Category: Journalism

So Not Feeling the Hope and Change Here

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The US Government leaned on James Risen’s publisher to spike his latest book on the US intelligence services:

James Risen’s new book on war-on-terror abuses comes out tomorrow, and if you want to find a copy it shouldn’t be hard to obtain. As natural as that seems, it almost wasn’t the case with the Risen’s last book, “State of War,” published in 2006. Not only did U.S. government officials object to the publication of the book on national security grounds, it turns out they pressured Les Moonves, the CEO of CBS, to have it killed.

The campaign to stifle Risen’s national security reporting at the Times is already well-documented, but a 60 Minutes story last night provided a glimpse into how deeply these efforts extended into the publishing world, as well. After being blocked from reporting on the NSA’s warrantless surveillance program for the paper of record, Risen looked into getting these revelations out through a book he was already under contract to write for Simon & Schuster, a book that would look at a wide range of intelligence missteps in the war on terror.

In response, it seems, the government once again went straight to the top in order to thwart him. As 60 Minutes reports:

The administration [reached] out to Leslie Moonves, head of CBS, whose Simon & Schuster division was the publisher of Risen’s book, in an unsuccessful attempt to stop its publication.”

In an interview with The Intercept, Risen said he had been told the same story by Simon & Schuster a day or two before his book was published. He added he remembers feeling “very happy” that Moonves stood up for him.

Yes, this is the right time to invoke Eric Arthur Blair (George Orwell).

Not also that the Obama administration is looking to jail Mr. Risen for not revealing his sources.

You I think that this whole, “Most transparent administration in history,” promise is, in the words of Ron Ziegler, “Inoperative.”

I miss the openness and transparency of Richard Nixon.

Time for Another Blogger Ethics Panel

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Noted intelligence reporter Ken Dilanian, who has written on intelligence issues for both the LA Times and Associated Press, has been revealed to have pre cleared his stories with the CIA:

A prominent national security reporter for the Los Angeles Times routinely submitted drafts and detailed summaries of his stories to CIA press handlers prior to publication, according to documents obtained by The Intercept.

Email exchanges between CIA public affairs officers and Ken Dilanian, now an Associated Press intelligence reporter who previously covered the CIA for the Times, show that Dilanian enjoyed a closely collaborative relationship with the agency, explicitly promising positive news coverage and sometimes sending the press office entire story drafts for review prior to publication. In at least one instance, the CIA’s reaction appears to have led to significant changes in the story that was eventually published in the Times.

“I’m working on a story about congressional oversight of drone strikes that can present a good opportunity for you guys,” Dilanian wrote in one email to a CIA press officer, explaining that what he intended to report would be “reassuring to the public” about CIA drone strikes. In another, after a series of back-and-forth emails about a pending story on CIA operations in Yemen, he sent a full draft of an unpublished report along with the subject line, “does this look better?” In another, he directly asks the flack: “You wouldn’t put out disinformation on this, would you?”

Dilanian’s emails were included in hundreds of pages of documents that the CIA turned over in response to two FOIA requests seeking records on the agency’s interactions with reporters. They include email exchanges with reporters for the Associated Press, Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and other outlets. In addition to Dilanian’s deferential relationship with the CIA’s press handlers, the documents show that the agency regularly invites journalists to its McLean, Va., headquarters for briefings and other events. Reporters who have addressed the CIA include the Washington Post‘s David Ignatius, the former ombudsmen for the New York Times, NPR, and Washington Post, and Fox News’ Brett Baier, Juan Williams, and Catherine Herridge.

The money quote on this is, “Of course, journalists routinely curry favor with government sources (and others) by falsely suggesting that they intend to amplify the official point of view. But the emails show that Dilanian really meant it.”

Read the rest, but basically, not only did act as a CIA stooge, he uncritically regurgitated CIA lies about things like civilian drone strike casualties.

H/t Gawker.

