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BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. Over the past four years, we have received mail from many listeners impugning our objectivity -- mostly charging that we were biased against the president. After reviewing our four year record, we readily admit that we can detect an increasingly critical tone. We do, after all, focus on media, and the news media rely on the free exchange of information. If this show is a watchdog, press freedom is what it seeks to guard under any administration. So, as we prepare for another Bush administration, we thought we'd consider how freedom of information has fared under our once and future president.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: As we burrowed into our archives this week, we found in our first post-inauguration interview with veteran White House reporter Helen Thomas, early signs of an impending chill. [TAPE STARTS]
HELEN THOMAS: I would like to feel, and I hope, that the new administration will understand the role of the press - will not cut us off - that our questions are legitimate - and that they cannot operate in total secrecy, which they seem to be wanting to do lately. [TAPE ENDS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Every administration seeks to control the day's message, but few as doggedly as this one. Reporters with probing questions, like Ms. Thomas, were skipped over in press briefings. Reporters' notes were subpoenaed in determined pursuit of government leakers. An official secrets acts, of sorts, re-emerged in Congress. We spoke to Lucy Dalglish of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press six months into the Bush administration. [TAPE STARTS]
LUCY DALGLISH: I'm so exhausted! Everybody has been telling me that August is so slow in Washington and that, you know, you should be able to just cruise through it, but I have to tell you that I have never been busier in my life. I just can't get over this chilling effect. I've heard some old-timers from the journalism world here in Washington describe this to me as almost a Nixonian atmosphere and how the media is feeling put upon with these subpoenas. [TAPE ENDS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And that was only August. After September 11th, the chill deepened into what one reporter called "an Arctic zone." The number of classified documents soared. In a report on government secrecy, California Democrat Henry Waxman noted that the administration had repeatedly refused to provide members of Congress, the government accountability office and congressional commissions with information necessary for meaningful congressional oversight, thereby blocking a key route by which inconvenient facts reach the public. And here's more from Vermont Democrat Senator Patrick Leahy in March of 2001. [TAPE STARTS]
PATRICK LEAHY: GAO is having to sue Vice President Cheney to get information that everybody else would acknowledge should be readily available. Attorney General Ashcroft has put restrictions that no other attorney general has put on FOIA requests. The closing of presidential papers that are normally available to scholars --three federal judges have already had to order the Bush administration to stop their delaying tactics. [TAPE ENDS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And we heard this from investigative reporter Scott Armstrong. [TAPE STARTS]
SCOTT ARMSTRONG: For the first time since the founding of the Defense Department, they took the regulations that control the Defense Department and made them unavailable to reporters, the public or anyone else. They've always been available. You could get them on websites. And they told you how things were supposed to happen in the military. They took them and they made them for official use only. [TAPE ENDS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Among the administration's preferred legal tactics was the state secrets privilege, derived from a 50 year old decision called U.S. vs. Reynolds. Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington University Law School told us: [TAPE STARTS]
JONATHAN TURLEY: Reynolds has virtually become a stamp. I mean, any case that involves remotely the military or national security or, you know, poultry regulations -- any type of civil liberties claim that's been brought since 9/11 has run right into Reynolds, and the government's come forward and said look -- we can't tell you whether we're beating detainees, cause it would reveal state secrets. Well, that's bloody ridiculous. I mean if you're asking about whether detainees have been beaten, you're asking about whether a crime has occurred. That's not a matter of national security. It's a matter of criminal law. [TAPE ENDS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And Congress passed the Homeland Security Act, one provision of which exempts a whole new class of information from freedom of information requests, specifically "any request for information that would expose weaknesses in our infrastructure, power plants and bridges and reservoirs, because that could be useful to terrorists." But because of that exemption, we also can't find out about the Love Canals or mis-managed Super Fund sites or foremen who dump pollutants into rivers. The legislative coup de grace, of course, was the Patriot Act, which permitted secret wiretaps, searches, detentions, trials and deportations. You probably already know about that. And then there were the wars. Reporters were kept far away from action in Afghanistan, and so were their cameras. [TAPE STARTS]
