News-Record.com

I haven't blogged in a while, partially because my role here at the N&R was changing so often and partially because I didn't think I had anything worthwhile to say. But Al Tompkins at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies posted a column today that really punched one of my buttons: open government records. In particular, he focused on cases in which court records, normally open in every state, are being sealed for what turns out to be no good reason.

In some of the cases he cites, prominent individuals most likely benefited from the case sealings. And newspapers have been fighting back in several communities, suing for access to the records.

And because such cases often are considered of interest only to journalists, they're writing about the subject in plain language meant to explain why everyone should care about this violation of law. A Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press article on the Seattle Times' work cited by Tompkins shows just how plain, and focused directly on the reader, the language could be:

The first story, for instance, starts like this:

Four years ago, a lawsuit was filed in King County Superior Court, alleging that a medical device was unsafe. A woman using it wound up in a coma. You'd probably like to know: What's the device? Does anyone in my family use it? Unsafe how?

But you can't know. You're not allowed to know.

The newspaper also wanted to be upfront with readers about its involvement in the cases.

That first story ended this way:

"We start filing motions tomorrow. We'll let you know how it goes."

I do not know whether the problem exists here, or, if it does, to what extent. If it did and we knew, I do not know whether we could devote the resources to documenting it that the Seattle Times did there in King County, Wash. But I would like to think we'd do everything in our power to see to it that the public's legal business, carried out in courts supported by our tax dollars, would be done in public. Secrecy breeds favoritism. Favoritism breeds injustice.

At least 144 journalists gave money to politicians between 2004 and the start of the 2008 campaign, MSNBC reports.

We deal with a lot of grays in this bidness. This is not one of them.

The home page for the Washington bureau of the McClatchy newspaper chain (which owns The Charlotte Observer and The News & Observer of Raleigh, among others) now has a new slogan: Truth to Power.

Chris Matthews, Tim Russert, et al., act as if there is some invisible force so strong that it keeps them from even trying to achieve this goal. But then, that's TV for you.

You probably don't recognize the name Nick Ut.

But you'd recognize his work.

(h/t: Apostropher)

Digby at his Hullabaloo blog runs down some of the things wrong with American TV journalism. It's lengthy but well worth reading.

If you're tired of reading about buxom dead celebrities, and I certainly am, go read this.

And reflect, please, not only on its substance but on the ways and means in which it is coming to the attention of at least a small fraction of the American public.

Everyone who has ever had to put up with an uninformed (or lying) bureaucrat to try to get public records, anyone who has ever had to twiddle her thumbs through the litigation of a public-records lawsuit whose resolution comes long after the records' news value has evaporated, will get at least a mild kick out of the luck involved in this story.

(Hat tip: John McCarthy at Florida Today, via the NICAR-L listserv.)

For the 23 years I've been in newspaper journalism, I've tried very hard to be accurate, and not just in reporting. Following my late father's advice, I've tried to avoid prediction completely. When that wasn't possible, I tried to base any predictions on incontrovertible facts and as rational an interpretation of those facts as possible. And when that wasn't possible, I predicted as conservatively as possible, so that if I was going to be wrong, at least it wouldn't be by much.

Dad's advice has worked for me. I sleep well, I can look at myself in the mirror without flinching about anything but my complexion, and I am able to live a comfortable middle-class lifestyle.

Unfortunately, however, I'm going to have to un-inurn my dad and beat him over the ashes that used to be his head with this article. Because following his advice turns out to have been precisely the wrong approach.

Somebody had probably better tell JR, too. But break it to him gently, OK?

COROLLARY: (courtesy Athenae): "Everything important in the last six years has been discussed entirely by crazy people."

So former New York Times reporter (or Bush-administration mouthpiece) Judith Miller was actually presuming to lecture the rest of us this past weekend on journalism ethics.

It is to laugh.

Now, to be absolutely, positively, scrupulously fair to Miller, she's quite right about increasing levels of secrecy, and corresponding decreases in the levels of freedom, in this country. In fact, the country's voters spoke rather loudly last Tuesday to the effect that they get that and want to do something about it.

But I had to laugh at this:

Miller said the American media, however, give the federal government reason to doubt its motives and competence each time it is discovered that an article is plagiarized or gossip is reported as fact.

The blurring of entertainment and news and the relaxing of journalistic standards can be seen in online bloggers who are critical of people without giving them an opportunity to respond or who don't post corrections when they learn that what they have posted is wrong, she said.

"I'm worried about bloggers," she said. "(A post) starts as a rumor and within 24 hours it's repeated as fact."

While she advocates a federal shield law to protect mainstream journalists from divulging their sources, she doesn't favor extending that to bloggers who don't follow the standards and ethnics of the journalism industry.

Still, she wouldn't restrict a blogger's right to publish online. She said some bloggers have been invaluable in uncovering government flaws.

"I'm glad to welcome them as long as they agree to the standards," she said.

Tell me, Miss "I was proved f------ right": What exactly are the standards?:

On September 7, 2002, Miller and Times reporter Michael R. Gordon reported the interception of metal tubes bound for Iraq. Her front page story quoted unnamed "American officials" and "American intelligence experts" who said the tubes were intended to be used to enrich nuclear material, and cited unnamed "Bush administration officials" who claimed that in recent months, Iraq had "stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb."[4]

Miller added that "Mr. Hussein's dogged insistence on pursuing his nuclear ambitions, along with what defectors described in interviews as Iraq's push to improve and expand Baghdad's chemical and biological arsenals, have brought Iraq and the United States to the brink of war." Although Miller conceded that some intelligence experts found the information on Iraq's weapons programs "spotty," she did not report specific and detailed objections, including a report filed with the US government more than a year before Miller's article appeared by retired Oak Ridge National Laboratory physicist, Houston G. Wood III, who concluded that the tubes were not meant for centrifuges.

Shortly after Miller's article was published, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld all appeared on television and pointed to Miller's story as a partial basis for going to war. Subsequent analyses by various agencies all concluded that there was no way the tubes could have been used for uranium-enrichment centrifuges.

Miller would later claim, based only on second-hand statements from the military unit she was embedded with, that WMDs had been found in Iraq. (NYT; April 21, 2003) This again was widely repeated in the press. "Well, I think they found something more than a smoking gun," Miller said on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. "What they've found is a silver bullet in the form of a person, an Iraqi individual, a scientist, as we've called him, who really worked on the programs, who knows them, firsthand, and who has led MET Alpha people to some pretty startling conclusions." This story also turned out to be false.[5]

On May 26, 2004, a week after the U.S. government apparently severed ties with Ahmed Chalabi, a Times editorial acknowledged that some of that newspaper's coverage in the run-up to the war had relied too heavily on Chalabi and other Iraqi exiles bent on regime change. It also regretted that "information that was controversial [was] allowed to stand unchallenged." While the editorial rejected "blame on individual reporters," others noted that ten of the twelve flawed stories discussed had been written or co-written by Miller.[6]

Miller has reacted angrily to criticism of her pre-war reporting. In a May 27, 2004 article in Salon, published the day after the Times mea culpa, James C. Moore quoted her: "You know what," she offered angrily. "I was proved f------ right. That's what happened. People who disagreed with me were saying, 'There she goes again.' But I was proved f------ right." This quotation was originally in relation to another Miller story, wherein she indicated that trailers found in Iraq had been proven to be mobile weapons labs. That too was later shown to be untrue.

