BOB GARFIELD: From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Finally this week, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice appeared in Congress before the 9/11 Commission and the world. As Court TV, it was alternately dull, contentious and gripping.
RICHARD BEN-VENISTE: Did you tell the president, at any time prior to August 6th, of the existence of Al Qaeda cells in the United States?
CONDOLEEZZA RICE: First let me just make certain--
RICHARD BEN-VENISTE: If you could just answer that question, because I only have a very limited-- [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
CONDOLEEZZA RICE: Well, first-- I, I understand, Commissioner, but it's important-- [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
RICHARD BEN-VENISTE: --did you tell the president--
CONDOLEEZZA RICE: -- it's important that I also address-- [APPLAUSE]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: This weekend, various assessments of Rice's effectiveness in fending off the charges of former counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke, but what about the overall impact of these televised hearings? Have they changed the media's and the public's view of the Bush administration, of the Congress? John Dean, former counsel to President Nixon, testified during the Watergate Hearings, and he watched them closely, just as he's watched the 9/11 hearings. Mr. Dean, welcome back to the show.
JOHN DEAN: Thank you. Pleasure to be with you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So could you compare and contrast these hearings with the Watergate Hearings as media event?
JOHN DEAN: There's no question that the Watergate Hearings were extensive, they were actually even protracted. There was massive media coverage. It was reality television before reality television, and it really was educational, and that was one of the aims of the committee. In later talking to Sam Dash about it, this is what they hoped to do --they built their case very slowly, and then went public with it.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Sam Dash, of course, was chief counsel to the Senate Watergate Committee, and actually he told us that he carefully staged the hearings as a detective story, beginning with the burglaries, then bringing out the accusers, like yourself, and ending with the accused. Do you think that these recent hearings use that same structure?
JOHN DEAN: To some degree, there was some similarity in the structure, because Richard Clarke had met with several members of the Commission for I think something like 18 hours. Yet, they also had a number of documents that had been supplied, and in a sense, Richard Clarke is the accuser. He's accusing Mr. Bush of not really being very vigilant about terrorism until after 9/11. Condoleezza Rice's role was to defend that.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:If you look at the hearings as theater, certainly Rice's testimony was intended to be the climax. Did you get that sense of satisfaction as a viewer from watching it?
JOHN DEAN: Well, I think she was a good witness theatrically. She's very eloquent and well-spoken, and she managed to sit there for almost 3 hours and say almost nothing. She knew how to play the game. She'd been carefully briefed. She couldn't have done what she did in the hearings in a courtroom. A judge would have held her in contempt if she'd have tried to go on those extended answers, and at one point, as you'll recall, Senator Kerrey, Bob Kerrey, said "You're filibustering," and that's exactly what she was doing.
BOB KERREY: So-- [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
CONDOLEEZZA RICE: Since we have a point of disagreement, I'd like to have a chance to address it-- [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
BOB KERREY: Well, no, no - no-- actually there's going to be - we have many points of disagreement, Dr. Clarke, but we'll have a chance to just-- [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
CONDOLEEZZA RICE: Sandy-- I think-- [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
BOB KERREY: -- we'll have a chance to do in closed session. [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
CONDOLEEZZA RICE: I--
BOB KERREY: You can't - please don't filibuster me. I, you -- it's not fair. [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
CONDOLEEZZA RICE: Do you mean--?
BROOKE GLADSTONE: During the Watergate Hearings, they had as much time -- as many hours as they needed --to grill a witness. Here they were only given 10 minutes, so as long as she filled that with some measure of verbiage, she would be safe.
JOHN DEAN: And she knew how to play to the camera and force him back down. If this had been a closed hearing, he would have prevailed, and she would not have been able to embarrass him into letting her continue to filibuster. She knew that here was a commissioner couldn't be beating up on her and telling her to start answering the questions without looking like he was getting overly aggressive and being partisan, when he was just trying to use his time effectively, so she prevailed, and it was the cameras that really enabled her to do that.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Once again, could you compare that with the way that the Watergate Hearings were conducted?