A Very Good Point on the Issue of Palestinian Statehood

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Journalist Matti Friedman makes the interesting point that most of the coverage completely ignores the idea that there exists any Palestinian agency:

A reporter working in the international press corps here understands quickly that what is important in the Israel-Palestinian story is Israel. If you follow mainstream coverage, you will find nearly no real analysis of Palestinian society or ideologies, profiles of armed Palestinian groups, or investigation of Palestinian government. Palestinians are not taken seriously as agents of their own fate. The West has decided that Palestinians should want a state alongside Israel, so that opinion is attributed to them as fact, though anyone who has spent time with actual Palestinians understands that things are (understandably, in my opinion) more complicated. Who they are and what they want is not important: The story mandates that they exist as passive victims of the party that matters.

Corruption, for example, is a pressing concern for many Palestinians under the rule of the Palestinian Authority, but when I and another reporter once suggested an article on the subject, we were informed by the bureau chief that Palestinian corruption was “not the story.”

Let me be clear, Mr. Friedman is clearly hawkish on this matter, but I think that this argument has a lot of validity to it.

I would also argue that it is not just the press that buys into this lack of agency, so do many Israelis and Palestinians, which explains why so much of the negotiation process seem to be more about playing to an outside audience than actually talking with each other.

Your Daily Dose of Eric Arthur Blair

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Also known as George Orwell

The US military has banned its personnel from accessing The Intercept website. You know, the place where Glenn Greenwald continues to publish Edward Snowden revelations:

The U.S. military is banning and blocking employees from visiting The Intercept in an apparent effort to censor news reports that contain leaked government secrets.

 According to multiple military sources, a notice has been circulated to units within the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps warning staff that they are prohibited from reading stories published by The Intercept on the grounds that they may contain classified information. The ban appears to apply to all employees—including those with top-secret security clearance—and is aimed at preventing classified information from being viewed on unclassified computer networks, even if it is freely available on the internet. Similar military-wide bans have been directed against news outlets in the past after leaks of classified information.

 A directive issued to military staff at one location last week, obtained by The Intercept, threatens that any employees caught viewing classified material in the public domain will face “long term security issues.” It suggests that the call to prohibit employees from viewing the website was made by senior officials over concerns about a “potential new leaker” of secret documents.

 The directive states:

We have received information from our higher headquarters regarding a potential new leaker of classified information. Although no formal validation has occurred, we thought it prudent to warn all employees and subordinate commands. Please do not go to any website entitled “The Intercept” for it may very well contain classified material.

 As a reminder to all personnel who have ever signed a non-disclosure agreement, we have an ongoing responsibility to protect classified material in all of its various forms. Viewing potentially classified material (even material already wrongfully released in the public domain) from unclassified equipment will cause you long term security issues. This is considered a security violation.

A military insider subject to the ban said that several employees expressed concerns after being told by commanders that it was “illegal and a violation of national security” to read publicly available news reports on The Intercept.

This is bullsh%$, of course.

It’s not unexpected, but it is still bullsh%$ none the less.

Your tax dollars at work.

Yes, James Risen Has a Legitimate Beef with Barack Obama

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What has been done to him is so egregious that Maureen Dowd actually wrote a decent column, albeit it one that still contains gratuitous fashion references and a junior high school sensibility:

Over lunch near the White House on Friday, Risen, dressed in his Men’s Wearhouse shirt and khakis and his brown Ecco walking shoes, talked about having the sword of Damocles over his head, as the reluctant star of a searing media-government showdown that could end with him behind bars.

(See what I mean about the fashion bullsh%$?)

Risen said he’s not afraid that F.B.I. agents will show up one day at the suburban Maryland home he shares with his wife, Penny. (His three sons are grown, and one is a reporter.) But he has exhausted all his legal challenges, including at the Supreme Court, against the Obama administration.

 “I was nervous for a long time, but they’ve been after me for six years so now I try to ignore it,” he said, musing that he’s already decided what he’ll take to prison: Civil War books and World War II histories.

 The Justice Department is trying to scuttle the reporters’ privilege — ignoring the chilling effect that is having on truth emerging in a jittery post-9/11 world prone to egregious government excesses.

 Attorney General Eric Holder wants to force Risen to testify and reveal the identity of his confidential source on a story he had in his 2006 book concerning a bungled C.I.A. operation during the Clinton administration in which agents might have inadvertently helped Iran develop its nuclear weapon program. The tale made the C.I.A. look silly, which may have been more of a sore point than a threat to national security.

