quinta-feira, agosto 26, 2004

Washington Post's Managing Editor to Quit So He Can Write



Steve Coll, the managing editor of The Washington Post for the last six years and the apparent front-runner to succeed the newspaper's top editor, announced abruptly yesterday that he would step down at the end of the year to divide his time between writing books and writing articles for The Washington Post.

domingo, agosto 22, 2004

New Overtime Law Vague On Reporters, But Could Be "Nightmarish"

By Joe Strupp

NEW YORK - As the federal government prepares on Monday to implement new overtime rules that make it easier for more employers to deny or limit overtime, the head of The Newspaper Guild is concerned that the new policy, which is vague on how reporters are to be treated, will make their lives more stressful.

"I think the effect will be more pressure to work off the clock," said Linda Foley, president of the Guild-CWA, which represents more than 35,000 members at more than 100 newspapers. "I think you are going to end up with more litigation."

The provision of the new law that affects reporters involves the criteria for employees who are deemed to be executives, "professionals" or administrative workers, titles that are often exempt from overtime. Most journalists fall under the professional category, but the guidelines of which journalists are entitled to overtime is unclear, even by the law's own definitions.

According to the explanation of the new law posted on the Labor Department Web site, www.dol.gov, journalists are exempt from overtime if "their primary duty is work requiring invention, imagination, originality or talent." Journalists are not exempt, and would have to be paid overtime, if "they only collect, organize and record information that is routine or already public, or if they do not contribute a unique interpretation or analysis to a news product."

"The gray area has expanded and it is even fuzzier," Foley said. "There is a nightmarish prospect of having some reporters covered and some not covered."

Most newspapers that currently have newsroom collective bargaining agreements, such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, would likely not be affected, at least not right away, because they have overtime clauses in their current contracts, Foley said. She said most provide for time-and-a-half pay after an eight-hour day or a 40-hour week.

But other papers without such contracts could be the focus of disputes. "I think it would be a nightmare to administer," said Dennis Dressman, associate managing editor/administration for the Denver Rocky Mountain News, which has a contract through 2007 and pays overtime. "Would you be exempt when you are on a big project and not exempt when you cover courts?"

Tom Fiedler, executive editor of The Miami Herald, welcomed the change, saying it will free up management to compensate newsroom workers who go beyond a 40-hour week in other ways, such as compensatory time off.

"It is much more sensible because it much more suits the talents and work style of the newsroom," said Fiedler. "The great majority of our staff will be exempt from the (overtime) rule because they bring creativity ad talent to what the do. Only those reporters who essentially work to the clock and whose role is more clerical than reportorial will get overtime pay."

But, Fiedler stressed that all reporters who work extra hours will be compensated, probably with time off. "Most of the people in the newsroom ignore the clock, but a lot of them would like to take comp time," he said.

Disputes over which reporters get overtime are likely to become more common, said Foley, as current Guild agreements expire and negotiations begin for future contracts. "It is unclear and what is going to happen is the courts are going to sort it out," she said.

Joe Strupp (jstrupp@editorandpublisher.com) is senior editor of E&P.

sexta-feira, agosto 20, 2004

Lula diz a assessores que não pretende retirar projeto do conselho de jornalistas

BRASÍLIA - O presidente Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva mostrou-se preocupado ontem com a polêmica repercussão nacional em torno da criação do Conselho Federal de Jornalismo e da Agência Nacional de Cinema e Audiovisual (Ancinav). Ele abordou os dois assuntos na reunião da coordenação política do governo, no Palácio do Planalto. Apesar do apelo da direção do PL pela retirada do apoio ao projeto enviado ao Congresso, o presidente reafirmou que não pretende voltar atrás.

Na reunião do núcleo central do governo, Lula disse estar convencido de que fez a coisa certa ao enviar um projeto apresentado pela Federação Nacional dos Jornalistas (Fenaj). A avaliação do governo é que, embora os jornalistas não se sintam representados pela Fenaj, a proposta é de uma entidade organizada e oficialmente representativa da categoria.

Em São Paulo, o presidente da Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT), Luiz Marinho, defendeu ontem a criação do Conselho Federal de Jornalismo. Marinho admitiu que não leu o projeto de lei, mas argumentou que os jornalistas “têm canhões nas mãos” e que “produzem matérias segundo os interesses patronais”. Para ele, a Justiça tem sido ineficiente na punição a casos de falta de ética.

— O jornalista é um profissional que tem um canhão nas mãos. O jornalista é parte. Muitas vezes o patrão fala: quero uma matéria assim e a matéria vem — disse Marinho.

Na reunião do Planalto também foram contestadas críticas à proposta de criação da Ancinav, que na opinião de especialistas e representantes do setor de audiovisual teria um viés autoritário. Para o governo, a proposta não tem essa característica porque está sendo debatida com a sociedade.


Esta tem a sua piáda. Aparentemente o Lula está a inaugurar um tipo novo de comunicação com a imprensa. Conta coisas aos assessores e depois deixa que eles contem prá imprensa. Não sei se estão a perceber a jogada. Se alguna coisa não bate certo, o Lula pode sempre dizer que foi engano do asesor e despedir o individuo, não é? Cuidado no Planalto, a partir de agora nenhum emprego tá seguro, meus senhores. Quem avisa, amigo é. [RF]

Two Michael Moore Books to be Published

New York – Michael Moore, the acclaimed filmmaker and #1 best-selling author whose latest movie, Fahrenheit 9/11, is the highest-grossing documentary of all time, has reached an agreement with Simon & Schuster to publish a collection of letters written to Mr. Moore by American G.I.s in Iraq. Titled WILL THEY EVER TRUST US AGAIN? Soldiers, Veterans and their Families Write to Michael Moore, the 256-page hardcover book will be priced at $21.00 and will be released in November 2004.



Michael Moore said about the collection: “I'm proud to give voice to the troops who have written to me.”

The book, which was acquired by Simon & Schuster Executive Vice President and Publisher David Rosenthal from Mort Janklow of Janklow & Nesbit, will contain introductory material from Mr. Moore as well as additional commentary throughout. The letters were received by Mr. Moore over the last year, many of them sent to his website.

Also later this year, in conjunction with the release of the DVD of Fahrenheit 9/11, Simon & Schuster will publish a volume containing the full movie transcript as well as supplementary material not included in the final cut of the movie. Entitled THE OFFICIAL FARENHEIT 9/11 READER, the book will be published as a trade paperback original and will be priced at $16.00.

Michael Moore described this book as, “Everything you want to know about Fahrenheit 9/11.”

terça-feira, agosto 17, 2004

“Habladuría-de-mierda”

A mi que me perdonen pero esto es la típica “habladuría-de-mierda” cuando se habla de ética.

Nosotros en El Nuevo Herald/Miami Herald tenemos el mismo tipo de programas, y yo he participado al menos en uno en Republica Dominicana, y nunca hice de la distribución de la ayuda el centro de la noticia. No tiene nada que ver un tema con el otro.

Cuando el desastre arrecia hay que tener la inteligencia de unir las dos cosas. Hay que saber unir la necesidad de cumplir un servicio público y comunitario con la necesidad de informar al público. Es una retroalimentación.

En el caso dominicano, se llevó ayuda desde Miami, y cuando en Santo Domingo trataron de robarla se transformó en una denuncia y los reportajes y alertas sirvieron para lograr que el contenedor llegara a las victimas. Lo demás, señores míos, es pura paja. Vean una mujer en la sala de su casa con el agua por la cintura y después vengan a hablarme a mí de ética en materia de programas de ayuda y su relación con la prensa.

Si después la gente compra más el periódico porque la ayudamos, pues bienvenido sea. Pero no me digan nunca que dejamos abandonados a nuestros lectores sólo porque no podemos transformar en noticia nuestros propios actos. [RF]

segunda-feira, agosto 16, 2004

¿Se debe reportar el suicidio de un menor?

Este es el dilema interesante que se le planeó a un editor. (Ver el texto siguiente) He meditado sobre el asunto y no estoy tan seguro de sus argumentos. Creo que tiene un punto valido cuando habla de la estructura de la noticia en si. Sin embargo, sigo más inclinado en tener en cuenta los derechos – o sentimientos – de los familiares. Después de todo, el suicidio del joven no tuvo consecuencias públicas, más allá de transformarse en una estadística.

No creo que noticiar el modo en que murió un menor, si fue por su propia mano, contribuye a disminuir lo suicidios entre los adolescentes. Después de todo los adolescentes no tienen aún una noción de la muerte. Ese es un punto interesante porque ahora en Miami se va a juzgar a un joven que mató a otro en la escuela y el argumento de los psicólogos es que a esa edad (14 años) no tienen una noción de la irreversibilidad de la muerte.

Pero, los adolescentes de nuestros días ven morir mucho en el cine y la televisión. Matar suele ser, por veces y para ellos, casi tan normal como la vida. Y esto levanta otro dilema. Si no distingue la muerte de la vida en la vida real, ¿lo sabe hacer cuando es de ficción?

¿Será que los adolescentes de nuestros días tienen una idea de la muerte apenas a un nivel de ficción y por eso no tienen noción de su irreversibilidad en la vida real? ¿Y ayuda a comprender esto, divulgar un suicidio como la razón de la muerte de un adolescente? [RF]

Death and self-censorship

By William B. Ketter
Editor-in-Chief

How did he die?

That's the simple question readers asked last week after perusing a story about the fifth-grader whose unexpected death at home caused school officials to send a letter to the parents of his classmates about ways to help kids cope with tragedy.

The answer was terribly difficult. But the abundance of inquiry and a vigorous staff discussion of the issue have convinced me that we made the wrong call in deliberately omitting the cause of death. The boy's death was by suicide.

We didn't include that fact in the story out of sensitivity to the boy's family and because of the newspaper's policy of only reporting suicide that's committed in public or by a public or well-known figure. Self-inflicted death done in the privacy of a home usually doesn't make the paper.

This, however, was not your usual private suicide, if there is such a thing.

The victim was only 11 years old. Additionally, because of his popularity with his peers, the school's principal felt compelled to reach out to the community with advice on how to handle what she described as an "untimely death." That also is unusual.