JOHN DEAN:There, there was no time limit. For example, I'd originally planned to go up and summarize my testimony in maybe a half hour on the first day of my appearance. Instead, they said no, we want you to read your testimony. So I had to read my testimony. It took 8 hours. With the 9/11 Hearings, given the fact they were constrained, she was effectively able to use the time.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Here's what Sam Dash told us was the recipe for a satisfying viewing experience and also, I guess, a successful legal proceeding.
SAM DASH: I knew exactly what my questions were going to be, and I knew exactly what the answers were going to be so that I could put it in a form that this would come out like a story, and I think it succeeded in the sense that the American people were glued to their television sets, waiting for the next episode.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Were you glued to the TV set when watching the 9/11 Hearings? Did it pay off for you?
JOHN DEAN: No. By no means did it.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: What do you think the principal lesson for the public has been so far?
JOHN DEAN:Well, what I took away from the hearings is that this is an example of secrecy. This is an example of putting forward what appears to be an open statement of what's going on, when in fact it really is not. No new information came out. The only thing the public learned was the name that was on the briefing paper that apparently the Bush administration is now reluctantly going to make available.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: The title that stated flatly that Osama bin Laden was looking to attack within the United States.
JOHN DEAN:That's correct. There may have been some other nuances and details, and it's clear that, because of the different position that Richard Clarke and Condoleezza Rice are taking, I think the Commission's going to sort this out and tell us what really is the truth.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:They were interesting and unlikely main characters for this drama, I think. We didn't expect Condi to appear at all, and Richard Clarke just seemed to emerge full-grown from the head of Zeus.
JOHN DEAN: Isn't that what makes theater most interesting, when characters walk on you don't expect.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Thank you very much.
JOHN DEAN: Thank you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: John Dean, former counsel to President Richard Nixon. His new book is called Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush.
BOB GARFIELD: In a press conference Wednesday, we caught this exchange between a reporter and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
JOURNALIST: Aren't you having a more difficult time making the case that things are going well in Iraq?
DONALD RUMSFELD: Things are, are -- we're trying to explain how things are going, and they're going as they are going, and we are-- we're here, pointing out what's taking place in the country. Some things are going well, and some things, obviously are not going well.
BOB GARFIELD:On Wednesday, that was an understatement. As the week wore on, the situation only got worse with Shiite militias partially controlling three southern cities, Marines fighting house to house in the Sunni city of Fallujah, and foreign civilians being kidnapped by Iraqi militiamen. But Rumsfeld stayed on message through it all, downplaying the bad and emphasizing the good, as did his staffers at the Coalition Provisional Authority press office in Baghdad. On Thursday, we caught up with Washington Post correspondent Anthony Shadid in Nasariya. Shadid has been filing from Iraq for the past year, and this week, won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. Anthony, congratulations.
ANTHONY SHADID: Thank you.
BOB GARFIELD: According to the Associated Press, the Coalition press office in Baghdad is led by Republican Party operatives and, and staffed largely by people with GOP ties. The New York Times noted that high-ranking British officials are concerned that, quote, "events are orchestrated with the American political agenda uppermost in mind." Can you talk about your experience with the Coalition information machine in Iraq and in what ways that has hindered your reporting or just colored it.
ANTHONY SHADID: I guess there's a couple things that strike me about my interaction with it over the, over the past year -- obviously there's an ideological component there. I mean it's part of an administration that's very political and politically aware. I think that drives things less than the isolation that the CPA deals with, and I think that is-- isolation at times is startling. You understand their isolation. I mean it's a - it's a very precarious, curious situation here. But I think they're -- they have lacked an ability to get out, to get around, to sense what's going on in the street, to sense what's going on in other cities, and I think you know time and again that's caught up with them, that they've been caught u-- you know, unaware of the speed of events, the pace of events, like we've seen this week in just a matter of days.
BOB GARFIELD:Concerning the security situation, you are someone who spends very little time in press conferences and a lot pounding the pavement. There is increasingly lawlessness throughout Iraq. Four American journalists were kidnapped for several hours earlier in the week, and a day later a Japanese journalist was kidnapped. Is this affecting your ability to get to the story?