So tell us, Judy: Is it OK if the bloggers lie the country into a war, like you did, as long as they correct their misspellings?

Actually, strike that. I'll tell you what: In the unlikely event we who are still in the business of trying to report stuff instead of making stuff up need your advice, we'll beat it out of you. Otherwise? Just. Shut. Up. Our jobs are hard enough as it is.

• Libel is libel, irrespective of whether it appears in a newspaper or on the Web.
• Unflattering but factually accurate reporting about someone is not libel, despite what the people on this jury think.

I don't often make predictions, by the way, but I'll make one in this case: The verdict will be overturned in its entirety on appeal, the entire judgment thrown out. The jury admits that the reporting was accurate; all else is sound and fury, signifying nothing even though it was extremely embarrassing (and no doubt terrifying) to the plaintiff. I haven't read the entire case file, but on the basis of this news article it looks as if the judge should have swatted this claim out of the park on summary judgment.

(Also, to gauge the jury's intellectual candlepower, note that although jurors concede that the plaintiff's name was on the jail log AND that the jail log was a public record, they couldn't agree on the invasion-of-privacy issue. In other words, at least one person thought that publication of the guy's name under those circumstances constituted a valid tort claim. Jayhawk, please.)

In the United States we do not, except in cases of national security, punish people for the publication of true but unflattering material. For those of you new to the country, that's one of the many things that lead us to think of ourselves as the good guys.

If you're ever attacked while we're covering a story together, I will help you.

Steve Safran, managing editor of Lost Remote, writes Perspective's obituary.

... courtesy of Fox News' John Gibson, and edited for length:

Ned Lamont = Pol Pot

But, hey, at least it's fair and balanced.

TO: House Speaker Dennis Hastert
FROM: Lex
DATE: 29 June 2006
RE: Your little temper tantrum

Yo, Self-Serving Fat Boy: Before you get your panties in a wad over The New York Times (and The Wall Street Journal, don't forget, although for some reason defenders of the administration always do) "disclosing" a program whose existence was only slightly more secret than the fact that the sky is blue, you might want to have a word with one of your friends:

No one would have mentioned his name at all if President George W. Bush hadn't singled him out in public. Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, West Point '76, is not someone the Army likes to talk about. He isn't even listed in the directory at Fort Bragg, N.C., his home base. That's not because McChrystal has done anything wrong—quite the contrary, he's one of the Army's rising stars—but because he runs the most secretive force in the U.S. military. That is the Joint Special Operations Command, the snake-eating, slit-their-throats "black ops" guys who captured Saddam Hussein and targeted Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi.

JSOC is part of what Vice President Dick Cheney was referring to when he said America would have to "work the dark side" after 9/11. To many critics, the veep's remark back in 2001 fostered his rep as the Darth Vader of the war on terror and presaged bad things to come, like the interrogation abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay. But America also has its share of Jedi Knights who are fighting in what Cheney calls "the shadows." And McChrystal, an affable but tough Army Ranger, and the Delta Force and other elite teams he commands are among them.

After the Zarqawi strike, multinational forces spokesman Gen. Bill Caldwell refused to comment on JSOC's role, saying, "We don't talk about when special operating forces are involved." But when Bush revealed to reporters that it was McChrystal's Special Ops teams that had found Zarqawi, Caldwell had to gulp and say (to laughter), "If the president of the United States said it was, then I'm sure it was."

Just sayin'.

Now, don't we have some terrorists to catch and an executive branch to oversee? Why, yes, we do. So put the Constitution down, hand me your scissors and go do your freakin' job.

Oh, and Denny? Last time I checked that Constitution, you worked for me and not the other way 'round, so I don't give a flying flip at a rolling doughnut what you "expect."

It's tempting to write off the controversy over The New York Times' reporting on surveillance of financial transactions as utterly meaningless. So tempting. And yet ...

I do not mean to say the Times did anything illegal, even though that's what the president and vice president have been saying. Quite the contrary: Although classified, the program had been no secret at all, and if you doubt me, then take the word of one of the president's own counterterrorism experts:

"There have been public references to SWIFT before," said Roger Cressey, a senior White House counterterrorism official until 2003. "The White House is overreaching when they say [The New York Times committed] a crime against the war on terror. It has been in the public domain before."

(UPDATE: Additional background here from former banker TBogg and his banking commenters on just how widely known (outside the U.S.) SWIFT and its capabilities are.)

That being the case, it's a little unclear why the program was classified in the first place, although that classification is consistent with the administration's policy of decreasing public access to the workings and records of government -- a policy that predates 9/11.

It also raises a question: Do the president and vice president not know the Times (and the Los Angeles Times, and The Wall Street Journal) did nothing wrong? I don't know. And if they do know it, then why are they saying what they're saying? I don't know that, either. (UPDATE: Media critic Dan Kennedy hazards a hypothesis:

The White House and its defenders also give the game away by refusing to differentiate between the NSA no-warrant wiretapping program -- obviously illegal, given that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requires warrants -- and the SWIFT program, which appears to be on more solid legal ground.

By lumping them together, folks like U.S. Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., make it clear that they're only interested in scoring points against the media.

(Why score points against the media? To energize their voting base for the fall elections, if in fact "scoring points against the media" is what they're trying to do and they aren't honestly mistaken.)

What I do know is that the incident has sparked a wave of pro-administration protest that the Times, the reporters and senior editors should be prosecuted for espionage, if not treason. Some commenters are even calling for vigilantism, as in this post at the Powerline blog, the one that took credit for taking down Dan Rather:

It is unfortunately past time for the Bush administration to enforce the laws of the United States against the New York Times. The Times and its likeminded media colleagues will undoubtedly continue to undermine and betray the national security of the United States until they are taught that they are subject to the same laws that govern the conduct of ordinary citizens, or until an enraged citizenry decides, like Bill Keller, to take the law into its own hands and express its disagreement some other way.

Nice First Amendment you got there. Be a shame if anything happened to it.

Well, I would remind the Powerline boys, secure in their Minnesota law offices, of a couple of things.