It is the exceptional that often makes life and death especially newsworthy. So does public interest and reader desire to know what happened, why it happened and how it happened. In other words, to know the complete story. Or as complete as we can assemble the details and still publish a timely story.

All of which argues for making an exception to our suicide reporting policy in the case of the boy's death. We were not, in this instance, completely honest with our readers, and that is an obligation that we take seriously every day. It goes to the heart of our believability.

Most of the readers who contacted the paper understood and even sympathized with our reasons for not publishing the cause of the boy's death. They also made the powerful point that if the story about it was important enough to put in the paper, then we had a responsibility to tell our readers how he died.

"If it is a story," said a caller, "don't tell me half of it. That just leaves me scratching my head, trying to imagine what happened. Give me the entire story or none at all."

Another said she did not expect the paper to carry "the specific details of how he died, but surely there was a delicate way for you to tell me that he took his own life. That's such an important element to a story like this."

Still others offered the logic that parents in the community could better explain the death to their children if they knew how the boy died. That would allow them, they said, to talk about how despondency can lead to someone taking his or her life, and why it is important to seek help when you feel desperately depressed or melancholy.

Claire Gauthier of Andover is a mother who wants the media to talk straight on suicide as a way to help prevent it. Her son took his life several years ago while in high school, causing her to organize an intervention program that includes friends and acquaintances offering to help a victim's family overcome the special grief connected with suicide.

Gauthier's advice to the community was in our story about the boy's death. But there was no reference to the circumstance of her son's death even though she fully expected it. We removed that detail for fear it would signal our readers the cause of the boy's death and thus void our self-censorship of that element.

Again, it was a mistake to finesse Gauthier's personal story. She was speaking specifically to death by suicide, with a very forceful message. Context was important.

"People are afraid to reach out sometimes because they think they are intruding," Gauthier said. "Do not be afraid to reach out to the victims. They appreciate it. My thought was that it was wonderful that they came and I knew I could call on them."

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that more than 30,000 Americans take their lives every year. That's a suicide every 17 minutes, making it among the 10 leading causes of death in the United States.

Newspapers have long been squeamish about suicide, for the same reason we don't identify the victims of sex crimes. There's a traditional social stigma attached to both even though there should not be. Perhaps more education through the media would help change that.

Reporting on suicide also raises questions of privacy and adding to the sadness of the victim's family. And if it is done in private, the reasoning goes, why does it matter if others are left wondering about the cause of death.

One thing is evident from our dealing with last week's story about the little boy's death. An absolutist policy on suicide doesn't work. We need to pick our way with care every time we're confronted with self-inflicted death and, at the same time, stay true to our obligation to be honest brokers of the news.

William B. Ketter is editor-in-chief of the Eagle-Tribune newspapers. He can be contacted at bketter@eagletribune.com or (978) 946-2233.

Erro da revista «Veja» destruiu imagem de deputado brasileiro

SÉRGIO BARRETO MOTTA

RIO DE JANEIRO - Em 1993, a principal revista semanal brasileira, Veja, publicou uma reportagem que desmoralizou o então presidente da Câmara dos Deputados, Ibsen Pinheiro. Com o título de «Até tu, Ibsen», a reportagem acusava o deputado de haver movimentado, ilicitamente, um milhão de dólares no exterior. À época, o nome de Ibsen era citado como possível candidato à presidência da República.

No entanto, segundo uma carta do jornalista responsável pelo artigo da denúncia, Luís Costa Pinto, pouco antes do fecho da edição o próprio profissional descobriu o erro que cometera: a quantia movimentada não era o milhão de dólares, mas inexpressivos mil dólares. Segundo o depoimento de Costa Pinto, agora publicado pela concorrente Isto É, a Veja decidiu não mudar a reportagem e, em vez disso, foi buscar depoimentos que corroborassem a denúncia. A Veja desvalorizou o facto de poder prejudicar a imagem da vítima, concentrando as suas preocupações em não ter prejuízo com a suspensão da distribuição, pois a revista já estava impressa.

De acordo com Costa Pinto, o então director executivo da revista, Paulo Moreira Leite, alegou que alterar a capa já impressa teria um grande custo e, assim, o melhor seria seguir em frente. A Veja publicou então a matéria desajustada da realidade, que fulminou a carreira de um expressivo deputado. A revista tinha uma tiragem de 1,2 milhões de exemplares.

A partir daí, Ibsen Pinheiro entrou em desgraça. Perdeu os seus direitos e foi esquecido pelos brasileiros. Onze anos depois, ele tenta reerguer-se. É candidato ao cargo por eleição mais modesto do país (o de vereador) na sua cidade, Porto Alegre, no Estado do Rio Grande do Sul. Este caso é um bom exemplo do que o mau jornalismo pode fazer a uma pessoa.

Há três meses, o jornalista Costa Pinto enviou uma carta à vítima, na qual admite que ajudou a prejudicá-lo e pede desculpas. Foi essa carta que deu origem à reportagem de Isto É, visando a reposição da verdade e lançando duras críticas ao comportamento ético da concorrente.

Hoje com 69 anos, Ibsen Pinheiro, embora tenha sido a grande vítima do caso, diz que não vai pedir indemnização. Afirmou que o mau jornalismo se combate com bom jornalismo e que somente um regime de plena liberdade de imprensa pode repôr a verdade. Ibsen diz que já obteve algum reparo moral e alegra-se que isso tenha ocorrido enquanto ainda está vivo.

Este episódio traz à discussão o que pode ser feito no Brasil para evitar repetições de acontecimentos semelhantes. A Federação Nacional dos Jornalistas apoia o projecto do Governo de criar um Conselho Nacional de Jornalismo, que teria poderes de controlar os meios de comunicação. A maior vítima de tudo isso, o ex-deputado Ibsen Pinheiro, declara-se contra a criação do Conselho, por considerar perigoso o controlo da informação por parte do Governo.

Diario de Noticias 2004

quinta-feira, agosto 12, 2004

Oh, pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeese!

O marido vai à guerra sem consultar com a nação e os jornalistas é que são divisionistas. Por que é que a senhora não volta prá biblioteca no Texas? Fazia-nos a todos um grande favor.

First lady says journalists contribute to divisions in country

WASHINGTON (AP) - First lady Laura Bush thinks the news media is increasingly filled with opinions instead of facts, and suggested Aug. 3 that journalists are contributing to the polarization of the country.

"I think there are a lot of reasons to be critical of the media in America," she said in an interview with Fox News Channel's "The O'Reilly Factor."

"I think that a lot of times the media sensationalize or magnify things that aren't _that really shouldn't be," she said.

"I do think there's a big move away from actual reporting, trying to report facts," the first lady said. "It's in newspapers and everything you read _ that a lot more is opinion."

When her interviewer suggested that journalists were out of sync with most of the country, she said with a laugh: "You just gave me a really great idea. Maybe it is the media that has us divided."

President Bush's mother had famously bitter relations with the news media during his father's term in office.

After the 1992 election, as Barbara Bush gave Hillary Rodham Clinton a tour of the White House she pointed to nearby reporters and told her successor: "Avoid this crowd like the plague."

The Post on WMDs: An Inside Story

Prewar Articles Questioning Threat Often Didn't Make Front Page

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post

Days before the Iraq war began, veteran Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus put together a story questioning whether the Bush administration had proof that Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction.

But he ran into resistance from the paper's editors, and his piece ran only after assistant managing editor Bob Woodward, who was researching a book about the drive toward war, "helped sell the story," Pincus recalled. "Without him, it would have had a tough time getting into the paper." Even so, the article was relegated to Page A17.

"We did our job but we didn't do enough, and I blame myself mightily for not pushing harder," Woodward said in an interview. "We should have warned readers we had information that the basis for this was shakier" than widely believed. "Those are exactly the kind of statements that should be published on the front page."

As violence continues in postwar Iraq and U.S. forces have yet to discover any WMDs, some critics say the media, including The Washington Post, failed the country by not reporting more skeptically on President Bush's contentions during the run-up to war.

An examination of the paper's coverage, and interviews with more than a dozen of the editors and reporters involved, shows that The Post published a number of pieces challenging the White House, but rarely on the front page. Some reporters who were lobbying for greater prominence for stories that questioned the administration's evidence complained to senior editors who, in the view of those reporters, were unenthusiastic about such pieces. The result was coverage that, despite flashes of groundbreaking reporting, in hindsight looks strikingly one-sided at times.

"The paper was not front-paging stuff," said Pentagon correspondent Thomas Ricks. "Administration assertions were on the front page. Things that challenged the administration were on A18 on Sunday or A24 on Monday. There was an attitude among editors: Look, we're going to war, why do we even worry about all this contrary stuff?"

In retrospect, said Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr., "we were so focused on trying to figure out what the administration was doing that we were not giving the same play to people who said it wouldn't be a good idea to go to war and were questioning the administration's rationale. Not enough of those stories were put on the front page. That was a mistake on my part."

Across the country, "the voices raising questions about the war were lonely ones," Downie said. "We didn't pay enough attention to the minority."

When national security reporter Dana Priest was addressing a group of intelligence officers recently, she said, she was peppered with questions: "Why didn't The Post do a more aggressive job? Why didn't The Post ask more questions? Why didn't The Post dig harder?"

Several news organizations have cast a withering eye on their earlier work. The New York Times said in a May editor's note about stories that claimed progress in the hunt for WMDs that editors "were perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper." Separately, the Times editorial page and the New Republic magazine expressed regret for some prewar arguments.

Michael Massing, a New York Review of Books contributor and author of the forthcoming book "Now They Tell Us," on the press and Iraq, said: "In covering the run-up to the war, The Post did better than most other news organizations, featuring a number of solid articles about the Bush administration's policies. But on the key issue of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, the paper was generally napping along with everyone else. It gave readers little hint of the doubts that a number of intelligence analysts had about the administration's claims regarding Iraq's arsenal."

The front page is a newspaper's billboard, its way of making a statement about what is important, and stories trumpeted there are often picked up by other news outlets. Editors begin pitching stories at a 2 p.m. news meeting with Downie and Managing Editor Steve Coll and, along with some reporters, lobby throughout the day. But there is limited space on Page 1 -- usually six or seven stories -- and Downie said he likes to feature a broad range of subjects, including education, health, science, sports and business.

