Government Secrecy and the Press

This is the panel on journalism and of journalists and the key note will be given by Bob Woodward of the Washington Post. The great thing about introducing Bob Woodward is that you don't have to. So I want to tell a couple of stories. It's very short. Actually there are only one story and an observation. When I called Bob about this conference he said we know it's a really interesting, it's a really interesting topic because he said, things are so bad in Washington now and Bill you might want to pay attention to this, that things are so bad in Washington now that if you don't classify something no one will read it. The last thing in a world you want to do is not classify. I mean, if you want to get your name in lights, if you want it out there classify its much better. It will eventually come out. The second is this that this is a university community. Bob Woodward's book, "All The Presidents Men" came out in the 1974 in the Watergate story which made him and Carl Bernstein icons for journalists and household names in the country, had unfolded by then. A word about the title and what it has to do with this conference. It was "All The President's Men". I just checked this with Bob a careful journalist. He said there is nothing to my theory but that is not going to stop me at all. To me "All The President's Men" always met humpty-dumpty, always. Humpty dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty dumpty had a great fall, All the King's horses and All the King's men could not put Humpty dumpty back together again or something pretty close to that. And to me Watergate was an egg. It was an egg that fell of a wall because Bob and Carl pushed it and it could not be put back together again just like any really good story. When it gets out there, you can't put it back together again, it's impossible. So my question which I hope Bob will at least wave a nod to in this remarks is have we reached an era in which Humpty Dumpty can be put back together again. Or is he still just on a wall not being pushed off. Ladies and gentlemen Bob Woodward. Thank you, thanks. Thank you it's great to be here. I wanted to begin, because we are in Michigan and because of the death of Gerald Ford, tell a Ford story that goes back to the Watergate era. It was that day in September 1974 when Ford went on television to grant a full pardon to Richard Nixon. I think he went on early Sunday morning hoping no one would notice. I was asleep in a hotel in New York City and my colleague then Carl Bernstein called me up and woke me and I was in a very defensive mood and he said if you heard you know what's going on and I said no, and Carl who then and still has the ability to say what's going on in the fewest words with the most drama said, "The son of a bitch pardoned the son of a bitch." Even I figured out what had happened. It is a different era and Bill I want it based on what you said and the issue of secrets and government secrecy. You said something that caused me to want to go up to my room and change my socks because my feet were sweating and that is that you said well if you kind of don't like the government or you don't like what the government is doing with secrets wait until the next election or cancel your subscription. The problem is always in this country we deal on a much shorter time frame. I have to remind you that Richard Nixon stood his last election in 1972, it was going to be in office until 1977 but he was held accountable for what occurred in Watergate. And that you can't always wait until the next election that the press has to be much more aggressive and operate in the time frame, that we live in. The other issue is that and I think Bob Pollock would agree with this. I know the Wall Street Journal editorial page with the concentrations of power are unsafe. Whether the press has too much power, whether the government has too much power and there is a balance in, I think shift back and forth, but I think there would have be a general acknowledgment that they do act is a check on each other and that neither of them is going to like what the other is doing much of the time if they are doing their job as they define it. Now I want to talk briefly about the elephant in the room which is the Iraq war. It is the thing going on in this country that is topic A, B, C, D and as far you might go in the alphabet. It is critical for the government, critical for the newspaper business, the news business, everywhere and critical for the citizens and I want to just real quickly until somebody holds up a yellow sign. Give some sense of the context in which the war is being conducted. The context in which people are trying to report on it, in books as I attempt to do or in the daily newspaper or on Greta's show on Fox News wherever it might be. First thing and then this is something lots of people don't like or don't agree with but I have spent a lot of time examining it and the impulse to go to war in Iraq comes from a lot of idealism on the part of President Bush. That I have interviewed him about this extensively for hours and at one point he said something which we put in the Washington Post which people had forgotten. He said I believe we have a duty to free people, to liberate people. Duty is the biggest word in the English language for a President. He went on to say that he and the others involved in the Iraq war have a zeal to liberate people. I think this is one of the driving forces in the war. The second context for all of this and this is most difficult thing for those of us in the news