Ex-CBS reporter delivers some 'Bad News'

ANTHONY VIOLANTI The Buffalo News

Tom Fenton symbolized the once-grand stature of CBS News as a foreign correspondent. Now Fenton has become something else to television news: a voracious critic. His book, "Bad News," comes out Tuesday and is an insider's condemnation of the declining standards and bottom-line mentality of the news business.

"I wrote this book out of conviction," Fenton said in a telephone interview from his home in London. "I don't have a lot of illusions it's going to change things."

Fenton does not spare his former employer for what he terms CBS' cutbacks in foreign news. He tells how in 1996 he was setting up an interview with Osama bin Laden.

"Our bosses saw him as an obscure Arab of no interest to our viewers," Fenton writes. "More concerned with saving dollars than pursuing the story, they killed the project."

CBS, which claims it is spending millions to cover the war in Iraq and other foreign news, is an easy target. Dan Rather, after the flawed reporting on President Bush's National Guard service, is in his final days as anchor. The nightly newscast has struggled with ratings and credibility.

Fenton, though, seemed to be the last person anyone expected to knock CBS.

"Tom is the embodiment of the wise and worldly CBS News correspondent," Andrew Hayward, president of CBS News, said in December when Fenton, 74, retired after 34 years of service. "He's a true gentleman," Hayward added.

That was then.

"Now I've become slightly radioactive as far as some of the CBS hierarchy is concerned," Fenton said. "I started the book last year before all this happened and I'm sorry it's coming out when everybody is jumping on CBS. The timing is coincidental."

Bush's National Guard story on "60 Minutes," was symbolic of the problems in network news, Fenton believes. He wrote, "the networks can no longer vouch for much of what they put on the air. Just as Dan Rather did ... with those phony Bush memos ... they take it on trust."

But, "Dan was let down by the people who served him," Fenton said in the interview. "He's over-used. He was working on four or five things that day and didn't get involved in the story to the extent he should have.

"That being said, CBS management and Dan himself should have been a little more wary about putting a story of that nature on the air in the midst of an election campaign without being damn sure they had everything nailed down."

Bob Schieffer is scheduled to take Rather's anchor chair in March on a temporary basis.

"I think he will help," Fenton said. "He's a respected person. I can't think of any reason why his credibility will be challenged."

No matter who sits behind the anchor desk, it's impossible for the networks to provide depth on a nightly basis, Fenton said, when the news of the world is "dumbed down" into 18 minutes at the dinner hour.

"Once you get halfway through the CBS Evening News, the rest of it you can turn off," he added. "There's nothing there you need to know. It's an attempt to entertain people and pump up ratings. If I want entertainment, I'll watch "The Daily Show.'"

The network battles took a toll on Fenton, and may have caused him not to battle hard enough to get bin Laden on the air.

"Perhaps I could have fought harder," he said. "But eventually, you really do get beaten down. Reporters work in the field. We can propose. The editors and producers dispose. There's no way you can force them to put something on the air."

In writing the book, Fenton applied the same standards as his news coverage, which earned him four Emmys. He was part of the old CBS guard, a foreign correspondent who spoke with insight and not only covered a country, but lived there.

"I tried to write the book as a reporter," Fenton said. "There was no point in pulling punches."

For a brief period after 9/11, Fenton said there was a resurgence of foreign news reporting, "but it didn't last," Fenton said.

Network news has left its mark on the nation.

"We have literally dumbed down our public," Fenton said. "We have trained them to accept the coverage they're getting. We so rarely explain what's going on, there's no context. So, people of course, aren't interested. They have no idea what's going on."

And what about those who say Fenton belongs to another time with other news standards.

"I'd say this is now and it's a different world," Fenton said. "It's a world in which we have an enemy, which our government tells us is trying to acquire chemical and biological weapons and waiting to pull off another spectacular attack. We have a duty to inform the public."

Regardless of cost.

Former GI Claims Role in Goering's Death

Bob Pool Los Angeles Times

It was one of the most baffling mysteries of the World War II era.

