman Steve Buyer’s suspicious charity. The liberal Talking Points Memo complimented the same report. This is, of course, before it became a chief critic of mine. Substitution Game: When left-wingers praised my work, it didn’t seem to ruffle any feathers among my colleagues at CBS. But when conservatives expressed support for my stories, some insiders viewed me as the enemy. She’s not one of us. Or else she wouldn’t be pursuing stories like that.
So the theory apparently goes something like this: I was a fair reporter when I examined the Bush-era controversies. But when I started digging into Obama administration problems, I was suddenly a fanatic bent on destroying the president and all good things liberal.
Not even the Obama folks believe that.
But successfully deploying that story line was part of a primary strategy: fight indisputable, damaging facts by controversializing the reporter and politicizing the subject matter. Harassment. Intimidation. Obstruction. And the Obama administration had many willing advocates and believers to help, both outside and inside CBS.
Why is it that the targets of legitimate questions or criticism seek to stop the reporting altogether rather than simply provide their side of the story and address any problems? Clearly, they’re afraid that their side of the story isn’t convincing and that the problems aren’t easily fixed. The Obama administration needn’t be concerned with the opinions of ultraliberals who will usually forgive and defend the president no matter the transgression. Nor need they bother with ultraconservatives who will usually side against the president regardless. It’s those crucial Americans in the middle who are of interest. The ones who can sway opinions—and elections. They must not hear about, lest they come to believe, the administration’s self-imposed controversies. With this administration, any facts that aren’t considered positive—any reporting that doesn’t toe the party line—must be labeled as crazy. The stuff of conspiracy theories. Like Vincent Foster suicide rumors or aliens at Area 51. The public must be convinced that any and all scandals surrounding the Obama administration are “phony” or “bogus.” All critics are “nutty.” The alternative could prove disastrous.
Obama officials clearly viewed me as a wild card. In the past, I had done stories that happened to please them. But they later came to see me as unaccepting of spin. Someone who makes independent checks. Unmoved by peer pressure. Uniquely motivated to get at hidden facts. Not intimidated by threats of my access being limited. (What access?) Not even influenced by my own managers’ disapproval.
While reporting a story in 2012, I was working to get an interview with a political figure. I told his spokesman that his boss might not like the story but that he’d get a fair shot in an interview. The spokesman said, “I know. I’ve asked around. I know you’re fair. And I know you can’t be bought.”
Can’t be bought?
In nearly thirty years of journalism, nobody else had been so blatant. It made me wonder. Are some reporters really “bought”? I began asking my friends who are journalists what they thought. Most of them speculated that yes, absolutely, reporters are bought, but not with cash. They’re bought with implied promises such as “if you don’t use this negative information today, I’ll funnel a bigger story your way tomorrow.” Or “if you back off, there might be a nice, high-paying job waiting for you outside of journalism down the road.”
I think more reporters are lured by the path of least resistance than by bribery. We’ve watched many of our talented peers give up trying to get original, meaningful stories on the air. Why battle the organized interests who mercilessly disparage the stories—and you? Why fight your own managers who discourage rather than value the digging and tenacity? Why put yourself through having to answer late-night phone calls, legal threats, and angry emails as some of the broadcast managers cower rather than support you?
On the other hand, the “day-of-air” reports, weather and transportation stories, features about animals, stories that everybody else is covering on a given day—those sail onto the news. Today a television journalist can earn a healthy six-figure salary barely lifting a finger and the news supervisors are happier than if they’d gotten an exclusive investigation. It’s Alice in Wonderland and everybody sits at the table, smiles, and drinks hot tea as if the Hatter isn’t Mad.
I received more kudos from the CBS Evening News managers for doing a thirty-second live shot that contained virtually no insight after the August 2011 East Coast earthquake than for investigations that my producer, Kim, and I sweated over for months, night and day. In fact, most often in the last couple of years those investigations were met by important people within the news division with a silence that signaled disapproval. And the propaganda whispers about me being a conservative grew to a loud roar.
Judging by the response I received after concluding my CBS News career, most people out there in the so-called real world who care at all about the drama didn’t fall for the creative story line. A friend forwarded me an online opinion piece in Commentary that reflected on my job change. The magazine describes itself as “neoconservative Jewish.” The article was memorable for its clear expression of how propagandists today don’t seek simply to influence the debate; they wish to censor contrary facts and opinions.
Speaking of the president’s supporters on Benghazi, the commentary states, “They aren’t interested in winning a debate. They want to silence opposing views.” The article also provides the astute observation that some who work in the news “are so biased that they actually think critical reporting about a liberal President they personally support is somehow wrong and those who pursue such stories are worthy of suspicion rather than praise.”
| NEW ERA
As in most any news organization, there were editorial and story challenges over the years. But, over time, with the help of my producers and support from key executives along the way, I was generally able to successfully navigate the challenges and establish a meaningful career and a strong record of reporting at CBS. For about seventeen years.
There was a sudden and insurmountable change when the CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley era began in May 2011. Many of us inside the company would later come to often speak to the irony that the broadcast, desperate to develop a reputation for original and investigative reporting, was in fact moving ever further from both.
Strangely enough, Pelley and his executive producer Shevlin showered verbal and written compliments on the first investigative story and script that I offered the new broadcast. It was an exclusive, non-political report about alleged travel industry deception involving a powerful group of influential people. Pelley and Shevlin called the story incredibly compelling and said that it was the sort of reporting that made them proud. I’d already gotten the seal of approval from our CBS lawyers. The story was scheduled to air.
From there, it all went downhill.
A few days later, I learned that the story was pulled off the schedule. Postponed. I had no idea what discussions had transpired. At first, it seemed Pelley just wanted to put his own style and spin on my work. That was unusual for an anchor at CBS. Dan Rather, Bob Schieffer, and Katie Couric had big-picture ideas and editorial input on stories but had never rewritten my scripts.
I acquiesced to Pelley’s oppressive editing, the countless style changes and revisions. I felt a pit in my stomach as I agreed to alterations that softened the facts and made the story convoluted and difficult to follow. But I needed to understand and adjust to Pelley’s style so that we could work together successfully. As the process dragged on for weeks, it became clear that I was on a fool’s errand. The revision process never ended. Were they scared of going after the powerful entities in the story? Were they feeling heat from the entities’ strong pushback? They didn’t say. All I know is, the story would never air on Pelley’s broadcast. The report that he had so effusively complimented was permanently sidelined.
This soon became a distinguishable pattern. Profuse compliments were often proven hollow. In fact, some of us in the field remarked that it seemed like the more the New York fishbowl claimed to “love” a story, the greater the odds it would never air. They rarely said the story wasn’t going to air. They just let it sit around and “loved it” until it began to stink like old fish.
At first, many of us held out hope that there was a way to overcome these new challenges. Getting stories on television, especially ones that address controversies and that challenge the powers that be, is rarely a cakewalk. It requires winning the confidence of managers who must have confidence in themselves.
But there would be no movement. With few exceptions, the writing was on the wall. A number of us sharing the same observations and experiences engaged in countless conversations speculating as to why the Pelley-Shevlin regime was so hostile to original and investigative reporting.
This new environment belied what the new CBS News CEO, Jeff Fager, had told me. In July 2011, just a few months into Pelley’s leadership, I told Fager that I was inexplicably meeting with roadblocks in getting any investigative stories on the Evening News. He asked me to fly to New York to talk about it before I went off for summer vacation. During our meeting, Fager was supportive and encouraging. He assured me that, under his vision, the Evening News with Scott Pelley would benefit nobody’s reporting more than mine. He envisioned my brand of reporting as the mainstay and mission of the new, hard news newscast. Considering Fager’s expressed vision, which I shared, it was particularly ironic that the Pelley broadcast ended up being the death knell for that type of journalism. At least when it came from me.
The universe of what they desired narrowed to a paper-thin slice that was inversely proportional to the expanding universe of what was censored or deemed undesirable. Several New York broadcast managers displayed an overtly visceral rejection of stories that they perceived as negative toward the Obama administration, which eventually equated to nearly any story that critically examined any facet of government or its functions.
There were exceptions. If a story reached such critical mass that many other news outlets were pursuing it, or if the New York Times covered it, our folks might jump on board and air some reports on that topic, too. But in general, the environment for my brand of reporting was poisonous.
Meanwhile, the New York–based investigative unit led by the award-winning team of correspondent Armen Keteyian and senior producer Keith Summa was following a similar trajectory. Their original investigations—once a valued staple of the Evening News—were now generally unwelcome. Instead, the Evening News largely relegated the accomplished producers to chasing an endless stream of rumors and leads on breaking stories copied from other outlets.
In part because of this issue, Summa asked CBS News management to remove the investigative unit from the Evening News budget, in hopes that the investigative team would be free to make original contributions to other broadcasts. To our amazement, Evening News agreed to let go of the New York investigative unit without a fuss. No broadcast that valued investigative reporting at all would dream of doing that. We didn’t know why they felt this way, but it confirmed my inferences: they simply had no serious appetite for true, investigative reporting. Don’t let the screen door hit you on the way out.
Unfortunately, with Summa, Keteyian, and their team freed up to offer stories to other broadcasts, the overall decline in the environment for investigative reporting continued. Keteyian, the New York unit’s only on-air correspondent, left and wasn’t replaced. Now there was a New York investigative team with no investigative correspondent. And nobody seemed to care. In 2012, senior producer Summa departed as well, and went on to become vice president of news partnerships at Univision, where he helps oversee many investigations.
The decimation of the CBS investigative infrastructure didn’t make sense.
Together, Kim and I (and other Washington-based producers who assisted) and the New York–based investigative unit had helped forge a formidable reputation on behalf of CBS News. The decision to cut things off at the knees had to involve other factors besides journalism and viewer interest. We felt like we went from batting a thousand to zero practically overnight.
