In Praise of Journalistic Independence

On a recent beautiful October afternoon, with the global financial system gyrating out of control, a group of journalists and friends gathered at Washington’s Newseum for the presentation of the first I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence, administered by the Nieman Foundation at Harvard. The credit implosion of 2008 and simultaneous climax of a riveting two-year presidential campaign has overwhelmed pretty much everything else this fall, as well they should have. But the awarding of the Stone medal (for which I serve as an adviser) underscored again the importance of reporting that aggressively and against the odds of conventional wisdom challenges official dogma.

The winner was John Walcott, Washington bureau chief for the McClatchy Company, who in 2002–03, as head of what was then the Knight-Ridder Newspapers Washington bureau, led a team of reporters that disputed the Bush administration’s argument for the invasion of Iraq, based on reporting in the intelligence community and the military. By now, the work of this team has become legendary inside journalism, especially because the rest of the media (and Congress) were nowhere near as focused on the flaws in the White House, CIA, and Pentagon case as they were. Walcott singled out Renee Schoof, an editor, and reporters Jonathan Landay, Warren Strobel, and Joe Galloway, whose by-line, he disclosed, was usually withheld to protect Galloway’s sources, a striking act of self-abnegation by this ex-UPI Vietnam correspondent. Their teamwork was a model for what journalism should be, and what everyone in the news business now worries is being eroded by weaknesses in the print media and traditional investigative reporting in particular.

Walcott’s acceptance speech was eloquent and gracious and conveyed a message that was especially relevant, given that the award was made in the name of I.F. Stone, who operated at the margins of latter-day media with a newsletter in a style often compared to today’s better bloggers. Stone’s impact nearly a half-century ago came from the crispness of his writing and his own intrepid reporting, much of which consisted of reading papers such as the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Christian Science Monitor, and Baltimore Sun in what we now call aggregation. Walcott and his colleagues were writing for major newspapers around the country, then part of the Knight-Ridder chain, including the Miami Herald, Detroit Free Press, and San Jose Mercury News. But Washington policymakers, the rest of the media, and readers seemed largely unmoved. Some of the pieces, Walcott said, were spiked by local editors in favor of stories from the New York Times and Washington Post news services that were less contradictory of the official line. The march to war was so dominant a theme that the work of skeptics was discounted.

So what would it take nowadays to capture the spotlight and influence policy with breakthrough reporting against the grain? It has been more than five years since the work of the Knight-Ridder team on Iraq first appeared (as McClatchy, the reporters are still turning out excellent work), and the role of journalism distributed on the Internet has developed considerably in that time. The Web is pervasive and can spread the word faster and more widely than information has ever moved before, and that might have made a difference in the way the Knight Ridder stories were received if they were supported by aggregators with proven integrity and stature. That is one of the goals of ProPublica, the new investigative on-line news organization underwritten by the philanthropists Herb and Marion Sandler. Aside from its own work, mainly done in partnership with established newspapers, magazines, and broadcasts, ProPublica is selecting the best of investigative reporting elsewhere and sending out daily summaries. ProPublica has instant clout because of its leadership team, which includes Paul Steiger, former editor of the Wall Street Journal. This is a development Stone would certainly have welcomed.

The near collapse of the American financial system is a cataclysm. For next year’s Stone medal, judges should search out reporters who highlighted the dangers of sub-prime lending and collateral debt obligations, especially if they work at places that don’t get center-ring attention. News which challenges orthodoxy is an essential element in our society’s well-being and journalistic independence can never get too much praise. As always, the big questions are how financially to support the work of these reporters at venues large and small and then how to get people to pay attention.

Afterword: There is now an excellent Web site devoted to the work of I.F. Stone, where you can read his newsletters and a rich trove of other material about him that has been assembled by Stone’s eldest son, Jeremy. Stone’s legacy thrives on that site.