How did convicted war criminal Hermann Goering manage to poison himself as U.S. soldiers prepared to hang him?

A dozen competing theories have swirled for nearly half a century about how the onetime Nazi second in command was able to commit suicide despite around-the-clock surveillance of his military prison cell.

Some historians assert that Goering had the cyanide poison with him throughout his 11-month war crimes trial in Nuremberg, Germany. The poison was hidden under a gold dental crown, or in a hollowed-out tooth, or beneath slicked-back hair, or inserted in his navel or his rectum, various accounts have theorized.

Others contend that someone sneaked poison to him shortly before his death — maybe a U.S. Army officer Goering bribed with a watch, or the German doctor who regularly checked on him, or a Nazi SS officer who passed it to him in a bar of GI soap, or his wife, Emmy, who slipped it from her mouth to his in "a kiss of death" on their last visit.

They're all wrong, according to Herbert Lee Stivers.

"I gave it to him," said the retired sheet-metal worker from Hesperia.

Stivers, 78, said he had kept the secret of his role in Goering's death for nearly 60 years, fearful that he could face charges by the U.S. military. Now, at the urging of his daughter, he has decided to go public, he said.

Whether Stivers is telling the truth is impossible to know. Other key players in Goering's case are dead.

An Army spokeswoman at the Pentagon declined to comment on Stivers' statement. But military records do show that Stivers was a guard at the Nuremberg trials.

And some historians contacted by The Times believe his story has a ring of truth. At the very least, they say, Stivers' account underlines the continuing puzzle of how one of the 20th century's worst criminals evaded final justice.

"It doesn't sound like something made up," Cornelius Schnauber, a USC professor who is director of the Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies, said of Stivers' tale.

"It sounds even more believable than the common story about the poison being in the dental crown."

Schnauber said he believes that someone smuggled in the poison ampul that Goering bit into two hours before he was to be hanged. "It could have been this soldier," he said.

According to Stivers, Goering escaped the hangman because of a teenager's puppy love.

A 19-year-old Army private when he was assigned guard duty at Nuremberg, Stivers said he was only trying to impress a local girl he had met on the street when he agreed to take "medicine" to a supposedly ailing Goering.

Stivers was a member of the 1st Infantry Division's 26th Regiment, whose Company D was assigned to serve as the trial's honor guard. The white-helmeted guards escorted the 22 Nazi defendants in and out of the Palace of Justice courtroom and stood at parade rest behind them during court sessions.

It was boring, Stivers said.

"We spent two hours on and four hours off. They wanted us to be alert and look neat. People had come from all over the world to see the trial," he recalled.

"We didn't carry guns. We had short billy clubs that we held behind our backs. That helped us hold our hands behind us. You'd get pretty tired standing at parade rest."

The guards were free to chat with the prisoners and even collect their autographs.

"Goering was a very pleasant guy. He spoke pretty good English. We'd talk about sports, ballgames. He was a flier, and we talked about Lindbergh," Stivers said. Charles Lindbergh, the first man to fly nonstop across the Atlantic, had received a medal from Goering before World War II.

Between court sessions, there were few diversions for the guards. "Off-hours, we had company clubs," Stivers said. "That was the only recreation, except for Frauleins."

Stivers had a German girlfriend — an 18-year-old named Hildegarde Bruner — to whom he gave candy bars, peanuts and cigarettes he got from the military commissary so she and her mother could trade them for food on the black market.

But he had an eye for pretty girls. And one day outside a hotel housing a military officers' club, Stivers said, he was approached by a flirtatious, dark-haired beauty who said her name was Mona.

"She asked me what I did, and I told her I was a guard. She said, 'Do you get to see all the prisoners?' 'Every day,' I said. She said, 'You don't look like a guard.' I said, 'I can prove it.' I'd just gotten an autograph from [defendant] Baldur von Schirach, and I showed it to her.

"She said, 'Oh, can I have that?' and I said sure. The next day I guarded Goering and got his autograph and handed that to her. She told me that she had a friend she wanted me to meet. The following day we went to his house."