First, they've been wrong on pretty much every legal issue involving the administration to come down the pike. (UPDATE: There's even a law about this, to go along with those of Murphy and Godwin, called Ezra's Law, coined by Ezra Klein: "Powerline ... has no bleeping idea what they're talking about at any given moment.") They don't deal in law on their blog; they deal in stroking some very paranoid fantasies.

Second, this is North Carolina. Down here, even the journalists carry guns.

Y'all have a nice day.

So Charlotte Observer reporter Michael Gordon and photographer Todd Sumlin just happened to be down at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, this past weekend, doing a feature on the prison's commander (who's from Kings Mountain, 45 minutes or so west of Charlotte), when three inmates hanged themselves.

Gordon, surprise, acted like a reporter: He filed a story. (And at least two others on succeeding days.)

As a reward, he and Sumlin were kicked off the base, and reporters from the Los Angeles Times and the Miami Herald who had arrived to cover the suicides also were ordered to leave.

Pentagon spokesman J.D. Gordon (whose relationship, if any, to Michael Gordon is not characterized), speaks out of both sides of his mouth on this incident. He told the trade magazine Editor & Publisher, "We are not into content management. The issue was that other media were threatening to take us to court." But the same spokesman also said Gordon's reporting had caused "controversy" and added, "He was doing a hometowner [i.e., an article on someone famous by a newspaper in that person's home town], a hometowner takes one day. You would think that a man allowed down for a whole week would be a bit more gracious about it. Have the good grace and class to leave."

Leaving aside the dubious assertion that a decent hometowner necessarily can be done in a day, how dare reporter Gordon do his, you know, job and all?

It would seem that Bumgarner, the prison commander, also suffers from a failure to understand the source of the problem:

But inside the detention facility, military leaders started clamping down on discipline and security in what they say is an effort to stop another round of suicide attempts already being planned.

"Right now, we are at ground zero," an emotional prison commander, Col. Mike Bumgarner told his officers at his [Monday] morning staff meeting.

"The trust level is gone. They [prisoners] have shown time and time again that we can't trust them any farther than we can throw them. There is not a trustworthy son of a ... in the entire bunch."

With that, Bumgarner, a Kings Mountain native, ordered his staff to assess and curtail existing policies on detainee clothing, meals, recreation time, prison lighting and discipline. He ordered more frequent patrols in the cellblocks. He said existing rules on detainee behavior must be enforced quickly and fully.

"If a brother [a term used both by U.S. troops to refer to Muslim prisoners and by male Muslims generally to refer to themselves] covers up a window with a sheet or blanket, you give him an order and then you go get him ...," Bumgarner said.

Later in the day, the colonel said the tougher restrictions would stay in place for the foreseeable future.

"Once I get a better read of things, I can manage a better balance of their quality of life with the security of this facility."

I'm all for more frequent patrols to prevent suicide. But the rest of it? Let's see: Suicide = betrayal of the commandant's trust. Degrading the quality of life of hundreds of prisoners -- in a facility where quality of life is already so bad that five United Nations experts have called for its closure -- is justified because of the suicides of three and the alleged planning of suicide of several more. Quality of inmate life and facility security constitute a zero-sum game.

And war is peace and ignorance is strength.

And it ain't just Bumgarner and Gordon:

"These men are smart, creative and committed, and they have no regard for life, neither ours nor their own," Guantanamo Bay commander Rear Adm. Harry Harris said Saturday during a news conference in Miami.

"We have men who are committed to al-Qaida and the Taliban. They were captured on the battlefield. They are continuing their fight against us here."

Yeah. And suicide is just a good PR move.

In fact, none of the three had been charged with a crime, although they'd been held for more than two years with little access to lawyers or courts. And at least one was going to be released soon, although he hadn't been informed of that fact.

Since Pentagon spokesman Gordon feels up to telling us how to do our jobs, I'm going to tell tell him how to do his: Stop treating prisoners so badly they come to see suicide as preferable. Stop violating international law. And stop whining about the media when your problems are a direct result of your organization's behavior.

(Full disclosure: I've got family and friends who work at the Observer, but I don't know either reporter Gordon or photographer Sumlin.)

I noted a few weeks back that Time magazine had let go the award-winning reporting pair of Donald Barlett and James Steele, apparently because it didn't want to pay them what they were worth.

Time appears to have an interesting concept of "worth." It apparently had no problem paying $4 million for pictures of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's new baby. Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen estimates that that money could've kept Barlett & Steele on the Time payroll, with research help, for another 10 years.

Anyone who wants to argue that this makes sense even in business terms is welcome to get in touch with me right after pictures of the baby become, on their own, a bestselling book. I won't be holding my breath.

So apparently "leading Democrats" are worried about Bill and Hillary Clinton's marriage and sex life ... and this "news" is considered fit for big-deal treatment on the front page of The New York Times in light of Hillary Clinton's rumored 2008 campaign for president.

I'm not a huge fan of either Clinton, but this is just ridiculous.

I'll tell you something else, too: A misjudgment this big, a misuse of resources this colossal, is not just the work of a single (no pun intended) reporter.

No, to screw up this big, I'm betting some of the most senior editors at the Times had to get involved.

I also must assume that, in the interests of fairness and balance, we have the dubious pleasure of looking forward to examinations of the marriages and/or dating lives of every other major presidential candidate, plus, I would think, stories checking to see whether single senior administration officials are hewing to its doctrine of abstinence before marriage and how their doing so, or failure to do so, is likely to affect their job performance.

Gawd. No wonder our industry is in so much trouble.

UPDATE: Someone alert The New York Times! Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is wandering the Capitol doused in gorilla testosterone!

Buried at the end of The New York Times' article on Time Inc.'s new managing editor was this woeful bit of news: Donald Barlett and James Steele have been laid off.

(Disclosure: I had the pleasure of hearing Jim Steele speak at the American Press Institute in 1990 but otherwise do not know either man.)

You probably won't recognize the names. But this would be worse than the San Francisco 49ers cutting Joe Montana in the prime of his career in a salary-cap move.

Barlett and Steele won two Pulitzer Prizes in 26 years at the Philadelphia Inquirer before moving to Time magazine in 1997. There, they won two National Magazine Awards. "America: What Went Wrong," their serial examination of flaws, and huge gifts to political contributors, buried within the 1986 tax-reform act, was so well-received that it was turned into a paperback book that spent an amazing six months atop The Times' paperback nonfiction bestsellers list. It did so not only because of its absolutely bulletproof reporting, backed by hundreds of interviews and thousands of documents, but also because of its clear, blunt language, much of which remains accurate today:

Worried that you are falling behind? Not living as well as you once did? Or expected to?

That you are going to have to work extra hours, or take a second job, just to stay even with your bills?

That the company you have worked for all these years may dump you for a younger person?

Or that the pension you have been promised may not be there when you retire?

Worried, if you are on the bottom rung of the economic ladder, that you will never see a middle-class lifestyle?