But Bush officials, no doubt still smarting from Risen’s revelation of their illegal wiretapping, zeroed in on a disillusioned former C.I.A. agent named Jeffrey Sterling as the source of the Iran story.

 The subpoena forcing Risen’s testimony expired in 2009, and to the surprise of just about everybody, the constitutional law professor’s administration renewed it — kicking off its strange and awful aggression against reporters and whistle-blowers.

 Holder said in May that “no reporter who is doing his job is going to go to jail,” trying to show some leg and signal that his intention is benign, merely to put pressure on Sterling so that he will plead guilty before his trial.

I can think of no more contemptible reason to go after a reporter then to save a bit of effort by prosecutors.

This is the sort of crap that killed Aaron Swartz.

How can he use the Espionage Act to throw reporters and whistle-blowers in jail even as he defends the intelligence operatives who “tortured some folks,” and coddles his C.I.A. chief, John Brennan, who spied on the Senate and then lied to the senators he spied on about it?

 “It’s hypocritical,” Risen said. “A lot of people still think this is some kind of game or signal or spin. They don’t want to believe that Obama wants to crack down on the press and whistle-blowers. But he does. He’s the greatest enemy to press freedom in a generation.”

I tend to agree.

The Obama administration has been implacably hostile to reporting on the US state security apparatus, to a degree that would make Richard Nixon go, “What the f%$#?”

Our security apparatus runs Barack Obama, not the other way around.

Edward Snowden Still has a Lot to Say

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He gave a rather expansive interviewed with Wired. Here are the most recent revelations:

  • He left “bread crumbs” which should have let shown the NSA what he took. He ascribes the fact that they continue to be surprised to incompetence, but I am not buying it.  I think that acknowledging what was taken would put our state security apparatus in the position of validating some programs that have not yet come out:

    • Snowden speculates that the government fears that the documents contain material that’s deeply damaging—secrets the custodians have yet to find. “I think they think there’s a smoking gun in there that would be the death of them all politically,” Snowden says. “The fact that the government’s investigation failed—that they don’t know what was taken and that they keep throwing out these ridiculous huge numbers—implies to me that somewhere in their damage assessment they must have seen something that was like, ‘Holy sh%$.’ And they think it’s still out there.”

  • Some of the leaks appear not to have come from Snowden, which points to a 2nd whistle blower.
  • The CIA’s IT infrastructure is archaic.
  • Syria did not shut down its internet at the beginning of their civil war, it was an NSA cock-up:

    • ………One day an intelligence officer told him that TAO—a division of NSA hackers—had attempted in 2012 to remotely install an exploit in one of the core routers at a major Internet service provider in Syria, which was in the midst of a prolonged civil war. This would have given the NSA access to email and other Internet traffic from much of the country. But something went wrong, and the router was bricked instead—rendered totally inoperable. The failure of this router caused Syria to suddenly lose all connection to the Internet—although the public didn’t know that the US government was responsible. (This is the first time the claim has been revealed.)

  • The NSA has setup  a program called Monstermind, which would have it launching cyber-attacks against other nations without human intervention.
  • The final straw for him was when James clapper flat out lied to congress about spying on Americans.  (I liked his use of the phrase, “Banality of Evil,” to describe this, though I didn’t like his use of the boiling frog metaphor, which is scientifically inaccurate)

There are more revelations to come.

It is really worth the read.

Man Who Works Sucking the Marrow out of the Economy Is Hired to Suck the Marrow out of the LA Times

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At least, there is symmetry.

That sound that you hear is the legendary publisher Otis Chandler spinning in his grave:

The Los Angeles Times has named Austin Beutner, a former deputy mayor of Los Angeles and Wall Street banker, as its new chief executive and publisher.

 The appointment, announced on Monday, comes a week after The Times’s parent, the Tribune Company, spun off its newspapers into a separate publicly traded company called Tribune Publishing.

 Mr. Beutner, 54, a former partner at the private equity firm Blackstone Group and a co-founder of the investment bank Evercore Partners, most recently worked as Los Angeles’s deputy mayor of economic development. He also explored a run for mayor and was once reported to be a possible buyer of The Los Angeles Times alongside the billionaire Eli Broad.