business to deal with is that in that in the Bush administration reality avoidance is a habit. That it's almost as if reality is somehow wrong at times. If the secret report show that violence is increasing its okay, to go out and say that terrorists are in retreat or we have turned the corner. This is not only difficult for the government, it is periless for reporters because you have so much that goes on in secret, so much that is in classified documents saying one thing that is contrary to what Bush administration people are saying publicly. The next context for understanding this and this is really difficult is there is no strategy for the war in Iraq. It is said by the government that we have a strategy. In my last book, I show that the strategy of clear, hold and build, the Defense Secretary at that time Donald Rumsfeld in on the record interviews with me said he did not agree with it. He was the one who was supposed to implement it. We will talk about, in this week, a new Iraq strategy. I tell you having spent years on this, there is no strategy now. Another context is that within the government there is a big disagreement about what we should do. I quote secretary Rumsfeld in a secret memo. Sorry Bill. Saying that the interagency process is so screwed up the "competence is next to impossible." This is the sitting secretary of defense, this is not a columnist, this is not a democrat, this is not a critic of the war, this is the secretary of defense saying competence is next to the impossible. Another context is the impatience. We have so much impatience in this country. It is natural character trait but it's almost as if we believe that we have to solve this in a month or two months or six months when anyone who knows anything about will realize that it's going to take years. So I could go on with the list but the I think the overwriting thought people in the news business have is that if all of the things we have to worry about certainly the war, so you know, whether you worry about global warming, the environment, healthcare the thing we ought to worry about most is secret government. It's true what was said. Democracies die in darkness and if we get secret government that takes us back to Nixon that's what Nixon tried and failed that. And so there is going to be instead of pulling back or some sort of acquiescence about government secrecy the reporting is going to be more aggressive because the people in journalism and I think the people who read newspapers, magazines and watch television and see that the disparity between what's going on and what is being said is so great. Now, no one likes being scrutinized. I remember many years ago finishing one of my books in the head of Simon & Schuster which is published them all took me to dinner in New York City and you know when the boss takes you to dinner it means something important is up. And we sat down and he said what's your next book going to be? I said I wanted to do some reading, thinking and reporting. He said reading, reporting, thinking - you are crazy Woodward. We are in the marketing business and the product delivery business, what's your damn next book going to be? Wouldn't let me up and finally after listening to him to through the whole dinner I said I figured out what my next book is going to be. He said great, what is it? I said my next book will be on the publishing business in New York City. He said great, that's terrific. I have a fabulous title for you. I said I didn't think there were any fabulous titles left. He said there is one your book on the publishing business in New York City will be called "My Last Book". Very good, except you took our little thing with us Bob. I think we will forget about this. Jill Abramson is Managing Editor for the news of New York Times. She is an old Washington hand too she ran the Times of Washington Bureau where she was in direct charge of 60 reporters around town. Her own specialty in reporting was investigative reporting. She did it in a very distinguished way for the Wall Street Journal. She specialized in where politics and money come together if there is anything hotter than that I don't know what it is and for that she won the National Press Club Award for that particular topic. One of the best there is. So Jill, what are you making of this? Now, your reference to my old gumshoe days makes me feel like I have to say I saw my column very much and the work that Bob Woodward had done and I did follow the money, so -. What I make of that again I thought Bob - his remarks were terrific. I never heard the story about the Ford, pardon and son of a bitches that's a delight but . You can see it in the paper anytime soon? Well, it's his exclusive but I won't try to steal it but again I want to use the few minutes of my remarks just to steer us back to why this all matters and why it doesn't just matter to journalists but to you out there and I think Bob being the keynote speaker for this panel is perfect because why it matters is that the founders of our country had a huge fear of unfettered executive power. That was the back drop into the founding of our nation and they believe that the press or free press could be a check against government abuse and unaccountable executive power and like Bill when I was following the money and at that point I was working in the Washington Bureau of the Wall Street Journal, I actually spent some quality time at the National Archives which is such an incredible building yes and large part because these documents that are the central force and still guiding ideas of our