Or, if you are a single parent or part of a young working family, that you will never be able to save enough to buy a home?

That you are paying more than your fair share of taxes?

Worried that the people in Congress are taking care of themselves and their friends at your expense?

You are right. Keep worrying.

For those people in Washington who write the complex tangle of rules by which the economy operates have, over the last twenty years, rigged the game -- by design and default -- to favor the privileged, the powerful and the influential. At the expense of everyone else.

Shed no tears for Barlett and Steele; they'll land on their feet, I'm sure. But the kind of journalism they produced -- powerful, influential, galvanizing -- is difficult and expensive and, accordingly, becoming more and more rare. We're now in an era in which a business model that will support even routine journalism online, let alone the kind of grand-slam reporting that B&S produced, hasn't yet surfaced or been created.

And the American people have less opportunity, as a result, to learn about ways in which the system is being rigged.

The Hill magazine reports today that Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee have cut a deal with Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., to hold hearings on the National Security Agency's warrantless-wiretapping program.

Specter had sought a requirement that the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court be asked to rule on the legality and constitutionality of the NSA program. But he now says he's dropping that requirement in favor of one that would allow the FISA court to rule only if a plaintiff with legal standing (that is, someone who claims to have suffered actual damage and isn't just asking for an opinion on the legality of the program) appeals to the court. As a practical matter, this change creates all sorts of roadblocks against the likelihood that the FISA court would ever get the chance to rule on the program.

So: If the administration is so confident that the program is legal and constitutional, why is it so reluctant to let the FISA court review it? Remember, one FISA judge already has quit in protest over this very program. Lawyer Glenn Greenwald asks the same question:

One would think that if [administration officials] really believed that they had the clear-cut legal justification for warrantless eavesdropping which they claim to have, they would be eager to have a court rule on this issue so that this unpleasant controversy -- with all of these mean-spirited and utterly baseless allegations of lawbreaking -- can finally be put to rest. And yet, time and again, they do precisely the opposite: they desperately invoke every available measure to prevent any judicial ruling as to the legality of their behavior.

Without the provision which was originally "demanded" by Sen. Specter, it is basically impossible for any plaintiff to ever challenge the legality of the NSA program. In very general terms, in order to have standing to bring such a suit, a plaintiff would have to prove that they have been specifically injured by the warrantless eavesdropping beyond the injuries of an average citizen. But the program is secret and there have been no investigations into it. As a result, nobody knows whose calls have been intercepted without warrants.

Therefore, any would-be plaintiff would be immediately trapped in the type of preposterous, bureaucratic Catch-22 in which American law specializes and which the Bush administration is eager to exploit -- namely, since nobody knows whose conversations have been eavesdropped on, nobody could ever make the showing necessary to maintain such a lawsuit, and since the administration claims that all such information is highly classified, the evidence necessary to make that showing can never be obtained.

Greenwald also makes this interesting point:

It is always worth noting that nothing in any of these bills immunizes the administration from being held accountable for its previous and ongoing violations of FISA. These bills simply render legal on a going forward basis warrantless eavesdropping. They do not make these programs retroactively legal.

Thus, absent any legal defense that a court will buy (and those offered so far by the program's defenders -- that the authorization to use force against 9/11 terrorists and/or the president's inherent warmaking powers make the program legal and constitutional, FISA itself and the Fourth Amendment be damned -- have appeared pretty weak), the administration remains guilty of multiple felony violations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, subject to both criminal prosecution and civil liability.

In related news, BellSouth is denying that it has provided bulk customer phone records to the NSA. Interestingly, however, it has not asked USA Today to retract or correct its earlier report to the contrary.

Is it telling the truth? I don't know. It might well be telling the complete truth. Or it might be engaging in a little Clintonian parsing -- agreeing, for example, to let the NSA install its hardware and software on its system ... or not trying to look too hard for any covert attempts by NSA to do so. Again, I do not know. My point is that BellSouth's statement does not completely shut the door on its participation in the NSA program. The article notes, for example, that while the company denies having a contract with NSA, it doesn't answer the question of whether it has a contract with NSA's government parent, the Department of Defense.

More questions ....

UPDATE: In this Atlanta Journal-Constitution article (annoying free registration required), BellSouth's denial is a bit broader and more emphatic:

BellSouth spokesman Jeff Battcher said Monday that the company had, in the days since the report, conducted a review of the allegations. Ackerman, Battcher said, did not approve an NSA request to give out records.

"We can find no instances where Mr. [CEO Duane] Ackerman has been asked to give any information to the NSA," Battcher said. "He has not signed off on it because he's never been asked."

In fact, Battcher said the company was not aware it had received any requests from the NSA. "To the best of our knowledge, we cannot find where we've ever gotten a request," he said.

On the other hand, the story goes on to say, if the government didn't approach BellSouth, that might have been because it didn't need to:

BellSouth's rebuttal adds another twist to a still-developing story. But it does not mean the overall gist of USA Today's account — that a huge database was collected — is incorrect.

Indeed, BellSouth is a different kind of carrier than AT&T, Verizon and Qwest in a crucial way: BellSouth does not own an international or nationwide long-distance network. When a caller in, say, Atlanta dials someone in Seattle, the call travels mostly over non-BellSouth lines. To obtain a record of such a call, the NSA would not need BellSouth. They could get it from the owner of the network, such as AT&T.

Curiouser and curiouser ....

Just because it seemed relevant. (All emphasis added; my comments in italics.)

§50.10 Policy with regard to the issuance of subpoenas to members of the news media, subpoenas for telephone toll rec&chyph;ords of members of the news media, and the interrogation, indictment, or arrest of, members of the news media.

Because freedom of the press can be no broader than the freedom of reporters to investigate and report the news, the prosecutorial power of the government should not be used in such a way that it impairs a reporter's responsibility to cover as broadly as possible controversial public issues. This policy statement is thus intended to provide protection for the news media from forms of compulsory process, whether civil or criminal, which might impair the news gathering function. In balancing the concern that the Department of Justice has for the work of the news media and the Department's obligation to the fair administration of justice, the following guidelines shall be adhered to by all members of the Department in all cases:

(a) In determining whether to request issuance of a subpoena to a member of the news media, or for telephone toll records of any member of the news media, the approach in every case must be to strike the proper balance between the public's interest in the free dissemination of ideas and information and the public's interest in effective law enforcement and the fair administration of justice.

(First, note the presumption that a warrant is required to seek these records. These regs were promulgated in 1980 -- after FISA was enacted but before the Patriot Act. Is there any case law that would supersede the warrant requirement? And if the FBI is relying on so-called National Security Letters (NSLs), which are basically administrative rather than judicial subpoenas, is there any case law on the constitutionality of this procedure? Finally, doesn't "the public's interest in effective law enforcement and the fair administration of justice" include an interest in knowing about illegal government activity, even if exposing that activity is, itself, at least nominally illegal? -- Lex)

(b) All reasonable attempts should be made to obtain information from alternative sources before considering issuing a subpoena to a member of the news media, and similarly all reasonable alternative investigative steps should be taken before considering issuing a subpoena for telephone toll records of any member of the news media.