 Jack Griffin, Tribune Publishing’s new chief executive, noted in a statement how these experiences would help Mr. Beutner in his new role.

 ………

 Mr. Beutner is taking over The Los Angeles Times at a major transitional point for its parent company, Tribune. After Tribune braved years of bankruptcy proceedings and threats of takeover by eager buyers, The Los Angeles Times, along with its fellow Tribune-owned papers like The Chicago Tribune, split from Tribune’s television stations into a separate company. But print institutions like The Los Angeles Times now face a brutal time for newspapers as more readers consume the news online.

And this guy won’t be helping.

He is there is to exsanguinate the LA Times, much like any vampire squid in finance.

Think what Mitt Rmoney did at Bain.

It Took You Long Enough!

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The New York Times has finally agreed to stop using euphemisms, and actually call the CIA’s torture program, well, torture :

Over the past few months, reporters and editors of The Times have debated a subject that has come up regularly ever since the world learned of the C.I.A.’s brutal questioning of terrorism suspects: whether to call the practices torture.

When the first revelations emerged a decade ago, the situation was murky. The details about what the Central Intelligence Agency did in its interrogation rooms were vague. The word “torture” had a specialized legal meaning as well as a plain-English one. While the methods set off a national debate, the Justice Department insisted that the techniques did not rise to the legal definition of “torture.” The Times described what we knew of the program but avoided a label that was still in dispute, instead using terms like harsh or brutal interrogation methods.

………

Meanwhile, the Justice Department, under both the Bush and Obama administrations, has made clear that it will not prosecute in connection with the interrogation program. The result is that today, the debate is focused less on whether the methods violated a statute or treaty provision and more on whether they worked – that is, whether they generated useful information that the government could not otherwise have obtained from prisoners. In that context, the disputed legal meaning of the word “torture” is secondary to the common meaning: the intentional infliction of pain to make someone talk.

Given those changes, reporters urged that The Times recalibrate its language. I agreed. So from now on, The Times will use the word “torture” to describe incidents in which we know for sure that interrogators inflicted pain on a prisoner in an effort to get information.

About f%$#ing time.

The Times has had absolutely no problem with calling other nations’ various brutalities, “torture,” but it’s taken 10 years, and a flat out admission from the President, for the New York Times to finally dip its toes in this water as it applies to the US state security apparatus.

It’s why I tend to look overseas, typically the Beeb and the Guardian, for accurate stories on these matters.

Remember When I Said that Newspapers Should Fact Check Their Own OP/EDs?*

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Well, it’s finally happened, and the paper was to do it was the Kansas City Star, an unlikely journalistic innovator, but they fact checked the editorial they published from Stephen Moore, head economist at the frequently fact challenged Heritage Foundation, † and discover that he is lying through his teeth:

The Kansas City Star probably thought it was on solid ground when it published an op-ed by Stephen Moore defending the draconian, and economically debilitating, tax cuts instituted by Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback. (We reported on how the tax cuts have turned Kansas into a smoking ruin here.)

Moore’s conservative credentials are impeccable: A former member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board, he’s currently chief economist at the Heritage Foundation and a familiar face on Fox News and CNBC. So when his piece asserted that “over the last five years,” the no-income-tax states of Texas and Florida gained jobs while the high-tax states of New York and California lost jobs, the editors waved it through.

Moore punctuated his statistical victory over Brownback’s critics with the ironic refrain “Oops.”

Oops, indeed.

It turns out Moore’s statistics were dead wrong. He later explained that he was citing figures from 2007-2012, not the last five years. But–oops again–he got those figures wrong too. His errors were discovered by Yael T. Abouhalkah, a Star columnist, who took the simple step of cross-checking them against the source, the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In this age of the Google machine, it would be a trivial matter for a newspaper to assign a junior reporter to fact check every statistic in every editorial that they publish on their own (syndicated editorials are a more complex matter).

In fact, any decent Googler could fact check a couple of hours.

To quote the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “‘You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.”

An OP/ED should not be a license to lie.
*Here is one example from juxtaposition the former Kaplan Test Prep company and Sarah Palin.
†Full disclosure: I have a personal reason for hating the ratf%$#s at the Heritage Foundation. They fired a friend of mine for having cancer.