country are there but also in these early years when I was carrying out the Woodward mandate to follow the money the National Archives were also that very building where the Nixon tapes were and behind the glass case was actually the Dictaphone machine that has been in the President's office where the secret taping had happened and for me as much as the founders document symbolize everything hopeful about this country. That Dictaphone machine - every time I went in to do research there symbolized everything that is dark and worrisome about unfettered executive power. And in 1971 the Times was very much have the forefront of what I think is a case that we have been talked about that define the landscape for decision - that's a Pentagon Papers case where if you go back and look at the briefs at the Nixon administration submitted to the supreme court arguing that the national security would actually be harmed by the disclosure of The Pentagon Papers which was a secret classified history of the Vietnam war. They had seem almost verbatim the same as the arguments that are being made now about things like the warrantless eaves dropping story that my newspaper published or the great story about secret detention facilities that Bob's newspaper The Washington post published last year and while the supreme court in that case ruled that the government could not execute prior restraint on the media what we have now is this proliferation of criminal leak investigations which don't involve prior restrain but which very much put a chill I would argue on the reporting process and as they proliferate really do mean that our roof could be on fire and I want to elaborate quickly on a point Gretta which is journalists have every much the same stake as the rest of our citizenry does in the safety of our country. We are not cavalier before the Times published the NSA story. We carefully consider and agonized over the governments arguments that publishing the story would harm the war on terror but we had to balance that against the role of the founders gave us of serving as a bulwark against possible abuses of power and in that case we felt that the scales weighed very much in favor of publishing and I guess I would like to close just by actually quoting a colleague of Bob's at the Washington Post Bob Kaiser who wrote a wonderful piece a little over a year ago about the whole tension between secrecy and on free press and he said, "If a war is being wedged The War on Terror in the name of the people, shouldn't they know what it's about?" And I just think that's crucially important and that's how I will close. Thanks. I have I called on Bill Kovach before introducing him. But now I'd like to introduce him properly. Bill is probably the statesman of our profession. He is not only been a journalist for 50 years, he has been a spectacular journalist for 50 years. And after an active career in active journalism, he went right on into, innovate in a very important way. He is The Founding Director of The Committee of Concerned Journalists, probably one of the most hopeless titles I have ever heard for one of the best organizations. It is just a mouthful. But what it means is, it's a group of journalists, publishers, academics, concerned persons who are worried about the State of American Journalism. I feel proud to have been on the founding board. I go to the meetings, I am never disappointed and it is it does wonderful work across the country. Bill was Washington Editor of "The New York Times". He was also Executive Editor, the top editor of the Atlanta Journal Constitution and he then became Curator of the Nieman Foundation which like us offers fellowships as a matter of fact they invented journalism fellowships. Bill. Thank you. Thank you, Charles. I want to thank you for the subject you asked me to talk about, because I think its something I can talk about. Can quality journalism survive the new secrecy? And the short answer, I think, it's easy to answer question like that, because its predictive and I can predict about anything whether I know anything about it or not. But in this case I think the answer is fairly clearly before us that it certainly can, but its going to require a lot of hard work on the part of the journalists and journalistic institutions in order to be able to compete in the world of information where, as Bob said, the concentrations of power are unsafe and part of what we were going through now as others have mentioned earlier is a struggle over power, over information that dates back to early 1970s, and the Church Commission and the High Commission examined all of those issues once Watergate blew the house open and Dick Cheney is talking about those years. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were there in positions of power. They saw the loss of control over information. Information which people rely on in order to make judgments, that's the struggle that has gone on ever since. We are in a position now, given the competition created by the new technology in a world where your provost said, we are awash in information, people are drowning in information. They are drowning in news and facts and they are so, so much information out almost no one even those of us who spend our lives worrying about information, almost no one has the opportunity to put that information into context in real time in a way that means something and that's the role that if what we called the mainstream journalism is going to survive. If democracy is going to survive this handling of information for the public that problem has