JOHN PIKE: This has been by far the most secretive war that the United States has fought over the last decade. [TAPE ENDS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: John Pike, an expert in satellite intelligence and director of the website GlobalSecurity.org, explained how the Pentagon bought exclusive rights to the satellite images from a company called Space Imaging, effectively blocking media access to satellite pictures of the war. [TAPE STARTS]
JOHN PIKE: I don't think that the primary reason for the government's purchase of the Ikonos imagery is controlling the flow of information, but unavoidably, you have to conclude that it does have that additional benefit -- that you basically remove the possibility of independent monitoring, independent verification of what's going on inside Afghanistan, and made it extraordinarily difficult to independently evaluate the claims, one way or the other, about civilian casualties or refugees inside Afghanistan. [TAPE ENDS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Speaking of images, in January of 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld barred the media from taking photographs of prisoners, citing the Geneva Conventions. [TAPE STARTS]
DONALD RUMSFELD: I've got a - there are a bunch of lawyers who are looking at all these treaties and conventions and everything, trying to figure out what's appropriate. The only thing I did notice, that you can't take pictures of them. That's considered embarrassing for them, and they can't be interviewed, according to the conve-- Geneva Convention. [TAPE ENDS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: But, as they were sent off to Guantanamo Bay, media and human rights groups couldn't follow them because the prisoners, now hooded and shackled, had acquired a new status. [TAPE STARTS]
DONALD RUMSFELD: And they will be handled, not as prisoners of wars, because they're not, but as unlawful combatants. As I understand it, technically, unlawful combatants do not have any rights under the Geneva Convention. [TAPE ENDS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: But the Pentagon did follow the press blackout in Afghanistan with a blaze of footage from Iraq, supplied by reporters embedded with and under the protection of American troops. But-- the Pentagon instructed those reporters that if they left their assigned units to, say, talk to Iraqis in their villages or assess bomb damage, they would lose their spots. So, mostly, the reporters stayed put, covering the war through a soda straw, at least on TV where it mattered most. It was clear that massaging the message had become, like everything else, a matter of national security, overseen by various offices throughout the Pentagon. Military analyst Bill Arkin had the Pentagon flow charts. [TAPE STARTS]
BILL ARKIN: All I can do is point to the organizations, because we don't know yet what they are actually doing or how it has had influence. What would do know is that a deputy undersecretary of defense for special plans has been created. What we do know is that there is a special cell that has been established within that office that is responsible for deception. What we do know is that information warfare has been elevated to a mission of the U.S. Strategic Command. What we do know is that the Air Force has transferred all of its bombers and fighters out of the Eighth Air Force and made it solely an information operations Air Force. What we do know is that the Navy has created a Naval Network Warfare Command. What would do know is that there are new doctrines and policies which have been created by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, by the Secretary of Defense, and by the individual services which trumpet deception, perception management, strategic influence operations, better control of the news media -- and those doctrines and policies, all of which have been established, signed and issued in 2001 and 2002, seem to indicate that there is a kind of blurring of the distinction between public information and psychological warfare. [TAPE ENDS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So, as the Bush administration played offense on the foreign information front, it played defense at home -- all in the ostensible cause of our own protection. But, as our founding fathers understood, the chief protection against mischief at home is accountability. If we can't hold our leaders accountable, we can't function as a democracy. With information so constrained, the White House has been less accountable to the Congress or the press. The president felt he was justified. Ken Auletta, who has written numerous books on the media, offered us this anecdote. [TAPE STARTS]