Charlie Pierce on a Rant is a Thing of Beauty

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In a post entitled, “Things In Politico That Make Me Want To Mainline Antifreeze, Part The Infinity,” he takes on Politico‘s hosting a fete of, and then writing a fawning article about Papa Dick and Baby Dick Cheney:

Its puerilty has finally crossed over into indecency. Its triviality has finally crossed over into obscenity. The comical political starfcking that is its primary raison d’erp has finally crossed over into $10 meth-whoring on the Singapore docks. Once a mere surface irritation, Tiger Beat On The Potomac has finally crossed over into being a thickly pustulating chancre on the craft of journalism. It has demonstrated its essential worthlessness. It has demonstrated that it has the moral character of a sea-slug and the professional conscience of the Treponema pallidum spirochete. Trust me. Stephen Glass never sunk this low. Mike (Payola) Allen has accomplished the impossible. He’s made Jayson Blair look like Ernie Pyle.

It goes on, and most of it near the perfection of, “He’s made Jayson Blair look like Ernie Pyle.“

Read the rest of it, and then someone please nominate Mr. Pierce for a Pulitzer.

“Right to be Forgotten,” My Ass

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Robert Peston, Economics Editor at the BBC, was notified by Google that it was removing one of his blog posts from its European search index in accordance with the European Court of Justice’s recent ruling giving people “The Tight to be Forgotten”:

This morning the BBC received the following notification from Google:
Notice of removal from Google Search: we regret to inform you that we are no longer able to show the following pages from your website in response to certain searches on European versions of Google:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/legacy/thereporters/ robertpeston/2007/10/merrills_mess.html

What it means is that a blog I wrote in 2007 will no longer be findable when searching on Google in Europe.

Which means that to all intents and purposes the article has been removed from the public record, given that Google is the route to information and stories for most people.

So why has Google killed this example of my journalism?

Well it has responded to someone exercising his or her new “right to be forgotten”, following a ruling in May by the European Court of Justice that Google must delete “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant” data from its results when a member of the public requests it.

(emphasis original)

The only person mentioned in this article was the disgraced former head of Merrill Lynch, Stan O’Neill, but the Ex-Merrill CEO has denied any knowledge of this request, though this is a kind of non-denial denial, where he might have hired a law form, or someone like Reputation.com to monitor his online presence, and they sent the request at his request.

You will notice that O’Neill did not deny that he had taken action to improve his reputation on the web, only that he lacked specific knowledge of this request.

In an update, Mr. Peston suggests that the request might have come from someone who commented on his post, since a search for Mr. O’Neill still pulls up the post, but I did a search of Google.co.uk for all of the commenter’s who left a proper name, and they all came up as well.

The Guardian revealed that they had been notified that 3 sets of articles, about a lying soccer ref, French Post-It® art, and a lawyer on trial for fraud.

This is, of course, a complete clusterf%$#, as was predicted when this ruling came down.

Because, Snoops Think that it Is All About Them

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It now appears that one impetus for the US state security apparatus to spy on all of us was to cover its own ass:

You may have heard about the government’s spying on the Associated Press. And high-level NSA whistleblower Bill Binney told Washington’s Blog that the government also spied on Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter James Risen, and chief Fox News Washington correspondent James Rosen.

But Senior NSA executive Thomas Drake tells Washington’s Blog that the spying on reporters started 12 years ago – in 2002 – and has been fairly systematic.

By way of background, Drake had championed the “ThinThread” program, which automatically encrypted Americans’ data (data could only be decrypted after a court found there was probable cause that the American was a bad guy).
But after 9/11, NSA instead adopted the competing “Stellar Wind” system, which didn’t protect Americans’ privacy, and was less effective and more expensive.

………

There was a program called “First Fruits”. They’ve no doubt changed the name of the program [since then.]

And that First Fruits program was a cutout which was designed from all of the domestic surveillance take. “Let’s just pipe off from all” that is involving designated [reporters] … or in some cases whole groups of reporters and journalists.

 So you’re targeting actual newspapers. You’re targeting media outlets.

And you’re monitoring – on a persistent basis – their communications.