got to be solved, which means we are going to have to change the way we do things. One of the ways we are going to have to change is to take advantage of what the new technology offers us to establish a new relationship on our websites. A new relationship with the public, to bring the public into our decision making process and into our reporting process in a way that turns us all into citizen journalists. I am glad Bill mentioned that when he goes to look at the original document, he also looks at the bill of rights, because the framers of our country did not prize information all that highly. The original document without the First Amendment didn't worry about our information, it worried about Thomas Jefferson's scientific experiments, but it didn't worry about our information. The public gave us, as people, the right to the information and the people themselves created what we now call the press in order to get that information. So at bottom the work we try to do in this competition for information and authority, the work we do has to be work that the people approve. The people say yes, that's what we want you to do, we need what you have to offer. And unless we can surmount that problem, unless the information owners and institutions that own news organizations rather than investing their money in projects that are in effect PR operations for their companies invested in think tanks to help journalists figure out how to compete successfully for the kind of information we need to and communicate with the public and put that information together in a way that makes them part of the operation. I think we are in a difficult, we are facing a difficult future. Many of you know our next speaker although you probably don't know, you know her, because she is a radio journalist. Jackie Northam, you hear on, "All things considered" you hear on "Morning Edition", you hear all over NPR. She is a National Security Correspondent which means Intelligence, it means the Pentagon, it means everything concern with the National Security of The United States of America. My private theory is that one reason she is so good and she has won three Edward R. Murrow Awards, The Columbia DuPont Award and just about everything that's available to be won in radio is because she is not a citizen of the United States or at least didn't begin as a citizen of United States, she is Canadian. I don't know her passport status at the moment. But there is something about the perspective that she brings, the outside perspective that I think is uniquely that and I don't think its surprising that so many of our top journalists have in fact been Canadians. Jackie. Well - Jackie covered Abu Ghraib, the scandal at Abu Ghraib and she also covered Guantanamo. So I thought she might begin her comments with, what it's like to cover America's concentration camp? Let me just clarify something first. Was it my accent that give me away or what was, I am not? Something about it Something about my accent, right, yeah. Guantanamo, yes, I actually had to have a little talk over when Charles posed the question, is it just that the journalists aren't trying hard enough to get information. When it comes to Guantanamo, it is an extremely difficult place to get information and I don't mean policy, that's laid out for you in Washington and if it is not given to you, Washington has a say that if somebody doesn't like something, they will leak it. So that's not the problem with Guantanamo. What is the problem is how those policies play out on the ground. The operational side of it. And I have I was trying to think this morning how many times I have been there. It's either eight or nine but it's enough over the course of the past few years just to see how the campus running there. But there are obstacles to covering Guantanamo, physical obstacles you need to get clearance every time you go in there. The more they know you the easier it is you need to say who want to talk, what you want to see that type of thing, you have to take flights down there. These little puddle jumpers that land you on the base to gain more clearance and then you are given minders not one but several minders. When you are there you cannot go anywhere on Guantanamo without a military escort at all. The camp is split up into two sides. It's the windward side which is where the prison camp is and where most of the troops are and that type of thing and where they used to put journalists was on the leeward sides. So you had to take ferries back and forth with heavy escort that type of thing. That was actually up until about a year and a half ago when defense lawyers started showing up at Guantanamo and the military quickly realized that it wasn't to their or its advantage to have defense lawyers and journalists on one side of the island having a couple of beers and discussing their day at Guantanamo. So journalists fortunately were shipped to nice side were a bit closer, but you know, we - you can never talk to the prisoners. You can never talk to the prison guards without having other minders there. It's all very carefully orchestrated. The military prides itself on it's transparency at Guantanamo though. It has put through hundreds and hundreds of journalists over the past few years and each journalist gets to see the kitchen where all these religiously sensitive meals are made. They get to see the prison camp and the security. They get to actually go see some prisoners there and they are the once that lived in communal conditions where they can eat, pray, play soccer together and everything else like