I’d never been better sourced and better positioned to break interesting stories. But never were the prospects for getting them on TV so grim. Kim and I began drowning in our endless sea of story pitches that would never be answered by New York or, if occasionally accepted, would never air. There were the ideological obstacles in New York. There was our belief that some of the broadcast managers were fearful of hard-hitting investigative reporting. There was their tendency to want to avoid most anything that hadn’t already been published elsewhere first. It was a perfect storm of often competing and contradictory factors that resulted in that narrowing, paper-thin slice of what they desired.
We tried to adjust by offering noninvestigative but still original, interesting stories. Stories that happened to appeal to liberal interests, conservative interests, all interests, or apolitical interests.
Consumer mortgage scams, food safety, failed green energy investments, labor union complaints against corporations, use of tax havens, whistleblowers, environmental damage, a major military scandal, a national monument controversy, government surveillance, drug cartels, medical costs, taxpayer waste, a dozen sequestration stories (pro and con), an unethical federal medical study, the hookah trend, consumer fraud, medical fraud, the IRS targeting of conservatives.
Thanks, thanks . . . but no thanks.
Kim and I tracked down Nakoula Basseley Nakoula in jail, the Egyptian filmmaker whom Hillary Clinton and other Obama officials incorrectly blamed for inciting the September 11, 2012, Benghazi attacks with his YouTube video. We knew that whatever he had to say, his story would be of great interest to many. Though we were not permitted to interview him in jail, we worked to persuade him to do an exclusive on-camera interview with CBS News immediately upon his release from a halfway house in California. It took some convincing, as Nakoula told me that he and his family had received death threats.
Nakoula agreed to let us and our camera meet him in the car that he’d arranged to transport him to a secret safe house upon his release. Just a few years back, a story like that would have led the CBS Evening News. Kim and I were excited at the prospect. But in the current CBS climate, I could no longer make final arrangements for such a shoot unless I had the advance commitment from a broadcast to air the story. In fact, in the current CBS climate, it just might be that nobody would want what could prove to be a high-interest gangbuster. The only way to ensure a taker would be if I could get CBS News president David Rhodes behind the effort. So I told him about the opportunity for the exclusive. He was unenthusiastic.
“That’s kind of old news, isn’t it?” he told me.
My heart sank. How could the impending release from jail of the YouTube filmmaker, the only person really held accountable in the entire Benghazi debacle, who had never done an on-camera interview, who was in essence running for his life, be old news? It hadn’t even happened yet. Many would surely find his story, whatever it may be, of interest. But clearly it would never air on CBS.
I broke the news to Kim, who was distressed. After spending all that time and effort convincing Nakoula to do an interview, and knowing how interesting the interview would be, we canceled on him.
We tried “selling” our stories to other broadcasts such as CBS This Morning, CBS Sunday Morning, and the CBS Weekend News. Occasionally, it worked. But the sales job grew more difficult as that universe narrowed, too.
For example, CBS This Morning enthusiastically accepted our original pitch about a school lunch fraud investigation. It was perfect for the morning show audience: popular, national school lunch food distributors were under criminal investigation for selling crappy, unhealthy products to schools in exchange for illegal kickbacks. We had exclusive information, an exclusive interview with a prosecutor on the case, and an exclusive interview with an inside whistleblower.
After traveling to several states to conduct the interviews, a senior producer on the broadcast began pushing us. The show was excited about the story and wanted to schedule it to air as quickly as possible.
How fast can you write the script? asked the senior producer. Can we edit on Friday?
I rushed to write the story, but before I could send the script to anybody to review, the whole vibe suddenly changed. The urgency cooled. They were no longer anxious to see the script. They changed their mind on scheduling a day to edit.
Kim and I had no idea why the light switch went off. We had grown accustomed to trying to predict objections from broadcast producers based on their political leanings, but we couldn’t figure out what they saw as a political angle to this story.
Out of curiosity, I searched news topics on the Web using the term school lunches. A lot of stories turned up about First Lady Michelle Obama’s initiative to make school lunches healthier.
Do they think this story will somehow negatively reflect on Mrs. Obama’s efforts? we wondered. Several CBS colleagues pointed out that CBS This Morning cohost Gayle King is good friends with Mrs. Obama. Did she put the kibosh on the story?
They’ll change their mind when they read the script, I think. It doesn’t criticize Mrs. Obama and the information is just too interesting to pass up.
But after reading a first draft, the senior producers on the story said the subject matter just wasn’t right for them. Wasn’t interesting to their audience, after all.
Kim and I were befuddled. I had been discussing the story with acquaintances for weeks—often a good way to gauge reaction to a topic—and received 100 percent enthusiastic responses, especially from the very sort of women targeted by the morning broadcasts. Everyone seemed interested in learning about the little-known processes behind delivering mass quantities of food to schoolchildren, and how that system could be rife with fraud.
What was weird about the wholesale rejection of the script was the fact that they didn’t want a rewrite. They were uncharateristically quick to accept the loss of the thousands of dollars they’d spent on the shoot. They didn’t want to see a cut of the piece (I assured them they would find the interviews strong and compelling). They just didn’t want the story. It was a complete 180 from just a few days before.
Among other disappointments was the almost wholesale rejection of the once-popular line of “follow the money” type stories I’d been assigned to do for years involving waste, fraud, and abuse of tax dollars. Almost every day, Kim and I were coming across new ideas for these important stories. They had become more relevant than ever with Congress unable to agree on a budget and spending more than it takes in, the debt growing ever larger, and sequestration looming. But there was near zero interest under the Pelley-Shevlin regime. During this time frame, New York producers initiated subtle edits that didn’t make sense to me substantively but, in retrospect, might be explained from an ideological standpoint. For example, when I wrote about misuse or waste of “tax dollars,” as I’d done for years, they began changing the phrase to “federal money.” When it became a pattern, I wondered if they didn’t want viewers reminded that it’s their hard-earned tax dollars being wasted.
In 2013, Kim and I tried convincing the Weekend News executive producer that it would be in the interest of our viewers and the network to air our brand of taxpayer watchdog stories. We started small with a simple story that we figured even skittish broadcast producers could feel comfortable with: a hearing on waste within the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. It was especially “safe” because it was the government itself, HUD’s inspector general, who had unearthed the problems, so the facts were pretty well established: billions of dollars in wasteful and abusive spending. The IG had presented his findings in a public hearing—so there were no pesky, original investigative facts to worry the broadcast. Even so, I had the script approved by the CBS legal team. It should be perfect.
But when it came time for our script to be reviewed by the executive producer in New York, she was out of the office and handed the task off to her number two. Kim and I immediately sensed trouble. This particular senior producer was commonly referred to as Shevlin’s ideological clone. The two had worked together on Weekend News for years prior to Shevlin’s promotion to Evening News as Pelley’s executive producer. This Weekend News senior, we predicted, wouldn’t like a story that exposed waste by the federal government.
And so, what should have been a quick and simple process devolved into what we came to refer to as “death by a thousand cuts.” After the senior read through the script, he reacted as if the story had disparaged his best friend. As if his best friend were Mr. Federal Government.
“Well, this is all the states’ fault! It’s the states’ fault,” he sputtered, recasting blame for the waste and abuse that the HUD inspector general had flagged. Viewing the story through his own political prism, he defended the federal government by claiming the fault rested with the states that receive the federal HUD dollars. “They should be tracking the money!”
“We can add your thought about how the states are to blame,” I offered in the spirit of compromise. “I can look for a sound bite from the inspector general [at the hearing] where he refers to something like that.”
But he wanted more changes. And he conveyed them in the pattern of questioning that I had come to recognize so well in the last couple of years. It means they just don’t like the subject matter. Nonetheless, I tried to answer all the questions and revise the script to his satisfaction.
Among the changes:
REMOVED the mention that the IG had found $3.5 billion of HUD fraud or waste in a single year.
DELETED the visual and compelling example of the historic Hotel Sterling in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, that was set to get a facelift with $6 million in tax dollars from HUD. But, as we wrote, most of the money was improperly used to demolish the building. With the hotel destroyed, none of the 175 promised jobs were created.
DELETED an example of a fraud case that we had written in the story.
CHANGED the inspector general’s sound bite.
CHANGED a sound bite in which the interviewee was critical of the waste and replaced it with one that was less pointed and less interesting.
REWROTE the example of misused HUD money in Louisiana (and changed the sound bite that referred to that).
All of those alterations in a story that ran under two minutes. I needn’t have bothered to do the legwork and write it in the first place. In the end, it was reshaped by a New York producer, who hadn’t done the firsthand research.
When the story aired, it was a shadow of its former self. And the last edit, removing a demonstrative example of waste from the final story, was made without anybody checking with me or Kim. We felt it was highly unusual and improper to make such a substantive editorial change without consulting us.
I can’t help but think that viewers walk away from a story like that entirely confused. What was the point? In its final form, it seemed as if there were really no cause for major concern. It was a bland nonstory that revealed little of interest.
We found no sense in complaining. This was the new reality.
It was the last attempt we made to get a government waste story on CBS News.
So what did the Evening News want from us during this time? A spot news story on the regional earthquake. A feature about renovation of the National Cathedral after the earthquake. A feature about renovation of the Washington Monument after the earthquake. A feature about damage to the Capitol Building after the earthquake.
Meanwhile, the whisper campaign continued. If I offered a story on pretty much any legitimate controversy involving government, instead of being considered a good journalistic watchdog, I was anti-Obama. If I offered a story on alleged corporate misdeeds, instead of being seen as a reporter holding powers accountable, I was a troublemaker. If I wrote a normal follow-up on national controversies with unanswered questions, instead of being viewed as a classically trained journalist, I was considered obsessed.
None of this was said to me directly. It was passed around by certain managers and colleagues to undermine my reporting and justify their own misguided decisions to censor it.