WASHINGTON’S BLOG: How early did that start?

THOMAS DRAKE: The preliminary version of that – as far as an active program – was in 2002.

(emphasis original)

When secrecy is used as a weapon to cover up ones own misdeeds, not only does it breed more secrecy, it breeds more misdeeds.

Our secret security state is not protecting us.  It is petri dish for incompetence.

Shorter New York Times, “We Pay Bros More than Ho’s”

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It was announced today that the New York Times fired Jill Abramson as executive editor.

It appears that this was largely because she complained when she discovered that her pay was significantly less than her predecessor, as well as one of her (male) subordinates:

As with any such upheaval, there’s a history behind it. Several weeks ago, I’m told, Abramson discovered that her pay and her pension benefits as both executive editor and, before that, as managing editor were considerably less than the pay and pension benefits of Bill Keller, the male editor whom she replaced in both jobs. “She confronted the top brass,” one close associate said, and this may have fed into the management’s narrative that she was “pushy,” a characterization that, for many, has an inescapably gendered aspect. Sulzberger is known to believe that the Times, as a financially beleaguered newspaper, needed to retreat on some of its generous pay and pension benefits; Abramson, who spent much of her career at the Wall Street Journal, had been at the Times for far fewer years than Keller, which accounted for some of the pension disparity. Eileen Murphy, a spokeswoman for the Times, said that Jill Abramson’s total compensation as executive editor “was directly comparable to Bill Keller’s”—though it was not actually the same. I was also told by another friend of Abramson’s that the pay gap with Keller was only closed after she complained. But, to women at an institution that was once sued by its female employees for discriminatory practices, the question brings up ugly memories. Whether Abramson was right or wrong, both sides were left unhappy. A third associate told me, “She found out that a former deputy managing editor”—a man—“made more money than she did” while she was managing editor. “She had a lawyer make polite inquiries about the pay and pension disparities, which set them off.”

Of course, Abramson was good for business, and the paper is “financially beleagered” Sulzberger decided to build a palatial new headquarters for the paper, and use very short term debt to finance this, which required a refinance at junk bond rates from Mexican crony capitalist Carlos Slim, and a sale-leaseback of $¾ million square feet in their headquarters.

Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. is letting his sense of entitlement show.

The Definition of a Good Journalist………

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When I muse on the difference between a journalist and a stenographer, I can think of no better example than Jason Mojica’s paean to Mohammed Fahmy, Jailed Al Jazeera Journalist Is Actually Kind of a Dick:

This may surprise you, but Mohammed Fahmy, the imprisoned Al Jazeera English journalist who on Friday was awarded the World Press Freedom Award, is actually kind of a dick.

And I’m sure he feels the same way about me.

A couple of years before he and his colleagues Peter Greste and Baher Mohamed were arrested in Cairo and accused of running a terrorist cell from their rooms at the Marriott, I worked with Fahmy on a story I produced for VICE News. It was July 2011 and the toppling of President Hosni Mubarak earlier in the year hadn’t brought the sea change that Egyptians were hoping for. Protesters were expected to return to Tahrir Square in what was being dubbed, “Egypt’s Second Revolution.” The very short version of this story is that we were having trouble getting all of the elements of the story we were after when we met Fahmy who offered his services as a fixer. Now, we already had a fixer in Cairo, but I was willing to try anything at that point, so I hired Fahmy for a day to see what he could do. He delivered, but he didn’t gel with me and my crew. At the end of a very long day of shooting, we were happy to part ways.

………

He ran the story, names and all, which pissed me off. We traded shitty BBMs [Blackberry Messenger] back and forth, and I came away thinking of him as a pushy, bull-headed bastard who cared more about getting a story out than for the people who that story was about.

In other words, a damn good journalist.

Journalists are people whose jobs it is to find out things that people don’t necessarily want them to find out. That often requires a type of aggression and self-righteous determination that rubs people the wrong way. And that’s one of the reasons we need to change the way we talk about press freedom.

While we like to lionize journalists as noble truth seekers serving the public good, for those on the other side of their aggressive reporting, they are a f%$#ing nightmare. So when journalists get detained, our knee-jerk moral indignation means f%$#-all to the people who see those journalists as a threat. Wagging our finger at them in the hope that they’ll suddenly come around to our way of thinking is naïve.

