Music
Welcome to Whistle Where You Work.
I'm Mark Cohen of the Government Accountability Project, a claimed journalist, Jane Mayer
and Deborah Nelson are with us to assess the state of investigative reporting in the age
of newsroom downsizing and infotainment, but first, Arlington National Cemetery, burial
ground for the celebrated and the unknown.
660 is where many of the 4,000-plus Americans who've fallen in Iraq are laid to rest, often
with a military escort, a flag-drake casket, a rifle volley, and a bugler playing taps.
Most families want the media present to record their loved one's sacrifice, but family wishes
are being thwarted by cemetery management, drawing comparisons to the Pentagon's ban
on photos of returning caskets from Iraq.
Are they trying to bury the bad news?
As Cemetery Public Affairs Director, Gina Gray could not understand why her management
was interfering with media coverage, okayed by grieving families.
Once her views were reported in the Washington Post this spring, Gray was demoted and then
fired.
Welcome, Gina, to Whistle Where You Work.
You began working at the cemetery this past spring, right?
Yeah, in April.
But before that, you were in the Army?
I spent eight years in the Army, and then I got out in 2004, and then spent all of the
rest of the time supporting the Army as a contractor.
And were you a public affairs specialist also in the Army?
Yes.
And when you were in the field in Iraq, did you see any action at all?
Yeah, in 2003, I was there with the 173rd Airborne Brigade in Kirkuk, Iraq, all in northern
Iraq there.
And I spent almost every day.
I was out there, I had a great experience with the Iraqi people.
We had a lot of change, a lot of hope, a lot of promise for that area.
And I was there most of the time, the sole female presence in an area with all men.
And yeah, I did see some things.
And did you ever encounter any enemy fire?
Yeah, it happened.
I lost my hearing in one instance as a result of an ambush, and still I went back in 2005
because I believed in it.
And you took the job at the cemetery because you continued to be concerned about this war,
I get it.
Well, this is my generation's war.
I know people who have been hurt, I know people who have been killed, I know people
who are buried there at Arlington.
And so this was something that was very near and dear to my heart.
And how did you find out that the cemetery was limiting media's access to burials?
Well, I found out by accident actually at a funeral for an active duty Marine who was
killed in Iraq.
I had gone out to pick up the press and bring them in before the burial started.
And when I got out there to the burial site, I had seen that the press area had been moved.
And that's when really I found out, along with the rest of the media, that there was
not really a policy in place.
There was nothing at the cemetery grounded in existing military public affairs policy.
The military has a policy, and the Department of Defense does, that it is not hiding anything.
We're not looking at war's past, like Vietnam.
The military learned.
And the embed program is a great example of how the military is not hiding information.
And so there are policies, there are regulations, there are procedures in place, and the cemetery
was ignoring them.
And so you raised concerns about this.
And when you did, a Washington Post reporter happened to be present at the time.
Is that right?
Yes.
Yes.
I had talked to the Deputy Superintendent there on site, and the reporters happened
to all be there.
And a Washington Post reporter happened to be there.
And the Deputy Superintendent, I think, was just really contentious with the reporters.
And so that kind of stirred everything up, and that started the problems.
And that really started the problems that I had with cemetery management from that point
on.
And what happened to you?
Well, then it was just kind of like turning the screws.
It was, I had to tell them, every time I left the building, I had to account for every
single minute, which not a problem, but I'm an adult.
Not everybody was subjected to the same things I was.
And then it was just kind of making rules up as you went along.
And I would point out, hold on a second, there's no law that says the media has to
stand back.
That's not a law.
That's not even a policy.
And who was imposing these rules?
The Deputy Superintendent was.
And so did you complain up the chain?
Yes.
I went Army Public Affairs, the Secretary of the Army's office, was looking into it.
Did you get any satisfaction there?
No.
It died down, you know, as things tend to.
It died down a little bit.
And then in June, you know, once again, everything kind of reared its head, and I was fired.
And now, the great thing about this is, is that the Army has come out and said, we are
going to implement a policy, and it's going to be very clear.
