The AP’s Remaining Competitive Function: Litigators for Big Media

I’m intrigued by this speech the AP CEO made yesterday for several reasons.

The Bush administration turned the U.S. military into a global propaganda machine while imposing tough restrictions on journalists seeking to give the public truthful reports about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Associated Press chief executive Tom Curley said Friday.

Curley, speaking to journalists at the University of Kansas, said the news industry must immediately negotiate a new set of rules for covering war because "we are the only force out there to keep the government in check and to hold it accountable."

Much like in Vietnam, "civilian policymakers and soldiers alike have cracked down on independent reporting from the battlefield" when the news has been unflattering, Curley said. "Top commanders have told me that if I stood and the AP stood by its journalistic principles, the AP and I would be ruined."

First of all, Curley’s comments seem to echo the report I discussed yesterday, which shows DOD spends more on domestic Psyop than foreign Psyop (thanks to Peregwyn for teaching me how to say it properly). 

Spending on public affairs has more than doubled since 2003. Robert Hastings, acting secretary of defense, says the growth reflects changes in the information market, along with the fact that the U.S. is now fighting two wars.

"The role of public affairs is to provide you the information so that you can make an informed decision yourself," Hastings says. "There is no place for spin at the Department of Defense."

But on Dec. 12, the Pentagon’s inspector general released an audit finding that the public affairs office may have crossed the line into propaganda. The audit found the Department of Defense "may appear to merge inappropriately" its public affairs with operations that try to influence audiences abroad. It also found that while only 89 positions were authorized for public affairs, 126 government employees and 31 contractors worked there.

Either his journalists did a great story and he almost immediately adopted it as his own pet issue. Or, knowing the AP, it just as likely worked the other way around: the AP was fed up with getting harassed by the military, so they allocated an unusual amount of reporting resources (interviews with 100 people and the review of more than 100,000 pages of documents, the article boasted) demonstrating what a problem the military’s new focus on Psyop is. And just in time for a new Administration, the cynical side of me adds.  

But note the terms on which Curley wants to combat this: "we [which this AP report described as the "news industry"] are the only force out there to keep the government in check and to hold it accountable."

Increasingly, it seems, the raison d’etre for the AP is no longer to do such decent standardized reporting that every news outlet will pay to carry that content. In fact, partly in response to the AP’s change in rate structure, it is losing customers, and new competitors–like Politico–are filling the gap. Plus, the AP has damaged its claim to absolute neutrality in recent years.

No. It seems, of late, that the AP’s raison d’etre is to litigate the privileges of the "news industry," in an attempt to shore up its monopoly on delivering the news. Most obviously it has done so through its specious assaults on fair use, most recently by going after Shepard Fairey to try to get some kind of revenues out of the artist’s iconic Obama poster. But who can forget their claim that the reproduction of their ledes is not covered under fair use?  (Me, I took that to be an admission that AP’s bland style never allows for the inclusion of really interesting shirt tails that reveal something well beyond the lede.)

But they’ve been doing this more generally–trying to expand the legal privileges of journalists.

My personal favorite, of course, is when they mobilized one of the Libby lobby’s attacks on Pat Fitzgerald to get some court documents unsealed, but then never reported on the issues that–they had represented to the Court–were so pressing they simply had to have access to the documents. That one proved in really stark terms that this has nothing to do with transparency and democracy and everything to do with the privileges of the "news industry."

Mind you, I’m well aware of the way that I, a DFH blogger, can sometimes piggyback on their litigation and get access myself. When Bill Jeffress attacked bloggers (that would be me, personally) in an attempt to hide all the people who had written leniency letters for Libby because they were being protected by his cover-up themselves, the AP and Jane and I were on the same side (though Jane and I made an argument about transparency and citizenship, whereas the AP made an argument about press privileges). So yeah, I’m happy to have the AP spend millions of dollars to litigate issues that allow me to do the work they’re not doing (and no, the AP never really reported on the conflicts of the people who had sent letters in support of Libby).

And I do think DOD needs to be a little friendlier to the First Amendment–though that’s as much about ending the embed monopoly as it ending the intimidation of the poor AP. (It definitely is about ending the incarceration of journalists, though.) 

In any case, while I don’t disagree with Curley’s points about the need to establish more transparency in DOD, I’m acutely aware that, so long as he claims the news industry is "the only force out there to keep the government in check and to hold it accountable," he’s really interested at least as much as returning to the glory days when the AP had a tight monopoly over news as he is about democracy and transparency.

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18 replies
  1. plunger says:

    Of particular interest should be how a group of politically appointed civilians with top secret clearances managed to set up a psyop shop inside the DOD with DOD funding:

    The Office of Special Plans routinely provided President Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Condoleezza Rice, who headed the National Security Council at the time, with questionable intelligence information on the Iraqi threat. Much of that information was included in various speeches by Bush and Cheney, and some was never vetted for accuracy by career CIA analysts.