(Again, note the presumption that a warrant is required to seek telephone records. Note also the requirement that other avenues be exhausted first. Has this requirement been met in any/every ongoing investigation involving journalists' phone records? -- Lex)

(c) Negotiations with the media shall be pursued in all cases in which a subpoena to a member of the news media is contemplated. These negotiations should attempt to accommodate the interests of the trial or grand jury with the interests of the media. Where the nature of the investigation permits, the government should make clear what its needs are in a particular case as well as its willingness to respond to particular problems of the media.

(Is there any evidence this requirement has been observed? Any at all? -- Lex)

(d) Negotiations with the affected member of the news media shall be pursued in all cases in which a subpoena for the telephone toll records of any member of the news media is contemplated where the responsible Assistant Attorney General determines that such negotiations would not pose a substantial threat to the integrity of the investigation in connection with which the records are sought. Such determination shall be reviewed by the Attorney General when considering a subpoena authorized under paragraph (e) of this section.

(So this "monitoring" of journalists' phone-call records required the attorney general himself to sign off on it. Good to know. Did he? -- Lex)

(e) No subpoena may be issued to any member of the news media or for the telephone toll records of any member of the news media without the express authorization of the Attorney General: Provided, That, if a member of the news media with whom negotiations are conducted under paragraph (c) of this section expressly agrees to provide the material sought, and if that material has already been published or broadcast, the United States Attorney or the responsible Assistant Attorney General, after having been personally satisfied that the requirements of this section have been met, may authorize issuance of the subpoena and shall thereafter submit to the Office of Public Affairs a report detailing the circumstances surrounding the issuance of the subpoena.

(f) In requesting the Attorney General's authorization for a subpoena to a member of the news media, the following principles will apply:

(1) In criminal cases, there should be reasonable grounds to believe, based on information obtained from nonmedia sources, that a crime has occurred, and that the information sought is essential to a successful investigation—particularly with reference to directly establishing guilt or innocence. The subpoena should not be used to obtain peripheral, nonessential, or speculative information.

(It was, remember, the purported leaking by CIA employee Mary McCarthy that got all this started. And yet the CIA itself has said she was not the source of the leak. So why are journalists' records still being trolled? Could it be to seek "peripheral, nonessential or speculative information"? -- Lex)

(2) In civil cases there should be reasonable grounds, based on nonmedia sources, to believe that the information sought is essential to the successful completion of the litigation in a case of substantial inportance. The subpoena should not be used to obtain peripheral, nonessential, or speculative information.

(3) The government should have unsuccessfully attempted to obtain the information from alternative nonmedia sources.

(4) The use of subpoenas to members of the news media should, except under exigent circumstances, be limited to the verification of published information and to such surrounding circumstances as relate to the accuracy of the published information.

(Has anyone involved in the purported "investigation" of leaks paid the slightest attention to this requirement? I'm aware of no evidence that they have. -- Lex)

(5) Even subpoena authorization requests for publicly disclosed information should be treated with care to avoid claims of harassment.

(Eh. If they want something we've published, they can go to the library or Nexis like everyone else. -- Lex)

(6) Subpoenas should, wherever possible, be directed at material information regarding a limited subject matter, should cover a reasonably limited period of time, and should avoid requiring production of a large volume of unpublished material. They should give reasonable and timely notice of the demand for documents.

(I infer from this paragraph that blanket hoovering of phone records is not permissible. -- Lex)

(g) In requesting the Attorney General's authorization for a subpoena for the telephone toll records of members of the news media, the following principles will apply:

(1) There should be reasonable ground to believe that a crime has been committed and that the information sought is essential to the successful investigation of that crime. The subpoena should be as narrowly drawn as possible; it should be directed at relevant information regarding a limited subject matter and should cover a reasonably limited time period. In addition, prior to seeking the Attorney General's authorization, the government should have pursued all reasonable alternative investigation steps as required by paragraph (b) of this section.

(Absent information of which I am unaware, the government appears to be 0-for-the preceding paragraph. -- Lex)

(2) When there have been negotiations with a member of the news media whose telephone toll records are to be subpoenaed, the member shall be given reasonable and timely notice of the determination of the Attorney General to authorize the subpoena and that the government intends to issue it.

(What negotiations? What subpoena? -- Lex)

(3) When the telephone toll records of a member of the news media have been subpoenaed without the notice provided for in paragraph (e)(2) of this section, notification of the subpoena shall be given the member of the news media as soon thereafter as it is determined that such notification will no longer pose a clear and substantial threat to the integrity of the investigation. In any event, such notification shall occur within 45 days of any return made pursuant to the subpoena, except that the responsible Assistant Attorney General may authorize delay of notification for no more than an additional 45 days.

(The government might be off the hook on this one, but only because one of its own people blew the whistle to ABC News. -- Lex)

(4) Any information obtained as a result of a subpoena issued for telephone toll records shall be closely held so as to prevent disclosure of the information to unauthorized persons or for improper purposes.

(h) No member of the Department shall subject a member of the news media to questioning as to any offense which he is suspected of having committed in the course of, or arising out of, the coverage or investigation of a news story, or while engaged in the performance of his official duties as a member of the news media, without the express authority of the Attorney General: Provided, however, That where exigent circumstances preclude prior approval, the requirements of paragraph (l) of this section shall be observed.

(i) A member of the Department shall secure the express authority of the Attorney General before a warrant for an arrest is sought, and whenever possible before an arrest not requiring a warrant, of a member of the news media for any offense which he is suspected of having committed in the course of, or arising out of, the coverage or investigation of a news story, or while engaged in the performance of his official duties as a member of the news media.

(j) No member of the Department shall present information to a grand jury seeking a bill of indictment, or file an information, against a member of the news media for any offense which he is suspected of having committed in the course of, or arising out of, the coverage or investigation of a news story, or while engaged in the performance of his official duties as a member of the news media, without the express authority of the Attorney General.

(k) In requesting the Attorney General's authorization to question, to arrest or to seek an arrest warrant for, or to present information to a grand jury seeking a bill of indictment or to file an information against, a member of the news media for an offense which he is suspected of having committed during the course of, or arising out of, the coverage or investigation of a news story, or committed while engaged in the performance of his official duties as a member of the news media, a member of the Department shall state all facts necessary for determination of the issues by the Attorney General. A copy of the request shall be sent to the Director of Public Affairs.