And isn't it right for the Army to say that grieving families should be able to decide
if they don't want the media present?
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
It is up to the family, period.
You know, if the family wants media coverage at a burial of their loved one, then it is
only appropriate, and it's the right thing to do, absolutely.
And I don't think that Army officials were arguing that.
I don't think that was the problem.
I think largely it was just unknown.
It kind of went under the radar for a while.
Were you the first public affairs specialist at the cemetery to raise these concerns?
No.
No.
There were two other women before me who did the same thing, and they eventually left
because things just got out of control.
And tell me about the day you were fired.
What happened?
There was a funeral that morning, and then I was called in.
We had media there, and then I was called into the administrative services supervisor's
office, and she handed me a letter and said, I read the letter and said, okay, you know,
I said I'm fired.
And what did the letter say to you?
Oh, let's see.
Why were you fired?
For being disrespectful, for acting in an appropriate manner.
You know, it was a typo, but for not following directions, basically.
But nothing was ever given.
It was all very general, very broad, and I wasn't even going to argue it.
Because why weren't you going to be out?
I wasn't going to get anywhere.
I wasn't going to get into an arguing match right then and there.
You know, I had an EO complaint that I had filed a month prior to that, so that was pending.
And I wasn't going to get anywhere by getting into an argument with them.
I had learned that.
And the equal employment suit that you filed, was that for discrimination on the basis?
Discrimination on the basis of race and sex.
Because the management is of a different skin color.
And subsequent to this, are you looking for a job in the Army?
Could you get another job with the Army?
I don't, you know, I don't think so.
I don't think so.
You know, I've done this for my entire adult life.
I've worked with the Army, worked for the Army, been in the Army my entire adult life.
And before I had gotten fired, I was looking for another job.
And you know, I was referred, there's a certain process with federal jobs, I think most people
are familiar with that.
And I was referred for about six of them.
Haven't gotten called back on any of them.
I think probably I've been blackballed a little bit.
And would you, on reflection, if you had it to do it again, would you have done anything
differently?
No.
No, I wouldn't.
Because I think ultimately, you know, the service member, the stories need to be told.
You know, they've earned the right, the families have earned the right to have their loved
one's story told.
You know, too many people too often don't understand that when you see a casualty number
on the screen on the news, those are people.
That is somebody's son, daughter, father, brother, mother.
Those are people.
And I think that it is amazing to be able to hear the stories about the very small number
of Americans who are willing to raise their hand and say, yeah, I will defend this country.
And it was not being told.
And I think that it's a shame.
And it does a disservice to the service member.
Now, good luck, Gina Gray, in your lawsuit and in lifting the veil of secrecy over burials
of American soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery.
When we return, the State of Investigative Journalism with authors Debra Nelson and
James Mayer.
Welcome back to Whistle Where You Work, where we are going to serve
the State of Investigative Reporting in the age of newsroom cutbacks and reality television.
We're joined by two leading lights in the field of investigative journalism, Deb Nelson
and Jane Mayer.
Jane is a staff writer for The New Yorker, a former Wall Street Journal, White House
and foreign correspondent, and a two-time Pulitzer nominee for feature writing.
She's the co-author of two books and most recently a heralded chronicle of post-911
America, The Dark Side, the inside story of how the war on terror turned into a war on
American ideals.
Deb Nelson is the Carnegie Visiting Professor at the University of Maryland Journalism School
and a veteran of numerous newspapers, including The Seattle Times, where she won a 1997 Pulitzer
for a series on abuses at HUD's Indian Housing Office.
Deb served five years as a Washington investigative editor for The Los Angeles Times, co-authoring
a 2006 series based on declassified records from the Vietnam War, which is also the subject
of her new book, The War Behind Me.
Vietnam veterans confront the truth about U.S. war crimes.
Welcome, Deb and Jane, to Whistle Where You Work.
Jane, why don't we start with you?
What is investigative reporting and is it any different than just being thorough?
Well, you know, I may be different on this than some other people.
I actually think there is no special subject called investigative reporting.