    In an article in the New York Times in October 2002, the paper reported that Rumsfeld had ordered the OSP to “to search for information on Iraq’s hostile intentions or links to terrorists” that might have been overlooked by the CIA.

    Patrick Lang, a former director of Middle East analysis at the Defense Intelligence Agency, said in an interview with the New Yorker in May 2003 that the Office of Special Plans “started picking out things that supported their thesis and stringing them into arguments that they could use with the president. It’s not intelligence. It’s political propaganda.”

    Lang said the CIA and the OSP often clashed on the accuracy of intelligence information provided to the White House by Paul Wolfowitz.

    By the fall of 2002, the White House had virtually dismissed all of the intelligence on Iraq provided by the CIA, in favor of the more critical information provided to the Bush administration by the Office of Special Plans. The CIA had failed to find any evidence of Iraq’s weapons programs.

    In a rare Pentagon briefing four years ago, Douglas Feith said the Office of Special Plans was not an “intelligence project,” but rather a group of eighteen people who looked at intelligence information from a different point of view. Feith now teaches a seminar on Iraq War planning at Georgetown University.

  2. JohnForde says:

    Hastings says. “There is no place for spin at the Department of Defense.”

    Good thing my daughter knows the Heimlich. I choked!

  3. klynn says:

    Great post.

    In any case, while I don’t disagree with Curley’s points about the need to establish more transparency in DOD, I’m acutely aware that, so long as he claims the news industry is “the only force out there to keep the government in check and to hold it accountable,” he’s really interested at least as much as returning to the glory days when the AP had a tight monopoly over news as he is about democracy and transparency.

    Could not agree more.

    Hey, would appreciate your take (and bmaz’s) on this idea about the stimulus bill.

  4. Teddy Partridge says:

    Excellent point about the evolution of AP. It’s as if rather than pursuing journalistic craft they are protected guild privilege, and not even pursuing craft when their own lawsuits based on privilege prevail.

    • emptywheel says:

      And very importantly, it’s a guild that–unlike medicine and law–refuses to enforce its own standards. They like to make a lot of claims about the quality of their process, but violating that process won’t get you sanctioned by the guild and often gets you celebrated by teh guild.

      • LabDancer says:

        But even “teh guild” is largely in tatters and lying [as usual but now visibly] in disgrace with even some low info types & certainly among high info readers of all political stripes. Anything of even marginal actual or potential news interest gets so thoroughly dissected & put under the microscope by bloggers [such as that awful unrepetent skeptic who blogs as emptywheel], its industry standards now are not more prestigious than weblogging awards, and in some particular instances less remunerative.

        I have a slightly different take – one that doesn’t conflict with yours but which I suggest might supplement it.

        With the few wire services left being in such trouble and among them AP being particularly large [and in its own particular troubles], the Obama administration’s policy of increased openness [even if for no positive effort in this regard but in ceasing to follow Cheneyesque secrecy and Rovian message control] makes the typical run of AP reporters’ approach so much easier, and at the same time spinable as “journalism”. This is all consistent with its move toward editorializing supposedly spin-free facts that you posted on last year, no?

        One ‘attraction’ to Bush administration publications is that one could pretty much assume it was all pre-spun in some enormous gyroscope device, but often was capable of being decoded [’specially by those nature endowed with decoding talent] due to some degree to the limiting effects of the malevolence involved.

        So I think it’s possible AP is pre-celebrating its anticipated uptick in the marketing of its production from a great deal more access with a lot less malevolent spin involved.

        At the same time, AP might also be recognizing the potential for a big opportunity to it from the White House largely closing down a number of executive branch production lines of regurgitated fish guts, plus the limited capacity for that in the decimated ranks of Congressional Republicans. Returning to your point [I think], this means AP plans on successfully marketing itself as New Improved Bushie-Base Spin, Now With Eskepticon.

  5. plunger says:

    March 18 / 19, 2006

    So Much for “Sunshine Week”

    AP Erases Video of Israeli Soldier Shooting Palestinian Boy
    By ALISON WEIR

    “The trend toward secrecy is the greatest threat to democracy.”

    – Associated Press CEO, in a speech about the importance of openness

    “The official response is we decline to respond.”

    – Associated Press Director of Media Relations, replying to questions about AP

    AP insists on conducting its own activities in the dark, and refuses to answer even the simplest questions about its system of international news reporting.

    Most of all, it refuses to explain why it erased footage of an Israeli soldier intentionally shooting a Palestinian boy.

    The witnesses state that there was no Palestinian resistance–no “clash,” no “crossfire,” not even any stone-throwing. At one point, after most of the vehicles had finally driven away, an Israeli soldier stuck his gun out of his armored vehicle, aimed at a pre-pubescent boy nearby, and pulled the trigger.

    We discovered that an AP cameraman had filmed the entire incident. This cameraman had then followed what apparently is the usual routine. He sent his video–an extremely valuable commodity, since it contained documentary evidence of a war crime–to the AP control bureau for the region. This bureau is in Israel.

    What happened next is unfathomable. Did AP broadcast it? No. Did AP place the video in safe-keeping, available for an investigation of this crime? No.