Woodward, for his part, said it was risky for journalists to write anything that might look silly if weapons were ultimately found in Iraq. Alluding to the finding of the Sept. 11 commission of a "groupthink" among intelligence officials, Woodward said of the weapons coverage: "I think I was part of the groupthink."

Given The Post's reputation for helping topple the Nixon administration, some of those involved in the prewar coverage felt compelled to say the paper's shortcomings did not reflect any reticence about taking on the Bush White House. Priest noted, however, that skeptical stories usually triggered hate mail "questioning your patriotism and suggesting that you somehow be delivered into the hands of the terrorists."

Instead, the obstacles ranged from editing difficulties and communication problems to the sheer mass of information the newsroom was trying to digest during the march to war.

The Doubts Go Inside

From August 2002 through the March 19, 2003, launch of the war, The Post ran more than 140 front-page stories that focused heavily on administration rhetoric against Iraq. Some examples: "Cheney Says Iraqi Strike Is Justified"; "War Cabinet Argues for Iraq Attack"; "Bush Tells United Nations It Must Stand Up to Hussein or U.S. Will"; "Bush Cites Urgent Iraqi Threat"; "Bush Tells Troops: Prepare for War."

Reporter Karen DeYoung, a former assistant managing editor who covered the prewar diplomacy, said contrary information sometimes got lost.

"If there's something I would do differently -- and it's always easy in hindsight -- the top of the story would say, 'We're going to war, we're going to war against evil.' But later down it would say, 'But some people are questioning it.' The caution and the questioning was buried underneath the drumbeat. . . . The hugeness of the war preparation story tended to drown out a lot of that stuff."

Beyond that, there was the considerable difficulty of dealing with secretive intelligence officials who themselves were relying on sketchy data from Iraqi defectors and other shadowy sources and could never be certain about what they knew.

On Sept. 19, 2002, reporter Joby Warrick described a report "by independent experts who question whether thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes recently sought by Iraq were intended for a secret nuclear weapons program," as the administration was contending. The story ran on Page A18.

Warrick said he was "going out on a limb. . . . I was struck by the people I talked to -- some on the record, others who couldn't be -- who were saying pretty persistently that these tubes were in no way suitable for uranium enrichment. On the other side were these CIA guys who said, 'Look, we know what we're talking about but we can't tell you.' "

Downie said that even in retrospect, the story looks like "a close call." He said the inability of dissenters "to speak up with their names" was a factor in some of his news judgments. The Post, however, frequently quotes unnamed sources.

Not all such stories were pushed inside the paper. A follow-up Warrick piece on the aluminum tubes did run on Page 1 the following January, two months before the war began. And The Post gave front-page play to a Sept. 10, 2002, story by Priest contending that "the CIA has yet to find convincing evidence" linking Hussein and al Qaeda.

That hardly settled the matter. On Dec. 12, 2002, investigative reporter Barton Gellman -- who would later win acclaim for his skeptical postwar stories from Iraq on WMDs -- wrote a controversial piece that ombudsman Michael Getler complained "practically begs you not to put much credence in it." The headline: "U.S. Suspects Al Qaeda Got Nerve Agent From Iraqis."

The story, attributed to "two officials with firsthand knowledge of the report" to the Bush administration "and its source," said in the second paragraph that "if the report proves true" -- a whopper of a qualifier -- it would be "the most concrete evidence" yet to support Bush's charge that Iraq was helping terrorists.

Gellman does not believe he was used. "The sources were not promoting the war. . . . One of them was actually against it," he said. "They were career security officials, not political officials. They were, however, wrong." Gellman added that "it was news even though it was clear that it was possible this report would turn out to be false."

But sources, even suspect ones, were the only game in town. "We had no alternative sources of information," Woodward said. "Walter [Pincus] and I couldn't go to Iraq without getting killed. You couldn't get beyond the veneer and hurdle of what this groupthink had already established" -- the conventional wisdom that Hussein was sitting on a stockpile of illegal weapons.

In October 2002, Ricks, a former national security editor for the Wall Street Journal who has been covering such issues for 15 years, turned in a piece that he titled "Doubts." It said that senior Pentagon officials were resigned to an invasion but were reluctant and worried that the risks were being underestimated. Most of those quoted by name in the Ricks article were retired military officials or outside experts. The story was killed by Matthew Vita, then the national security editor and now a deputy assistant managing editor.

"Journalistically, one of the frustrations with that story was that it was filled with lots of retired guys," Vita said. But, he added, "I completely understood the difficulty of getting people inside the Pentagon" to speak publicly.

Liz Spayd, the assistant managing editor for national news, says The Post's overall record was strong.

"I believe we pushed as hard or harder than anyone to question the administration's assertions on all kinds of subjects related to the war. . . . Do I wish we would have had more and pushed harder and deeper into questions of whether they possessed weapons of mass destruction? Absolutely," she said. "Do I feel we owe our readers an apology? I don't think so."

Digger or Crusader?

No Post reporter burrowed into the Iraqi WMD story more deeply than Pincus, 71, a staff member for 32 of the last 38 years, whose messy desk is always piled high with committee reports and intelligence files. "The main thing people forget to do is read documents," said Pincus, wielding a yellow highlighter.

A white-haired curmudgeon who spent five years covering the Iran-contra scandal and has long been an expert on nuclear weapons, Pincus sometimes had trouble convincing editors of the importance of his incremental, difficult-to-read stories.

His longevity is such that he first met Hans Blix, who was the chief U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq, at a conference in Ghana in 1959.

"The inspectors kept getting fed intelligence by our administration and the British and the French, and kept coming back and saying they couldn't find" the weapons, Pincus said. "I did one of the first interviews with Blix, and like everyone else he thought there would be WMDs. By January and February [of 2003], he was starting to have his own doubts. . . . What nobody talked about was how much had been destroyed," either under U.N. supervision after the Persian Gulf War or during the Clinton administration's 1998 bombing of Iraqi targets.

But while Pincus was ferreting out information "from sources I've used for years," some in the Post newsroom were questioning his work. Editors complained that he was "cryptic," as one put it, and that his hard-to-follow stories had to be heavily rewritten.

Spayd declined to discuss Pincus's writing but said that "stories on intelligence are always difficult to edit and parse and to ensure their accuracy and get into the paper."

Downie agreed that difficulties in editing Pincus may have been a factor in the prewar period, because he is "so well sourced" that his reporting often amounts to putting together "fragments" until the pieces were, in Downie's word, "storifyable."

Some editors, in Pincus's view, also saw him as a "crusader," as he once put it to Washingtonian magazine. "That's sort of my reputation, and I don't deny it," he said. "Once I get on a subject, I stay with it."

On Jan. 30, 2003, Pincus and Priest reported that the evidence the administration was amassing about Baghdad hiding weapons equipment and documents "is still circumstantial." The story ran on Page A14.

Some of the reporters who attended the daily "war meetings," where coverage was planned, complained to national editors that the drumbeat of the impending invasion was crowding out the work of Pincus and others who were challenging the administration.

Pincus was among the complainers. "Walter talked to me himself," Downie said. "He sought me out when he was frustrated, and I sought him out. We talked about how best to have stories be in the kind of shape that they could appear on the front page." Editors were also frustrated, Downie said. "Overall, in retrospect, we underplayed some of those stories."

The Woodward Factor

Bush, Vice President Cheney and other administration officials had no problem commanding prime real estate in the paper, even when their warnings were repetitive. "We are inevitably the mouthpiece for whatever administration is in power," DeYoung said. "If the president stands up and says something, we report what the president said." And if contrary arguments are put "in the eighth paragraph, where they're not on the front page, a lot of people don't read that far."

Those tendencies were on display on Feb. 6, 2003, the day after Secretary of State Colin Powell delivered a multimedia presentation at the United Nations -- using satellite images and intercepted phone calls -- to convince the world that Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction.

An accompanying front-page story by DeYoung and Pincus examined Powell's "unprecedented release of U.S. intelligence." Not until the ninth paragraph did they offer a "however" clause, saying that "a number of European officials and U.S. terrorism experts" believed that Powell's description of an Iraqi link to al Qaeda "appeared to have been carefully drawn to imply more than it actually said."

Warrick focused that day on the secretary's assertion, based on human sources, that Iraq had biological weapons factories on wheels. "Some of the points in Powell's presentation drew skepticism," Warrick reported. His piece ran on Page A28.

Downie said the paper ran several pieces analyzing Powell's speech as a package on inside pages. "We were not able to marshal enough evidence to say he was wrong," Downie said of Powell. "To pull one of those out on the front page would be making a statement on our own: 'Aha, he's wrong about the aluminum tubes.' "

Such decisions coincided with The Post editorial page's strong support for the war, such as its declaration the day after Powell's presentation that "it is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction." These editorials led some readers to conclude that the paper had an agenda, even though there is a church-and-state wall between the newsroom and the opinion pages. Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt, not Downie, runs the opinion side, reporting to Post Co. Chairman Donald Graham.

In mid-March, as the administration was on the verge of invading Iraq, Woodward stepped in to give the stalled Pincus piece about the administration's lack of evidence a push. "We weren't holding it for any political reason or because we were being pressured by the administration," Spayd said, but because such stories were difficult to edit at a time when the national desk was deluged with copy. "People forget how many facets of this story we were chasing . . . the political ramifications . . . military readiness . . . issues around postwar Iraq and how prepared the administration was . . . diplomacy angles . . . and we were pursuing WMD. . . . All those stories were competing for prominence."

As a star of the Watergate scandal who is given enormous amounts of time to work on his best-selling books, Woodward, an assistant managing editor, had the kind of newsroom clout that Pincus lacked.

The two men's recollections differ. Woodward said that after comparing notes with Pincus, he gave him a draft story consisting of five key paragraphs, which said the administration's evidence for WMDs in Iraq "looks increasingly circumstantial and even shaky," according to "informed sources." Woodward said Pincus found his wording too strong.

Pincus said he had already written his story when Woodward weighed in and that he treated his colleague's paragraphs as a suggestion and barely changed the piece. "What he really did was talk to the editors and made sure it was printed," Pincus said.