There, Stivers said he was introduced to two men who called themselves Erich and Mathias. They told him that Goering was "a very sick man" who wasn't being given the medicine he needed in prison.

Twice, Stivers said, he took notes hidden by Erich in a fountain pen to Goering. The third time, Erich put a capsule in the pen for him to take to the Nazi.

"He said it was medication, and that if it worked and Goering felt better, they'd send him some more," Stivers said. "He said they'd give him a couple of weeks and that Mona would tell me if they wanted to send him more medicine."

After delivering the "medicine" to Goering, Stivers said, he returned the pen to the young woman.

"I never saw Mona again. I guess she used me," Stivers said. "I wasn't thinking of suicide when I took it to Goering. He was never in a bad frame of mind. He didn't seem suicidal. I would have never knowingly taken something in that I thought was going to be used to help someone cheat the gallows."

But two weeks later — Oct. 15, 1946 — Goering did just that. He left a suicide note bragging that he'd had the cyanide in his possession all along. A subsequent search of Goering's belongings locked in a prison storeroom uncovered another cyanide vial — standard-issue for Nazi leaders — hidden in luggage.

Stivers was shaken by Goering's suicide. Guards who were on duty at the time of the death were grilled by Army investigators. But Stivers and other honor guard team members were asked only if they had seen anything suspicious.

The Army's investigation concluded that Goering had the cyanide all along. The report pointed to Goering's note and concluded that the vial was "secreted in the cavity of the umbilical" and at other times "in his alimentary tract" and behind the rim of his cell toilet.

Some historians and others have long been skeptical of the official account. Some Jewish leaders have wondered if Goering escaped the hangman with help from a sympathetic American.

In his 1984 book "The Mystery of Hermann Goering's Suicide," the late author Ben Swearingen brushed aside the Army's conclusion as well as numerous alternative theories.

Swearingen speculated that Army Lt. Jack Wheelis, who had a key to the prison storeroom, had allowed Goering to visit the storage area shortly before his death to retrieve the poison pill from his luggage. Wheelis — who died in 1954 — had previously been given a wristwatch and other personal items by Goering.

Swearingen did not explain how the closely watched Goering might have gotten to the storeroom. But his research does suggest how the Nazi might have briefly hidden something like the "medicine" Stivers said he delivered.

Goering, who was obese, had lost a lot of weight in prison. By the end of the trial, he was draped in sagging skin that could have easily concealed the capsule. And during the two weeks before his suicide, Goering had passed up opportunities to bathe in a heavily guarded shower area where a concealed vial might have been spotted.

Stivers said he has been haunted by his actions with the fountain pen for 58 years.

He said he has pondered the various theories on Goering's poisoning in an unsuccessful search for a plausible explanation that would ease his sense of guilt.

"I felt very bad after his suicide. I had a funny feeling; I didn't think there was any way he could have hidden it on his body," he said.

The Army's explanation never rang true to him, Stivers said, noting that Goering "was there over a year — why would he wait all that time if he had the cyanide?"

It was daughter Linda Dadey who urged him to reveal his role. He disclosed the fountain pen story to her about 15 years ago.

"I said, 'Dad, you're a part of history. You need to tell the story before you pass away,' " said Dadey, 46, of Beaumont. "It's been on his conscience all his life."

Stivers agreed to do so after learning that the statute of limitations had run out long ago, preventing any prosecution of a case against him.

His story "is crazy enough to be true," said Aaron Breitbart, senior researcher at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. "But there's no way in the world it can be proven. Nobody really knows who did it except the person who did it."

As for Stivers, he's convinced that he's that person. And, he said, "I feel very bad about it."

Is Deep Throat ill?

By John W. Dean

I have little doubt that one of my former Nixon White House colleagues is history's best-known anonymous source — Deep Throat. But I'll be damned if I can figure out exactly which one.

We'll all know one day very soon, however. Bob Woodward, a reporter on the team that covered the Watergate story, has advised his executive editor at the Washington Post that Throat is ill. And Ben Bradlee, former executive editor of the Post and one of the few people to whom Woodward confided his source's identity, has publicly acknowledged that he has written Throat's obituary.