(%$# mine)

Reporters are supposed to be a pain in the ass.

When reporters become accepted members of polite society, they become eunuchs in the court of the Sultan.  (See Woodward, Robert)

They are supposed to be unsuited for polite society.

Times Ombud Calls Out Shoddy Financial Reporting

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The New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan criticizes their coverage of Bank of America’s latest financial results, because they completely ignored the massive fines for fraud:

Reading The Times’s coverage of Bank of America’s quarterly loss last week, I almost felt sorry for the financial behemoth. It has mortgage troubles, you see. It has onerous legal costs.

“The disappointing news shows how Bank of America is still paying for its mortgage problems nearly six years after the financial crisis,” the article said.

I thought of sending a small check to help or at least conveying my sympathy.

I really should have remembered what this is all about because it was only last month that Bank of America settled a lawsuit that claimed the bank had committed mortgage fraud. The cost of the settlement? More than $9 billion. Bank of America was one of the banks that sold mortgage securities backed by subprime mortgages, which went south during the housing and financial crises – in many cases driving American consumers into financial ruin.

Some Times readers wrote to me about it, pointing out that there was more to the story. They hadn’t forgotten what happened, it seemed. Jamison Wilcox, for example, noted in an email that he was “dismayed to see the term ‘legal costs’ given a vague and euphemistic meaning – and repeated in a headline – as a short replacement for the specific identification of monies paid out … as a legal consequence of wrongful conduct by a corporation or bank.”

………

The language certainly isn’t overheated. In fact, nowhere in this article is there any straightforward mention of what really caused these legal troubles and costs.

It says only this: “At the heart of the additional legal expenses was a $6.3 billion settlement that the bank announced last month to settle a lawsuit arising from troubled mortgage-backed securities it bundled and sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac before the financial crisis.” (The bank also agreed to buy back $3.2 billion in mortgage securities, bringing the penalties to $9.5 billion.)

Bundles and troubles and costs, yes. Fraud accusations, not so much.

I do not think that this will make a difference, though.

I am Happy to be Wrong

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Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras have entered the United States, and they were not detained:

Despite fear over detention by the authorities, journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras — the first reporters to meet with Edward Snowden and receive access to his trove of leaked NSA documents — reentered the U.S. without trouble.

Both journalists feared detention or at the very least questioning on returning to U.S. soil. The Justice Department had refused to give any information about whether Greenwald and Poitras might be subject to a grand jury investigation. Furthermore, last year Greenwald’s partner, David Miranda, was held at Heathrow airport for nine hours, his electronic devices confiscated, under a U.K. counterterror act. In this age, when journalism is all too often aligned with terrorism, Greenwald and Poitras were understandably concerned. Indeed, Poitras has been questioned for hours on end at U.S. airports in the past over her journalistic work pre-dating the Snowden leaks.

But, as Greenwald told reporters Friday, he “expected that they wouldn’t be that incredibly stupid and self-destructive to try and do something that in the eyes of the world would be viewed as incredibly authoritarian. … That would forever undermine their ability to criticize other governments for imprisoning journalists and for having a constitutional fight over the First Amendment that successive administrations have wanted to avoid.”

And indeed, the U.S. authorities were not so stupid, and Poitras and Greenwald entered the U.S. safely. That the two journalists feared detention at all remains grimly reflective of what whistle-blower attorney Jesselyn Raddack calls the current “war on information.” Lest we forget, Barrett Brown and Chelsea Manning sit behind bars; Edward Snowden faces hefty charges under the Espionage Act; AP journalists’ phone logs were surveilled by the DOJ; Fox News correspondent James Rosen was once named by the FBI as a possible “co-conspirator” in a crime for the journalistic act of obtaining leaked information. The NSA revelations, shedding light on a vast and unbounded corporate-government surveillance nexus, have unquestionably been in the public interest. The whistle-blower behind them should not fear persecution, nor should the journalists reporting the story. But where Poitras and Greenwald can point to the First Amendment (or whatever meek vestiges of it that the U.S. cares to recognize), Snowden has no such recourse and no such protection.