"Despite the Bush administration's claims" about WMDs, the March 16 Pincus story began, "U.S. intelligence agencies have been unable to give Congress or the Pentagon specific information about the amounts of banned weapons or where they are hidden, according to administration officials and members of Congress," raising questions "about whether administration officials have exaggerated intelligence."

Woodward said he wished he had appealed to Downie to get front-page play for the story, rather than standing by as it ended up on Page A17. In that period, said former national security editor Vita, "we were dealing with an awful lot of stories, and that was one of the ones that slipped through the cracks." Spayd did not recall the debate.

Reviewing the story in his glass-walled office last week, Downie said: "In retrospect, that probably should have been on Page 1 instead of A17, even though it wasn't a definitive story and had to rely on unnamed sources. It was a very prescient story."

In the days before the war, Priest and DeYoung turned in a piece that said CIA officials "communicated significant doubts to the administration" about evidence tying Iraq to attempted uranium purchases for nuclear weapons. The story was held until March 22, three days after the war began. Editors blamed a flood of copy about the impending invasion.

Whether a tougher approach by The Post and other news organizations would have slowed the rush to war is, at best, a matter of conjecture.

"People who were opposed to the war from the beginning and have been critical of the media's coverage in the period before the war have this belief that somehow the media should have crusaded against the war," Downie said. "They have the mistaken impression that somehow if the media's coverage had been different, there wouldn't have been a war."


© 2004 The Washington Post Company

quarta-feira, agosto 11, 2004

What about outsourcing Reuters' top execs?

The Washington Post reports that Reuters is cutting costs by firing 20 editorial staffers in America and Europe and replacing them with 60 new hires in India.

This is just an early stage of newsroom outsourcing. Copy editors especially pay attention: digital copy can move across the globe as quickly as across the newsroom.

So what if we play with the numbers a little?

Reuters did not announce salary figures, so let's plug in some conservative hypotheticals: Let's say that each of those being fired makes $40,000-a-year and another $10,000 in benefits. That's a total of $1 million annually.



Since Reuters thinks 3 Indian hires equal 1 U.S.-Europe hire AND Reuters says is saving money, let's assume then that the Indian replacements will get $13,000-a-year with no benefits. That would mean total personnel costs of $780,000.

That would mean by firing 20 Americans and Europeans Reuters is saving $220,000 a year or 22 percent.

I think those are conservative figures, especially for the total salary and benefit costs of the American and European workers who are losing their jobs. And while there are some one-time severance and administrative costs, the savings should be permanent so long as one can arbitrage wage rates between America/Europe and India.

But is firing 20 journalists and support staff is the only way, or even the best and most efficient way, to cut personnel costs? Could there be a better way to do this, one that would do a smoother job of improving efficiency and maximizing shareholder value?

Hmmm....are there any other options?

What about outsourcing the top executives at Reuters?

The top four Reuters executives had combined compensation of almost $3.6 million last year, the Wall Street Journal reported earlier. Add on fringe benefits and their real cost is likely to be at least $4.4 million.

If Indian executives can be hired at the same wage discount ratio as Indian journalists then Reuters could expand its top level executive suite from four to 12 and still save $968,000.

That's more than four times what could be saved by outsourcing journalists.

Of course one wonders why Reuters would need more executives. India has plenty of competent executives, especially in IT and in news. Maybe one can higher even better executive talent for lower costs by going to India.

So if Reuters only needs to replace the four outsourced executives with the same number of Indian executives it could save $3.3 million annually, based on the conservative assumptions above. That's 15 times as much as can be saved by outsourcing the jobs of 20 journalists and support staff in the U.S. and Europe.

If looking out for shareholders is the reason for outsourcing then why just nibble at costs when you can slash them? Why save a dollar when you could save 15? Why not squeeze every possible dollar out of personnel costs for the benefit of shareholders?

If outsourcing is sound then why not apply it across the board?

Did top management at Reuters even considered this? Did it conduct a single study or make an analysis of savings from outsourcing the executive function? It seems reasonable for shareholders to ask. After all, what's fair on the top floor should be fair on the shop floor, right?

Woodward: We're rushed to nail down stories these days

Larry King to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein: "Does this press go light on its president?" [Link]



Woodward: "I think certainly in the last year that is not the case. That, in fact, anything the White House does gets questioned and scrutinized, and it should. But you know, there's this -- we are by nature, particularly with the advent of CNN and cable television, everyone's impatient. Tell us everything. Explain it. When Carl and I, 30-years-ago, plus, worked on Watergate we could draft a story and hand it in. The editors would look at it, and ask questions and send us off on reporting errands. And we could wait two or three weeks before we got that story nailed down. Now, even at the Washington Post, as good and patient as the editors are, if you get what looks like a good story, they'll be in your office and say, 'can we get it on the Web site by noon.'"
Posted at 10:55:38 AM

Existe um outro conselho



O projeto que cria o Conselho Federal dos Jornalistas é da Federação Nacional dos Jornalistas. Tornou-se anátema na medida que ganhou o selo do governo. É um erro do governo meter a mão nesta cumbuca, numa hora destas. Mas a discussão sobre as práticas da imprensa é saudável e está ganhando pernas. Em Portugal, neste momento, um jornalista enfrenta processo ético e ação judicial porque gravou conversas em of f com suas fontes sem que eles soubessem da gravação. Aqui também há muito o que se discutir. O projeto subscrito por Lula agora deve mofar no Congresso. Mas já que o assunto está em pauta, vai aí um subsídio. Que tal valorizar melhor o Conselho de Comunicação Social (artigo 220), fruto de emenda da já falecida deputada e jornalista Cristina Tavares? Foi instalado há dois anos mas ainda engatinha. Ela o concebeu com este objetivo: um lugar onde empresários, artistas, jornalistas, produtores culturais e sociedade civil (todos ali representados) discutam e emitam pareceres sobre a produção e o comportamento dos veículos de comunicação social. O jornalismo está aí incluído. O Conselho é órgão auxiliar do Congresso.

E a Constituição?

BRASÍLIA. O presidente do Superior Tribunal de Justiça (STJ), ministro Edson Vidigal, defendeu a liberdade de imprensa e lembrou que ela está resguardada pela Constituição. Vidigal disse que não conhecia o projeto do Conselho Federal de Jornalismo e que falava em tese, mas ressaltou que tentativas de cercear a liberdade de imprensa nem deveriam ser discutidas.

— Qualquer tentativa neste sentido esbarra na Constituição, que assegura não apenas o direito da sociedade à informação como o direito da imprensa em buscar, por intermédio de suas fontes, as informações e repassá-las à sociedade. Sou a favor da Constituição. Qualquer tentativa que esbarra na Constituição não merece qualquer discussão — disse o presidente do STJ.

Vidigal evitou, entretanto, responder se considerava o projeto inconstitucional ou não:

— Não li o projeto, mas o que está escrito na Constituição é o que vale, é o que se impõe.

Fenaj denuncia ‘massacre da mídia’

BRASÍLIA. O vice-presidente da Federação Nacional dos Jornalistas (Fenaj), Fred Ghedini, e o secretário-geral, Aloísio Lopes, defenderam a proposta de criação do Conselho Federal de Jornalismo (CFJ) e acusaram a mídia de massacrar a entidade. Em entrevista na Câmara, eles reafirmaram que a proposta é da Fenaj, e não do governo.

— Viemos denunciar o massacre da mídia, em plena luz do dia, que em última análise é o massacre à própria ética da profissão. Exigimos dos veículos de comunicação que cumpram o Código de Ética, ouçam as opiniões contrárias. Das 61 reportagens publicadas, apenas uma é favorável — criticou Ghedini.

O vice-presidente da Fenaj explicou que o Executivo enviou a proposta ao Congresso, a pedido da entidade, e embora ele e boa parte dos diretores sejam filiados ao PT, rechaçou a partidarização da Fenaj.

Fenaj: “Isso não tem nadaa ver com censura”

Ghedini afirmou ainda que há muita desinformação e defendeu o debate sobre o tema no Congresso, rejeitando o regime de urgência. Segundo ele, o Conselho será uma instância a mais para que jornalistas e cidadãos que se sentirem lesados possam recorrer. Ele comenta que atualmente a legislação só atende a casos de calúnia, difamação e atentado à honra.

— Um jornalista que é obrigado a escrever sobre algo que é contra a ética, porque o patrão determina, não tem a quem recorrer. Jornalistas que usam o jornalismo para perseguir pessoas também poderão ser punidos com a cassação do registro profissional. Isso não tem nada a ver com censura — afirmou o vice-presidente da Fenaj.

Pode me explicar?

Eu gostava que alguém me explicasse como pode haver liberdade com ressalva. Porque a liberdade existe ou não existe, não há meios termos. [RF]

Gushiken defende liberdade, mas faz ressalva

Cristiane Jungblut/O Globo

BRASÍLIA - Em meio à polêmica sobre o projeto que cria o Conselho Federal de Jornalismo (CFJ), o ministro da Secretaria de Comunicação de Governo e Gestão Estratégica, Luiz Gushiken, afirmou ontem que a liberdade de imprensa é um valor definitivo na democracia, mas ressalvou que nada é absoluto em uma sociedade. Para o ministro, cabe aos próprios jornalistas debaterem o assunto.

— Vocês são profissionais que sabem os limites da ação, sabem que a liberdade de imprensa é um valor definitivo na democracia, mas sabem também que numa sociedade nada é absoluto — afirmou o ministro, que participou ontem, ao lado do presidente Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, da solenidade de recepção aos novos recrutas das Forças Armadas.

Gushiken disse acreditar que a imprensa brasileira vive em total liberdade de expressão. Ele acrescentou que podem ocorrer deslizes e até fabricação de notícias, e argumentou que até por isso é importante que a categoria discuta a necessidade ou não de mecanismos como o Conselho Federal de Jornalismo.

Dirceu: projeto pode ser mudado

O ministro frisou que o projeto foi elaborado em resposta a uma demanda dos próprios jornalistas, representados pela Federação Nacional dos Jornalistas (Fenaj). Gushiken evitou comentar a posição do governo diante das críticas.