that. And then you are given for the most part an interview with the commander. And the first time you go there that's it is quite impressive. You know, they were given 4200 calories of all sorts of food and then they were given exercise by just start working off some of those calories. The more you go there though you are not satisfied with the simple questions that you ask the first time to the commander. The commander is certainly not very comfortable with you asking much tougher questions. But I have never heard so many ways for somebody not to answer questions as I have for the Guantanamo Commanders, its quite remarkable. In journalism you go to all sorts of different people that try to find information and Guantanamo that doesn't exist because there aren't any outside sources really going to Guantanamo before the lawyers or even things like the only organization that was with the International Committee of The Red Cross. By tradition this is an organization that does not talk. So you are hamstrung. Too many things happen along the way though it helped change that. One of them is Abu Ghraib. And what that did even though it happen that half the world the way it swung a huge spotlight on Guantanamo and that sort of broke open the shell, all of a sudden there was questions. Congress suddenly arose itself into action. The military went into a defensive crouch and they started answering more questions. They started giving us more access. We can go to hearings where we could see that how thin the evidence was against the detainees. We could see that they had no legal representation. The other thing that happened when we talk about this is for your requests all of a sudden we got thousands of documents coming in and I looked up the type of treatment that they were receiving and the type of evidence. We finally find out who was in there. And I am starting to wrap-up so others so much more like to talk about, but essentially that is just Guantanamo and I have even addressed the CIA secret prison sites which is one tough nut to crack and it is the Washington Post broke that story. But you know there is access but certainly it is a very, very difficult story to cover and there are still so many layers that we have to get to the government give the yellow sign so I will stop. Jackie was not pointing at anybody particular in the audience just a cue card that says that's it, Jackie. Rob Pollock I first met in a sort of a marital kind of argument. I had met him before, but I wanted him to come. He represents the Wall Street Journals editorial page. As many of you who are not in journalism have no reason to know the news side of the Wall Street Journalism is not particularly conservative. I mean the people who worked there, but the editorial page is famously conservative. So he said, well, what you want me to talk about? And I said, well, I want you to talk about the Right Wing view of secrecy. And he said we are not Right-Wing. And I said, yes, you are. He said, no, we are not. And I said, well, what is it that you really object to? He said, well, we don't like pigeon holes. So I think in the end I just wore him down and I am delighted that he is here to talk about the Right-Wing view of secrecy. Maybe I will call in a new term here, how about the Libertarian Hawkish View of Secrecy? I don't know. I mean, other one of the journalist he has gotten that the trip to gitmo actually just recently but I want to start out with an anecdote about an another trip I took in June of 2004 and it was with Paul Wolfowitz and George Casey, who had yet to assume command in Iraq. It was right before the theoretical transition to Iraqi sovereignty and Casey and Wolfowitz and I and some other people helicoptered around the country meeting with the commanders in various places in Baghdad and Tikrit up North, with the local leaders down in Basra, with the commander of something that at that time was called The Fallujah Brigade which was made up of Ex-Baathist to they hope we are going to solve the security problem in that city. In on that meeting was the Head of Iraqi Intelligence, a guy called Sherwani (ph). We talked about the whereabouts of Zarkawi. I was sitting in an all of this. It is not like Wolfowitz and Casey were going off into another room after that after that conversation finished to have the real conversation. No I followed them out, we got on helicopters and we went somewhere else. And it wasn't just me, it wasn't just for the so-called right wing media, it was Fred Hiatt from the Washington Post, it was Peter Boyer from the New Yorker, many others. You know, I was actually pretty amazed by the amount of access we got, you know, the fact that we got the briefings, leaflets that Casey were getting and the reason I tell the story is I guess, I just want to say that I, I think if this war has been fought badly and perhaps it has been. It hasn't been fought badly because it's been fought in secret. Not at all, I think that, you know, never in the history of human kind probably has a war from conception, conception to planning to execution been so intimately scrutinized as this one has. So, I mean, I guess, the point I would like to make is that you know, first of all, I think we have to be careful about letting secrecy just become a synonym for bad, you know, bad government isn't necessarily secret government and even if we think things in Iraq and the other parts of War on Terror have gone poorly I think its largely for other reasons. You know, now coming to the right wing view of secrecy, what is that - what is the view of