I would anticipate that they are being intensely watched, and that all their communications are monitored, but the fact there has been no official harassment yet is heartening.

Then again, the fact that I, and many others, expected official misconduct on the part of the US state security apparatus speaks volumes about the state of our society.

If I Were Glenn Greenwald, I’d Watch My Back Around Pierre Omidyar

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A while back Mark Ames wrote of the ties between the founder of First Media, who now employs Glenn Greenwald, and the CIA and State Department’s clandestine activities to destabilize the Ukraine.

Now, Paul Carr follows up with an analysis of Pierre and Pamela Omidyar’s pattern of regular  visits to the Obama White House:

Speaking to the Daily Beast, documentary maker Jeremy Scahill mentioned his boss explicitly when comparing the cozy relationship between other news organizations and the White House. First Look, he insisted, would be different…

I think that the White House, whether it is under Republican or Democrat, they pretty much now [sic] who they are dealing with. There are outlets like The Daily Beast, or The Huffington Post that have risen up in the past decade, but they are very quickly just becoming part of the broader mainstream media, and with people that have spent their careers working for magazines or newspapers or what have you, and the White House believes they all speak the language on these things. With us, because we want to be adversarial, they won’t know what bat phone to call. They know who to call at The Times, they know who to call at The Post. With us, who are they going to call? Pierre? Glenn?”

Scahill’s question is a good one — and it’s also very easy to answer: If the White House has a problem with First Look, it’s a pretty safe bet they’ll pick up the phone and call Pierre Omidyar.

After all, according to records made available under Obama’s 2009 transparency commitment, Omidyar has visited the Obama White House at least half a dozen times since 2009. During the same period, his wife, Pamela Omidyar, who heads Omidyar Network, has visited 1600 Pennsylvania Ave at least four times, while Omidyar Network’s managing partner, Matthew Bannick, has visited a further three. In all, senior Omidyar Network officials made at least 13 visits to the White House between 2009-2013. (In fact the logs indicate that, on several occasions, Omidyar visited the White House more than once in the same day. To avoid unfairly inflating the numbers, I’ve removed same-day duplicates from all the totals cited in this article.)

To put the numbers in perspective, Omidyar’s six visits compare to four visits during the same period by NBCUniversal chief Stephen Burke, two by Fox News boss Roger Ailes, two by MSNBC’s Phil Griffin, one by New York Times owner Arthur O Sulzberger, and one each by Dow Jones’ Robert Thompson, Gannett/USA Today’s Gracia Martore and Omidyar’s fellow tech billionaire turned media owner, Jeff Bezos.

In fact Pando could only find three media titans who had earned more White House visitor loyalty points than Omidyar: CNN’s Jeffrey Zucker (7), former Post owner Donald Graham (9) and queen of all media, Arianna Huffington (11). According to records, neither The Daily Beast’s Tina Brown or Barry Diller were invited at all — nor, by the way, was Rupert Murdoch.

Even compared to other major tech leaders, Omidyar is a special case. LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman visited the White House twice during the same period, as did Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. Omidyar also beat out Marissa Mayer (5), Eric Schmidt (5), John Doerr (4), Dick Costolo (3), Evan Williams (3), Jack Dorsey (2), Larry Ellison (1) and poor old Reed Hastings who wasn’t invited at all, until this week. According to records, other people not important enough to make it through the door include Pando investors Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel.

………

Serbia, Georgia and Burma are, of course, all places where USAID-backed pro-US color revolutions were successful. And now we have Omidyar Network investing in USAID’s newest overseas programs, “advancing U.S. national security interests” in USAID’s words.

Carr reveals Omidyar’s extensive and ongoing ties to the US state security apparatus’ involvement in the intelligence operations, Scahill says that Omidyar is aggressively involved with the day to day operations of First Media‘s magazine, The Intercept, “Pierre writes more on our internal messaging than anyone else.”

This is not proof that Omidyar is somehow in cahoots with the CIA or the Obama administration, but it does mean that neither Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill, Dan Froomkin, nor Matt Taibbi should trust him any further than they could throw him.

As James Reisen of the New York Times observed, the Obama administration, is “The Greatest Enemy Of Press Freedom That We Have Encountered In At Least a Generation.”