If I were still thirty years old, I might be convinced that they were right about all of it. That I really had, quite suddenly, without explanation, become the purveyor of all bad story ideas. I might adapt to the new reality by agreeing to do the stories they want, shaped in advance according to their personal views. Happily copy stories from the competition. Forget about developing my own sources and leads. Devote my time to chasing down and confirming rumors from tweets, blogs, and other reporters’ leads.
But, at this stage in my career, I knew better.
| WORRIED ABOUT THE WRONG THINGS
At this stage, I also knew better than to be party to journalism that I viewed as wrong. Over the years, when I raised concerns with the CBS ethics czar or expressed disquietude to my superiors, I always did so in the best interests of CBS News, which I considered my home. But my actions weren’t always viewed as being conscientious. As I’ve explained, the network culture has an inclination—as do many corporate and government cultures—to worry about the wrong things and not worry about the right things. To label the one who’s raising concerns as a troublemaker rather than view him as someone working to protect the company.
I’d seen that sort of marginalization used againt whistleblower Special Agent John Dodson in Fast and Furious. Against whistleblowers inside the FDA, the National Zoo, the American Red Cross, the U.S. Agency for International Development, Firestone, Enron, the National Institutes of Health, the State Department, the military, Los Alamos National Laboratory—so many over the years. Some of those whistleblowers saved human lives. Few, if any, were offered anything other than retaliation and ridicule at the hands of their employers. There are no rainbows for those who risk their careers to stand up for what they think is right. There’s usually only a stormy aftermath filled with heartache that never ends.
I’d been at CBS a decade earlier, in September 2004, during Rathergate, when we’d worried about the wrong things.
Prior to the airing of Dan Rather’s infamous story on 60 Minutes II, a CBS senior producer hustled me into his office and said he had documents that 60 Minutes II was billing as the “smoking gun” against President George W. Bush regarding his Vietnam-era National Guard service: military letters dated 1973. The senior said he was sharing them with me because if Rather’s soon-to-air story made a “big splash” on 60 Minutes II and merited a follow-up the next day on the CBS Evening News, I would be the correspondent assigned to do it.
He handed me the military letters. After reviewing them for no more than thirty seconds, I questioned their authenticity.
“Where’s the source?” I asked, referring to the signatory.
“He’s dead,” answered the senior. “His widow apparently found the letters in storage in the attic.”
“So did 60 get them—from the widow?”
“No. Rather’s producer got them from a group of Republicans in Texas,” he answered. (Note: the CBS investigation into Rathergate later showed this to be untrue.)
I handed the papers back to him. He looked at me quizzically.
“I sure hope they have a lot more evidence than this,” I said. “I assume that they do.”
“What are you talking about?” asked the senior.
“These look like they were typed by my daughter on a computer yesterday,” I answered. (My daughter was nine at the time.)
I knew very well what a typed letter from the era should have looked like. In 1973, I was a devoted student of a secretarial typing class at Brookside Junior High School in Sarasota, Florida. We used top-quality, modern IBM Selectrics—and even they weren’t good enough to type with the uniformity of these obviously computer-generated documents. Heck, in the 1990s, some military bases I visited on assignment were still using old manual typewriters whose finished product was instantly recognizable by its rustic nature. Uneven lines. Corrected mistakes impossible to hide. Varied darkness and clarity of the individual letters, depending on the strength with which the user pounded the key. Even the electrics of the era had distinguishable, trademark irregularities.
Whoever had peddled these documents as genuine had to be a child of the computer age, otherwise they’d understand how unconvincing they looked. And whoever believed them had to be ignorant or blinded by their desire to push the story.
In the embarrassing aftermath of Rathergate, with the documents ultimately exposed as fakes, my colleagues and I suffered the fallout. We lived through the incredibly painful process of watching some insiders who knew the documents were bogus defend them anyway. They were banking on Rather surviving the scandal and were betting that when the dust cleared, Rather would take down anyone not on his side.
Prior to an Evening News conference call one morning, I advised my senior producer to strongly push our New York superiors to bring in an independent entity to oversee any news coverage we attempted to do on Rathergate as it unfolded. My rationale was that we shouldn’t risk digging ourselves into a deeper hole by dabbling in conflicts of interest and covering our own story unfettered. The senior said it was a good idea, but, as far as I know, he didn’t pass along the suggestion.
One day, the senior approached me to say that I would have to cover that day’s Rathergate story.
“I can’t do that,” I told him.
“Well, you may have to. You’re the only choice today.” The regular reporter who’d been covering the story was off.
I doubted that I’d be given the independence to address questions about Rather’s actions—in a story that Rather would be approving, to air on Rather’s broadcast.
A couple of hours later, I found my senior producer in front of our M Street offices on a break.
“I can’t do the story,” I told him again.
“Why not?”
“Because I saw the documents ahead of time and I told you what I thought about them. My contract states that I’ll uphold certain ethical standards. I can’t report a story that says something that I know to be false.”
He was quiet.
“And if you make me,” I continued, “I’ll have to call to my lawyer.”
Nobody ever again suggested I report on Rathergate.
As predicted, CBS was later criticized for attempting to cover our own story when we, ourselves, were at the center of the probe. In my view, it was another example of the company being worried about the wrong things and not worried about the right things.
Such was the case once again in 2013 after 60 Minutes apologized for what it said was a “deeply flawed” story on Benghazi, as reported by another correspondent, who relied upon a later-discredited witness. This new scandal led managers, already skittish about original and investigative reporting, to embark on illogical overreactions. CBS This Morning had asked me to report on the new book, written by Fast and Furious whistleblower John Dodson. There would be nothing legally precarious about this feature, but I had my script approved by the CBS legal department anyway, because I knew how fearful the broadcast producers were. The supervising producer approved the script as well.
Still, that wasn’t enough.
“They also want John Miller to approve your script,” the supervising producer informed me, referring to a fellow CBS News correspondent who had well-placed sources at the FBI, where he used to work. The backstory is that some inside the network believed if 60 Minutes had asked Miller to check out its Benghazi source for their story, his FBI contacts would have waved him off and that CBS scandal would’ve been avoided.
Whatever the truth of that matter, it was silly to try to thrust Miller into the script approval chain on my story. A generous, smart, and well-connected colleague to be sure, he was nonetheless no better suited to “approve” my stories than I was to approve his. And he certainly wasn’t better sourced on Fast and Furious.
In the end, I got word that Miller “approved” my script. To this day I have no idea what that approval could have possibly added or entailed.
While they were busy heaping unnecessary worry on my feature story, there were very real issues they should have been paying attention to.
But, by this time, I’d long since made up my mind that I would leave CBS at the end of my contract in December 2014, if not sooner. And the event that sealed that decision for me was related to Benghazi.
| BENGHAZIGATE
I should have known something was up when I received an unsolicited phone call from a White House official a few days before the second debate between President Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney on October 16, 2012.
The president was coming off a tough loss in the first debate, after which uncommitted voters, by a 46 percent to 22 percent margin, said Romney won; and 56 percent had an improved opinion of the Republican candidate.
The White House official and I chatted casually about unrelated topics and then he introduced a non sequitur: “The president called Benghazi a ‘terrorist attack’ the day after in the Rose Garden,” he told me.
At the time, I hadn’t given any thought to whether the president had or hadn’t termed the Benghazi assaults “terrorism.” The debate on that point hadn’t widely emerged and I was still focused on the State Department’s denial of security requests from Americans in Libya prior to the attacks.
Since I really didn’t know what the president had said in the Rose Garden the day after, I didn’t offer a comment to the White House official on the other end of the phone. He repeated himself as if to elicit some sort of reaction.
“He did call it a terrorist attack. In the Rose Garden. On September twelfth.”
I had no idea that the question of how the administration portrayed the attacks—and whether it was covering up the terrorist ties—would emerge as a touchstone leading up to the election. But the White House already seemed to know.
A couple of days later, I’m watching the Obama-Romney debate at home on television as moderator Candy Crowley of CNN asks a Benghazi-related question. My ears perk up when the president replies using very similar language to that of the White House official on the phone.
OBAMA The day after the attack, Governor, I stood in the Rose Garden and I told the American people and the world that we are going to find out exactly what happened. That this was an act of terror and I also said that we’re going to hunt down those who committed this crime.
I now feel as though the White House official had been trying to prep me to accept the president’s debate claim that he’d called the Benghazi assaults an “act of terror” on September 12.
The Benghazi question and the president’s response are all Romney needs to try to seize control of the debate and score big points. He accuses the president of downplaying terrorist ties to protect his campaign claim that al-Qaeda was on the run.
ROMNEY I—I think [it’s] interesting the president just said something which—which is that on the day after the attack he went into the Rose Garden and said that this was an act of terror.
OBAMA That’s what I said.
ROMNEY You said in the Rose Garden the day after the attack, it was an act of terror? It was not a spontaneous demonstration, is that what you’re saying?
OBAMA Please proceed, Governor. . . .
ROMNEY I want to make sure we get that for the record because it took the president fourteen days before he called the attack in Benghazi an act of terror.
OBAMA Get the transcript.
The exchange feels strangely awkward. Romney seems genuinely bewildered and President Obama seems oddly anxious to move on. Then, the moderator, Crowley, comes to the president’s rescue.
CROWLEY It—it—it—he did in fact, sir. So let me—let me call it an act of terror. . . .
OBAMA Can you say that a little louder, Candy?
CROWLEY He—he did call it an act of terror.
Crowley is quick with her take. It makes me wonder if she, too, had gotten that call from a White House official in advance, telling her that the president had immediately labeled Benghazi a terrorist act.
Why is this point so important to the Obama administration?
The next day, I look for a transcript of the president’s Rose Garden statement to see if I can figure out the puzzle.