I think all reporting should involve thorough investigation, whether you're doing an O-bit,
which is where I started reporting up in Rutland, Vermont, or if you're doing something very
complicated about the government.
I mean, basically, you never want to just take somebody's, you know, press release
and write it up without doing some kind of inquiry about what's behind it.
So I think all reporters have a responsibility to investigate further.
I don't think it's anything different.
It just means maybe taking more time.
OK, but it's a discipline, as far as you're concerned, because you were the head of a unit
that was an investigative unit.
You teach it.
What does it mean to you?
I think it's a tradition.
It is true.
I think, as Jane says, that all reporters should be investigative reporters, but not all stories
are investigative stories.
Some of what we do is reporting to the public on the daily events, on daily events of government,
of corporations.
But it's important to stop and take a look now and then at what officials have said to
find out if they're telling the truth, or to find out if they're leaving something out.
And that requires investigative reporting often, which I would define as kind of tenacious
reporting, independent reporting, independent documentation, I think is really important.
Is it, by its nature, a long form and resource intensive?
No, it's not.
It could take a couple of days, or it could take a couple of weeks, sometimes it could
take a couple of years, just depending on how difficult it is to get the information.
But what it does require is tenacity, independent reporting, complete documentation that sheds
light on some problem.
And I would define problem very broadly.
Some people in investigative reporting stop at corruption, intentional wrongdoing.
But I think that any sort of societal ill, you know, waste, abuse, corruption, environmental
pollution is investigative reporting.
I mean, I guess what I really feel is that anybody who is in Washington as a reporter
has to, at this point, investigate beyond what you're being told.
Because basically, there's an entire industry in Washington at this point.
Must or should?
Must.
I mean, your responsibility as a reporter.
There's an industry devoted to basically cropping reality in a way that's self-serving.
So you've got all of this gigantic public relations industry.
Everybody in government with any power has a spokesman whose job it is to burnish their
image and basically cover up anything that's not helpful to them.
And any reporter would be, you know, falling down on the job from my standpoint if they
just take it as the gospel truth when they're handed some kind of, you know, press release
or told something, even, you know, when I was a White House reporter in the Reagan administration,
every day we would have Larry Speaks come in and tell us what was supposed to be the
truth.
And every day our job really should have been to dig further because there's always, there
are always other points of view on something.
It should have been, though, I think, as the operative expression in what you said.
Because if we go back, for instance, to the period right after 9-11, the beginning of
the Iraq war and the creation of the embedded reporter motif, there weren't a whole lot
of questions asked.
There weren't a lot of people pushing and looking behind what the government officials
were saying, what the White House was saying.
It's hard.
I mean, there were a number of factors, I think, that led to that in particular.
I mean, there are times, and it was true also in the Reagan years.
When a president is very popular and unchallenged by the opposition party, a reporter is not
the opposition.
A reporter's job is to try to get the facts.
And if the Democratic Party is not challenging the Republican White House, in particular,
say, during the Reagan years or during the run-up to the war in the Bush years, it's
very hard for a reporter to find the opposition facts.
You know, we need to have somebody we can go to to get alternative information from.
So that's part of a problem.
And also, editors cower sometimes.
When there's a very popular president, they get bombarded with letters from readers who
are upset.
And why are you questioning the president?
Is this an unpatriotic thing to do?
It takes a lot of metal to keep going.
But I mean, I just think that that is so completely the job of a reporter.
We're not there to be popular.
We're there to try to help the public understand what's going on even when the government doesn't
want you to know it.
And what are we losing?
There's a lot of hand-reading about the death or the decline of investigative reporting.
What are we losing in that process?
Well, can I go back for a second to the Iraq War?
And I do think that that was a case of where, ideally, we would have all been looking to
– we'd be reporting not only what the government was telling us, but we'd be looking to see
whether they were telling us the truth.
And I was new to Washington, fairly new to Washington at the time, to Washington reporting.
And I was shocked, actually, at how little digging and skepticism there was when the
president rolled out a war.
I mean, here we're sending people off to risk their lives.
