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.
wow. just wow.
multiply that times all of the major news folk and that’s a boatload of censhorship.
And what a manly little fellow he is to assume sole responsibility for killing that story, as if the top executives of CBS News weren’t involved in the decision.
The writer-editors of Public Eye certainly know which side their bread is buttered on.
Isn’t this to be expected and don’t you expect it to get more restricted? It’s the result of letting the admin get away with so much shit all of the time. They are never held accountable and the more they can hide the more they will hide.
There’s no way of telling which truth might damage and which piece of propaganda might help. I’ve decided that not discussing the war in Iraq is the safest way to handle it. The govt threatened plans to prosecute reporters for leaking the wiretap story and Cheney is bragging that he can ruin lives by selective, spontaneous declassification. I don’t see any reason to doubt the chance that they might decide to prosecute any or all of us.
by crusade commanders. This is to ensure that Americans learn the truth about selected events in Iraq so they will not be deceived by terrorist propaganda.
This is also a business-friendly policy, as crudadecom does its part to defend the American way of life not only by its activities in Iraq, but by helping to ensure that the news coverage will be appealing to both advertisers and readers alike!
They certainly wouldnt want our cosseted people knowing that we were losing. Hmmm far to optimistic. I should say knowing we had lost.
I saw some comment from Noam Chomsky cross my email earlier today about how self-censorship among the media now is so complete control from the outside is really not needed.
The effort to control the media started in WWII. The OSS saw how effectively the Nazis controlled the press in Germany and lusted for that same level of persuasion. So for years the CIA ran their “Operation Mockingbird” program to recruit journalists to serve as agent, and trained agents to serve as journalists. I think Chomsky is right on this. The patterns of servitude are now so well established they’ve become self-perpetuating, and Jerry describes so well above. Thank goodness for blogs, and the Internet. Where else can we still find challenges to the official lies?
There are so many unintentioned admissions in what Martin writes that it boggles the mind.
Obviously Martin hasn’t a clue as to just how much he has told us about how compromised he, his network, and his associates really are.
Yup, but the blogs aren’t going to last as they are much longer the way things are going. That censorship is already moving over this. The blogs are the logical place to suppress the sharing of information and dissent. The govt will leak more ominous warnings and subliminal messages, prosecute a select bunch and ramp up the obvious monitors on the blogs. Some well placed stories on the dangers of advertising data collection of users will slow down revenues. Eventually, people will figure out that the risks aren’t worth it and they’ll do something else.
When it comes to IED’s though and how we hunt them or anything that could be of benefit to the insurgents, I draw the line. Nothing has evolved in Iraq like the IED has. At first they were simple devices that they began to hide in anything available once we began searching for them. They have even hidden them in the corpses of dogs laying on the side of the road. IED’s have now evolved into some evil killers that have been quite large, demolished tanks, detonated using cell phones, killed 14 Marines in one blast, and the list will continue to grow because you can a good kill in with minimal man power and bodily risk. IED’s are big body bag winners for insurgents and they intend to keep on improving them and get better and better at racking up the body bag count. Where IED’s are concerned the insurgency in Iraq is in a constant state of learning fresh ideas and new techniques to foil the soldiers. This is one time that I’ll just have to eat the press self censorship as long as our soldiers are dodging IED’s!
Except I suspect that this story dealt more with how the military is dragging its feet in equipping our vehicles with devices that have been perfected but not deployed. That seems to be the emerging story, and since Martin concedes that he disagreed with the reasons for pulling the story, I cannot fathom that he felt he was telling the insurgents anything they did not already know. If I am right about what Martin’s story was about, pulling it would serve no point except to avoid embarrassing the Pentagon. As far as our troops go, the lax deployment of this gear puts them in greater danger. I suspect the yanking of the Martin story put them in danger as well.
indeed be to not embarrass the Pentagon. I will keep checking on it. My husband has photos of what an IED did to a tank over there and it was just mind boggling. Must have been one of the better ones. The whole place was one big ammo dump when the soldiers got there, but protecting the oil fields was first priority. We didn’t even start patrolling and destroying ammo dumps seriously until we were in there for about six months……a bit too late to have been of any real use to anybody who really wanted weapons and a way to fight. My husband was furious. The soldiers had discovered several ammo dumps in the Fallujah area but nothing was really done about them for months and the whole time nasty things were being removed by anybody who wanted them.