When I locate and review the remarks that the president made in the Rose Garden on September 12, 2012, I find that he did not say Benghazi was “an act of terror,” as he’d claimed in the debate. In fact, at each point in his speech when he could have raised the specter of “terrorism” or “terrorists,” he’d chosen a synonym (examples of this from his speech are bolded):
THE PRESIDENT Good morning. . . . Yesterday, four of these extraordinary Americans were killed in an attack on our diplomatic post in Benghazi. Among those killed was our Ambassador, Chris Stevens, as well as Foreign Service Officer Sean Smith. . . . The United States condemns in the strongest terms this outrageous and shocking attack. . . . And make no mistake, we will work with the Libyan government to bring to justice the killers who attacked our people. Since our founding, the United States has been a nation that respects all faiths. We reject all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others. But there is absolutely no justification to this type of senseless violence. None. The world must stand together to unequivocally reject these brutal acts. Already, many Libyans have joined us in doing so, and this attack will not break the bonds between the United States and Libya. Libyan security personnel fought back against the attackers alongside Americans. . . .
Nope, no mention of terrorism there.
Where the president may be granted some wiggle room, though there’s no doubt he overstated it in the debate, is when his speech segued to the fact that the attacks happened on the anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington. That’s when he used the word terror. But not referring directly to Benghazi.
THE PRESIDENT Of course, yesterday was already a painful day for our nation as we marked the solemn memory of the 9/11 attacks. We mourned with the families who were lost on that day. I visited the graves of troops who made the ultimate sacrifice in Iraq and Afghanistan at the hallowed grounds of Arlington Cemetery, and had the opportunity to say thank you and visit some of our wounded warriors at Walter Reed. And then last night, we learned the news of this attack in Benghazi. As Americans, let us never, ever forget that our freedom is only sustained because there are people who are willing to fight for it, to stand up for it, and in some cases, lay down their lives for it. Our country is only as strong as the character of our people and the service of those both civilian and military who represent us around the globe. No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for. Today we mourn four more Americans who represent the very best of the United States of America. We will not waver in our commitment to see that justice is done for this terrible act. And make no mistake, justice will be done. But we also know that the lives these Americans led stand in stark contrast to those of their attackers. . . .
One might be able to believe that the administration’s wholesale avoidance of the term terrorism in direct reference to Benghazi is an accident of wording. Except that the same accident happened in those early days when White House spokesman Carney briefed reporters, when Secretary of State Clinton spoke at the return of the victims’ bodies, and when U.S. ambassador Rice appeared on Sunday talk shows. Except that the references to terrorism and al-Qaeda were purposefully removed from the talking points used to relate details to the public. In fact, one would have to go out of his way to use so many synonyms for the attackers and not say the actual word terrorist.
Taken together, it’s difficult to believe the wording is anything other than a purposeful strategy. The main unanswered questions: Who spearheaded the strategy? Why? And in what form was it transmitted to all the officials who got on board with it?
So what does all this have to do with my own situation at CBS?
In an unexpected way, it came to expose the extraordinary lengths to which some of my colleagues would go to misrepresent and slant the facts when they had explicit evidence to the contrary, which they kept hidden. It was enough to irreparably destroy any confidence in and respect I might have had for those at the network who were involved.
In the Benghazi chapter of this book, I referred to the fact that 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft happened to have an unrelated interview scheduled with President Obama the day after the Benghazi attacks.
However, the contents of his crucial interview, as it related to Benghazi, were largely kept under wraps at the time. The interview was only pulled out of the archives more than five weeks later when CBS Evening News managers wished to cherry-pick an excerpt and dictate its use out of context in a way that supported President Obama’s version of events.
It’s October 19, 2012, three days after that fateful Obama-Romney debate and less than three weeks before the election. Obama had managed to turn around Romney’s advantage. The president had held his own in the debate. Maybe even thrown Romney back on his heels with his Benghazi answer, insisting he’d immediately labled the attacks “terrorism.” After being smacked down by Crowley, Romney would hesitate to raise the specter of Benghazi again during the rest of the campaign.
But still simmering in the background is the building flap over whether the Obama administration had tried to hide the Benghazi attacks’ terrorist ties. The CBS Evening News wants the controversy addressed and, preferably, put to rest. The New York producers commission a story on the topic from a fellow CBS Washington correspondent.
Midday, I’m in the Washington newsroom when I overhear our senior producer relay strict instructions from New York. The instructions say that the other correspondent’s story must include a specific, never-before-aired sound bite from President Obama’s September 12 60 Minutes interview with Kroft. I’m busy working on my own story that day, but it’s news to me that 60 Minutes had spoken to the president about Benghazi weeks before. New York also dictates the precise wording that the other correspondent should use to introduce the chosen Obama sound bite. It appears to be an attempt to make the president’s case for him—that he had called the Benghazi attacks “terrorism.”
The resulting Evening News script reads as follows:
It had been about 14 hours since the attack, and the President said he did not believe it was due simply to mob violence. “You’re right that this is not a situation that was exactly the same as what happened in Egypt,” Obama said, referring to protests sparked by an anti-Islam film. “And my suspicion is that there are folks involved in this who were looking to target Americans from the start.” Shortly after that, Obama stepped into the Rose Garden and spoke of the killing of four Americans as if it were a terrorist attack. “No act of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation,” Obama said in his Rose Garden remarks.
I mentally note that my own interpretation of the president’s Rose Garden remarks isn’t quite the same.
Meanwhile, in subsequent days, my producers and I break several more important stories on Benghazi as documents and witnesses chip away at the Obama administration’s narrative.
On October 24, 2012, I exclusively obtain the email alerts issued by the State Department to the White House Situation Room and government and intelligence agencies as the attacks unfolded on September 11. One of the initial alerts stated what the Obama administration kept hidden from the public: that the Islamic militant group Ansar al-Sharia had claimed responsibility for the attacks. As evidence mounts, none of it supports the Obama administration’s narrative about a spontaneous protest.
As I’m writing my script for the Evening News, the hotline from the New York fishbowl sounds in the Washington newsroom. New York is instructing me to insert the same Obama 60 Minutes sound bite in my story that they’d told the other correspondent to use a few days before.
“It has to be used, and you have to use that same wording to introduce it: Obama ‘said he did not believe it was simply due to mob violence,’” my senior producer tells me in the voice that conveys to me there’s no arguing the point and don’t-ask-why-because-he-doesn’t-know-the-answer. Their minds are made up.
So for the second time in five days, New York has us insert the same line and Obama sound bite in an Evening News story to imply that the president had called Benghazi a terrorist attack the next day. It seems as though they’re putting a lot of effort into trying to defend the president on this point.
It’s not long after that story when the proverbial light switch on the Benghazi story turns off at CBS. The broadcast has gone from asking me to aggressively pursue all leads, to demurring when I begin to turn up more facts that show important inconsistencies in the administration’s accounts. The election is drawing near. Witnesses and documents are raising more legitimate questions by the day. But I feel that familiar Big Chill.
Leave it alone.
Troublemaker.
Pretty soon, the only sure outlet for new developments is CBSNews.com. As with Fast and Furious, the public is thirsty for developments on the Benghazi story and the Web postings draw a great deal of traffic. Clearly, viewers are interested. But the broadcast producers are not.
It’s not until the weekend before the November presidential election that I learn something that would shake any remaining faith I had in the New York fishbowl.
It’s Friday afternoon. A colleague calls.
“You know that interview 60 Minutes did with Obama in the Rose Garden on September twelfth?” the colleague says.
“Yes,” I answer. “Why?”
“I just got a transcript. Of the entire interview.”
“From who?
“I can’t say. But holy shit.”
“What’s it say?” I ask.
“Holy shit.”
The colleague proceeds to read to me from the transcript. It’s undeniably clear to both of us. We instantly know that the interview that had been kept under such a tight wrap for nearly eight weeks is explosive.
The very first comment Kroft made, and the president’s response, proved that Romney had been correct all along:
KROFT Mr. President, this morning you went out of your way to avoid the use of the word terrorism in connection with the Libya attack.
OBAMA Right.
Kroft’s take on the president’s wording and intent was the same as mine had been and, according to the president himself, at the time, our take was correct. All the synonyms used by Obama, Clinton, White House spokesman Carney, and Ambassador Rice were intentional. They “went out of [their] way to avoid the use of the word terrorism.”
Then Kroft asked a question that offered the president the opportunity to clarify or at least hint at the behind-the-scenes conclusions already formed by nearly everyone on the inside: that the attacks were the work of terrorists. But the president balked.
KROFT Do you believe that this was a terrorist attack?
OBAMA Well, it’s too early to know exactly how this came about, what group was involved, but obviously it was an attack on Americans.
Kroft had asked the question point blank. Though the president has told the world that he unequivocally called it a terrorist attack that very day, and though the media has largely sided with his interpretation, his own hidden interview with CBS belied the claim.
My thought turns to the selectively chosen Obama sound bite the Evening News had directed me to use a week before. To put it mildly: it was misleading.
This was a really bad thing.
Besides the implications for the story itself, I couldn’t get past the fact that upper-level journalists at CBS had been a party to misleading the public. Why wouldn’t they have immediately released the operative sound bite after Romney raised the issue in the debate? It would have been a great moment for CBS. The kind of break that news organizations hope for. We had our hands on original material that no other news outlet had that would shed light on an important controversy. But we hid it.
Now, eight years after Rathergate, I feared that we’d once again mischaracterized facts in advance of a presidential election to hurt a Republican. We not only had stood by silently as the media largely sided against Romney, but we’d also taken an active part in steering them in that direction.
Still on the phone with my colleague, we both knew what had to be done but I said it out loud.
“This has to be published,” I said. “Before the election.”
“I know,” agreed my colleague.
What’s really going to bake your noodle later on is—How did the White House know CBS wouldn’t use the part of the 60 Minutes Obama interview that disproved the president’s debate claim?
Thus began a frenetic forty-eight hours of activity inside CBS News during which a small group of us made individual contact with news executives and explained what we thought needed to happen.