ANTHONY SHADID: You know, it is. It's definitely more precarious now than it's ever been. And even when you talk to people, all they can think about is your safety. They're worried about, you know, the danger that you're, you're putting yourself in. I think it's going to pose a real challenge to, to reporting here, because I think there's almost a, a reflexive, you know, reaction by journalists to, to harden themselves, and what I mean by that is, you know, possibly to have armed escorts, to fortify the places that they're working from. And while it's understandable, there's a risk in isolating ourselves from the story, and you know perhaps it's inevitable, but you know we, we do run the risk of falling into the same isolation that we may have criticized the, you know, the CPA for and not understanding how the story's changing and how it's moving on the ground.
BOB GARFIELD:On the flip side, there seems to be a growing reliance on reporters from Arab television stations who have become on the scene reporters by proxy because Western reporters simply can't safely get access to the story. What implications does that have, do you suppose?
BOB GARFIELD:Some coverage is politicized. There's no question about it. And, and if it's in a context that might be different from the context that Western reporters are used to reporting on, that's how I think, you know, a lot of this is information - information itself is useful, and you know we don't have a person in Najaf right now. We have an Iraqi reporter down there who's done a fantastic job. He's been able to get details. He's himself in an incredible, you know, dangerous situation. [BACKGROUND NOISE UNDER] And we feel really lucky that we have him there, so I guess I right off just don't see any far-reaching implications of that. I think any time you have second hand information, it's less preferable than first hand information, but we are reaching a point where it is, it's too dangerous in parts of this country to simply go into.
BOB GARFIELD:In your piece in Thursday's Washington Post, you, you wrote about the increasingly fuzzy line between civilians and combatants in Sadr City, the Baghdad slum where so much fighting has been going on since last weekend.
ANTHONY SHADID: You go into Sadr City and you realize the implications of what, you know, of what's ahead perhaps. You know, I think the U.S. government often wants to personalize these conflicts -- they're against one man, they're against Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden or Moktada al-Sadr -- but what we see in Sadr City, it's not that easy for the people that are in that neighborhood. There's an almost kind of a knee jerk reaction to arresting clerics. It reminds people of, of Saddam's government. It's, it's distasteful to them. I think when you see civilian casualties mount -- we've seen more than 60 people killed there since Sunday -- there's, there's a sense that even if you don't have a lot of love for Moktada al-Sadr, you have, you know, a certain affinity for your neighbors, basically, who are coming under fire. And that's where you see the nature of the opposition I think changing and becoming very fluid.
BOB GARFIELD:I want to talk to you about the language of reporting in a situation like this. As the nature of the combatants themselves is changing, seemingly before our eyes, does the language of your reportage change with it? Who's the enemy and how do you describe him?
ANTHONY SHADID: You know, that's an interesting question, because it's one thing that we really never understood before, I think, is the nature of opposition to the U.S. occupation. [DOG BARKING BACKGROUND] I think we all felt it was driven by remnants of the government, in the beginning. Even though there was a different component later with the suicide bombings. You know, now it's - we're seeing in Fallujah what looks to be popular resistance at a certain level, [DOGS BARKING] and I think it's going to be even more complex as time goes on, and I think it's not easy to put them into neat and tidy categories.
BOB GARFIELD:You know, I've always known that some day I would interview a war correspondent with a dogfight going on in the background, but I never expected it to be a fight between actual dogs.
ANTHONY SHADID: [LAUGHS] They are loud dogs, I have to say.
BOB GARFIELD: [LAUGHS] Well, Anthony, thank you very much. Congratulations, again.
ANTHONY SHADID: Thank you.
BOB GARFIELD: Anthony Shadid covers Iraq for the Washington Post. He spoke to us from Nasariya. He is the winner of this year's Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Coming up, why Iraqi journalists can't catch a break, and how the most powerful pictures can obscure the real details of tragedy.
BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media, from NPR. BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Three weeks ago, three men working for the Arab satellite news channel Al Arabiya were at the scene of a rocket attack on a hotel, waiting for permission to film. The Coalition said no, and as they pulled out to leave, another car suddenly passed them, trying to break through the U.S. Army barricade. Ahmed Abdul Kassim was driving the Al Arabiya news van -- when he heard shots, he pressed hard on the gas pedal and sped himself and his colleagues to safety. At least he thought he had. When he was far enough away to slow down, he realized that both of his passengers were dead. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, as of Friday, 11 journalists have died in Iraq in 2004, all of them from the Middle East. Dan Murphy reports from Baghdad for the Christian Science Monitor, and he's covered the story. Dan, welcome to the show.
DAN MURPHY: Thanks for having me.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Al Arabiya is now considering legal action against the U.S. because of the death of those two newsmen.
DAN MURPHY: That's correct. It's not just the deaths of the newsmen; it's the fact that the American report on it exonerated the soldiers involved, and there were enormous discrepancies between the driver who survived the attack's account of what happened and the official American account of what happened. Certainly it's the case that if you go to Al Arabiya's offices now, there is a much greater anger towards the U.S. military and the U.S. government in general than there was before.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Arab journalists seem to be caught in the middle. You tell the story of a cameraman who was stringing for an Arab news outlet who was given a tip from insurgents who told him that they had just blown up a U.S. Humvee. He rushed to the scene -- can you describe what happened next?
DAN MURPHY: Absolutely. He went out, you know, like a lot of these stringers out in difficult areas, he has a camera, he works alone, and he's paid to get great footage of the latest attacks, and very often that makes the news, because that's what people are interested in seeing. So he rushes out to film it, the Americans on the scene are immediately suspicious, they think he's gotten there too soon, and he gets questioned about how he knew that something had happened, and they think maybe these people have foreknowledge of the attacks. Eventually he is allowed to leave, and he dispatches footage to Baghdad where it can be distributed to his station. The 5 o'clock news update hour comes and goes, and for whatever reason, they didn't use that footage, but he got paid a visit by the guy who gave him the call who were upset that their handiwork hadn't been on the air. They came into his place, and they had guns, and they threatened him.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: What is the impact of being pressured from both sides on these journalists?
DAN MURPHY:It's a sensitive subject, but I know that one large station has actually chosen not to use a lot of the good footage that it gets because of the allegations they've gotten from the Coalition that they tend to know too much, and that maybe they have foreknowledge of attacks. On the other side, in terms of the insurgents being upset with what you report or show footage of, I think it's very, very difficult for them to anticipate what's going to make those folks happy, so the Arab journalists say that they're trying to play it straight down the middle, and, and try to convince everybody that they're neutral parties, just the way any other journalist would. But it's not clear to what extent they're succeeding in doing that.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:We spoke about Al Arabiya and Al Jazeera as well-established news services that have been caught in between the two warring parties. Is this also true of the nascent Iraqi media?
DAN MURPHY: Certainly average Iraqi journalists will feel under threat. The interesting thing is, is there have been a number of attacks in recent months on translators and drivers and fixers for Western journalists. These are people that are Iraqis that help foreigners get the stories here. There have been 3 or 4 people like that killed in, let's say, the past month of six weeks, and they've clearly been targeted by insurgents. This category of people I'm talking about working with the Western journalists work in Baghdad a lot, just like we all do, but I'll come home to my safe compound, you know, hotel with protection around it at night, and these guys go back and they live in their Iraqi neighborhood, and people that want to do them harm know the street that they live on and, and that's how they get targeted.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Right. Dan, thank you very much.
DAN MURPHY: Thank you very much.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Dan Murphy reports from Baghdad for the Christian Science Monitor. BOB GARFIELD: Jim Lewis has always believed in photography. The journalist and novelist has often written about photography and has done quite a bit himself, most memorably at the scene of a horrific atrocity last summer in Congo. There was a time he believed that such awful pictures, pictures such as emerged from the murder of four Americans in Falujah two weeks ago, were crucial for documenting the horrors of war. But no longer. The Fallujah images and the journalistic handwringing over them prompted Lewis to write this week on Slate.com why graphic documentation of violence doesn't necessarily help anyone understand the story.