(l) When an arrest or questioning of a member of the news media is necessary before prior authorization of the Attorney General can be obtained, notification of the arrest or questioning, the circumstances demonstrating that an exception to the requirement of prior authorization existed, and a statement containing the information that would have been given in requesting prior authorization, shall be communicated immediately to the Attorney General and to the Director of Public Affairs.

(m) In light of the intent of this section to protect freedom of the press, news gathering functions, and news media sources, this policy statement does not apply to demands for purely commercial or financial information unrelated to the news gathering function.

(n) Failure to obtain the prior approval of the Attorney General may constitute grounds for an administrative reprimand or other appropriate disciplinary action. The principles set forth in this section are not intended to create or recognize any legally enforceable right in any person.

(Treat criminal journalists the same as noncriminal journalists criminal nonjournalists. But don't be using criminal charges to retaliate for reporting on illegal government activity. Remember, using government-secrecy rules to cover up a government crime is itself a crime. -- Lex)

[Order No. 916–80, 45 FR 76436, Nov. 19, 1980]

As I read this, I think the government has a serious problem on its hands. But I Am Not A Lawyer®, nor do I play one here on The Lex Files. So: Anyone got any legal citations suggesting that what the government is doing is, in fact, legal and consistent with existing rules and policy?

UPDATE: Via LizardBreath at Unfogged, we find more evidence that the administration might have stepped into a bucket of something warm and brown.

The FBI's National Security Letters -- the administrative (rather than judicial) subpoena-like documents mentioned above -- appear to be governed by Title 18, Section 2709, which says in pertinent part:

(b) Required Certification.— The Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or his designee in a position not lower than Deputy Assistant Director at Bureau headquarters or a Special Agent in Charge in a Bureau field office designated by the Director, may— (1) request the name, address, length of service, and local and long distance toll billing records of a person or entity if the Director (or his designee) certifies in writing to the wire or electronic communication service provider to which the request is made that the name, address, length of service, and toll billing records sought are relevant to an authorized investigation to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities, provided that such an investigation of a United States person is not conducted solely on the basis of activities protected by the first amendment to the Constitution of the United States; and

(2) request the name, address, and length of service of a person or entity if the Director (or his designee) certifies in writing to the wire or electronic communication service provider to which the request is made that the information sought is relevant to an authorized investigation to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities, provided that such an investigation of a United States person is not conducted solely upon the basis of activities protected by the first amendment to the Constitution of the United States. (emphasis added -- Lex)

Is the administration willing to try to prove -- in court, if need be -- that whistleblowing leakers and the reporters who rely on them are engaging in "international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities" and not "activities protected by the first amendment to the Constitution of the United States"?

I'm skeptical it would try and even more skeptical that it would win if it did.

Says here that 7 out of 10 journalists were accused of bias last year.

The other three must've been out on disability.

So Rep. Patrick Kennedy, D-R.I., had himself a wreck and offers this defense: "I wasn't drinking. I was high." Or, you know, words to that effect.

I don't know about D.C., but here in N.C., you can get a DWI even if you haven't had a drop to drink, if you have taken medication of any kind that has impaired your ability to drive. (The "I" in DWI stands for "impaired," not "intoxicated." True fact, as Mark Sutter would say.) You'll want to remember that the next time you have a cold.

And if that's the case in D.C. as well, then by all means the district should prosecute Kennedy. (Or even if it's not the case, if prosecutors can prove Kennedy was, in fact, drinking, although I suspect we've lost the chance to get a definitive answer on that question. And why is it that this particular Congresscritter appears to have gotten special treatment from the police?)

But here's what I don't get (and neither does Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo and TPMmuckraker.com): Why are the networks making such a big deal about this ... and ignoring bigger things going on?

The simple fact is that when you have an alleged driving under the influence or sleep-driving story and it involves a Kennedy, the press is going to be all over that. What's new.

But here's what does get my attention. There's another pretty tawdry story that's out there -- one about members of Congress getting sauced up at rollicking parties and set up with hookers by crooked defense contractors in exchange for help bagging pricey defense contracts.

That's pretty salacious too. You'd expect the press to be all over it. As [TPMmuckraker.com staffer] Justin reported yesterday, the legendary Watergate Hotel has already received mulitple subpoenas from federal investigators investigating the hotel's role in 'Hookergate'. So this thing's for real.

Yet, I'm not seeing any morning show's running with it.

And, while the Kennedy story is 'newsy' it doesn't really have any greater policy implications. And the public trust implications are minor. The Wilkes-Watergate-Hooker story, on the other hand, is both. It's salacious, which the press loves. And it's also directly tied to crooks ripping off taxpayers, probably allowing our service members abroad to have shoddy equipment or defense dollars going to worthless projects.

So, [TPMmuckraker.com is] the Kennedy case. But why the silence [except, he later notes, on last night's NBC Nightly News] on the much bigger scandal bubbling up out of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee?

Cricket, cricket ...

Why indeed? Honestly, I don't know the answer. I mean, normally, a story about an (allegedly) impaired Kennedy would trump a policy story on TV news. But doesn't the hooker angle trump that? I mean, c'mon ... Congresscritters, hookers, bribes ... what's not to love, even for TV news?

UPDATE: CIA director Porter Goss resigns, and The Wall Street Journal explains how that might be related:

The agency also has been drawn into a federal investigation of bribery that has sent former Rep. Randall "Duke" Cunningham to prison. Just this past week, the CIA confirmed that its third-ranking official, a hand-picked appointee of Mr. Goss, had attended poker games at a hospitality suite set up by a defense contractor implicated in the bribing of former Rep. Cunningham. Friday, people with knowledge of the continuing Cunningham inquiry said the CIA official, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, is under federal criminal investigation in connection with awarding agency contracts.

Unrelatedly, the Journal's Web site, much of which is normally behind a subscriber pay wall, is totally free at the moment in celebration of its 10th anniversary. They've done many, many things right on that site, so go check it out.

The online magazine Slate's media critic, Jack Shafer, has a thoughtful article up on government secrecy in the age of government crime:

Every time the Bush administration cracks down on openness, it creates new sources for journalists inside the bureaucracies. Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, says the strategy of decertifying the press works only if you can block the press from obtaining alternative sources of information. That's something the administration hasn't been able to do, says Blanton, citing the blockbuster stories about the Bush's secret prisons, secret torture programs, secret rendition operation, warrantless wiretaps, and so on.

Blanton attributes such scoops to a "revolt of the JAGs," his shorthand for the recent round of whistle-blowing by career civil service and career military officers. It's not that these whistle-blowers oppose secrecy, he notes, giving the example of the FISA court, which issues secret warrants. In the 20-plus years of FISA warrants, not one has been leaked because most everyone respects the FISA process. The establishment of FISA was publicly debated in congressional hearings, which demonstrated the need for such a court, but one that operated under legal limits.