No dia 7 de abril, Lula recebeu no Palácio do Planalto representantes da Fenaj para comemorar o Dia do Jornalista. Na ocasião, Lula e Gushiken receberam e apoiaram a proposta de criação do CFJ.

Gushiken afirmou que o assunto deve ser debatido pelos jornalistas. Para o ministro, a proposta de criação do conselho não é uma tentativa de intimidar a imprensa.

— Não vejo desta forma. Este é um assunto que vocês jornalistas e o Congresso devem discutir — disse o ministro.

Ao responder se considerava que a imprensa estava abusando do direito de denunciar, Gushiken disse que no Brasil há total liberdade de expressão.

— Acho que grande parte da imprensa brasileira vive em clima de total liberdade. Aqui em nosso país não há qualquer restrição quanto a isso — afirmou o ministro, que se esquivou de comentar a conduta de jornais e revistas.

Em seguida, completou:

— Agora, evidentemente, alguns deslizes podem existir. Vocês da área sabem mais do que eu disso. E vocês convivem diariamente com pessoas fazendo, fabricando notícias, dando interpretações...

O ministro José Dirceu, chefe da Casa Civil, também defendeu a criação do Conselho Federal de Jornalismo. Para ele, o órgão regulamentará a profissão de jornalista.

— Não vejo como considerar uma interferência na linha editorial ou na independência da liberdade de imprensa. Se o projeto tem qualquer viés ou qualquer artigo que leve a isso, devemos modificá-lo no Congresso — disse o ministro.

O presidente da Câmara, João Paulo Cunha (PT-SP), avisou que a proposta que cria o CFJ não será aprovada com urgência na Casa. Embora não tenha se declarado contra a proposta, João Paulo acrescentou que o projeto será debatido com muita cautela e garantiu que a Câmara não vai aprová-lo se representar qualquer risco à liberdade de imprensa.

— O projeto será debatido pelos deputados e somente depois de exaurido o debate é que o texto será encaminhado ao plenário. Se houver qualquer risco à liberdade de imprensa, risco de censura, a proposta não vai prosperar. A Câmara não vai participar disso — garantiu João Paulo.

O deputado ressaltou, no entanto, que há uma preocupação na Casa com a regulamentação de profissões, incluindo a de jornalista. Ele disse que a proposta do governo foi apensada a outro projeto que já tramita na Casa, de autoria do deputado Celso Russomano (PP-SP), que cria a Ordem dos Jornalistas do Brasil. As duas propostas foram enviadas à Comissão do Trabalho. O próximo passo, agora, será a escolha de um relator para a matéria. Ele terá, regimentalmente, dez sessões para apresentar seu relatório, prazo que pode ser estendido.

CNN insists on 'hostile environment' training for Olympics reporters

CNN has insisted that staff covering the Olympic Games in Athens undergo extensive courses in hostile-environment training before leaving the news organisation's headquarters in Atlanta. Chris Cramer, CNN International's British-born managing director, believes that such precautions are necessary and will become increasingly common as journalism of all disciplines becomes more dangerous. "We are sending sports correspondents on hostile-environment courses to school them in the things that might happen in something as previously relatively risk-free as a sporting occasion," he says.
Source

Journalists Face Jail Time

dmittedly, the Valerie Plame affair is not the typical case involving a reporter's right to protect a source. Such cases are often about constraining the government from identifying and punishing a whistle-blower; this one involves an allegation of an illegal leak by a Bush administration official to punish a whistle-blower.

But no one should be fooled by the unusual circumstances here - the underlying principle remains democracy's need for a free press and the free press's need to operate with a minimum of government interference, and to protect confidential sources. Those principles are endangered by a federal judge's order this week holding a Time magazine reporter in contempt for refusing to reveal a source. The order should be reversed on appeal.

The reporter, Matthew Cooper, was subpoenaed as part of a criminal investigation into who leaked information to the columnist Robert Novak, telling him that Ms. Plame was an undercover C.I.A. officer. Ms. Plame, whose cover was blown by Mr. Novak in a column, is the wife of Joseph Wilson IV, the former diplomat who incurred the wrath of the Bush administration by contending in a New York Times Op-Ed essay that President Bush had relied on discredited intelligence when he claimed that Iraq had sought uranium from Africa.

Judge Thomas Hogan of Federal District Court in Washington has ordered that Mr. Cooper be jailed and that Time magazine pay a fine of $1,000 per day, although both penalties have been suspended while the decision is appealed. Other journalists are also being subpoenaed.

The law on the legal privilege of journalists to avoid being compelled to testify in a criminal inquiry is notoriously sketchy, but the courts have repeatedly recognized that reporters' work is entitled to a degree of protection. In Branzburg v. Hayes, a seminal 1972 Supreme Court decision, Justice Lewis Powell Jr. made it clear that reporters have some constitutional right to protect their confidential sources. Since then, the courts, and even the Justice Department's own internal regulations, have recognized that to preserve the important free-speech interests involved in news gathering, journalists should be subpoenaed in only the rarest of cases.

To unmask a confidential source as part of a criminal investigation, the government should have to show two things: that the information is central to the investigation and that it cannot be obtained any other way. In Mr. Cooper's case, the information could more than likely be provided under oath by government officials, including those implicated. But it is impossible for Mr. Cooper's lawyers to make this argument in any detail because Judge Hogan has allowed the special prosecutor to withhold what he has already uncovered.

Protecting confidential sources benefits society as a whole. People with knowledge of wrongdoing will be reluctant to speak if they know that a reporter's promise of confidentiality can be undone by a prosecutor with a hot tip.

CBS Newsman Mike Wallace Issued Summons

Wallace Wonders Why Anyone Thinks He's a Threat

NEW YORK — "60 Minutes" correspondent Mike Wallace, who was placed in handcuffs and taken to a police precinct in a dispute with city parking enforcement inspectors, says he wonders why anyone thought that he, at 86, was a threat. Wallace was released after being issued a summons citing him with disorderly conduct.

Wallace said the dispute began as he was leaving Luke's Restaurant late Tuesday after picking up a take-out order of meatloaf.

Wallace saw two Taxi and Limousine Commission inspectors interviewing his driver, who they said was double-parked outside the restaurant.



"I asked what's going on, and they kept telling me to get back in the car," Wallace said in an interview on WFAN's "Imus in the Morning" show. "Then they arrested me and took me to the 19th Precinct."

The TLC inspectors saw it another way, saying Wallace approached the inspectors and became "overly assertive and disrespectful," interfering with their ability to perform their duties.

The inspectors said they asked Wallace to step away from the car, but he refused, and lunged at one of the them, TLC spokesman Allan Fromberg told the New York Post.

"I'm an 86-year-old man," Wallace told the Post. "For whatever reason, this guy and his buddy were intent upon telling me that I was interfering with the execution of the law."

Fromberg told The Associated Press on Wednesday that the agency was investigating the incident but would not comment further.

A spokesman for Wallace confirmed the incident, but added no details.

Luigi Militello, manager of Luke's Restaurant, told WCBS that the inspectors "manhandled" Wallace.

Wallace has been with CBS since the 1950s and on its flagship "60 Minutes" newsmagazine since its inception in 1968.

He is due in court in October.

Copyright 2004 The Associated Press

also

Pegar o touro pelos cornos

LUÍS FILIPE BORGES

Estão aí os Jogos Olímpicos, uma competição cujo lema é “Mais rápido, mais alto, mais forte” – o mesmo em que Santana se inspirou para o seu percurso político. A propósito de líderes ambíguos, Bush deu uma calinada sublime: “Os nossos inimigos estão sempre a pensar em novas maneiras de nos fazer mal. Tal como nós.” Mas quem é que escreve os textos deste tipo? O nosso amigo de Rumsfeld, Paulo Portas? Mas, enfim, garanto que Bush, por vezes, é sensato e equilibrado. Nomeadamente enquanto dorme. Já Pinto da Costa terá despedido Del Neri alegando que este ainda se encontrava no período experimental do contrato. Espera lá: será que é isto que Jorge Sampaio pensa fazer ao primeiro-ministro? Entretanto, o nosso director quase foi colhido por um touro. Imaginem que, em vez de um homem magro de 32 anos, estava na tourada d’A Capital o director-tipo da imprensa lusa? Estávamos agora a raspar os restos dos cornos da besta. Refiro-me ao touro, claro.

terça-feira, agosto 10, 2004

Reporter From Time Is Held in Contempt in C.I.A. Leak Case

By ADAM LIPTAK

federal judge in Washington held a reporter for Time magazine in contempt of court yesterday and ordered him jailed for refusing to name the government officials who disclosed the identity of an undercover C.I.A. officer to him. The magazine was also held in contempt and ordered to pay a fine of $1,000 a day.

The judge, Thomas F. Hogan, chief judge of the Federal District Court in Washington, suspended both sanctions while Time and its reporter, Matthew Cooper, pursued an appeal. But the judge firmly rejected their contention that the First Amendment entitled journalists to refuse to answer a grand jury's questions about confidential sources.

"The information requested," Judge Hogan wrote, "is very limited, all available means of obtaining the information have been exhausted, the testimony sought is necessary for completion of the investigation, and the testimony sought is expected to constitute direct evidence of innocence or guilt."



The ruling came in an investigation into whether Bush administration members illegally disclosed the identity of a covert C.I.A. officer.

Legal experts said yesterday that the potential jailing of a journalist represented perhaps the most significant clash between federal prosecutors and the news media since the 1970's. The case is one of several making their way through federal courts in which journalists have been ordered to reveal their sources.

The subpoenas for Mr. Cooper and other journalists were issued by a special prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, trying to learn who told the syndicated columnist Robert Novak the identity of an undercover C.I.A. officer, Valerie Plame. Ms. Plame is married to Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former diplomat who asserted in a July 6, 2003, Op-Ed article in The New York Times that President Bush had relied on discredited intelligence when he said, in his 2003 State of the Union address, that Iraq had sought uranium from Africa.

On July 14, 2003, Mr. Novak wrote in his column that "two administration officials" told him that Ms. Plame "is an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction." Disclosing the identity of a covert officer for the Central Intelligence Agency officer can be a crime. Mr. Wilson has suggested that the White House might have leaked his wife's name as retribution for his criticism of the president.