KEN AULETTA: Bush has held fewer press conferences than any modern president in the post World War II period. The number is roughly three times fewer than his own father had, and it's a reflection of his attitude towards the press. I mean, I was present at this barbecue with the press this August, and a reporter said to him, "Mr. President, is it really true you don't read the press or watch us on television?" And he said "No." And the reporter then said "Well, how do you then know, Mr. President, what the public is thinking?" And Bush, without missing a beat, said "You're making a powerful assumption, young man. You're assuming that you represent the public. I don't accept that." That's his attitude. And when you ask the Bush people to explain that attitude, what they say is "We don't accept that you have a check and balance function. We think that you are in the game of 'Gotcha.'" [TAPE ENDS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So, the president has chosen to speak past the press corps, directly to the people, believing they need only hear his convictions, not a cacophony of facts. For his part, he says his advisors tell him all he needs to know. But according to insider accounts, his advisors also select the facts to fit the president's convictions. NPR's Deb Amos reported regularly from Baghdad until the handover, and she told us this last year. [TAPE STARTS]
DEB AMOS: I can tell you a particular example of an economist working in the CPA, which is the provisional authority in Baghdad, and he said that it was almost impossible to pass bad news up. If he was asked to write a report, his supervisor would edit that report before it went up the chain; that the idea of the good news story is not just one that the administration is pushing on journalists; it's also an internal idea. And I think that that is a little bit more dangerous. [TAPE ENDS] [TAPE STARTS]
GEORGE W. BUSH: There's a sense that people in America aren't getting the truth. I'm mindful of the, of the filter through which some news travels, and sometimes you just have to go over the heads of the filter and speak directly to the people, and that's what we will continue to do. [TAPE ENDS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: There is, indeed, a sense that people in America aren't getting the truth, and there's plenty of blame to go around. In another retrospective, we will review the media's responsibility for withholding or burying the facts. But the solution to most problems is found in more information, not less. If we don't trust the news we are getting, we ought to look elsewhere. That's why we have a free press. Most administrations are resistant to the sunlight, preferring to pursue some of their policies in the shadows. But in the president's first term, the curtains were drawn on matters not just of war and peace, but of business and science and energy and the environment -- even the papers of past presidents. This has been a presidency conducted in the dark. So the press must use even higher wattage in the effort to peer in.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. Over the past four years, we have received mail from many listeners impugning our objectivity -- mostly charging that we were biased against the president. After reviewing our four year record, we readily admit that we can detect an increasingly critical tone. We do, after all, focus on media, and the news media rely on the free exchange of information. If this show is a watchdog, press freedom is what it seeks to guard under any administration. So, as we prepare for another Bush administration, we thought we'd consider how freedom of information has fared under our once and future president.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: As we burrowed into our archives this week, we found in our first post-inauguration interview with veteran White House reporter Helen Thomas, early signs of an impending chill. [TAPE STARTS]
HELEN THOMAS: I would like to feel, and I hope, that the new administration will understand the role of the press - will not cut us off - that our questions are legitimate - and that they cannot operate in total secrecy, which they seem to be wanting to do lately. [TAPE ENDS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Every administration seeks to control the day's message, but few as doggedly as this one. Reporters with probing questions, like Ms. Thomas, were skipped over in press briefings. Reporters' notes were subpoenaed in determined pursuit of government leakers. An official secrets acts, of sorts, re-emerged in Congress. We spoke to Lucy Dalglish of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press six months into the Bush administration. [TAPE STARTS]
LUCY DALGLISH: I'm so exhausted! Everybody has been telling me that August is so slow in Washington and that, you know, you should be able to just cruise through it, but I have to tell you that I have never been busier in my life. I just can't get over this chilling effect. I've heard some old-timers from the journalism world here in Washington describe this to me as almost a Nixonian atmosphere and how the media is feeling put upon with these subpoenas. [TAPE ENDS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And that was only August. After September 11th, the chill deepened into what one reporter called "an Arctic zone." The number of classified documents soared. In a report on government secrecy, California Democrat Henry Waxman noted that the administration had repeatedly refused to provide members of Congress, the government accountability office and congressional commissions with information necessary for meaningful congressional oversight, thereby blocking a key route by which inconvenient facts reach the public. And here's more from Vermont Democrat Senator Patrick Leahy in March of 2001. [TAPE STARTS]