He contrasts the public FISA process with the secret machinations of the "torture lawyers" - Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, John Yoo, et al. - whose primary goal is to enhance presidential power. In the minds of many honorable government employees, the expansion of presidential power in the post-9/11 era lacks basic legitimacy, making it vulnerable to leaks.

By "lacks basic legitimacy," of course, he means, "is nowhere rooted in, and frequently violates the letter as well as the spirit of, the Constitution, federal statutes and/or treaties." And, remember, using classification to conceal a crime is, itself, a crime.

I don't care who's doing it; behavior like that is un-American by definition.

It has come to my attention that some people think this is funny:

(There's a real company out there making these, but I'm not going to link to it.)

Memo to anyone who takes this the least bit seriously: This is North Carolina, son. Even the journalists are armed.

Y'all have a nice day.

I've touched on this before, but Mindy McAdams discusses the issue again in the context of what bloggers can contribute to the public good.

TO: Bill Bennett*, Sandy Carmany, and everyone in between who's concerned about government leaks.
FROM: Lex
DATE: 4/19/2006
RE: Government leaks

If y'all spent half the time cracking down on government that you do trying to crack down on government leaks, this would be a better country. Specifically, when a leaker is leaking about actual or potential violations of law by the government, were I you I'd be a lot more concerned about the violations of law by the government than any possible violation of law by the leaker.

I'm not saying every leaker should get a free pass -- even those whose intentions appear on the surface to be most honorable often are acting out of a complex mix of motives, not all of them admirable. But, folks, leaks do not occur in a vacuum. Most commonly, they occur because the public good is being harmed, a political advantage is being sought, or both. And it behooves public officials to worry first and foremost about possible harm to the public good, and in particular, about violations of law by our government, which acts with our consent and on our behalf.

Certainly, the media have obligations, too: to weigh, fully and fairly, the harm done by publication of leaked information against the harm done by withholding it; to consider what legal obligations they might have; and so forth. Not every leak clearly merits publication. For that matter, not every leak pertains to something that's arguably newsworthy. And anytime anything is leaked for purely political reasons, that fact should be treated as news in itself.

But government officials, elected or appointed, need to keep the public good uppermost in their minds. That means keeping their priorities in order and their eyes on the ball.

*And don't even get me started on the unintentional humor that abounds when our so-called betters presume to give us moral instruction, especially when they want to back it up with calls straight from the V.I. Lenin playbook.

When I was at Davidson (1978-82), I didn't work regularly for the school paper. Oh, I contributed an op-ed or two, and because my radio shift on Wednesday nights ended while the paper was being laid out in a room adjacent to the studio, I occasionally did a little layout and pasteup. But for almost my entire undergraduate career, I worked full-time in radio, first at the campus radio station and then at a Charlotte commercial station. If I'd wanted to work for the paper as well, I'd've had to sacrifice a few things. Like sleep. And classes.

If Davidson had any kind of class on journalism or the media while I was there, I don't recall it. This isn't surprising; Davidson was and remains a rigorous liberal-arts college that aims to prepare people for varied careers and productive citizenship far more than for any particular kind of job. (The joke among us English majors who were trying to find jobs during the '81-'82 recession was that "I'm a real people person!" was code for, "I'm graduating from a very good school but I'm not going to have a single marketable skill!")

Still, I was pleased to learn (via Romenesko) that the school now has a seminar, "Critical Issues in Mass Media," being taught by Jennie Buckner, a former editor of The Charlotte Observer. And, not surprisingly, the seminar has a blog, Pressing Matters, to which students contribute.

A quick glance at the blog posts, which mainly take the form of short essays, shows that the students are looking at some of the biggest issues we're wrestling with, such as bottom-line pressure. At first glance, I don't see anything about more engagement with our audience in a news-reporting partnership (i.e., for lack of a better term, "citizen journalism"). But the class is still in progress and so, I presume, is the blog.

I'm glad the school is bringing its liberal-arts approach to bear on the news media and the challenges they face. I applaud the school for offering the course and Buckner for being willing to lead it.

And just in case anyone's still wondering whether the so-called mainstream media hold a monopoly on ethics, I bring to your attention two items.

The first I would consider a journalistic misdemeanor, I guess:

Over at the Cincinnati Enquirer's online site, Cincinnati.com, there's a blog about Iraq written by military staffer whose job is to generate positive news about U.S. efforts to rebuild Iraq.

Grandma in Iraq is the title of the blog, written by Suzanne M. Fournier, a Public Affairs Officer for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The posts are largely upbeat. "Everytime [sic] an Iraqi contractor bids on a reconstruction project. . . it is a sign that democracy is winning here," reads one. "I am confident we'll have another banner year of success for the benefit of the people of Iraq and democracy in the Middle East," another says.

Cincinnati.com identifies "Grandma" as "Suzanne Fournier of Alexandria, grandmother of 15, [who] posts from Iraq, where she is stationed with the U.S. Army Corp. [sic] of Engineers." It makes no mention she's a flack.

In her posts Fournier doesn't conceal her day job, but she doesn't trumpet it, either. In reading her 50 or so posts currently online, we could find only one where she explicitly states, "I do public affairs[.]" In a handful of other posts, she makes passing references such as, "I just put out a press release."

In general, I think it's fine for a newspaper or Web site to have anyone blogging for it that it wants, as long as that person isn't lying, fabricating and/or plagiarizing. (For obvious reasons, each individual site also should consider how well or poorly any particular blogger might help the site achieve whatever its goals are for its content.) However, in fairness to readers, any possible conflicts of interest the blogger might have must be fully disclosed. That didn't happen here, although the evidence that there was any deliberate attempt to deceive readers is thin at best.

Our second example is much more serious -- not only a journalistic felony, but possibly a real-life felony as well.

A New York Post Page Six staffer solicited $220,000 from a high-profile billionaire in return for a year's "protection" against inaccurate and unflattering items about him in the gossip page, the Daily News has learned.

In two 90-minute meetings, characterized by a shocking breach of ethics, Jared Paul Stern, a fixture on the city's gossip scene who also edited Page Six The Magazine, asked for a series of payments from Ron Burkle, the managing partner of Yucaipa Cos., a conglomerate with interests in supermarkets, celebrity clothing lines, and media.

It was all a setup, a sting monitored by law enforcement, including the U.S. attorney's office and the FBI, who are now investigating the extortion attempt. The meetings, on March 22 and March 31, were videotaped.

The shakedown began with a series of e-mails sent last month by Stern to Burkle.

It reached a boiling point more than an hour into the first meeting after Stern outlined various ways Burkle could buy protection on the gossip page.

An exasperated Burkle finally said, "How much do you want?" after Stern said he could control coverage by Richard Johnson, the column's chief writer, and his staff. "Um, $100,000 to get going and then you could get it to me on a month-to-month, maybe like $10,000," replied Stern.