It is not known whether Mr. Novak has received a subpoena or, if he did, how he responded. His lawyer, James Hamilton, declined to comment yesterday.

On July 17, 2003, Time reported that "some government officials" had disclosed Ms. Plame's identity to the magazine.

Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and a number of White House officials have been questioned in the inquiry, which Mr. Fitzgerald, the United States attorney in Chicago, took over after Attorney General John Ashcroft recused himself in December.

Like Mr. Cooper, Tim Russert, of the NBC program "Meet the Press," received a subpoena in May. In a decision dated July 20 but made public yesterday, Judge Hogan ordered Mr. Russert and Mr. Cooper to testify before the grand jury.

Mr. Cooper refused, leading to the contempt order yesterday. By contrast, Mr. Russert agreed to cooperate.

In a statement, NBC said Mr. Russert was interviewed under oath by prosecutors on Saturday. NBC said Mr. Russert had not been a recipient of a leak and was not asked questions that would have required him to disclose a confidential source.



"The questioning focused on what Russert said when Lewis (Scooter) Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, phoned him last summer," NBC reported Saturday. "Russert told the special prosecutor that at the time of the conversation he didn't know Plame's name or that she was a C.I.A. operative and did not provide that information to Libby."

A spokesman for Mr. Fitzgerald declined to comment on the investigation.

A Washington Post reporter, Glenn Kessler, was interviewed by prosecutors in June. The Post reported then that he had testified about conversations with Mr. Libby at Mr. Libby's request and that he did so without violating any promises to confidential sources.

A second Post reporter, Walter Pincus, said he received a subpoena yesterday. He referred questions about whether The Post would challenge the subpoena to the paper's lawyers. Neither The Post's in-house lawyers nor its outside lawyer, Seth P. Waxman, responded to messages seeking comment.

Legal experts, including some sympathetic to the arguments by Mr. Cooper and Time, said the appeals court was unlikely to reverse Judge Hogan's decision.

"I think we're going to have a head-on confrontation here," said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. "I think Matt Cooper is going to jail."

Time's managing editor, James Kelly, said the judge had given too little weight to the importance to the public of allowing reporters to pledge confidentiality to their sources in exchange for important information.

Several reporters, including James Risen and Jeff Gerth of The New York Times, have been ordered to reveal their confidential sources in a case brought by Wen Ho Lee. Mr. Lee, a scientist at the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory, was suspected of espionage in 1999 but ultimately pleaded guilty to a single felony count of mishandling secrets. Mr. Lee is suing the federal government, alleging violations of his privacy.



Later this month, Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, also of the Federal District Court in Washington, is scheduled to rule on a motion by Mr. Lee's lawyers to hold the reporters in contempt. Mr. Lee's case is a civil one, seeking money, while the Plame investigation is a criminal one.

In his ruling in the Plame matter last month, Judge Hogan said a federal Supreme Court decision from 1972 known as Branzburg required Mr. Cooper to disclose his sources.

Judge Hogan wrote, "Branzburg makes clear that neither the First Amendment nor the common law protect reporters from their obligations shared by all citizens to testify before the grand jury when called to do so."

Floyd Abrams, a lawyer for Time and Mr. Cooper, said the decision would make it harder for reporters like Mr. Cooper to do their jobs.

"The story was essentially critical of the administration for leaking information designed to focus the public away from what Ambassador Wilson was saying was true and toward personal things," Mr. Abrams said of the Time article. "That sort of story, about potential government misuse of power, is precisely the sort of thing that is impossible to do without the benefit of confidential sources."

segunda-feira, agosto 09, 2004

El Gobierno de Lula planea crear un consejo para fiscalizar a los periodistas

Encargado de "orientar, disciplinar y fiscalizar"

El Gobierno de Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva ha presentado en el Parlamento un proyecto de ley para controlar el ejercicio de la profesión periodística. El Consejo Federal de Periodismo (CFJ) estará encargado de "orientar, disciplinar y fiscalizar" el ejercicio de la profesión, que hasta ahora no padecía ningún control. Para ello, los periodistas deberán inscribirse como tales, recibirán una cartilla y en ella podrán hacerse anotaciones marginales de su actividad. La decisión viene acompañada de una fuerte polémica y ha dividido a las asociaciones del sector.

La idea de regular la profesión periodística quizás hubiese sido menos polémica en Brasil si el presidente Lula no hubiese demostrado públicamente, desde que llegó al poder, una cierta insatisfacción con los medios de comunicación, que, según él, prefieren publicar noticias negativas a positivas. Lula asegura que la opinión pública "tiene sed de noticias buenas".

Una de las preocupaciones del Gobierno de Lula ha sido la divulgación, por parte de la prensa, de algunos presuntos escándalos de corrupción de miembros del Ejecutivo: desde el ministro de la Casa Civil, José Dirceo, hasta el presidente del Banco Central, Henrique Meirelles. "En Brasil estamos asistiendo al hecho de que se condene a personas por los titulares de los periódicos", manifestó el presidente brasileño.
En opinión del jefe de Comunicación y Gestión Estratégica del gobierno, Luiz Gushiken, la creación del organismo buscaría "proteger a los periodistas y a la sociedad".

Mientras, el ministro brasileño de Justicia, Marcio Thomaz Bastos, manifestó: "Soy favorable a la creación del Consejo, que no considero un instrumento de censura ni de restricción a la prensa, sino disciplinante de la profesión".

"Estalinista"

La Federación Nacional de Periodistas de Brasil apoya la creación del organismo, pero la Asociación Brasileña de Prensa se opone.

Igualmente lo rechazan un grupo de periodistas, intelectuales y políticos, algunos de ellos pertenecientes al Partido de los Trabajadores (PT) del propio Lula da Silva.

"En nombre de una buena intención, podemos estar dando el primer paso para la tragedia de la censura", opinó Cristovam Buarque, ex ministro de Educación de Lula y senador del PT.
Un aliado de Lula, el senador y ex presidente José Sarney, declaró: "Como presidente del Congreso considero que la libertad de prensa debe ser respetada siempre. Excesos todos cometemos. La prensa también puede cometerlos, pero hasta los excesos de la prensa el tiempo los corrige".

Entre las organizaciones que intervinieron en la polémica está la Asociación de Magistrados de Brasil, para la cual "los abusos y el mal periodismo deben ser corregidos por la Justicia (...) sin necesidad de un órgano con poderes para cercenar la libertar de expresión y de cancelar licencias profesionales".

El diario brasileño Folha de Sao Paulo dijo que el proyecto refleja la tendencia "estalinista" del gobierno de Lula.

El proyecto se presentó en el congreso en momentos en que el gobernador del Banco Central de Brasil, Henrique Meirelles, enfrenta presiones para que dimita a partir de denuncias de prensa sobre irregularidades tributarias.

domingo, agosto 08, 2004

Family Matters

QUESTIONS FOR VICTORIA GOTTI



Your new reality show, ''Growing Up Gotti,'' follows your travails as a single mother trying to raise three strapping teenage boys in a mansion on Long Island.

People look at my home and assume it's an inheritance from Dad, mob money. But guess what? No. Not five cents. I built my home, and I made it the neighborhood hangout because I would rather my kids be here than at someone else's house.

Italian mothers and Jewish mothers are often characterized as overly possessive.

And I have both in my bloodlines. My mother is one-fourth Russian-Jewish. The guilt, forget it. I have so much guilt.

Judging from the show, your sons never leave the house.

They're not allowed to go on sleepovers, but their friends can always sleep at my house. Anyone who knows me will tell you that I am the den mother for all the kids in the neighborhood. For spring break, I took nine kids to Miami. It's an episode on my show.

Do you not let them stay at other people's houses because you worry about them being kidnapped? Your father, John Gotti, certainly had his share of enemies.

It's not that. When I was growing up, my father never let us go on sleepovers. I used to say, ''You don't trust me.'' He would say: ''I trust you. It's the other people I don't trust.''

Do your sons ever see their father, Carmine Agnello, who is serving time for racketeering, arson and tax fraud?

He's somewhere in Ohio. He's not in their lives as much as I wish he would be. I encourage it. We are divorced.

And your brother, John A. Gotti, is also serving time. He was just indicted for planning the murder of Curtis Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels.

It's very painful, and my heart is with John. My children see my brother often, every two or three months. My brother was a very big force in their lives.

Do you worry about keeping the children away from lives of crime?

No. My kids are in the fanciest prep schools on Long Island, and they are honor students. I was always a stickler for education with my kids.

Where were you educated?

I was a nerd. When I was 7 years old, the hangout for me was the Brooklyn Public Library. I graduated from St. John's University. I started law school there, but in the 11th hour I realized I didn't want to be a lawyer. I was too shy.

Why do you write a gossip column for Star magazine, which seems very far from a legal career?

I am the executive editor at large. And the legal department at Star is second to none.

How can you make peace with the legacy of your father, a convicted murderer?

My dad was my hero. He was my biggest cheerleader. People can say whatever they want about my dad, but at the end of the day, that man was passionate about his family. He loved barbecuing.He loved throwing the grandkids in the car and taking them out shopping.



Did you see him all those years when he was in solitary confinement at the federal penitentiary in Marion, Ill.?

It traumatized me to watch him suffer like he did, having cancer in prison. We were allowed to see him through glass, through a partition. We couldn't touch him.

Wasn't he eventually moved to a prison hospital?

It broke my heart. His arms were tied to the bed. He was trapped like an animal. I used to love to visit him, even toward the end when he was in a coma. I think I suffer from the Scarlett O'Hara syndrome.

Which syndrome is that?

Tomorrow, there's always tomorrow. Forget that you missed out today.