When that posthumous profile reveals the secret name, it will be flash powder on the long-simmering debate about reporters' use of anonymous sources — an issue much in the news lately because my former law school classmate, Thomas F. Hogan, now the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, has been holding journalists in contempt of court for refusing to reveal their sources to a grand jury investigating the leak of the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame.

I'm caught in the middle on this discussion. As a columnist, occasional freelancer and author of six nonfiction books, I use unidentified sources myself. In fact, I just used one. The source who informed me that Woodward leaked the news of Throat's illness to the executive editor of the Post gave me that information either on "deep background" or "off the record" (I never could get the distinction of those rules straightened out). So I apologize to my source if this information was never meant to be public, but it is a tidbit too hot to keep sitting on.

I don't like using unidentified sources and never was one. During my years at the White House, not to mention those at the Justice Department and on Capitol Hill, I never leaked information, although I was frequently approached. If I couldn't say it on the record, I didn't say it. And because I had no authority to speak on the record, I chose not to speak.

So what is to be made of those who clank jail keys to encourage reporters to reveal their sources?

Without confidential sources, much of what people need to know in a democracy would never be reported, so unless there is a higher reason, journalists must be able to protect such sources who are willing to impart such information. That said, no news person should agree to provide confidentiality unless it is essential to obtain information that the public should be told and there is no other way to obtain the information. A scoop per se does not justify a pledge of confidentiality.

A source may be using the reporter, while the reporter is using the source. Motives range from the noble whistle-blower who is morally offended by misconduct to the staffer who is floating a trial balloon to the low-end leaker who is seeking to gain advantage by sabotaging a competitor or foe.

Reporters and their sources (and the public) must remember that when journalists agree to keep a source confidential, they have entered into a contract. Indeed, reporters have been successfully sued for damages when they have breached their agreement. However, in most states, every contract has an implied warranty of good faith and fair dealing — meaning that neither a reporter nor a source can take unfair advantage of the other. This is important because insiders leak for an array of reasons, not always honorable, and may be using the reporter's confidentiality to protect themselves if, say, they are releasing information obtained improperly. If the source tried to enforce confidentiality, or collect damages from the reporter, the attempt would fail because of implied warranty.

Finally, if the confidential information relates to criminal activity, the U.S. Supreme Court said in 1972 (in Branzburg vs. Hayes) that should a grand jury investigating the crime need the information, the journalist must turn it over — despite the freedom of the press guaranteed under the 1st Amendment.

No reporter can enter into an agreement that violates that law. Rather, an agreement of confidentiality is subject to it. The so-called news person's privilege, just like the attorney-client privilege or a president's executive privilege, is a qualified privilege. When a judge holds a reporter in contempt for violating the law, that judge is merely upholding the law of the land.

As for Deep Throat, well, we will all soon learn if Woodward has been protecting a criminal for three decades, or merely a source who gave him some good information and some bad information — when history's greatest source was wrong — that Woodward has never corrected. (To pick just one of Throat's many errors, I randomly opened "All the President's Men," scanned until I came to the passage in which Woodward reports Throat as giving him this: "Dean talked with Sen. [Howard] Baker after [the] Watergate committee [was] formed and Baker is in the bag completely, reporting back directly to the White House." It never happened.)

I suspect that Throat's identity may prove a cautionary tale for all news gatherers. Stay tuned.

John W. Dean is a former White House counsel and author, most recently, of "Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush."

White House-friendly reporter under scrutiny

Charlie Savage and Alan Wirzbicki The Boston Globe

WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration has provided White House media credentials to a man who has virtually no journalistic background, asks softball questions to the president and his spokesman in the midst of contentious news conferences, and routinely reprints long passages verbatim from official press releases as original news articles on his website.

Jeff Gannon calls himself the White House correspondent for TalonNews.com, a website that says it is "committed to delivering accurate, unbiased news coverage to our readers." It is operated by a Texas-based Republican Party delegate and political activist who also runs GOPUSA.com, a website that touts itself as "bringing the conservative message to America."