I told the executives I spoke with that withholding the operative sound bite and information was extremely unethical and dishonest. I argued that we had no choice but to publish it quickly, prior to the election. It was up to them to decide the format, but it had to be published.
It was all going to come out one way or another. There were 60 Minutes staffers who had been talking about it, wondering why the Evening News had avoided using the operative part of the Obama interview. And now, at the eleventh hour, the chatter had grown so strong that a transcript had been leaked to some of us outside 60 Minutes. Like chewing on a gristly piece of bad meat, it was only going to get bigger. It was only a matter of time before people outside of CBS found out.
If we published quickly and took our lumps, at least we would have done so before the election. If we didn’t publish, and outsiders found out later—and they would—it would be said that we engaged in a cover-up to try to affect the outcome of the election.
In no instance did any executive express disagreement to me or to others in our small group. In fact, they enthusiastically agreed. There had been a grave and purposeful error. We had to fix it. And so, the Sunday night before the election, nearly eight weeks after the Obama interview had taken place, the network posted it on CBSNews.com as part of a comprehensive Benghazi timeline that I and several colleagues had built.
I exhaled for the first time in two days.
I paused and thought back to the actual transcript I’d seen of the entire Kroft interview with Obama. 60 Minutes had emailed it to the Evening News fishbowl in New York the very day it took place. Anchor and Managing Editor Pelley. Executive Producer Shevlin. They had to have known. They were emailed the full transcript on day one. They must have known after the Romney debate and when they dictated use of the misleading sound bites in October.
“Look, we fucked up,” CBS News president Rhodes would tell me in our continuing discussions. “But what matters is that as soon as it was brought to my attention I took steps to correct it. And if there are [congressional] hearings, that’s what I’ll testify to, because it’s the truth.”
There were no hearings.
A few Republican members of Congress who were paying closer attention than others contacted CBS News executives with their concerns about the belated posting of the president’s Benghazi interview. But by and large, the whole episode was mostly forgotten, eclipsed by the actual election, after which attentions were focused elsewhere.
I was relieved that the material was published before the election. But I felt the internal follow-up was crucial. There had been a serious breach of ethics that could have done irreparable harm to the news division, had it not been caught and remedied. Those responsible for the lapse have no business working in a news division. People like that can bring down a news operation by caring more about their own selfish motives than the good of the network and its duty to the public. If there ever were to be an outside inquiry, as there was after Rathergate, we would need to demonstrate that we’d taken all the appropriate steps. That we’d learned from our past mistakes. That meant there should be an internal ethics investigation holding accountable whoever was responsible.
But that was not to be.
A few weeks later, I met with David Rhodes during one of his regular visits to Washington. I asked for an update on the internal investigation. For me, there was no point in pulling punches. Speaking of the Evening News managers who I felt had been a party to covering up the Obama bite, I said, “They’re dishonest, they’re unethical, and they’re not very smart. I don’t trust them, I don’t respect them, and I can’t work for them.”
David assured me that a full investigation was under way. Or was going to be conducted in the future. I wasn’t entirely sure. It was a bit vague.
“Will the rest of us get to know the results?” I asked. Twice.
I wondered realistically what could be done. Pretty much the whole New York fishbowl was potentially implicated in the ethics breach. How could CBS really punish them all? And would the network risk taking action that could draw attention to something that had gone relatively unnoticed by the public?
David assured me that, yes, we would all know the results of the investigation when it was finished.
That was the last I ever heard of it.
| CONTROVERSIALIZING IN ACTION
It’s spring of 2013 and, disillusioned about the network’s handling of the Benghazi story, I nonetheless continue to turn up new information and offer stories. My sources and information on Benghazi are bearing serious fruit but, more often than not, it tends to die on the vine now. The partisan propaganda campaign to portray Benghazi as an Area 51–type conspiracy theory, a Republican-manufactured phony scandal, has successfully taken root with receptive audience members inside and outside CBS. Many other media outlets that had once enthusiastically covered the story have, like CBS, backed off.
I’m taking a day off on Friday, May 10, when Bureau Chief Isham contacts me and asks me to check out a story that’s just been broken by ABC’s Jonathan Karl about the Benghazi talking points.
For months, the Obama administration had refused to publicly release crucial emails showing the genesis of the controversial and misleading talking points that excluded mention of terrorism. But the administration had made some of the emails available to members of Congress and their staff on an extremely restricted basis: the documents had to be viewed in a special room during certain hours in the presence of one or more administration officials. Members of Congress and their staff were not allowed to remove the documents from the room. They were not allowed to make copies. All they could do was make handwritten notes about them.
Karl’s news is big. He reports that ABC has “reviewed” “White House emails” and obtained “12 different versions of the talking points.” They reveal for the first time that, from start to finish, the content of the talking points was transformed from revealing that terrorism and al-Qaeda were responsible, and that the CIA had issued prior warnings of an attack on the Benghazi compound, to a scrubbed version that removed all traces of terror references. This is the very thing that inside sources had suggested, but the administration had denied.
Isham wants to know if I can get the emails, too. I make some calls and pretty quickly discover that I can’t get the actual emails. But I can find out what they said from a reliable source who reviewed them. I report back to Isham.
“I can’t find anybody who has the administration’s emails. The administration turned them over to Congress with a bunch of restrictions. But I can get a read on them from a good source who reviewed the emails and took handwritten notes,” I tell Isham.
The source reads to me directly from notes and repeats the caveat that there may be paraphrasing because of the unusual arrangement whereby access was limited and they weren’t allowed to photocopy the emails.
After the briefing, I compare my notes to Karl’s emails and they match up very closely. Not exactly, which could be expected due to the paraphrasing, but the meaning is the same.
The series of Obama administration revisions chronicled in the emails is astonishing. The White House had spent months hiding the information in them, insisting it didn’t know who was responsible for developing the talking points and refusing to release the drafts to members of Congress who requested them. Under any neutral assessment, Karl’s break is the big story of the day.
I write up a comprehensive note summarizing the various drafts of the Obama administration talking points emails and I forward it to my Washington managers and our Capitol Hill staff. Then I brief them in a conference call. I make it crystal clear both in my note and on the telephone that neither I nor my source have the emails in hand since the administration had not allowed them to be physically turned over to Congress. For that reason, I reiterate, my source’s notes are paraphrases, but can be trusted as accurate representations.
My Washington managers forward my email note to the substitute White House correspondent on duty and the Evening News fishbowl in New York. They send back a message for me to not bother to come into work. They’ll have the White House correspondent use my notes to do the story.
Yeah, we’re in that phase, I think.
Isham tells me to go ahead and post a write-up on CBSNews.com to match Karl’s reporting. The very first line of my article contains the same disclosure I’d made to my managers:
NOTE *Emails were provided by the Administration to certain Congressional Committees for limited review. The Committees were not permitted to copy the emails, so they made handwritten notes. Therefore, parts of the quoted emails may be paraphrased.
The cleansing of the talking points is such a damning development in the Benghazi saga, the Obama propaganda forces focus their full attention to trying to discredit it. Their crisis response is primarily directed at controversializing Karl, who broke the story.
STEP ONE The White House releases the talking point emails—the ones it had withheld all this time—and shows wording that differs slightly from the quotes Karl had provided.
STEP TWO The White House falsely claims the discrepancies are significant, and then uses them to discredit Karl and controversialize the whole damaging story.
STEP THREE Assistance comes from the administration’s surrogate bloggers on the Web who claim the unnamed source of the email leaks lied by saying he had the emails in hand—though the source had done no such thing. They accuse the source of “doctoring” quotes. Again, utterly false. But pretty soon, legitimate news organizations take the baton and perpetuate the idea that the whole talking-point-email-fuss is a Republican-created-scandal.
It’s a familiar syndrome: the same news outlets that ignore a genuine controversy when it emerges are all too eager to jump in and pick up the story if it means discrediting it . . . or if it means reporting on the administration’s defense.
In fact, the differences between Karl’s presented quotes and the actual emails were without distinction. Both demonstrated that the Obama administration had seriously misled Congress and the public. But all of that is lost in the furor whipped up by left-wing bloggers with help from the mainstream press.
I feel sorry for Karl. He doesn’t have a chance against the White House spin machine, its surrogates on the Web, and a complicit news media on Obama’s side.
A few days later, I inadvertently get wrapped up in the controversy.
It starts with a text message from a colleague.
“Did you see what they did to your story?” the colleague asks.
“What are you talking about?” I reply.
“I’ll call you.”
On the phone, the colleague explains that the Evening News had required our White House correspondent to do a one-sided story discrediting Karl’s reporting on the talking point emails and, by proxy, discrediting my own reporting on the same subject, as well as my source.
I was told that there were heated internal arguments over this particular Evening News story. That nobody in the Washington bureau thought it should air. Not the correspondent, not the producer, not the senior producer, not the bureau chief. But New York was hell-bent. I was told that Pelley and his producers rewrote the entire script to their liking, “top to bottom.”
So CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley introduces the resulting report, referring to the content of the White House emails “leaked to reporters last week.” (That would include me.)
“It turns out some of the quotes in those emails were wrong,” Pelley says. For reasons unknown, he ignores the fact that I had reported the “quotes” provided to me as paraphrases—they weren’t “wrong” at all.
The correspondent’s report then continues the fallacy by comparing supposed “quotes that had been provided by Republicans” (which are actually paraphrases supplied by a source) to the emails the White House later released, as if some sort of subterfuge has been unearthed.
But the differences are without distinction: a review of the emails proves that the original paraphrased quotes from a source the week before were entirely accurate in spirit, context, and meaning.
Tonight’s CBS story is, in my view, inaccurate, misleading, and unfair. It may as well have been written by the White House. On top of that, it mentions the White House’s Ben Rhodes as author of some of the talking points drafts in question, but fails to disclose that he’s the brother of CBS News president David Rhodes.