JIM LEWIS: Part of the problem with printing photographs like this is that they tend to strip away any of the context which would help anybody actually understand the story. You know, what did these guys look like before this happened? You know, what were they traveling in? What part of town were they in? How many people actually were there? All of that gets lost in the grisly sight of these bodies hanging from a bridge. I just think that, to the extent that it's the function of journalism to explain things to people, photographs like this do less explaining than one might otherwise wish.
BOB GARFIELD: You're thinking on the subject changed based on your own work in Eastern Congo.
JIM LEWIS: Mm-hmm.
BOB GARFIELD: You were there almost a year ago. Tell me about your experience.
JIM LEWIS:Yeah, it was based in a little town called Bunyan, and we went out of town one day, myself and another reporter and a photographer up into the hills outside of town where we had heard that there had been a massacre, and we got there, and there was, and-- there was nobody else there except for the people who had died, and they had been-- not just killed but dismembered and, and in a particularly horrific way. And after I had finished sort of taking my notes, and the people I was with had other work to do, I didn't know what to do, and I was just kind of standing around, and took out my camera and took a lot of photographs.
BOB GARFIELD:So-- what you had in your camera was--something-- shocking, something extraordinary. At what point did you know that your mind had changed and that whatever these pictures were, they were not something to be shared with a mass audience?
JIM LEWIS: I would be talking to friends and family and people that I worked with and trying to explain what was going on in the Congo and what I had seen, and I would show them these photographs along with others, and I just found that-- they got in the way of, of trying to tell the story I wanted to tell, and that in fact rather than clarifying the story, the shock of the photographs had a tendency to derail both my telling of the story and other people's understanding of it.
BOB GARFIELD:In your piece in Slate, you referred to a story where a, a man killed himself, and that the suicide was captured by the security cameras in his building, and then somehow found their way to an internet site that traded in, in shocking video footage and so forth, and the mother of the victim I believe was beside herself wondering how her son's death could turn into a sort of pornography.
JIM LEWIS: What I mean by pornography is just that the fact that such a thing exists on film at all is often so surprising to people or so--shocking or-- exciting or whatever it may be, that it tends to overwhelm the information that the pictures would otherwise actually convey.
BOB GARFIELD:Now I, I saw the Fallujah pictures when they were first published and aired and they were genuinely horrifying. But I must say I was not as moved by them as I was by a single line in a single wire story about one of the kidnappings in Iraq. It was of a Jerusalem resident who evidently also has a, a United States' driver's license, and the kidnappers, to prove that they had this guy in custody, were showing his passport and his U.S. driver's license and, and his-- supermarket frequent shopper's card. And the very quotidian nature of a supermarket frequent shopper's card was so humanizing for me, that I, I, I got very choked up; far more than I did from the most graphic pictures emerging from the war.
JIM LEWIS: I have much the same sort of reactions. I used to think that only a photograph can really accurately convey what goes on in a war, and that anything less than absolute explicitness would amount to a kind of whitewashing, and I think in fact that's simply not true. A well-written paragraph can be just as informative and just as horrifying and, and just as touching but doesn't run the same kinds of, of risks.
BOB GARFIELD: Well, Jim, thank you very much.
JIM LEWIS: Thank you.
BOB GARFIELD: Jim Lewis is a novelist living in Austin, Texas. His article, "Front Page Horror," appeared last week on Slate.com. BROOKE GLADSTONE: It's been 10 years since the Rwandan genocide; a hundred days of ruthless slaughter that left perhaps a million dead. Mostly the outside world sat that one out. But in commemoration of the anniversary, this month a flood of memorials, specials, documentaries and feature films are filling the ether. Now, it seems, the West is ready to remember. But two years ago, we interviewed Nick Hughes, a photo-journalist who was among the first to try and convey the experience in a way that people might comprehend. Hughes had already made many documentaries of the horror, but this time he and his co-producer, Eric Kabera, who lost 32 family members to the genocide, wanted to find a new way to tell the story, so they hired witnesses -- Tutsis and Hutus -- as actors - and created a love story to put a human face on the slaughter. The result was One Hundred Days. [CLIP PLAYS]
MAN: Get rid of women and their baby rats. Don't leave any rats for the future. [CROWD CHEERS] The time for work is now. [CHEERS] What we have waited for is happening! [CHEERS Hutu power, power! Hutu power! [DRUMS AND MUSIC]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Director Nick Hughes joins us now from Rwanda. Welcome to the show.
