PRIZE
SNOOZE
by Matt Taibbi
 I'm
new to Buffalo, but already I feel offended on the city's
behalf every time I turn on the news. No city in the country
gets less love from the national media than Buffalo. And no
city's journalists get left out of the fun more. When was
the last time you saw a TV reporter from Buffalo standing
in a flak jacket in front of a burning tank? When was the
last time you saw an overpaid Buffalo journalist (Tim Russert
no longer counts) with a self-satisfied smirk on his face
lobbing out softball questions from a panel at a Presidential
debate? The answers in both cases are never and never-- and
the sad news, folks, is that that will probably never change.
Here's an illustration of how bad things are for Buffalo.
Just last week, when the remains of Chandra Levy's body were
found in a park in Washington, every major network in the
country had a reporter in a jogging costume at the park within
two hours. Fox TV's Greta Van Susteren was there in 90 minutes.
As I watched her doing her live shot, I thought there was
something strange about the camera was set up. Van Susteren's
trademark masculine chin was just as freakishly cubical and
convex as always, but the background in the shot looked fuzzy,
remote. After a minute, I thought to myself: "Gosh, Greta's
pretty far off the ground. She's gotten taller."
But that was only the way it looked. In fact, Van Susteren
was standing on top of Wolf Blitzer, Sam Donaldson, and 23
other bureau hacks from local affiliates all over the country.
The journalists were standing in a pile there at Rock Creek.
They were stacked so high that the networks had to shoot from
crane-buckets and towers. But there was no one there from
Buffalo, not even on the print side-- in fact, as far as I
can tell, there was no Buffalo reporter even in the city at
all.
Buffalo's best chance to get in on the feeding frenzy, the
Buffalo News, mailed it in. Their front-page Chandra story
the next day was a dull double-bylined offering by two out-of-house
reporters, Steve Twomey and Sari Horowitz of the Washington
Post.
The Levy story, frivolous as it obviously is, is a perfect
illustration of how the structure of modern media fails smaller
markets like Buffalo. Year after year, the Buffalo News attains
some of the highest profitability margins of any newspaper
in the country. Just a few years ago, Editor and Publisher
magazine rated it as the most profitable newspaper in the
country. It has a billionaire owner and seemingly limitless
resources to pursue its own coverage of breaking news. Yet
it doesn't even have its own reporters in the nation's capital
to cover hot-button news stories. If a major city's sole print
daily can't even cover Washington, what kind of coverage of
the rest of the planet can it possibly get?
The owner of the News, hurrumphing billionaire Warren Buffet,
has an answer to that question. As a director of the Washington
Post and the owner of a 17 percent stake in that paper, he
would naturally answer that, by allowing the Buffalo News
to take advantage of the fine coverage of his other, more
famous paper, he is doing the citizens of Buffalo a favor.
And indeed, when Buffet bought the News, it was widely hoped
that an owner with deep pockets and media connections would
help raise journalistic standards in the city. At the time
of the sale, Buffet issued a statement that was widely cheered
and quoted: "I want to achieve business success in newspapers,
but will be unhappy unless it is accompanied by journalistic
success."
But in fact what Buffet's business acumen has meant for the
city is a one-horse daily newspaper market, and a pattern
of cost-cutting that has left the News itself utterly dependent
on outside sources for non-local coverage. As for the efficacy
of using material from the reputable and much-ballyhooed Washington
Post, well... one need only look at this year's Pulitzer Prize
awards to see what that has meant for ordinary readers in
places like Buffalo, who live far from the action.
The Post, as it does every year (the Post and the New York
Times usually win about half of the Pulitzers overall and
generally all of the important ones, while lesser papers like
the Boston Globe are usually thrown a bone for things like
sports coverage or editorial cartooning), won a handful of
Pulitzers in 2002. One of the three awards that it won this
spring was for National Reporting. This particular award is
directly relevant to Buffalo, since most all of the articles
submitted for the prize were also republished in the Buffalo
News.
In lieu of having its own home-grown reporters cluelessly
wandering the mall at Washington in search of dubious scoops,
Buffalo last year had the privilege of reading storied muckraker
Bob  Woodward's
celebrated insider bulletins from the Hill. The Pulitzer committee,
which singled out stories like the October 21 "CIA Told to
Do 'Whatever Necessary' to Kill Bin Laden," (republished in
the Buffalo News under the homier headline of "Bush Backs
CIA on Killing of bin Laden") for praise, deemed this a good
thing. But upon closer examination, what the committee was
really praising the Post for was its willingness to restrict
itself to sources higher up in the ivory tower than a small-town
reporter would likely have access to.
The Post's National Reporting award was for "comprehensive
coverage of America's war on terrorism, which regularly brought
forth new information together with skilled analysis of unfolding
developments." The Pulitzer Committee's ruling was that the
Post coverage of the most important story of this or any other
recent year was the best that the country had to offer. Cities
like Buffalo that relied on Post coverage, in other words,
had no reason to complain of being uninformed about 9/11.
But get this: of the eleven stories the Post submitted to
the Pulitzer Committee for the award, a full six relied exclusively
on government sources, the vast majority of them unnamed.
And as sportswriters say, this game wasn't even as close as
the score indicated. Even in those stories that didn't rely
entirely on government sources, the overwhelming majority
of the information still came directly from anonymous employees
of the state.