And there's very little reporting being done to –
It's fair to say that besides Knight Ritter, the mainstream media was basically prostrate.
There were some other exceptions.
And I think Walter Pincus at the post was plugging away, albeit inside the paper.
And actually, Bob Drogan, who was on the L.A. Times Washington Bureau staff, he spent full
time true squatting the administration.
And Carlotta Gaul in Afghanistan, though the Times was running her stories way inside,
so you really didn't get to see a lot of them.
But it was a situation where the Democrats were rolling over also.
Many of the people from the Clinton administration were just as adamant that there were weapons
of mass destruction as the people who were now in power in the Bush administration.
So reporters had to look hard to find counter-facts.
There were people who had them, like Scott Ritter, in particular, with somebody.
And his reputation was so ruined by people who didn't like his point of view that you
couldn't even quote him in respectable company.
So there were a lot of political pressures.
Scott Ritter was the weapons inspector who said that, in fact, there weren't weapons
of mass destruction in Iraq and that they had been removed years before.
Right.
But he was kind of marginalized from the debate at the time that this was the run-up to the
war.
I mean, what would you have expected reporters to do that they weren't doing more of?
Going out and doing that sort of independent reporting, not just kind of holding out their
hands and taking the leaks or standing at press conferences and transcribing what was
said, but going out and talking to more sources, looking for documentation.
The fact that Knight Ritter did it, the fact that Bob Drogen did it, and Walter Pincus
was able to do it, shows that it could be done.
And let me pose the question this way.
Maybe it isn't so much a question of whether there was investigation sufficient or not.
I do think you raised an interesting question.
If the Democrats are rolled over, will the media then rise to the occasion?
And it raises the question of who's driving the agenda.
Should it be the newsmakers driving the media's agenda?
Or should the media be independently attempting to assess, not that it should ignore what
newsmakers presidents say, but should the news media be independently assessing, well,
what's really going on here?
And deploying resources on that basis as opposed to being a stenographer at a press conference
and simply reporting what's said, watchdog versus stenographer.
Well, clearly, I think both of us come from the viewpoint that the reporter should be
a watchdog.
Even in the more difficult the circumstances are, how do you try?
And that's the nature of investigative reporting, and that's the nature of the investigative
reporter.
I mean, when a person's in a beat or a standalone investigative reporter, their nature is to
dig harder for the facts, the greater the obstacles to obtaining them.
But even White House reporters, I mean, the good ones are always questioning and always
skeptical.
The problem is a question of time and money, really, when it comes down to it.
And that's the problem with the industry right now, which is that the newspaper industry
is collapsing.
It doesn't have a lot of extra money right now to spend on reporters.
And there's nothing more expensive, really, than investigative reporting and foreign reporting
are the two most expensive things.
Investigative reporting, it takes a really long time to get beneath the surface.
I mean, I think of the example of the Swift Boat story in the 2004 campaign.
It took the New York Times three weeks of multiple staffers to finally track down all
the lies that were in those Swift Boat ads about John Kerry.
It takes 10 seconds, if they old saying, for a lie to travel the distance of the world.
And it takes so much time and time is money.
Those staffers could be doing something that would be in the paper every day.
So you have to take them off the daily coverage, put them into something where you don't really
see any results right away.
And sometimes with investigative reporting, you don't see any results ever.
I mean, that's the other thing is it's a high-risk venture.
Sometimes you'll go down on some kind of rabbit hole thinking there's some really hot story.
It turns out there isn't one there, and you have to kill it.
And if you're going to be responsible, you don't run anything.
And that's happened to me.
I actually killed one of my own stories at the New Yorker not so very long ago.
And it's a huge credit to David Remnick, the editor at the New Yorker, that he said, if
you don't think it's there, don't worry about it, we'll move on.
And that had been after paying my salary for a couple of months on something that was taking
a lot of time and money.
It is resource-intensive, it is expensive, it does take a long time, and there is the
possibility of digging a dry well.
Right.