I’m genuinely stunned that this story about my reporting and my source aired on my network with nobody picking up the telephone and speaking to me to get the facts. It’s contrary to the most basic practices in journalism. Whoever wrote the story appeared to make no effort to seek the facts beyond the White House spin. I could have immediately told them that what they were about to report was wrong.
Although my source isn’t named in the disparaging CBS Evening News story, I worry about potential liability. Not only have the facts been misrepresented, but the report, in essence, labeled my source a liar. I feel pretty certain that nobody had run this script by the CBS legal department. They never would have allowed it to air.
The White House and outlets such as Mother Jones seize upon this new CBS Evening News report as an admission that my report, and Karl’s, had been wrong. That the GOP had “doctored” quotes, though my source had doctored nothing.
Several CBS colleagues encourage me not to let this inaccuracy go unanswered.
“[CBS is] selling you down the river,” says one. “They’ll gladly sacrifice your reputation to save their own. If you don’t stand up for yourself, nobody will.”
I email key CBS News executives, noting that my original article contained the explicit disclosure that the email quotes were paraphrased from handwritten notes, just as my source had explained. I point out that the content of the paraphrases and the emails match up perfectly. I reiterate that everyone who received my story note, including the New York fishbowl, knew this and so shouldn’t have pursued a story that falsely implied quotes were doctored or a source had lied.
Next, I go to view the original article I’d written for the Web. As I click on the page, I quickly scroll up and down—something is missing. Somebody has edited out the key explanation I’d included at the top of the article about the paraphrased quotes. It’s gone.
Who edited out the caveat—and why?
Within a matter of hours, I solve the mystery. An editor for CBSNews.com had made an innocent error. He had removed the disclosure paragraph because he simply didn’t feel it was necessary.
The big question is: How to fix the whole mess? We need to add back the disclosure paragraph as I originally wrote it and include an explanation as to how it got inadvertently edited out. That way people would know that our source hadn’t lied, and that my reporting had been accurate.
But that simple fix is met with resistance from management.
“If we amend the story, it will just draw attention to the [incorrect] Evening News story [the other correspondent had aired],” one New York manager tells me.
I decide to consult some trusted advisors within CBS Corporation. They agree I need to push the point both for the sake of accuracy and my reputation. They come up with this suggestion: if my managers won’t agree to restore my Web story to the way I’d written it, then I should ask that it be removed from the website entirely.
I contact the relevant New York executive and ask that he facilitate getting my Web article reinstated to its initial version. He puts me off saying he’s too busy to focus on it. But for me, the whole thing has already been drawn out too long and the propagandists are making serious hay out of the affair. I tell the executive that if he doesn’t have time to address my concerns, I plan to consult our CBS lawyers.
“No, Sharyl,” comes his quick reply. I’ve gotten his attention.
In the end, CBS management agreed to make the fix to my Web article.
Understandably, the whole Washington inner circle that watches these things seemed confused by the shenanigans surrounding the talking points emails, the spin, and the CBS News stories. So much so that a Washington Post fact-checker ultimately dissected the matter. He, too, was befuddled by the most recent Evening News story that seemed to contradict my reporting. But he was able to get a grasp on the facts. He noted that the paraphrases of the White House emails reported by me and Karl were identical in meaning to the actual quotes, though the White House spin claimed otherwise. He correctly reported that I had clearly disclosed that the material used in my Web article was paraphrased. He even pointed out that Ben Rhodes is David Rhodes’s brother. As a result, he gave the White House three out of four “Pinocchios,” meaning he found “significant fact errors and/or contradictions” in its claim that “GOP operatives deliberately tried to ‘smear the president’ with false, doctored emails.”
“Indeed, Republicans would have been foolish to seriously doctor emails that the White House at any moment could have released (and eventually did),” noted the Post.
All of these unnecessary internal battles, largely prompted by propagandists, consume time and energy, and they take their toll. They steal efforts away from real newsgathering. They divert attention from important stories. And they result in convincing management more than ever that it’s easier just to avoid these types of stories entirely. As intended.
Of course, to this day, the propagandists who manufactured the false tale about the “doctored” emails continue to promulgate the narrative. Yet another effort to controversialize the factual reporting on Benghazi. That’s just what they do.
| THE DREAMLINER NIGHTMARE
It was early 2013 when the network assigned me to cover transportation issues. The beat had been passed around among a number of correspondents in recent years, kind of like Hot Potato, and the Evening News fishbowl was looking for a Washington correspondent to pick it up. Maybe they were happy to divert my attention from the watchdog stories I had been focused on. I told Bureau Chief Isham I didn’t really want the assignment, but I’d take it and give it my all.
There was plenty to keep me busy. The current broadcasts loved anything that could go wrong on an airplane. A chute deploys midflight? That’s a national story! A passenger stands up and shouts something crazy? That’s a national story! A suspicious character passes through security at LAX? That’s a national story! A jet slides off the runway? That’s a national story!
They also loved industry and government press releases on aggressive driving efforts, cell phones on planes, lasers pointed at planes, drunk driving studies, distracted driving statistics, and crash safety tests. Safe stories fed to us by the powers that be. Stories that everyone covers.
My idea was to dig a little deeper on these stories and produce something more original. And one of the meaty transportation stories that merited further investigation was the Boeing Dreamliner.
The giant Boeing 787 Dreamliner was the first commercial jet to rely so heavily on lithium-ion battery technology, which saved money by making the plane lighter and burn less fuel. The downside is that lithium-ion batteries occasionally happen to burst into flames. There was a fire in January 2013 on a Japan Airlines Dreamliner parked at Boston Logan International Airport. Another battery incident less than two weeks later in Japan on All Nippon Airways. Soon Dreamliners were grounded worldwide.
Kim and I were all over the story and the broadcasts seemed pleased. At first. Like a lot of stories, they loved it before they hated it.
As we continued our daily news coverage, CBSNews.com asked me to look into the case of a Dreamliner whistleblower who had told his story to a few news organizations but had largely gone unnoticed.
His name is Michael Leon and, in 2006, he was a senior engineering technician at Securaplane, in Tucson, Arizona, working on the Dreamliner’s prototype battery chargers. The chargers sit next to the batteries on the planes and operate as a system. Leon’s hands were the last hands on the prototype chargers before they went out the door. He claimed that Securaplane, under extraordinary pressure to meet Boeing contract deadlines, took shortcuts and compromised human safety.
As part of his work years before, Leon discovered that the internal monitor in a prototype Dreamliner battery wasn’t working properly. But Securaplane officials assured him it was safe. Two weeks later, he was in the company lab when the same battery exploded. It wasn’t even hooked up to the charger.
“It was like an F-16 afterburner,” Leon said. One cell after another exploded and spewed out toxic black smoke as thick as oil. It burned down Securaplane’s three-story building. Leon suffered permanent injuries, including heart problems from the chemical smoke, but continued to work. Boeing claimed the battery caught fire due to an “improper test setup,” but investigators were never able to determine the cause.
Now, seven years later, experts wondered whether whatever made the battery catch fire then might be a clue to the Dreamliner’s current problems. But Boeing and Securaplane say it’s unrelated.
Leon had also raised objections to what he felt were “dangerous” chargers. Once, during development, when he refused to sign off on the chargers for safety reasons, he learned that a colleague shipped them out anyway. (Boeing and Securaplane say the battery charger from the early testing is different than the final product so it shouldn’t be a safety concern.)
Feeling as though his safety complaints were disregarded, and believing that management was targeting him, Leon filed a complaint with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in 2007. Securaplane fired him. He sued for wrongful termination, but lost. The labor judge said that Leon wasn’t fired for whistleblowing, but for his hostility and repeated misconduct. Leon argued that the hostility and supposed misconduct were a result of his managers marginalizing him when he raised safety concerns.
Interestingly, the labor judge did agree that “someone with Leon’s level of expertise could reasonably believe Securaplane might be in violation of FAA regulations” and “Leon’s concerns were objectively reasonable. They were the type of air safety concerns Congress intended to protect whistleblowers for raising.”
The FAA—often rumored to favor industry—investigated Leon’s complaint in 2007 and 2008 but took no action. The agency said that Leon complained about prototypes that are not installed in the Dreamliners that eventually went into service, so there was no concern.
As part of our research, Kim and I consulted numerous experts who said that the FAA’s response in 2008 missed the point. Errors in prototypes can be perpetuated in the final product. Additionally, the company’s practices were also at serious issue and so, theoretically, could affect any of its final products, not just certain prototypes.
So, we studied Leon’s court testimony and documentation from 2006. We consulted with battery and air safety experts in the field to check out his claims. One of them went so far as to tell us he thought Leon’s material qualified as a “smoking gun” in the current Dreamliner investigation.
Former National Transportation Safety Board chairman Jim Hall was on record as having said the 2006 battery fire which Leon claimed was caused by a faulty battery and/or poor company practices “is a significant event that the NTSB will want to look closely at.” Former NTSB member John Goglia told us on camera that Leon’s complaints took on new significance in light of the Dreamliner’s grounding and “go right to the core of the battery and the battery charging system and they’re really right on what we’re looking for today.”
Indeed, the NTSB investigation had narrowed to three areas, and Leon had touched upon each of them in his original complaints years before: the battery charger, battery construction and design, and defects introduced during manufacturing. The NTSB had recently interviewed Leon and so did a Democratic congressional staffer preparing for possible hearings. Leon’s story and the facts revealed were interesting and important context in this developing story.
Best of all from a story standpoint, we had a compelling on-camera interview from Leon himself. A burly Vietnam vet who’s part Native American, he came off as quirky, knowledgeable, sincere, and credible.
By late February 2013, we had nailed everything down. Kim, another Evening New producer, and I put the finishing touches on what we felt was an extremely strong script. It was approved by our senior producer and the CBS lawyers.
But what broadcast to offer the story to?
