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Writing to influence

Thursday, June 7, 2007

Good old reliable Associated Press ... passing few judgments, always preferring like Detective Joe Friday to deal in "just the facts, ma'am, just the facts". It was this same safe, non-opinionated AP that, for its opening line in reporting Lewis "Scooter" Libby's 30-month prison sentence this week for lying and obstruction, summarized his trial as having exposed "a White House obsessed with criticism of its decision to go to war".

The case has certainly done that and more. More thoroughly political observers than I will make much of the endemic abuse of power revealed among Bush Administration members, many wanting Karl Rove and Dick Cheney to be held as responsible as Libby - if not more so. Being purely a student of the Fourth Estate, I’ll stick to what the shabby episode has to teach us about Press and Government relations.

One reporter - the vainglorious Judith Miller, no longer of the New York Times - went to jail in a wrongheaded display of devotion to First Amendment rights. Another, Matthew Cooper, no longer of Time magazine, nearly went there too. Cooper's boss at the time, Norman Pearlstine, then Time Inc's Editor-in-Chief (but also no longer in place ... this is getting eerie!) spent what he called "millions of dollars — on our own behalf and that of Matt Cooper" to fight Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's subpoenas as far as the Supreme Court, only to fail. Pearlstine recognized - how could he not? - that "some ugly truths emerged about one of the biggest problems with Washington journalism" and with zoological exactitude he labeled the problem as a "symbiosis".

Few would argue with that; at the same time some would defend its necessity (I certainly am well aware that reporters and political operatives need to drink at the same troughs). But I commend Pearlstine’s pragmatism, and also precision, in saying the essential fault arises when the right balance necessary to such relationships gets out of whack and priorities are distorted. He said: "reporters often think that it is their first job to protect their sources and that informing the public comes second".

BUT SOME ELEMENTS IN THE COMUNICATIONS MIX do come out rather well from the Libby case. I mean especially some writing members of the public - those who wrote to Judge Reggie Walton about how Libby deserved to be sentenced. While the likes of Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz (also no longer in place ... okay, this is getting less eerie now) could praise respectively Libby's “tireless, honorable, selfless” qualities and his “extraordinary and selfless public service”, and could make their pleas for leniency … other men and women of less social prominence often voiced what could be seen as the opposite of "special pleading".

A certain Tripp Badger's handwritten note to the judge (pictured above) said with some cogency and directness that Libby "is a criminal and deserves no special treatment". Judge Walton clearly agreed.

IT TRIGGERED A LITTLE FRISSON TO SEE THE WALL STREET JOURNAL the day after its owners met with its prospective new buyer, Rupert Murdoch. The meeting had been delightfully prefigured - but as ever trenchantly, too - by David Carr of the New York Times in a column headlined "Mr Murdoch Comes Round for Tea". The Journal itself also brought trenchant reporting to the matter, but with little appetite for writerly grace. It presented a dour and massive 4,500-word “detailed examination” by four correspondents in three continents who analyzed Murdoch's past behavior in and after his newspaper acquisitions.

For the WSJ's parent company, Dow Jones, and its effective controllers, the Bancroft family, their agreeing to a Murdoch takeover evidently requires some form of reliable protection for the Journal’s "independence and integrity". And Murdoch is making what his unfortunate spokesman called early on "the necessary promises".

We have been here before, for sure - most obviously with The Times in London, and Sir Harold Evans, the paper's Editor at the time of Murdoch’s taking control (1981-82), has strong and bitter memories of it all. But will he actually talk about them now? No. Not to the Wall Street Journal for its thorough probe, and not to the thirty or more other news organizations, including the BBC, who contacted him earlier this week. And not to me. His typical waggish evasion of my request was: “Even for you … I can't break the self-denying vow I made to myself not to do any more interviews”.

"It's all in my book", Evans often says - and says again now. The book being "Good Times, Bad Times" - a more recent third edition of which carries an updated Preface that is still no less critical of Murdoch's behavior than when the wounds were still bloodily fresh. (In fact the newer version casts Murdoch as a Lucifer figure leading the once-noble old paper “from light to dark; and all of us involved were diminished by the shadows").

For whatever reasons - maybe social, maybe just war weariness – Harry has buried the hatchet, but we know exactly where, and its glint is never sharper than in the pages where he describes Murdoch as “incontinent in breach of promise”, and acting like “the philanderer who convinces each new girl that she's the one who'll change him''.

Specifically, during the story of Murdoch's manoevering to dump him, Evans recounts how Murdoch told the Times’ Home Editor (ie, national editor) Fred Emery that the tightly-negotiated “Guarantees” of the paper's editorial independence, to which the new owner had himself put his signature, were simply “not worth the paper they're written on”.

That infamous quote has often seemed like simply Harry’s word against Rupert’s, but (creditably)
the Journal has followed up for this week’s investigation. It talked to Emery, who recalled Murdoch as also saying “God, you don't take all that [the independence guarantees] seriously, do you?"

The Journal interviewed Murdoch too (uncharacteristically he made himself available – an
unavoidable chore in the circumstances, I guess) and his tactic was to recall the conversation with a different spin, saying Emery “was extremely critical of Harry”.

The Journal reporters followed up on their follow-up - “Mr. Emery responds: ‘Having summoned me to this meeting, it is rather odd that Mr. Murdoch remembers only my criticisms, but not his own statements about the firm promises he had given'.”

“Firm” or “necessary”, or of any other kind, promises from Murdoch have a habit of turning out the same way … broken.