secrecy. Look I am a journalist, I want information just like any of the journalist wants. I guess, if there is a right wing view of secrecy is that I don't necessarily think someone to be jerk or a Fascist for not wanting to give it to me. I do respect the fact that people in government might have legitimate reasons for not wanting to get it to me. Doesn't mean I don't try to get the information, in fact I am often kind of tricky and you know, you have to have tricks you know, for, you know, I can tell you one little anecdote as I wanted to find out if a certain strategy paper had been at the written at the National Security Council. I didn't call up and say, just did somebody write this strategy paper. I called up I said, I heard so and so was involved in drafting this strategy paper, is it true? They came back to me and said no, she didn't have a hand in that. They were backing from the existence of the paper. So look, there is a constructive tension between government and the press. The fact that the government is not always forthcoming doesn't necessarily make them bad. We all first met, Greta Van Susteren in the O. J. Simpson trial. She had the fastest mind on the subject and her commentaries were, in my opinion, by far the best. She then became a television journalist full time. At CNN and now at Fox News. That's on the record with Greta Van Susteren. What people appreciate the most, I think, from that show is that, for lack of a better term, the horse feather content to use an euphemism is just about zero and you can't, you can't help but be interested by the speed of that mind. So I want to ask Greta to talk about something that we have dealt with tangentially as we have gone along, which is, has access been more politicized recently than it used to be. Can Fox for example, in this particular administration get access to sources that others can't and if so is that just because they work harder or because of an ideological symbiosis. Greta. I think access has always been politicized I don't think that's anything new. Does Fox have greater access in this administration? Some of the journalists at Fox have greater access than others, without a question, likewise at some of the other news organizations, they have greater access. I don't think you would say straight across the board whether there is greater access or not. Look people in government want to talk to people who they think for whatever reason, whether true or not, that they think they will get a fair shake from someone. They think someone is out to get him or her, they are not going to talk to the person. But access has always been politicized. Administrations only want you to hear information that they think projects their agenda forward and puts them in the best light. They are not going to choose someone who they think is going to overly challenge them if they can help it unless, you know, there are instances of course, when they do end up having to talk to people that they don't necessarily want to where they get trapped but bottom-line is they want to spin you. They are not out there to try to make themselves look bad. Jackie raised a description of her visit to Gitmo and in my experience has been looking at this industry and I am accidental anchor. I never intended to be in this business, I was happy far too long teaching. I never dreamed this. But my experience has been that, many times when you go to see the government, whether it's a prior administration to this one, it is programmed. They are not trying to make themselves look bad. We know when we go on these visits that they are done, they are putting the light most favorable to whoever is showing us around it for whatever purpose. It's our duty as journalists to dig deeper, to compare and contrast. Obviously Jackie raises a question if you have nothing to compare and contrast with what we are, you know, severely hampered and trying to get the message out to you, which of course, is our job. If you want more information, if you believe more information is the bedrock of democracy and I do. You need to figure out a way to help us and that is that journalist need more protection. You hear E. Burton, talking about prosecution of journalists with leaks. Jill talks about prosecution of journalists in New York Times for leaks. If you truly think that there is secrecy in the government and if you truly think that you need more information so you can make more informed decisions and you can help us challenge the administration, whether it's Republic or Democrat help us. The Congress is sitting up there on Capitol Hill, they can pass legislation to protect reporters. They can do all sorts of things but right now in many instances those hard charge reporters who are asking those tough questions don't have a whole lot of protection out there and when I talked a moment ago, I talked about fear. Fear is extremely powerful, fear is what you know, has gotten this into a lot of this mess, because we want to live safely. What journalists you know, they would like to do their job without spending 18 months for contempt of court in prison. Some are willing to do that, and I applaud those who are, but you know, there is an awful lot of fear out there and you could help us by helping, you know, by pushing your members of Congress to help give journalists more protection. You give us more protection and I think there will be more hard charging journalists out there asking questions getting more information and if you believe in information, as being, you know, a sense of power, I do I think that it would be wise.