PATRICK LEAHY: GAO is having to sue Vice President Cheney to get information that everybody else would acknowledge should be readily available. Attorney General Ashcroft has put restrictions that no other attorney general has put on FOIA requests. The closing of presidential papers that are normally available to scholars --three federal judges have already had to order the Bush administration to stop their delaying tactics. [TAPE ENDS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And we heard this from investigative reporter Scott Armstrong. [TAPE STARTS]
SCOTT ARMSTRONG: For the first time since the founding of the Defense Department, they took the regulations that control the Defense Department and made them unavailable to reporters, the public or anyone else. They've always been available. You could get them on websites. And they told you how things were supposed to happen in the military. They took them and they made them for official use only. [TAPE ENDS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Among the administration's preferred legal tactics was the state secrets privilege, derived from a 50 year old decision called U.S. vs. Reynolds. Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington University Law School told us: [TAPE STARTS]
JONATHAN TURLEY: Reynolds has virtually become a stamp. I mean, any case that involves remotely the military or national security or, you know, poultry regulations -- any type of civil liberties claim that's been brought since 9/11 has run right into Reynolds, and the government's come forward and said look -- we can't tell you whether we're beating detainees, cause it would reveal state secrets. Well, that's bloody ridiculous. I mean if you're asking about whether detainees have been beaten, you're asking about whether a crime has occurred. That's not a matter of national security. It's a matter of criminal law. [TAPE ENDS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And Congress passed the Homeland Security Act, one provision of which exempts a whole new class of information from freedom of information requests, specifically "any request for information that would expose weaknesses in our infrastructure, power plants and bridges and reservoirs, because that could be useful to terrorists." But because of that exemption, we also can't find out about the Love Canals or mis-managed Super Fund sites or foremen who dump pollutants into rivers. The legislative coup de grace, of course, was the Patriot Act, which permitted secret wiretaps, searches, detentions, trials and deportations. You probably already know about that. And then there were the wars. Reporters were kept far away from action in Afghanistan, and so were their cameras. [TAPE STARTS]
JOHN PIKE: This has been by far the most secretive war that the United States has fought over the last decade. [TAPE ENDS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: John Pike, an expert in satellite intelligence and director of the website GlobalSecurity.org, explained how the Pentagon bought exclusive rights to the satellite images from a company called Space Imaging, effectively blocking media access to satellite pictures of the war. [TAPE STARTS]
JOHN PIKE: I don't think that the primary reason for the government's purchase of the Ikonos imagery is controlling the flow of information, but unavoidably, you have to conclude that it does have that additional benefit -- that you basically remove the possibility of independent monitoring, independent verification of what's going on inside Afghanistan, and made it extraordinarily difficult to independently evaluate the claims, one way or the other, about civilian casualties or refugees inside Afghanistan. [TAPE ENDS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Speaking of images, in January of 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld barred the media from taking photographs of prisoners, citing the Geneva Conventions. [TAPE STARTS]
DONALD RUMSFELD: I've got a - there are a bunch of lawyers who are looking at all these treaties and conventions and everything, trying to figure out what's appropriate. The only thing I did notice, that you can't take pictures of them. That's considered embarrassing for them, and they can't be interviewed, according to the conve-- Geneva Convention. [TAPE ENDS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: But, as they were sent off to Guantanamo Bay, media and human rights groups couldn't follow them because the prisoners, now hooded and shackled, had acquired a new status. [TAPE STARTS]
DONALD RUMSFELD: And they will be handled, not as prisoners of wars, because they're not, but as unlawful combatants. As I understand it, technically, unlawful combatants do not have any rights under the Geneva Convention. [TAPE ENDS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: But the Pentagon did follow the press blackout in Afghanistan with a blaze of footage from Iraq, supplied by reporters embedded with and under the protection of American troops. But-- the Pentagon instructed those reporters that if they left their assigned units to, say, talk to Iraqis in their villages or assess bomb damage, they would lose their spots. So, mostly, the reporters stayed put, covering the war through a soda straw, at least on TV where it mattered most. It was clear that massaging the message had become, like everything else, a matter of national security, overseen by various offices throughout the Pentagon. Military analyst Bill Arkin had the Pentagon flow charts. [TAPE STARTS]