"Okay, that's a great deal," said Burkle, the subject of numerous Page Six items including a "date" with supermodel Gisele Bundchen, meetings with other women and a nasty breakup with a longtime lover.

Aside from blackmail being a felony and all, the only thing I can find wrong with this scenario is that, as Will Bunch observes, we in the newspaper bidness have unconscionably neglected it as a possible revenue stream.

JR already has addressed the self-serving unsigned editorial splashed on the front page of State Rep. Earl Jones' Greensboro Times. But inasmuch as I contributed some of our Project Homestead coverage and edited much of the rest, I'm taking the additional step of inviting Rep. Jones to point out, in all our Homestead coverage, a single example of "false allegations," "deception," "publishing false and misleading information" or "sloppy, questionable and racially charged bias [sic] journalism."

I issue this invitation because the Times' lengthy, unsigned, front-page diatribe, and Jones' bylined "Publisher's View," fail to identify a single one and are, themselves, riddled with factual errors. Those errors begin, as JR noted, with the headline claim that Homestead has been "cleared" and continue right through to the end, where the article claims that JR was "hired" in 1999. (He was already here when I was hired here 19 years ago.)

I could be wrong. It's certainly possible that we've made mistakes in our coverage. If we have, we'll correct them. So I await his getting in touch.

But as I wait, I'm confident that if we'd made any mistakes of the type Jones alleges, someone, somewhere, would have brought them to our attention before now.

In the comments to my previous post, Roch Smith suggests that the N&R would gain readers if it would stop ignoring important stories. (For the record, not being involved right now in day-to-day journalism, I'm not in a position to do anything one way or the other about coverage of the issues he raises.)

It sounds simple. But how do you define "important," and who decides?

I raise those cautionary questions after reading this column by Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat:

As I look back at the year in news, it's clear I should have focused more on people having sex with horses.

That's the conclusion I reach after reviewing a new list of the year's top local news stories [as determined by counting Web-site hits]. ...

The story last summer about the man who died from a perforated colon while having sex with a horse in Enumclaw was by far the year's most read article.

What's more, four more of the year's 20 most clicked-upon local news stories were about the same horse-sex incident. We don't publish our Web-traffic numbers, but take it from me — the total readership on these stories was huge.

So much so, a case can be made that the articles on horse sex are the most widely read material this paper has published in its 109-year history.

I don't know whether to ignore this alarming factoid or to embrace it.

Wow. So that's the secret.

We here at the N&R embraced the notion, sort of, in today's year-end roundup of the idiotic, the ironic and the just plain weird, taking note of antiabortion activist Neal Horsley's public confession that he once had sex with a mule. The Washington-state horse-sex item was in the original version of our roundup but got cut for space. (The draft I started with this year was about four times as long as the version we published, which is par for the course -- there's never any lasting shortage of weird news.)

Westneat continues:

There's not much on the so-called "issues" we're always implored to focus on, such as transportation or education. Nothing on the big campaign topics of the year, such as the monorail or gas tax. And nothing on this paper's major investigations or in-depth series.

So there's the thing: Do we give readers what they say they want? Or do we give them what they actually click on? And are the lists the same in print and online, or do online readers go for the weird and fluffy while print readers go for the substantive?

And how, short of monitoring your eyeballs, can we tell?

Everyone has his/her own ideas, including the pseudonymous Athenae at the group blog First Draft, who takes a couple of items from Jim Romenesko's newspaper-industry blog at Poynter and whips them into a to-do list for the industry:

[Many newspapers' efforts to attract young readers are] like desperate parents dyeing their hair pink and listening to their kids' CDs in a futile and sad attempt to get their kids to like them. Personally? ... I don't want my parents to be just like me. I want my parents to be my parents, to do things I need parents to do, like set a good example, provide food and shelter, and teach me about the world.

Here's some resolutions: Stop sucking. Stop running front-page features on flip-flops and the Sopranos and The Passion of the Christ. Stop cutting your newsrooms in half because you only pulled a 20 percent profit last year. Stop acting irritated that your readership isn't what it used to be. Nothing's what it used to be. Stop saying you have no money for journalism and sending your ad sales execs to Jamaica as a reward for meeting quota. Learn to wiki? How about learning to FOIA? Do the little things: Local official giving you a hard time? Request his travel reimbursement records. Tell the story you don't think is a story because it's always been that way, or because everybody does it. Stand up to power and when [politicians] whine that you're mean, buy yourself a beer and send me the bill, because that kind of mean is defined in the real world as your job. ... No fear or favor. No backing down. Not. One. Inch.

So, which of these items, if any, should we put on our action plan for 2006?

Knight Ridder, the nation's second-largest news chain, has retained an investment bank to start the bidding after its largest shareholder pressured the company to sell itself or sell off papers to boost its stock price.

I said at the time that the likeliest outcome from a journalistic standpoint would be enormous damage to the quality of news coverage in the 31 communities served by Knight Ridder papers (Philadelphia has two).

I still think that. But Jay "Pressthink" Rosen, taking time from finishing a book to guest-post over at Arianna Huffington's group blog, says it doesn't have to be that way:

Here is my own solution: a community buyback plan, explained in these eleven points. I am told it's impossible and will never happen. And that's probably true. But no one has any better ideas, so here goes...

* Knight-Ridder announces that rather than sell to another big company or get bought, it has another plan: to break itself up. It will sell all 32 newspapers it owns to local buyers who will pay a premium for the opportunity to own the local daily. If no such buyers are found to exist, there is no transaction. The plan is called the Main Street Strategy to distinguish it from Wall Street thinking.

* The goal of the plan is to maximize shareholder value. That means a total price equal to or better than what shareholders could be expected to realize from any of the options commonly talked about today in the industry and the press: takeover by another newspaper company, purchase by a private equity firm, or cutting quality further in order to halt the erosion in market share (the current strategy.) A second goal is to improve the probability that quality journalism will happen in the future in the 31 towns where Knight-Ridder operates newspapers.

He further elaborates on this plan in the nine remaining points. (Mark Fitzgerald, editor-at-large for the trade magazine Editor & Publisher, comments on the plan here.)

The truth? This isn't the way the business of newspapers normally works. But it would come closer to maximizing shareholder value than the status quo does, and it might even outperform the "normal" business transactions likely being envisioned by KR and its largest shareholders. Besides, what has "normal" gotten us except declining circulation, declining quality and a whole bunch of lost jobs?

If you have friends in Charlotte, Columbia or Myrtle Beach who care about quality local journalism and have some capital to invest, you might want to send them a link to Rosen's post. Even if Rosen's plan has zero chance of being implemented, I think it's long overdue that we had a national conversation about the benefits and costs of quality local journalism. The 31 Knight Ridder communities seem as good a group of places as any to start.

UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis offers a variation on Jay's plan