    According to its cameraman, AP erased it.

    http://www.counterpunch.org/weir03182006.html

    • plunger says:

      These two stories are six months apart, though DIRECTLY related:

      Media ownership study ordered destroyed
      Sept 14, 2006

      ‘Every last piece’ destroyed

      Adam Candeub, now a law professor at Michigan State University, said senior managers at the agency ordered that “every last piece” of the report be destroyed. “The whole project was just stopped – end of discussion,” he said. Candeub was a lawyer in the FCC’s Media Bureau at the time the report was written and communicated frequently with its authors, he said.

      http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14836500/

      Destruction of evidence in both cases. DIRECTLY RELATED. Powell at the FCC has some ’splainin’ to do.

      • LabDancer says:

        This is really taken completely off your wall. Powell is no longer at the FCC since 2006, and as since has been shown a number of times on Bill Moyers’ show, the threat posed by Kevin Martin has gone considerably beyond anything Powell’s largely undefined ‘leadership’, with its ecletic mix of principles and lack thereof, led to.

        • plunger says:

          I know of Powell’s departure. I’d like to hear him answer quite a few questions, under oath, regarding his own role in the destruction of the media ownership study…among other issues.

  6. chetnolian says:

    Actually you should probably get in there and support the AP CEO. You may be right about his aim to re-establish a monopoly of news, but it ain’t going to happen is it? You’re not planning to go away are you? And short of blowing his cover, if his aim is what he says it is, Mr Curley has to support the rights of the bloggers as well.

  7. bobschacht says:

    Thanks for the mention of Shepard Farley. He’s the one who created the ominous-looking (sinister?) hairless face accompanied by the single word, “Obey“, that mysteriously appeared anywhere in public spaces where one could put up a poster. For me, the poster evoked memories of “Big Brother,” 1984, and the like. Anyone else remember wondering about that?

    He’s recently famous for his Obama portrait, but in the history of art, especially street art, his “Obey” poster has got to win some kind of prize.

    Bob in HI

    • bobschacht says:

      Likewise, thanks for the correction. I’m fascinated by Fairey’s Obey Giant poster, which appeared in my life without announcement or explanation. The Wikipedia compiles a useful history of this poster that was most interesting in its “OBEY” phase because it was enigmatic, mysterious, and vaguely anti-authoritarian. Although it appeared before Bush’s election (1998), it served as a prophetic harbinger of what was to come.

      Ironically, it was the threat of a lawsuit from Titan Sports, Inc. that forced the conversion of the unnecessarily explicit “Andre the Giant” poster to the enigmatic and mysterious “OBEY” poster– which might also be taken as a protest against oppressive restrictions on freedom of speech– in this case by big business, rather than big government. But in Orwell’s 1984, or Bush’s Orwellian administration, that’s a distinction without much of a difference.

      Bob in HI

  8. JTMinIA says:

    I love the AP. Now … now that Bush is gone … now the AP wakes up.

    Wot a coinkydink.

    Next stop: we won’t print selective leaks from the Exec Branch any more.

  9. JohnLopresti says:

    One of the cheerful aspects of McClatchy’s brink of bankruptcy reportage was the impact of the Lasseter investigations, though McClatchy has a centrism history much like WaPo’s. Perhaps Woody has left a vacuum in the WhiteHouse wich AP may have interest in filling. I have noticed, too, AP’s name on some of the FOIAs, and appreciate their working in that regard.

    I continue reading the days-old formal replies to interrogatories Panetta filed with Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, among which answers appears the following deftly crafted depiction of what I would characterize as the 16words experience and Judy’s journalistic effort:

    “The principal lesson of the pre-war intelligence assessments on Iraqi WMD is that the Agency must be far more careful in analyzing, assessing, and characterizing the information that comes into it. As has now become clear, many of the judgments contained in the 2002 NIE were based on evidence from sources that proved unreliable. Policymakers were not sufficiently alerted to how unreliable the evidence actually was. Instead of explaining how little they knew or how uncertain their knowledge was, analysts fell back upon what our experience with Saddam Hussein’s regime had been in the past. While this was undoubtedly relevant, it should not have been determinative. If the Agency had been more careful in saying what it actually knew and did not know – and if it had informed policymakers about the reliability and quality of its sources – it might have avoided much of the criticism that followed. As far as its performance on the issue of Iraqi ties with Al Qaeda is concerned, the Intelligence Community seems to have done reasonably well, according to the information I have read. Here, as contrasted with the WMD issue, its conclusions were carefully crafted to reflect precisely what the Agency thought the evidence supported.” p.3/23.

    I am hoping the Coburn amendment avoids further suppression of NPR. Then there is always Gingrich’s passion for repressing the National Endowment for the Arts. Those sound like Republican ideals in these times; I hope the Democrats avoid compromising.

    The issue with liveblogging in hearings, as I understood it, was defused when some dignitaries helped some bloggers have access apart from the issue of whether iNews is newspaperNews.

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