While one must give him credit for his candor, CBS Pentagon correspondent David Martin made a disturbing, if not surprising admission at the CBS newsblog, Public Eye, the other day:
“This week I killed a story about the battle against Improvised Explosive Devices after a senior military officer told me it contained information that would be helpful to the enemy,” writes Martin in his opening paragraph.
Questions spring immediately to mind, like how did that senior military officer know just what was in Martin’s story, for example? Is Martin turning his stories over to military officials for vetting before submitting them?
But Martin’s apparent self-censorship becomes more disturbing as he writes more:
I didn’t find [the officer’s] argument about how it would help the enemy very persuasive, but because there’s a war on I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. I’ve done that a number of times over the years, and each time it’s turned out that going with the story wouldn’t have caused any harm [emphasis added]. It’s always a difficult decision, made more difficult by the fact that it always seems to happen late in the day when you’re under deadline pressure. When I killed the story on Thursday, it was 5:30 – an hour to air – and I left the Evening News broadcast without a lead story which they had been counting on all day. Not a good career move.
More beneath the fold.
Martin’s account continues:
So how do you decide that a story contains sensitive information that shouldn’t see the light of day? In war, you can make an extreme case that almost any accurate information about the U.S. military is news the enemy can use. A story about the Army being “stretched too thin” or even “broken” by the pace of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan could be said to encourage the enemy to fight on. A story I did this week about new pictures of abuse from Abu Ghraib could be said to increase the likelihood of violence against American soldiers in Iraq. Indeed, the Pentagon made exactly that case when it went to court to try to prevent the photos from being released under the Freedom of Information Act. But that’s too hypothetical for me. The story I killed dealt with specific techniques and how well they were or weren’t working against IEDs. It wasn’t as simple as “you report this and American soldiers will die,” but I could see how it might conceivably be news the enemy could use to make their IEDs more effective. It wasn’t clear cut, but it was close enough. So how do you decide that a story contains legitimate secrets? It’s like the famous definition of pornography – you know it when you see it [emphasis added].
You know it when you see it???
Martin’s own account challenges that assertion when he admits early on that he did not find the argument to kill this story very compelling, and that whenever he has acquiesced in the past to implied pressure to kill a story “each time it’s turned out that going with the story wouldn’t have caused any harm.” More likely Martin knows that his continued successful career depends upon remaining on the good side of those same military officers who ask him to kill stories that fail to please them. Nor is his claim credible that he refused to kill a story on the new Abu Ghraib photos based on Pentagon arguments that they would “encourage the enemy” because “that’s too hypothetical for me.” Those photos have been shown on Australian television and in non-U.S. media across the globe. There was no story to kill. It was out there for all to see.
Martin is a veteran correspondent who has covered beats that included intelligence matters, the FBI and CIA, the State Department and the Pentagon for the Associated Press, Newsweek and CBS. Perhaps because he can be trusted to kill an occasional story for the Pentagon, he was the recipient of one of the early “scoops” in the lead-up to the war: the military’s “shock and awe” strategy for its initial strike on Baghdad. He was also the first reporter to be told and to report, on the opening day of the war, that the U.S. was launching a strike on a palace bunker in southern Baghdad in an attempt to take out Saddam Hussein.
As mainstream media reporters go, though, he is one of the better ones, and it was also Martin who reported that, in the immediate aftermath of planes flying into the Pentagon and World Trade Center on 9/11, “Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq — even though there was no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks.”
I repeat that Martin is to be congratulated for his candor in reporting episodes of self-censorship on the Public Eye blog. But his admission underscores one of the basic reasons why the U.S. mainstream media has become an ever increasingly poor source of objective reporting. If you don’t play ball you do not get the scoops, and if you do not get the scoops you will soon be out of a job. The regretable thing is that the government would not hold the careers of working correspondents and reporters in their hands were it not for the fact that there is always some journalist eager and willing to do their bidding in return for being an insider.
Judith Miller is living proof of that.