I actually went through all the articles and did a count.
By my reckoning, 67 of the 78 quoted sources in the eleven
Post articles were government sources. And again, the vast
majority of those sources were unnamed.
It is hard to call reporting that relies solely on government
sources real journalism. The Soviets did it, of course, giving
prizes to Pravda and Izvestia journalists for their efficient
clerical work in relaying official Communist party press releases
to the masses. In the States, we confidently called that kind
of reporting total bullshit for over 70 years. But when one
of our own journalists does exactly the same thing, we can't
give him awards fast enough.
Here's an example from the award-winning Post submissions--
the December 9 piece, "U.S. Says New Tape Points to bin Laden,"
written by Walter Pincus and Karen DeYoung. This is a piece
that the Soviets couldn't have done any better. In it, the
Post reported that a "new tape" obtained by U.S. intelligence
services offers offers "the most conclusive evidence" to date
that Osama bin Laden was behind the 9/11 bombings. Unnamed
government sources quoted in the piece claimed that the tape
shows bin Laden bragging about the attack to associates, and
noting that the damage to the World Trade Center was "worse
than [he] expected."
The story was reported as fact despite the fact that the journalists
were not even allowed to see the tape, or even see a transcript.
It ran it despite the fact that none of the sources in the
piece were willing to go on the record asserting the tape's
existence.
Given the fact that the Bush administration's failure to publicly
release concrete proof linking bin Laden to the attacks had
already been an international issue, this was extremely dicey
journalism. A truly independent newspaper would have laughed
in the White House's face had it called up to say, "We have
proof that bin Laden did it. It's on tape. But don't quote
us on that."
The right response there would have been to say, "Uh-huh.
Show us the tape and we'll think about it." But the Post blew
off all of these considerations and just ran the piece under
a big banner headline on the front page. Again, if the Soviets
had done this (and they did, over and over, for instance in
the numerous Pravda articles claiming that the Soviet Union
had been "invited" to invade Afghanistan), we would have laughed
at any suggestion that this was real journalism. But Pincus
and DeYoung now have a Pulitzer Prize on their resumes.
A quick note on Pincus. Since all news articles in papers
like the Washington Post seem more or less exactly alike,
few people ever bother to look at the byline to wonder who
wrote them. After all, you don't ask the name of the chef
that cooked your Big Mac. But in Pincus's case, the byline
is worth a look. Among journalists, his name is one of the
most notorious in the business. In an article he wrote for
the Post shortly after taking a job there in 1967, Pincus
admitted proudly that he had worked for the CIA, representing
the U.S. at international conferences in 1960 under an assumed
identity. The Washington Times, one of the most conservative
papers in the country, referred to Pincus in 1996 as the "CIA's
house reporter."
It's well-known in the business that when the intelligence
community has something it really wants to put over on the
people, it gives Pincus a call. A good example came in the
famous San Jose Mercury-News fiasco in 1996, when the small
California paper published an expose that claimed that the
CIA had sold crack to fund the contras. Pincus led a counterattack
by the big dailies dismissing the Mercury reporting as groundless.
He was an old hand at dismissing Contra-hijinks allegations
by then. In 1989, Pincus's take on the Iran-Contra allegations
had been, "Just because a congressional commission in Costa
Rica says something, doesn't mean it's true." Obviously, he
doesn't bring the same muckraker skepticism to statements
by American officials... but who's counting?
If you bother looking closely, you can see that the Post itself
is uneasy about its reliance on unnamed sources. This is clear
when you look at the tortured wording of the attributions
in the pieces. There are a finite number of different ways
to say "According to one unnamed government source," but the
Post somehow manages to use all of them, sometimes within
the same article. Take the aforementioned Woodward piece,
"CIA Told to Do 'Whatever Necessary' to Kill bin Laden." Here's
a list of the attributed sources in that piece:
- "Officials"
- "One
senior official"
- "A
senior official"
- "The
Vice President"
- "Another
senior official"
- "A
senior Bush official"
- "Another
senior Bush official"
- "One
official"
- "Bush
officials"
It takes some doing not to repeat any of those phrases within
an article. I mean, you have to really be looking out for
it. And in this case, you wouldn't be looking out for it if
you weren't painfully aware of how embarrassing the whole
thing is.
This is what having Warren Buffet running your only serious
newspaper does for a city like Buffalo. Here you have a city
that's in the midst of a serious fiscal crisis, brought on
in no small part by a shortfall in expected income tax revenue
sent back to the region by the state. That shortfall is obviously
mainly due to the blow dealt to the New York State economy
by 9/11. The terrorism issue, and the federal government's
decision to allocate more of its resources to a military buildup
than to aid to New York State, is directly relevant to this
city.
But instead of getting the perspective of a local reporter,
who might be inclined to ask if a dozen new school buildings
in Buffalo might be more useful in the long run than one pilotless
drone that the Air Force fires into the side of a mountain
somewhere in Afghanistan, we get a bunch of Georgetown hotshot
hacks with monster expense accounts feeding us feel-good war
news from the anonymous White House pals their paper just
treated to lunch. It might be the truth, but who knows? Would
you be willing to bet your school system on it? All of this
sucks, but that's the way things work in the Warren Buffet
era-- it just costs too much to let the natives in small cities
do their own reporting. We don't even get to gawk at Chandra
Levy's skull with our own eyes.
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