Interview by DEBORAH SOLOMON

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

sábado, agosto 07, 2004

Os portugueses no Iraque

"No avião vão também três mil cervejas e Vinho do Porto oferecidos por empresas ao contingente português. Seguem também quatro fadistas para uma noite de fado no Iraque, assim como bacalhau".

in Correio da Manhã

quinta-feira, agosto 05, 2004

The Case Against George W. Bush



by Ron Reagan

It may have been the guy in the hood teetering on the stool, electrodes clamped to his genitals. Or smirking Lynndie England and her leash. Maybe it was the smarmy memos tapped out by soft-fingered lawyers itching to justify such barbarism. The grudging, lunatic retreat of the neocons from their long-standing assertion that Saddam was in cahoots with Osama didn't hurt. Even the Enron audiotapes and their celebration of craven sociopathy likely played a part. As a result of all these displays and countless smaller ones, you could feel, a couple of months back, as summer spread across the country, the ground shifting beneath your feet. Not unlike that scene in The Day After Tomorrow, then in theaters, in which the giant ice shelf splits asunder, this was more a paradigm shift than anything strictly tectonic. No cataclysmic ice age, admittedly, yet something was in the air, and people were inhaling deeply. I began to get calls from friends whose parents had always voted Republican, "but not this time." There was the staid Zbigniew Brzezinski on the staid NewsHour with Jim Lehrer sneering at the "Orwellian language" flowing out of the Pentagon. Word spread through the usual channels that old hands from the days of Bush the Elder were quietly (but not too quietly) appalled by his son's misadventure in Iraq. Suddenly, everywhere you went, a surprising number of folks seemed to have had just about enough of what the Bush administration was dishing out. A fresh age appeared on the horizon, accompanied by the sound of scales falling from people's eyes. It felt something like a demonstration of that highest of American prerogatives and the most deeply cherished American freedom: dissent.Oddly, even my father's funeral contributed. Throughout that long, stately, overtelevised week in early June, items would appear in the newspaper discussing the Republicans' eagerness to capitalize (subtly, tastefully) on the outpouring of affection for my father and turn it to Bush's advantage for the fall election. The familiar "Heir to Reagan" puffballs were reinflated and loosed over the proceedings like (subtle, tasteful) Mylar balloons. Predictably, this backfired. People were treated to a side-by-side comparison—Ronald W. Reagan versus George W. Bush—and it's no surprise who suffered for it. Misty-eyed with nostalgia, people set aside old political gripes for a few days and remembered what friend and foe always conceded to Ronald Reagan: He was damned impressive in the role of leader of the free world. A sign in the crowd, spotted during the slow roll to the Capitol rotunda, seemed to sum up the mood—a portrait of my father and the words NOW THERE WAS A PRESIDENT.

The comparison underscored something important. And the guy on the stool, Lynndie, and her grinning cohorts, they brought the word: The Bush administration can't be trusted. The parade of Bush officials before various commissions and committees—Paul Wolfowitz, who couldn't quite remember how many young Americans had been sacrificed on the altar of his ideology; John Ashcroft, lip quivering as, for a delicious, fleeting moment, it looked as if Senator Joe Biden might just come over the table at him—these were a continuing reminder. The Enron creeps, too—a reminder of how certain environments and particular habits of mind can erode common decency. People noticed. A tipping point had been reached. The issue of credibility was back on the table. The L-word was in circulation. Not the tired old bromide liberal. That's so 1988. No, this time something much more potent: liar.Politicians will stretch the truth. They'll exaggerate their accomplishments, paper over their gaffes. Spin has long been the lingua franca of the political realm. But George W. Bush and his administration have taken "normal" mendacity to a startling new level far beyond lies of convenience. On top of the usual massaging of public perception, they traffic in big lies, indulge in any number of symptomatic small lies, and, ultimately, have come to embody dishonesty itself. They are a lie. And people, finally, have started catching on. None of this, needless to say, guarantees Bush a one-term presidency. The far-right wing of the country—nearly one third of us by some estimates—continues to regard all who refuse to drink the Kool-Aid (liberals, rationalists, Europeans, et cetera) as agents of Satan. Bush could show up on video canoodling with Paris Hilton and still bank their vote. Right-wing talking heads continue painting anyone who fails to genuflect deeply enough as a "hater," and therefore a nut job, probably a crypto-Islamist car bomber. But these protestations have taken on a hysterical, almost comically desperate tone. It's one thing to get trashed by Michael Moore. But when Nobel laureates, a vast majority of the scientific community, and a host of current and former diplomats, intelligence operatives, and military officials line up against you, it becomes increasingly difficult to characterize the opposition as fringe wackos.Does anyone really favor an administration that so shamelessly lies? One that so tenaciously clings to secrecy, not to protect the American people, but to protect itself? That so willfully misrepresents its true aims and so knowingly misleads the people from whom it derives its power? I simply cannot think so. And to come to the same conclusion does not make you guilty of swallowing some liberal critique of the Bush presidency, because that's not what this is. This is the critique of a person who thinks that lying at the top levels of his government is abhorrent. Call it the honest guy's critique of George W. Bush.

THE MOST EGREGIOUS EXAMPLES OF distortion and misdirection—which the administration even now cannot bring itself to repudiate—involve our putative "War on Terror" and our subsequent foray into Iraq. During his campaign for the presidency, Mr. Bush pledged a more "humble" foreign policy. "I would take the use of force very seriously," he said. "I would be guarded in my approach." Other countries would resent us "if we're an arrogant nation." He sniffed at the notion of "nation building." "Our military is meant to fight and win wars. . . . And when it gets overextended, morale drops." International cooperation and consensus building would be the cornerstone of a Bush administration's approach to the larger world. Given candidate Bush's remarks, it was hard to imagine him, as president, flipping a stiff middle finger at the world and charging off adventuring in the Middle East.But didn't 9/11 reshuffle the deck, changing everything? Didn't Mr. Bush, on September 12, 2001, awaken to the fresh realization that bad guys in charge of Islamic nations constitute an entirely new and grave threat to us and have to be ruthlessly confronted lest they threaten the American homeland again? Wasn't Saddam Hussein rushed to the front of the line because he was complicit with the hijackers and in some measure responsible for the atrocities in Washington, D. C., and at the tip of Manhattan?Well, no.As Bush's former Treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill, and his onetime "terror czar," Richard A. Clarke, have made clear, the president, with the enthusiastic encouragement of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, was contemplating action against Iraq from day one. "From the start, we were building the case against Hussein and looking at how we could take him out," O'Neill said. All they needed was an excuse. Clarke got the same impression from within the White House. Afghanistan had to be dealt with first; that's where the actual perpetrators were, after all. But the Taliban was a mere appetizer; Saddam was the entrée. (Or who knows? The soup course?) It was simply a matter of convincing the American public (and our representatives) that war was justified.The real—but elusive—prime mover behind the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden, was quickly relegated to a back burner (a staff member at Fox News—the cable-TV outlet of the Bush White House—told me a year ago that mere mention of bin Laden's name was forbidden within the company, lest we be reminded that the actual bad guy remained at large) while Saddam's Iraq became International Enemy Number One. Just like that, a country whose economy had been reduced to shambles by international sanctions, whose military was less than half the size it had been when the U. S. Army rolled over it during the first Gulf war, that had extensive no-flight zones imposed on it in the north and south as well as constant aerial and satellite surveillance, and whose lethal weapons and capacity to produce such weapons had been destroyed or seriously degraded by UN inspection teams became, in Mr. Bush's words, "a threat of unique urgency" to the most powerful nation on earth.Fanciful but terrifying scenarios were introduced: Unmanned aircraft, drones, had been built for missions targeting the U. S., Bush told the nation. "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice deadpanned to CNN. And, Bush maintained, "Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists." We "know" Iraq possesses such weapons, Rumsfeld and Vice-President Cheney assured us. We even "know" where they are hidden. After several months of this mumbo jumbo, 70 percent of Americans had embraced the fantasy that Saddam destroyed the World Trade Center.

ALL THESE ASSERTIONS have proved to be baseless and, we've since discovered, were regarded with skepticism by experts at the time they were made. But contrary opinions were derided, ignored, or covered up in the rush to war. Even as of this writing, Dick Cheney clings to his mad assertion that Saddam was somehow at the nexus of a worldwide terror network.And then there was Abu Ghraib. Our "war president" may have been justified in his assumption that Americans are a warrior people. He pushed the envelope in thinking we'd be content as an occupying power, but he was sadly mistaken if he thought that ordinary Americans would tolerate an image of themselves as torturers. To be fair, the torture was meant to be secret. So were the memos justifying such treatment that had floated around the White House, Pentagon, and Justice Department for more than a year before the first photos came to light. The neocons no doubt appreciate that few of us have the stones to practice the New Warfare. Could you slip a pair of women's panties over the head of a naked, cowering stranger while forcing him to masturbate? What would you say while sodomizing him with a toilet plunger? Is keeping someone awake till he hallucinates inhumane treatment or merely "sleep management"? Most of us know the answers to these questions, so it was incumbent upon the administration to pretend that Abu Ghraib was an aberration, not policy. Investigations, we were assured, were already under way; relevant bureaucracies would offer unstinting cooperation; the handful of miscreants would be sternly disciplined. After all, they didn't "represent the best of what America's all about." As anyone who'd watched the proceedings of the 9/11 Commission could have predicted, what followed was the usual administration strategy of stonewalling, obstruction, and obfuscation. The appointment of investigators was stalled; documents were withheld, including the full report by Major General Antonio Taguba, who headed the Army's primary investigation into the abuses at Abu Ghraib. A favorite moment for many featured John McCain growing apoplectic as Donald Rumsfeld and an entire tableful of army brass proved unable to answer the simple question Who was in charge at Abu Ghraib?The Bush administration no doubt had its real reasons for invading and occupying Iraq. They've simply chosen not to share them with the American public. They sought justification for ignoring the Geneva Convention and other statutes prohibiting torture and inhumane treatment of prisoners but were loath to acknowledge as much. They may have ideas worth discussing, but they don't welcome the rest of us in the conversation. They don't trust us because they don't dare expose their true agendas to the light of day. There is a surreal quality to all this: Occupation is liberation; Iraq is sovereign, but we're in control; Saddam is in Iraqi custody, but we've got him; we'll get out as soon as an elected Iraqi government asks us, but we'll be there for years to come. Which is what we counted on in the first place, only with rose petals and easy coochie.This Möbius reality finds its domestic analogue in the perversely cynical "Clear Skies" and "Healthy Forests" sloganeering at Bush's EPA and in the administration's irresponsible tax cutting and other fiscal shenanigans. But the Bush administration has always worn strangely tinted shades, and you wonder to what extent Mr. Bush himself lives in a world of his own imagining.And chances are your America and George W. Bush's America are not the same place. If you are dead center on the earning scale in real-world twenty-first-century America, you make a bit less than $32,000 a year, and $32,000 is not a sum that Mr. Bush has ever associated with getting by in his world. Bush, who has always managed to fail upwards in his various careers, has never had a job the way you have a job—where not showing up one morning gets you fired, costing you your health benefits. He may find it difficult to relate personally to any of the nearly two million citizens who've lost their jobs under his administration, the first administration since Herbert Hoover's to post a net loss of jobs. Mr. Bush has never had to worry that he couldn't afford the best available health care for his children. For him, forty-three million people without health insurance may be no more than a politically inconvenient abstraction. When Mr. Bush talks about the economy, he is not talking about your economy. His economy is filled with pals called Kenny-boy who fly around in their own airplanes. In Bush's economy, his world, friends relocate offshore to avoid paying taxes. Taxes are for chumps like you. You are not a friend. You're the help. When the party Mr. Bush is hosting in his world ends, you'll be left picking shrimp toast out of the carpet.

