Forget Leaks, Look at Substance
Terry H. Schwadron
June 12, 2021
Journalists at ProPublica have gotten their hands on documents showing that ultra-rich Americans like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and business tycoon Warren Buffett paid very little or no taxes?
So, let’s launch an immediate investigation — not into why these ultra-rich guys aren’t paying taxes, but about how the journalists got leaked the tax documents. ProPublica, which has not disclosed how they got them, then ran them by the 25 named rich guys named for confirmation, so accuracy is not the question here.
Or, separately, we learned that The New York Times and The Washington Post have seen evidence that the Donald Trump White House tried mightily to sneak away from reports of trying to fire both ex-FBI director James Comey and the special counsel investigating the actions.
The reaction: Let’s investigate the journalists at those organizations to find out who leaked rather than actually, say, trying to determine the actual timeline of Trump twisting arms to use the Justice Department to keep himself free of pesky dissidents. In fact, celebrate Trump for stalling long enough that four-year-old, closed-door testimony by former White House lawyer Don McGahn was so constrained and limited that it is all but meaningless beyond confirming that a shielded Trump did commit obstruction of justice.
Let’s even have the Justice Department Civil Division even get a court gag order to stop the top lawyer at The New York Times and CNN or their publishers from sharing even with the editor or the reporters involved — his clients — that Justice had subpoenaed phone records in pursuit of its probe — and, by the way, get thwarted and never prove who did leak whatever was considered so almighty important.
In fact, the Trump administration went after telephones and emails of Democratic congress members, their staff and family (there was no evidence of sought leaks), according to a new disclosure from Apple. Protect Trump at all costs, apparently, even at the cost of abuse of office. “The zeal in the Trump administration’s efforts to hunt leakers led to the extraordinary step of subpoenaing communications metadata from members of Congress — a nearly unheard-of move outside of corruption investigations,” said The New York Times. Yesterday, former Atty. Gen. Bill Barr sought to distance himself from these particular subpoenas, saying he was not aware of them, and the department’s inspector general announced an investigation.
But senators asking a million questions from the usual suspects to learn that the Capitol Police formally had received information about a pending Jan. 6 raid but not acted upon it — and never seek why Donald Trump sat on reports about the insurrection for hours — one must be ruing that there are no journalists around to investigate for failing to leak the appropriate information. The same could be said for investigations by the Barack Obama team for probing leaks of the so-called Fast and Furious gun-running operations at the border.
Providing Political Cover
The public outrage machine repeatedly has showed itself to be pointed in the wrong direction — all for obvious political cover. I’m less worried that most my career profession about leaks and more concerned that we’re asking the wrong questions.
Indeed, the question is at what point the Justice Department mania for finding leaks violated other laws and norms.
As someone who spent four decades in newsrooms doing most every job, yes, there is too much reliance on leaks, particularly of the anonymous variety. Yes, there should be a lot more reliance on documents than on chats and interviews, formal or not, in offices or in darkened Deep Throat parking garages. There ought to be more adherence to maintaining principles of rigor and fairness, and to committing journalism in ethical ways rather than gotcha sound bites.
But reporters get leaks, and always will. Someone’s ox always is being gored. And journalists should be doing the hard work involved towards verification before using them. Protecting sources when it places you in legal jeopardy is a courageous reality that shield laws and reputation attacks cannot fully repel.
This is not a judgment on officials’ constant attempts to control leaks from their organizations nor a total exoneration of all participating journalists in maintaining a system based on tell-me-your-secret.
That the Joe Biden-Merrick Garland administration wants to close the barn door on investigating journalists comes only after they were found to be continuing probes doing exactly that may be a good sign, but it is irrelevant to the wider issue here.
As a society, we prefer to shoot the messenger than to face the bad news.
So, if we don’t like that the pandemic started in China, skip the actual investigation, and slip right to the blame for Dr. Anthony Fauci not being vocal enough about the unproved theory that it was a lab leak. Or if Trump was actually committing obstruction of justice by trying to fire Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III, skip the questions, gather the Republican vote into enough of a bloc to rebut impeachment, and investigate anyone asking questions.
We see it over and over, with Republicans and Democrats alike.
A Spread of Disdain
A reader wrote me this week, calling me a Democratic shill, not because I was arguing that Kamala Harris probably lacks sufficient sway to win over the likes of Sen. Joe Manchin, D-WVa., over voting rights, but because I worked for three news organizations in my career, and anyone who had done so was and remain Democratic shills, even in retirement, even in a new role offering public opinion for the first time.
We seem to prefer starting from the conclusion and work backwards to the question at hand. Believe it or not, all questions do not involve support or criticism for Donald Trump, and observations about how we live don’t live or die around The Big Lie or The Big Steal, depending on your point of view.
We ought to be able to respond to a report about Jeff Bezos paying no income tax with a question or two about how that comes about and whether it is a good thing to let our multi-billionaires slide rather than on how the question came up in the first place.
Likewise, we ought to be able to know what our presidents actually do while they talk transparency and end up using the Justice Department to discourage questioning.
Over the years, it matters a lot less that Daniel Ellsberg was unauthorized to take and copy the Pentagon Papers or how The New York Times and The Washington Post were able to get them published than it does that the government was pulling the wool over the eyes of its citizenry about what it was doing in Vietnam altogether, just for one such example.
And Mitch McConnell, it makes no sense to leave all the questions about Jan. 6 to a Senate committee if the committee is not allowed to raise the obvious question about the guy at the center of the insurrection.
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