Evening News wouldn’t want an original story like this. After all, the story took on Boeing and the FAA. But if we gave it to another broadcast and it got lots of attention and pickup, as it undoubtedly would, Evening News would be upset. Everybody would be asking why they didn’t have the story. It had happened before. They didn’t necessarily want a particular story, but they also didn’t want to be called out for not running it if another broadcast did.
A CBS New York executive advised me to first offer the story to Evening News, as a formality, and then take it to CBS This Morning when Evening News declined.
Evening News executive producer Shevlin reviewed the script and either didn’t get it or didn’t want to. She wanted to gut it. Among other changes, she wanted to cut out the entire section about the 2006 fire, and the video of it.
“It doesn’t have anything to do with what’s going on today,” she concluded, mistaken and uninformed. In one fell swoop she had disregarded our weeks of research and the opinions of seasoned experts. Shevlin sometimes had a difficult time grasping complex stories. Maybe I hadn’t written it clearly enough. I offered to rewrite the section to better explain the fire’s relevance. I was determined not to let her tear out the heart of the report. But she was intractable.
The confounding conversation dragged on—Shevlin in New York with three of us listening on telephone extensions in the Washington newsroom: me, one of my producers, and my senior producer. Each of us patiently took a stab at trying to help explain to Shevlin why her interpretations were so off base. She grew louder and more agitated as she dug in. The three of us in Washington made eye contact and shook our heads. Eventually, I made a knife-across-the-throat gesture signaling to my colleagues that there was no point continuing the discussion. We hung up and agreed that she just didn’t like the story and wasn’t going to air it. There was no sense continuing the charade.
I went straight to the CBS Saturday Morning broadcast, where I knew the executive producer was still receptive to great original stories and would give this one the time it needed to be well told. He viewed the script and the finished product, said it was terrific, and scheduled it to air the following weekend. I would fly to New York to introduce it on the set.
All was well until the Thursday before the air date. I got a strange call from Laura,* our ethics czar. That was never a good sign. Over the years, disgruntled CBS insiders sometimes went to Laura to complain about my reporting, especially if it stepped on their toes or was contrary to their personal beliefs. Managers had also employed Laura’s services to try to soften or block my reporting on topics that riled corporate interests.
In this case, it seems somebody inside CBS had raised objections to our Dreamliner story, though it was yet to air. From what Laura said, this person falsely claimed that I had used Leon as an anonymous source for a previous Dreamliner story that was wrong.
Nothing like that had occurred: it was a complete fabrication on somebody’s part. Leon hadn’t been a source for me on any other story.
After we chatted, Laura was satisfied that the complainant had been mistaken and gave my script her seal of approval, commenting that it was “great.”
I wondered which of my colleagues made up a disparaging story about me and my whistleblower, and why?
The next day, I was producing an unrelated story for the Evening News and preparing to fly to New York after the broadcast for the Saturday morning Dreamliner live shot.
A flurry of strange activity erupted.
First, the Saturday morning executive producer contacted me and said there had been some sort of meeting in New York, and he needed me to talk to Laura about my story again. Meanwhile, my senior producer in Washington told me he’d listened to that meeting via telephone. He said that among those in attendance were Shevlin, CBS This Morning executive Chris Licht, and CBS president Rhodes. Apparently, they came up with endless reasons not to run my story—without seeking any input from me or my producers.
“It was a bloodbath,” my senior producer told me.
“Did you defend the story?” I asked. After all, he knew it better than they did. He had approved the script and said it was a great story.
“There was no point,” he answered. “Their minds were made up.”
He was right. By the time I talked to Laura later that day, it was clear she’d been convinced or directed to find a way to pull the story.
Is this a feature story about a whistleblower or an investigative story about the Dreamliner? Laura asked me when we spoke on the phone.
Both, I explained. As with any good investigation, you like to have a strong human subject at the center of the story, as you expose important facts and information. It was an odd question for a seasoned producer like Laura to ask. She knows how we work.
Well, if it’s a feature about a whistleblower, I’m not sure he’s that compelling, Laura continued. And if it’s an investigation, why don’t we just wait and see what the government finds and then do the story?
I took a breath. I could tell the story was dead. This was all pro forma.
I didn’t give up easily. I explained my philosophy about the type of reporting I try to do. I don’t wait until a story is over, then join the pack and report what everyone else reports, I told Laura. And if we wait on the government to do the right thing before we report a story, we could be waiting forever. Afflicted by conflicts of interest, federal officials more often than not seem to bring up the rear in these types of investigations.
My explanations fell on deaf ears.
I hung up the phone and informed my senior producer the story was dead. He told me that if it was any consolation, Evening News probably wouldn’t have aired it anyway once they saw what the quirky whistleblower looked like. It was like twisting the knife in my heart. TV likes pretty people who say predictable things and speak in homilies. I like real people who tell the truth.
Both of my producers and I lodged verbal and written objections. I told David Rhodes that my two terrific producers and I had worked at a combined four networks and three investigative units. To exclude our input and kill the story was dreadfully wrong.
The incident added a new sense of urgency to the discomfort I already had over the Benghazi affair. The day the Dreamliner story died, I told my senior producer, “I’m not going to walk out today or tomorrow. But I’m letting you know, I don’t see how I can finish out my contract under these circumstances.”
When Isham returned from vacation, he said he was sorry he hadn’t been here to help intervene on my behalf. I told him I didn’t foresee finishing my contract. It was late February 2013.
Deep down, Kim and I suspected what was going on. Boeing was in PR crisis mode. Experts and consultants felt threatened not to talk to the press about the Dreamliner. Many of these consultants depend on the airlines and airplane manufacturers for business. They couldn’t afford to go up against Boeing.
I also knew that Boeing had been lobbying Congress to not convene hearings on the Dreamliner. And, in fact, hearings that were once reported to be imminent never materialized.
I could only assume that powerful interests had gotten to CBS, too. I had no way to know for sure. Nobody was going to tell me. Fueling my suspicions: it seemed like other media quit covering the Dreamliner’s problems about the same time. The NTSB even halted its regular schedule of issuing updates. We all went from near-daily interest in the developing Dreamliner story, to more or less letting the topic fall off the planet.
Six months later, on August 1, 2013, a CBS colleague who knew about the fiasco over the Dreamliner story alerted me that United Airlines CEO Jeff Smisek was about to be interviewed live on CBS This Morning. United was the only U.S. airline flying Boeing Dreamliners.
I turned the TV to Channel 9, our local CBS Washington affiliate, and watched Smisek get several minutes of uninterrupted airtime on our news broadcast to promote his corporation and an upcoming merger that required government approval. A PR coup for United.
Midway through, the Dreamliner came up.
“Do you still believe in the 787 Dreamliner?” asked an anchor.
“Absolutely!” answered Smisek, adding, “It’s a great airplane!”
The other anchor chimed in. “So you’re here to say”—he points in time with the words for emphasis, as if a probing question is ahead—“the safety issues are behind you with respect to the Dreamliner?”
“I think the Dreamliner is absolutely a safe airplane . . .” agrees Smisek.
Much later, in June 2014, the National Transportation Safety Board would issue findings that Boeing’s processes to certify its lithium-ion batteries in 2006 were “inadequate.” The board also, in essence, criticized the FAA—the agency that had cast aside Leon’s original complaint—and said that in the future, it should draw on the expertise of independent specialists outside the aviation industry so “that both the FAA and the aircraft manufacturer have access to the most current research and information related to the developing technology.”
| AWARDS REBUFFED
It’s against the backdrop of the Dreamliner disaster, the Benghazi bungling, and the green energy drubbing that the 2013 television news award season rolls around. The broadcasts enter their best work in various categories from the prior year, in hopes to gain professional recognition for their efforts and the public service provided.
But this year, nobody contacts me to see which of my stories I might recommend for the prestigious Emmys.
Kim and I talk about it. It had been a struggle, but we had managed to find homes for some excellent stories on various broadcasts that season. There was the one green energy story that aired on CBS This Morning before the Big Chill descended. And there were more that we managed to get on the CBS Weekend News.
There was an impressive spate of exclusive Benghazi stories that aired on Evening News prior to the curtain falling on that story.
And there was a mix of congressional oversight reporting we had done for various broadcasts, including an exposé on lobbying for CBS Sunday Morning and an undercover investigation into the fund-raising practices of congressional Republican freshmen.
We are proud of the work. So, we decide to enter the Emmys on our own. Who knows? The judges might find one of our entries worthy of a nomination, even if CBS didn’t.
A couple of months later, I’m on vacation in Austria when I click on an email from a colleague.
“Congratulations on the Emmy nomination!” it reads.
The nominations have just been announced online. I click on the link for the full list and am pleased to see that our green energy stories had received a nomination. I scan to see what other stories made the list.
To my surprise, I find my name on another nomination. This one for our Benghazi stories.
As I keep reading, I see a third nomination: for the congressional stories. All three of our entries had received nominations. My strongest year ever in terms of this sort of commendation.
That recognition makes it more difficult for partisans and propagandists to credibly portray my work as shoddy, partisan, and agenda driven. It also makes the CBS insiders who tried to disparage the stories furious, because it appears to prove their judgment wrong.
| THE FINAL DAYS AT CBS
It’s mid-February 2014. There are new discussions between my agent, Richard Leibner, and CBS over my possible departure. I’m at Reagan National Airport preparing to fly from Washington to New York.
I see my Isham browsing the magazine rack at the Delta Shuttle gate. The same one from which I’m departing.
I approach him.
“Hello, sir!” I say.
Isham looks up from the magazines. I ask if he’s going to New York. He is. He asks if I’m going. I am. We ask each other what flight. We’re both on the 2 p.m. Coincidence.
We’re silent for a moment. Looking at each other. He looks stern. He’s always tried to be an advocate for me and for investigative reporting. He was still trying at the end. He’s an investigative guy to the core. But I know I’m a headache he doesn’t need.
Suddenly, he breaks out into a smile and chuckles.