Called on last week by President Bush at a press conference, Gannon attacked Democratic Senate leaders and called them "divorced from reality." During the presidential campaign, when called on by Press Secretary Scott McClellan, Gannon linked Senator John F. Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, to Jane Fonda and questioned why anyone would dispute Bush's National Guard service.

Now, the question of how Gannon gets into White House press conferences is coming under intense scrutiny from critics who contend that Gannon is not a journalist but rather a White House tool to soften media coverage of Bush. The issue was raised by a media watchdog group and picked up by Internet bloggers, who linked Gannon's presence in White House briefings to recent controversies over whether the administration manipulates the flow of information to the public.

These include the disclosure that the Education Department secretly paid columnist Armstrong Williams to promote its education policy and the administration's practice of sending out video press releases about its policies that purport to be "news stories" by fake journalists.

McClellan said Gannon has not been issued -- nor requested -- a regular "hard pass" to the White House, and instead has come in for the past two years on daily passes. Daily passes, he said, may be issued to anyone who writes for an organization that publishes regularly and who is cleared to enter the building.

He said other reporters and political commentators from lesser-known newsletters and from across the political spectrum also attend briefings, though he could not recall any Internet bloggers. McClellan said it is not the White House's role to decide who is and who is not a real journalist and dismissed any notion of conspiracy.

Nonetheless, transcripts of White House briefings indicate that McClellan often calls on Gannon and that the press secretary -- and the president -- have found relief in a question from Gannon after critical lines of questioning from mainstream news organizations.

When Bush called on Gannon near the end of his nationally televised Jan. 26 news conference, he had just been questioned about Williams and the Education Department funds, an embarrassment to the administration. Gannon's question was different.

"Senate Democratic leaders have painted a very bleak picture of the US economy," Gannon said. "[Minority Leader] Harry Reid was talking about soup lines, and Hillary Clinton was talking about the economy being on the verge of collapse. Yet, in the same breath, they say that Social Security is rock solid and there's no crisis there. How are you going to work -- you said you're going to reach out to these people -- how are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?"

As it turned out, Reid had never talked about soup lines. That was a phrase attributed to him in satire by Rush Limbaugh on his radio show.

Last year, during the presidential campaign, Gannon's comments could be even more pointed. In a Feb. 10, 2004, briefing with McClellan, for example, Gannon rose to deliver the following:

"Since there have been so many questions about what the president was doing over 30 years ago, what is it that he did after his honorable discharge from the National Guard? Did he make speeches alongside Jane Fonda, denouncing America's racist war in Vietnam? Did he testify before Congress that American troops committed war crimes in Vietnam? And did he throw somebody else's medals at the White House to protest a war America was still fighting?"

David Brock, the former investigative journalist who made his name revealing aspects of former President Bill Clinton's extramarital affairs, said he was watching last week's press conference on television and the "soup lines" question sparked his interest because it "struck me as so extremely biased." Brock asked his media watchdog group, Media Matters for America, to look into Talon News.

It quickly discovered two things, he said. First, both Talon and the political organization GOP USA were run by a Texas Republican activist and party delegate named Bobby Eberle. Second, many of the reports Gannon filed for Talon News "appeared to be lifted verbatim from various White House and Republican political committee documents."

Eberle did not return phone calls yesterday, and Gannon declined to comment. He did reply to Brock's group on his personal blog: "In many cases I have liberally used the verbiage provided on key aspects of the issue because it is the precise expression of where the White House stands -- free of any 'spin.' It's the ultimate in journalistic honesty -- unvarnished and unfiltered. If only others would be as forthcoming."

Claim: Gannon lifts from GOP docs for his "news reports" (Media Matters)

Venezuelan Media Restrictions Squeeze Broadcasters

CARACAS, Venezuela -- Set to music befitting an action movie, the promotional ad for broadcaster Globovision recounts some of the events that have shaken this country since President Hugo Chavez came to power six years ago: a failed coup, soldiers firing on demonstrators, a strike that crippled the country and a recall vote that divided it.