ALL ADMINISTRATIONS WILL DISSEMBLE, distort, or outright lie when their backs are against the wall, when honesty begins to look like political suicide. But this administration seems to lie reflexively, as if it were simply the easiest option for busy folks with a lot on their minds. While the big lies are more damning and of immeasurably greater import to the nation, it is the small, unnecessary prevarications that may be diagnostic. Who lies when they don't have to? When the simple truth, though perhaps embarrassing in the short run, is nevertheless in one's long-term self-interest? Why would a president whose calling card is his alleged rock-solid integrity waste his chief asset for penny-ante stakes? Habit, perhaps. Or an inability to admit even small mistakes.Mr. Bush's tendency to meander beyond the bounds of truth was evident during the 2000 campaign but was largely ignored by the mainstream media. His untruths simply didn't fit the agreed-upon narrative. While generally acknowledged to be lacking in experience, depth, and other qualifications typically considered useful in a leader of the free world, Bush was portrayed as a decent fellow nonetheless, one whose straightforwardness was a given. None of that "what the meaning of is is" business for him. And, God knows, no furtive, taxpayer-funded fellatio sessions with the interns. Al Gore, on the other hand, was depicted as a dubious self-reinventor, stained like a certain blue dress by Bill Clinton's prurient transgressions. He would spend valuable weeks explaining away statements—"I invented the Internet"—that he never made in the first place. All this left the coast pretty clear for Bush.Scenario typical of the 2000 campaign: While debating Al Gore, Bush tells two obvious—if not exactly earth-shattering—lies and is not challenged. First, he claims to have supported a patient's bill of rights while governor of Texas. This is untrue. He, in fact, vigorously resisted such a measure, only reluctantly bowing to political reality and allowing it to become law without his signature. Second, he announces that Gore has outspent him during the campaign. The opposite is true: Bush has outspent Gore. These misstatements are briefly acknowledged in major press outlets, which then quickly return to the more germane issues of Gore's pancake makeup and whether a certain feminist author has counseled him to be more of an "alpha male." Having gotten away with such witless falsities, perhaps Mr. Bush and his team felt somehow above day-to-day truth. In any case, once ensconced in the White House, they picked up where they left off.

IN THE IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH and confusion of 9/11, Bush, who on that day was in Sarasota, Florida, conducting an emergency reading of "The Pet Goat," was whisked off to Nebraska aboard Air Force One. While this may have been entirely sensible under the chaotic circumstances—for all anyone knew at the time, Washington might still have been under attack—the appearance was, shall we say, less than gallant. So a story was concocted: There had been a threat to Air Force One that necessitated the evasive maneuver. Bush's chief political advisor, Karl Rove, cited "specific" and "credible" evidence to that effect. The story quickly unraveled. In truth, there was no such threat.Then there was Bush's now infamous photo-op landing aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln and his subsequent speech in front of a large banner emblazoned MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. The banner, which loomed in the background as Bush addressed the crew, became problematic as it grew clear that the mission in Iraq—whatever that may have been—was far from accomplished. "Major combat operations," as Bush put it, may have technically ended, but young Americans were still dying almost daily. So the White House dealt with the questionable banner in a manner befitting a president pledged to "responsibility and accountability": It blamed the sailors. No surprise, a bit of digging by journalists revealed the banner and its premature triumphalism to be the work of the White House communications office.More serious by an order of magnitude was the administration's dishonesty concerning pre-9/11 terror warnings. As questions first arose about the country's lack of preparedness in the face of terrorist assault, Condoleezza Rice was dispatched to the pundit arenas to assure the nation that "no one could have imagined terrorists using aircraft as weapons." In fact, terrorism experts had warned repeatedly of just such a calamity. In June 2001, CIA director George Tenet sent Rice an intelligence report warning that "it is highly likely that a significant Al Qaeda attack is in the near future, within several weeks." Two intelligence briefings given to Bush in the summer of 2001 specifically connected Al Qaeda to the imminent danger of hijacked planes being used as weapons. According to The New York Times, after the second of these briefings, titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside United States," was delivered to the president at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, in August, Bush "broke off from work early and spent most of the day fishing." This was the briefing Dr. Rice dismissed as "historical" in her testimony before the 9/11 Commission.What's odd is that none of these lies were worth the breath expended in the telling. If only for self-serving political reasons, honesty was the way to go. The flight of Air Force One could easily have been explained in terms of security precautions taken in the confusion of momentous events. As for the carrier landing, someone should have fallen on his or her sword at the first hint of trouble: We told the president he needed to do it; he likes that stuff and was gung-ho; we figured, What the hell?; it was a mistake. The banner? We thought the sailors would appreciate it. In retrospect, also a mistake. Yup, we sure feel dumb now. Owning up to the 9/11 warnings would have entailed more than simple embarrassment. But done forthrightly and immediately, an honest reckoning would have earned the Bush team some respect once the dust settled. Instead, by needlessly tap-dancing, Bush's White House squandered vital credibility, turning even relatively minor gaffes into telling examples of its tendency to distort and evade the truth. But image is everything in this White House, and the image of George Bush as a noble and infallible warrior in the service of his nation must be fanatically maintained, because behind the image lies . . . nothing? As Jonathan Alter of Newsweek has pointed out, Bush has "never fully inhabited" the presidency. Bush apologists can smilingly excuse his malopropisms and vagueness as the plainspokenness of a man of action, but watching Bush flounder when attempting to communicate extemporaneously, one is left with the impression that he is ineloquent not because he can't speak but because he doesn't bother to think.

GEORGE W. BUSH PROMISED to "change the tone in Washington" and ran for office as a moderate, a "compassionate conservative," in the focus-group-tested sloganeering of his campaign. Yet he has governed from the right wing of his already conservative party, assiduously tending a "base" that includes, along with the expected Fortune 500 fat cats, fiscal evangelicals who talk openly of doing away with Social Security and Medicare, of shrinking government to the size where they can, in tax radical Grover Norquist's phrase, "drown it in the bathtub." That base also encompasses a healthy share of anti-choice zealots, homophobic bigots, and assorted purveyors of junk science. Bush has tossed bones to all of them—"partial birth" abortion legislation, the promise of a constitutional amendment banning marriage between homosexuals, federal roadblocks to embryonic-stem-cell research, even comments suggesting presidential doubts about Darwinian evolution. It's not that Mr. Bush necessarily shares their worldview; indeed, it's unclear whether he embraces any coherent philosophy. But this president, who vowed to eschew politics in favor of sound policy, panders nonetheless in the interest of political gain. As John DiIulio, Bush's former head of the Office of Community and Faith-Based Initiatives, once told this magazine, "What you've got is everything—and I mean everything—being run by the political arm."This was not what the American electorate opted for when, in 2000, by a slim but decisive margin of more than half a million votes, they chose . . . the other guy. Bush has never had a mandate. Surveys indicate broad public dissatisfaction with his domestic priorities. How many people would have voted for Mr. Bush in the first place had they understood his eagerness to pass on crushing debt to our children or seen his true colors regarding global warming and the environment? Even after 9/11, were people really looking to be dragged into an optional war under false pretenses?If ever there was a time for uniting and not dividing, this is it. Instead, Mr. Bush governs as if by divine right, seeming to actually believe that a wise God wants him in the White House and that by constantly evoking the horrible memory of September 11, 2001, he can keep public anxiety stirred up enough to carry him to another term.

UNDERSTANDABLY, SOME SUPPORTERS of Mr. Bush's will believe I harbor a personal vendetta against the man, some seething resentment. One conservative commentator, based on earlier remarks I've made, has already discerned "jealousy" on my part; after all, Bush, the son of a former president, now occupies that office himself, while I, most assuredly, will not. Truth be told, I have no personal feelings for Bush at all. I hardly know him, having met him only twice, briefly and uneventfully—once during my father's presidency and once during my father's funeral. I'll acknowledge occasional annoyance at the pretense that he's somehow a clone of my father, but far from threatening, I see this more as silly and pathetic. My father, acting roles excepted, never pretended to be anyone but himself. His Republican party, furthermore, seems a far cry from the current model, with its cringing obeisance to the religious Right and its kill-anything-that-moves attack instincts. Believe it or not, I don't look in the mirror every morning and see my father looming over my shoulder. I write and speak as nothing more or less than an American citizen, one who is plenty angry about the direction our country is being dragged by the current administration. We have reached a critical juncture in our nation's history, one ripe with both danger and possibility. We need leadership with the wisdom to prudently confront those dangers and the imagination to boldly grasp the possibilities. Beyond issues of fiscal irresponsibility and ill-advised militarism, there is a question of trust. George W. Bush and his allies don't trust you and me. Why on earth, then, should we trust them?Fortunately, we still live in a democratic republic. The Bush team cannot expect a cabal of right-wing justices to once again deliver the White House. Come November 2, we will have a choice: We can embrace a lie, or we can restore a measure of integrity to our government. We can choose, as a bumper sticker I spotted in Seattle put it, SOMEONE ELSE FOR PRESIDENT.

ESQUIRE - September 2004, Volume 142, Issue 3