“Never a dull moment when you’re around,” he says.
I shrug and smile back. I don’t think I’m the one creating the drama. But I guess there’s a difference of opinion on that.
A couple of weeks later, it was finished. I ended the CBS stage of my career after twenty mostly happy, mostly successful, mostly satisfying years—and a couple that were really, really tough.
| MORELL POSTSCRIPT
I couldn’t have been happier to be gone from CBS than when the Benghazi story again reared its head in earnest, in April 2014. It centered on former CIA deputy director and now CBS News consultant Morell.
First, on April 4, Morell was called to testify to Congress about newly released documents that show he heavily edited the Benghazi talking points. This wholly contradicted the original stories Morell told.
Free from CBS, I was able to write an unvarnished, factual account of his testimony and contradictions and publish it on my own website. Few others in the media seemed to assign any particular significance to Morell’s highly evolved story and contradictions. (Yawn.)
But on April 29, it became difficult for the press at large to ignore incriminating new documents—even though they were obtained by a conservative watchdog group that many in the news media love to hate: Judicial Watch. Judicial Watch had obtained emails by suing the State Department over a denied Freedom of Information Act request.
These emails showed direct White House involvement in steering the Benghazi narrative toward the “spontaneous protest.” The very thing that the administration had denied repeatedly, implicitly and explicitly.
One of the operative Judicial Watch documents, which the government had withheld from Congress and reporters for a year and a half, was an email circulated two day after the attacks by President Obama’s assistant and deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes. The September 14, 2012, email told White House press advisors that a goal of an upcoming call to prepare Ambassador Rice for her Sunday talk show appearances was “[t]o underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure of policy.”
While many in the media would have liked to continue turning a blind eye to the Benghazi story, that changed when USA Today published an article on this revelation. I imagined it set off a flurry of meetings and frantic editorial discussions at major news outlets.
USA Today covered it. Should we cover it, too?
Will we look bad if we don’t?
Jonathan Karl of ABC reported a full package on his network’s evening newscast while NBC had a brief thirty-second “voice-over.” CBS alone decided there was no news at all here. Nothing to see. Move along.
The media blog Mediabistro later noted, “CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley was the only evening newscast last night to not cover newly uncovered emails from White House adviser Ben Rhodes. . . .” In response, a CBS News spokesperson stated that there was “a thorough editorial discussion about it at CBS Evening News and David Rhodes [Ben’s brother] was not involved [in the discussion].”
On May 1, 2014, I received a document that showed the State Department almost immediately concluded that the Islamic militia terrorist group Ansar al-Sharia was to blame for the Benghazi attacks. The State Department’s Beth Jones said so in a private communication to the Libyan government, according to an internal email at 9:45 a.m. on September 12, 2012.
“When [the Libyan ambassador] said his government suspected that former Qaddafi regime elements carried out the attacks, I told him the group that conducted the attacks—Ansar al-Sharia—is affiliated with Islamic extremists,” Jones reports in the email.
The private account between Jones and the Libyan government was entirely at odds with the messaging that President Obama, Clinton, Rice, and White House press secretary Carney delivered to the American public.
The Obama administration’s entire Benghazi narrative had now fallen to pieces and was still crumbling. Imagine if the public had known prior to the 2012 election all that’s been revealed since.
Were I still at CBS, there’s little doubt I would be viewed by some as the network villain, offering stories on these important developments, pushing for them to air while the whisper campaign thundered on. Now dearly departed from my alma mater, I was free to commit unencumbered journalism without pressure.
Substitution Game: Is there anyone who really believes that if President Bush had claimed al-Qaeda was on the run, only to have the misfortune of a terrorist attack in Benghazi in 2012 and the event of ferocious jihadists taking over Iraqi cities in 2014, the press wouldn’t have led the news highlighting the contradiction between his optimistic proclamations and the sordid reality? Bush, like all presidents, had plenty of imperfections. The difference is, they were usually, enthusiastically, and thoroughly probed by a persistent media.
| AFTER CBS
In April 2014, just a few weeks after leaving CBS, I attended an invitation-only investigative reporting conference at the University of California, Berkeley, called the Logan Symposium. The theme was apt: “Under Attack: Reporters and Their Sources.” I was invited to moderate a panel called “The Third Rail: Stories We’re Not Supposed to Tell.” CBS had withheld the invitation from me when it first arrived before Christmas of 2013 and, I learned, intended to decline on my behalf without telling me. But the Logan organizers eventually reached out to me directly and I accepted.
At the symposium, I was greeted with a surprisingly warm reception from peers who were familiar with some of my travails. Many of them shared their own stories of undue political and corporate pressure and censorship. There was general agreement among the speakers that the Obama administration has advanced press restrictions beyond anything previously experienced, at least by us.
“The Obama administration is trying to narrow the playing field for reporters,” said Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times reporter James Risen, who faced the threat of jail time for refusing to turn over information about a confidential source.
“A Rip Van Winkle today would be shocked with what we accept in society and what we think of as normal,” Risen told the audience of several hundred investigative journalists and Berkeley journalism graduate students. He warned that there’s been a “fundamental change in society” since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and that Americans have given up civil liberties and press freedoms “slowly and incrementally.”
“We’ve been too accepting of rules and mores of, first, the Bush administration and, now, the Obama administration. We have to stand up and begin to fight back. . . . [W]e need to think about how to challenge the government in the way we’re supposed to challenge the government.
“[The Obama administration] want[s] to create an interstate highway for reporting in which there are police all along telling you to stay on that highway. As long as we accept this interstate highway of reporting, we are enabling and complicit in what’s happening to society and the press,” said Risen.
Lowell Bergman, director of the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, echoed the warnings, calling these “sad times” and telling the audience that reporters “have to take some more direct action, public action,” to “raise the profile of what the government is doing or attempting to do.”
Attendees sidled up to me to commiserate. Some said they’ve worked for bosses who shape or censor reporting in response to Obama administration threats to withhold “exclusive” interviews with administration officials. We marveled over the dynamic under which this administration and previous ones have convinced news organizations that serving as a government propaganda tool is actually a desirable thing. The White House and its agencies dole out officials for television news appearances in a rotation and lord over the schedule. We dutifully oblige, and promote the interviews as if they’re special exclusives. In fact, they serve as little more than positive PR for the government and its officials.
We’re next in line to get an interview with Michelle Obama, producers declare excitedly, after being told of the arrangement by the administration.
(That is, we’re next as long as we stay on that interstate highway of reporting. We’d better not run that pesky story looking into Michelle Obama’s travels!)
On April 10, 2013, the New York Times’ Jill Abramson joined the growing chorus of journalists criticizing the Obama administration’s press restrictions.
“The Obama years are a benchmark for a new level of secrecy and control,” said Abramson in an interview. “It’s created quite a challenging atmosphere for the New York Times, and for some of the best reporters in my newsroom who cover national security issues in Washington.”
But one of the most personally telling anecdotes comes to me from a colleague named David Kirby, a self-described left-winger who authored the investigative award-winning book Evidence of Harm: Mercury in Vaccines and the Autism Epidemic: A Medical Controversy.
“I couldn’t wait,” says Kirby, speaking of Obama being elected president in 2008.
A “new era” was being ushered in. At last the GOP was out, and a new era of transparency was about to begin. He was the real deal, a Constitutional scholar who understood the fundamental importance of basic freedoms—the right to information and accountability, for example—to our democracy and its vaunted promise of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
Then I tried to get information out of the new gang.
The first six months of 2009 was a daily lesson in rejection, frustration and anger. I could not get any information out of anyone—not the USDA, not the EPA, and certainly not the White House. FOIA requests, the few that were actually fulfilled, came back with up to 90% of the text “redacted,” blacked out like an angry child had taken an extra-wide Sharpie to the pages.
That summer I ran into an old friend from my early days in politics, a die-hard progressive, who would probably vote for the Communist Party if he could. Of course the subject of the new administration came up. “So how do you think he’s doing so far?” my friend asked.
“Well, I gotta say,” I replied, shuffling my feet, “At least when it comes to getting information out of the Obama people, I hate to say it, but it’s worse than Bush. Much worse.”
My comrade turned the color of farmed salmon, clashing with the red trumpet-vine blossoms behind the fence. He glared, he stammered, he yelled. I don’t think he has spoken to me since.
Today I am deeply unsettled, yet sadly unsurprised, by the fumbling explanations from Democratic Party apparatchiks clumsily trying to play down recent scandals rocking the White House and the nation: NSA domestic spying; monitoring the Associated Press and Fox News like North Korean “minders.”
Kirby is so moved by what’s happened, he’s writing his own book on the subject.
All of this makes me think back to that letter addressed to White House spokesman Carney, signed by many news organizations on November 21, 2013, referring to
an arbitrary restraint and unwarranted interference on legitimate newsgathering activities . . . constitutional concerns . . . [a] troubling precedent with a direct and adverse impact on the public’s ability to independently monitor and see what its government is doing . . .
From what I can see, our letter didn’t spark any big changes.
It’ll take more than a letter.
Since CBS, I’ve heard from conservatives urging me to continue reporting on untouchable subjects. I’ve also heard from a great number of people who claim to be either liberal or down the middle or politically disassociated altogether, and want me to know that they support journalism that follows a story no matter where it leads. There’s not enough of it, they say. They’re thirsty for it.
| JUNE 20, 2014
On this date, a new Gallup poll finds confidence in the news media is at an all-time low and confidence in TV news ranks even below the Internet. Liberals, conservatives, moderates: they all agree on this.
Can something good be born from something bad? With so much recognition that much is seriously broken, will the press fight to get back its mojo? Is it recoverable? Or too far gone?
Today, I feel as though I’ve taken a step forward. My heart is light. I breathe unrestricted, fresh air for the first time in several years. It smells different to me. It smells like freedom.
Do your own research. Consult those you trust. Make up your own mind.
Think for yourself.