Those images are now barred from the airwaves, as are all news clips depicting unrest or confrontation, whether live or edited, domestic or foreign.

New regulations imposed on Venezuelan media by the National Assembly make it punishable by fines or imprisonment to broadcast scenes of violence, words or images that "cause anguish," or information or commentary that the legislation says could defame public officials or harm national security.

In moves critics denounce as censorship, the populist Chavez has imposed controls on television and radio that have compelled broadcasters to hold back news the government watchdogs might deem offensive, from footage of the Asian tsunami disaster to almost all the images out of Iraq.

"This is a perfect instrument to censor our programs or close the network," said Ana Cristina Nunez, legal consultant for Globovision, the country's only all-news channel and a counterweight to the government mouthpiece Venezolana de Television, or VTV. "Because the law is so vague and open to interpretation, there will always be the possibility to say we breached some rule. Most news has some violent element. ... We believe this law censors information that adults have the right to watch."

Three other private networks -- RCTV, Venevision and Televen -- have edited out sex scenes and graphic violence from soap operas and sitcoms. But the law has most strongly affected the way news is presented on TV, as station managers self-censor their coverage, ever mindful of the new 11-member Responsibility Directorate that will determine and punish infractions.

Chavez loyalists, including lawmaker Denise Santos-Amaral, who helped draft the broadcast law, defend the changes as long-overdue moves to clean up the airwaves.

"Television needs to serve the interests of families," she said, claiming scenes of gore and violence from news events can have detrimental effects on children. She pointed to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in the United States as an example of upsetting violence that she believes shouldn't be shown on TV. Under the new law's provisions, such images can only be shown after 11 p.m. and inadvertent live broadcasts of violence cannot be repeated.

"There should be respect for audience sensitivities," Santos-Amaral said. "Viewers shouldn't have to look at corpses."

But the legislative moves also have drawn censure from international democracy advocates, including the Organization of American States of which Venezuela is a member.

Late last year, before the legislature gave its final endorsement to the Law on Social Responsibility in Radio and Television, the OAS's Inter-American Commission on Human Rights wrote to Chavez to express its concern that the law violates the community's collective commitment to free expression and "limits the flow of information on matters of public interest."

Press freedom watchdogs such as the Committee to Protect Journalists in New York have also expressed unease at the restrictions, which will take effect here at staged intervals over the next five months.

The broadcast responsibility law will fundamentally change the nature of programming for stations such as all-news Globovision. By the end of March, all broadcasters, even those devoted to news, sports, weather or marketing, must carry at least three hours of programming for children. By July, they must offer at least 5 1/2 hours of "independently produced programming," content they must buy from a government-approved list of suppliers.

All licensed networks already are obliged to carry the government's direct feeds on events deemed of essential public importance. Station owners complain that the feeds -- including long presidential and parliamentary addresses and official ceremonies celebrating military holidays and Chavez's birthday -- already exceed what would be considered vital in more democratic societies.

The outside content provisions are intended to "democratize'' the airwaves, said William Castillo, deputy minister for communications and information.

"Venezuelan society has felt for the past 30 years that a new law was needed. The influence of the broadcast media over the world of politics is direct and substantial," Castillo said.

At the National Telecommunications Commission, known as Conatel, director Alvin Lezama said officials of the government regulatory agency believed the legal changes were necessary because some stations, particularly those that are privately owned, had the power to monopolize content and "didn't reflect society." Conatel will be the licensing agency for the new programming.

Primero Justicia, an opposition political alliance, will challenge the media
regulations in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, said Gerardo Blyde, an opposition member of parliament. The group also will appeal to the Venezuelan Supreme Court, even though the latter has just been packed with pro-Chavez judges, he said.

"We have conventions on human rights that we have signed," Blyde said.

Lawmaker Santos-Amaral accused private broadcasters of transmitting an opposition editorial line and promoting violence against the government.

As for complaints that the law's language is too vague to give broadcasters a clear idea of what constitutes violence or anguish, the lawmaker smiled and repeated what was famously said about obscenity: "They know it when they see it."