BILL ARKIN: All I can do is point to the organizations, because we don't know yet what they are actually doing or how it has had influence. What would do know is that a deputy undersecretary of defense for special plans has been created. What we do know is that there is a special cell that has been established within that office that is responsible for deception. What we do know is that information warfare has been elevated to a mission of the U.S. Strategic Command. What we do know is that the Air Force has transferred all of its bombers and fighters out of the Eighth Air Force and made it solely an information operations Air Force. What we do know is that the Navy has created a Naval Network Warfare Command. What would do know is that there are new doctrines and policies which have been created by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, by the Secretary of Defense, and by the individual services which trumpet deception, perception management, strategic influence operations, better control of the news media -- and those doctrines and policies, all of which have been established, signed and issued in 2001 and 2002, seem to indicate that there is a kind of blurring of the distinction between public information and psychological warfare. [TAPE ENDS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So, as the Bush administration played offense on the foreign information front, it played defense at home -- all in the ostensible cause of our own protection. But, as our founding fathers understood, the chief protection against mischief at home is accountability. If we can't hold our leaders accountable, we can't function as a democracy. With information so constrained, the White House has been less accountable to the Congress or the press. The president felt he was justified. Ken Auletta, who has written numerous books on the media, offered us this anecdote. [TAPE STARTS]
KEN AULETTA: Bush has held fewer press conferences than any modern president in the post World War II period. The number is roughly three times fewer than his own father had, and it's a reflection of his attitude towards the press. I mean, I was present at this barbecue with the press this August, and a reporter said to him, "Mr. President, is it really true you don't read the press or watch us on television?" And he said "No." And the reporter then said "Well, how do you then know, Mr. President, what the public is thinking?" And Bush, without missing a beat, said "You're making a powerful assumption, young man. You're assuming that you represent the public. I don't accept that." That's his attitude. And when you ask the Bush people to explain that attitude, what they say is "We don't accept that you have a check and balance function. We think that you are in the game of 'Gotcha.'" [TAPE ENDS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So, the president has chosen to speak past the press corps, directly to the people, believing they need only hear his convictions, not a cacophony of facts. For his part, he says his advisors tell him all he needs to know. But according to insider accounts, his advisors also select the facts to fit the president's convictions. NPR's Deb Amos reported regularly from Baghdad until the handover, and she told us this last year. [TAPE STARTS]
DEB AMOS: I can tell you a particular example of an economist working in the CPA, which is the provisional authority in Baghdad, and he said that it was almost impossible to pass bad news up. If he was asked to write a report, his supervisor would edit that report before it went up the chain; that the idea of the good news story is not just one that the administration is pushing on journalists; it's also an internal idea. And I think that that is a little bit more dangerous. [TAPE ENDS] [TAPE STARTS]
GEORGE W. BUSH: There's a sense that people in America aren't getting the truth. I'm mindful of the, of the filter through which some news travels, and sometimes you just have to go over the heads of the filter and speak directly to the people, and that's what we will continue to do. [TAPE ENDS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: There is, indeed, a sense that people in America aren't getting the truth, and there's plenty of blame to go around. In another retrospective, we will review the media's responsibility for withholding or burying the facts. But the solution to most problems is found in more information, not less. If we don't trust the news we are getting, we ought to look elsewhere. That's why we have a free press. Most administrations are resistant to the sunlight, preferring to pursue some of their policies in the shadows. But in the president's first term, the curtains were drawn on matters not just of war and peace, but of business and science and energy and the environment -- even the papers of past presidents. This has been a presidency conducted in the dark. So the press must use even higher wattage in the effort to peer in.
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