Nonetheless, if we don't do it, if reporters aren't looking deeply and looking behind the
public statements of officials and power, how will the public ever know what the truth
is?
Well, they won't.
I mean, there certainly are growing instances where citizen journalists have uncovered wrong-doing
corruption in local communities.
But I don't think we can rely on that.
We do have to continue doing it and find a way to continue doing it.
There have always been obstacles.
I've probably gotten more trouble from bean-headed editors and the bean counters in terms of being
prevented from getting stories in the paper.
But now I think we do face a real threat from a financial threat, an economic threat, with
staffs being cut back dramatically.
Well, let me give you an example of perhaps a model and tell me what you think about this.
The San Diego Union Tribune in 2005 did an investigative piece that resulted in Congressman
Randy Duke Cunningham being caught and prosecuted, convicted, and imprisoned for a real estate
deal with a defense contractor.
Two years later, that same paper had cut its staff by 25 percent.
But what they did was they set up – they've deployed their staff on a model of a watchdog
organization, which is that they give reporters time to do longer pieces, their beat reporters
are trained in investigative methods, and that all reporters are told that their job is to
go deep in an age of diminished resources.
Is that the model?
Well, it sounds good.
I mean, I do worry that what's – the problem is the public won't realize what it's not
reading about.
You know, they will just not have that kind of coverage.
And I mean, it's rare that a small paper can do it.
I think it's no accident that the Washington Post and the New York Times have really led
in covering things like the NSA wiretapping story and Dana Priest's coverage of the
Blackside prisons that the CIA was running.
It takes – often it takes a really big and powerful institution to step up to the power
in Washington, and one that has the resources.
I mean, the LA Times, too, has done a fantastic job in this.
You said, Knight Ritter, these are all very big places.
Small town papers have a very hard time doing that.
I've been on some of them in the past.
As I said, the Rutland Herald in Rutland, Vermont, it's – you get a lot of flak from
a community, and it's hard to have those kinds of resources.
I mean, it's also the public model of ProPublica, right?
And let's talk about that briefly, ProPublica.
This is an organization that's relatively new.
It's very well endowed, and it exists for a sole purpose, which is to get out investigative
pieces and to provide the resources to enable them to put it on a website and then on occasion
to put it on major platforms as well, given where the resources are lacking elsewhere.
Is that the way it's going to get done going forward?
I think the more alternatives there are, the better.
When – with large papers shrinking, with all papers shrinking, we have to find new
ways to get the information out there.
So – and I shouldn't say that it's new, because there have been non-profits out there
doing this sort of thing for a long time, and they've done great things.
The Center for Investigative Reporting in San Francisco, Center for Public Integrity
in Washington, D.C., the Chicago Reporter, a little investigative monthly that's been
doing its thing, I think, since the 1960s or 70s.
So that model has been out there, but I think it's become more important as papers reduce
their staffs because they're looking at the bottom line.
And I might take exception to the notion that small papers have – don't do – or have
a hard time doing investigative journalism, because if you look at investigative reporters
and editors, you know, the leading investigative reporting organization, many of the reporters
are members, and many of the stories you'll see posted on their website are from small
and medium-sized papers.
And they are hard hit by the recent cutbacks, but there's a lot of great journalism being
done there.
And as somebody who's done investigative reporting, yet a tiny paper where the travel
budget was, you know, a role of public transit tokens, and the office managers draw to the
post where, you know, you have hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Maybe that's being done that we just don't hear it.
The other thing is there's this kind of national conversation that takes place when
a story really hits big, and it's really – you know, it goes around the world.
And I – you know, maybe they're – it's also very hard, I think, for some place that's
out in the country, they can cover their area, but it's hard for them to really hold what
your project is about, which is, you know, the seat of the American government here in
Washington accountable, which is a, you know, a very difficult thing for people to do.
Well, many thanks to Deb Nelson and Jane Mayer for sharing your thoughts on the state of investigative
reporting in the U.S. and best of luck with your latest books, Jane's The Dark Side and
Deb's The War Behind Me, or Whistle Where You Work.
I'm Mark Cohen.