NICK HUGHES: Thank you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So you're a documentary cameraman who's covered the war in Rwanda. You have hours and hours of powerful footage of the genocide. Why did you decide to tell the story of such a dramatic historical event as a fictional drama?
NICK HUGHES: I, I worked on so many documentaries after the genocide, and in many ways a documentary is the best way to tell the history of such an enormous event, but documentaries about Rwanda aren't watched, and if they are watched, they're watched by people who already know and have assumptions about Rwanda, and therefore you're preaching to the converted, and A Hundred Days is made to explain in a dramatic form, to explain what happened to - in Rwanda - to an audience that has no interest in Rwanda.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Two of the most important characters in A Hundred Days are Josette and Baptiste, both young lovers. Was this lovers subplot a way of drawing people in?
NICK HUGHES: You know, love is a universal theme. The audience, even if they're in Tokyo or Toronto can immediately relate to the hopes and fears of that couple.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:I'd like to share with you my reaction to the movie. It seemed to me that when you cleaved closest to the actual events, it had the most impact, and when you moved off to the plots that you had imposed to attract the audience, because the actors were, frankly, rather wooden, it was when my mind began to wander.
NICK HUGHES: Indeed. I mean none of the actors are professional actors. But they are Rwandan, and they were portraying something under whose shadow they lived and from which they had lived. Maybe the film fails on this, and maybe we should have had very professional actors, but they weren't going to be Rwandan. Some people find the acting wooden; some people find that because they're Rwandan acting their own story, twice as powerful.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:I was fascinated by your use of the extraneous characters who came through the, the UN soldiers, the journalists. You have journalists -- people holding cameras -- just as you, yourself, did during the actual genocide -- scattered all through. [SOUNDTRACK FROM A HUNDRED DAYS]
MAN: Yes, hold on, hold on -- [SHOUTING] Catherine! Just wait right there. [RUNNING]
WOMAN: Who were they?
MAN: They were friends! Mr. Kabera was not liked! He was in an opposition political party.
WOMAN: Is that why they killed him?
MAN: I, I don't know - maybe, maybe. I, I don't know. Maybe.
WOMAN: Who killed him?
MAN: I, I can't tell! I don't know!
BROOKE GLADSTONE: They're generally in the way; they're irrelevant; they're taking no moral stand, and they have no impact on what's going on around them -- it's as if they were dropped from the moon.
NICK HUGHES: Yeah, well I think that's exactly what happens - you had UN soldiers from the West; you had aid workers; you had ex-pats; you had journalists -- all of them betrayed the Rwandan people. The media took absolutely no part in the genocide and in exposing it to the international community. It brushed it off with cliches, caricatures. The aid workers, 99 percent of them, just got on the plane and left. The ex-pats just left their servants to be slaughtered and evacuate--while they evacuated their dogs. And the UN who were there, brought in to protect the Tutsi population -- to keep the peace -- just ran away. And there's a worrying thing, I think, at the moment that the -- particularly in the media--in film, in documentaries, in books -- is that there is now a sort of myth-making about Westerners in Rwanda -- that somehow they suffered. They didn't suffer at all. I didn't lose anybody there. You know --compared to someone who lost their entire family - generations slaughtered in a, in a month.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:It's clear that you don't have much respect for those characters who wander through your story. You don't pay much attention to them at all, and yet you, yourself -- when you were there -- videotaped a machete-wielding man beating a woman and her daughter pleading for their lives -- and it was broadcast all over the world in 1994. Do you think it did nothing?
NICK HUGHES: Well, it was something very, very small. I mean I didn't save anybody. I didn't put my camera down and save any children. And nor did anybody else. And, and nor did those people who, who sat at home and watched those two women being murdered -- watching their television in, in Europe or America -- nothing happened. There was no great outcry for something to be done.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:In an effort to tell your story in a way that would be popular and not cheapen or distort it, you tried to cleave a sort of middle course. You put in a love story, but you offered no redemption for any of the characters. There isn't anybody who is saved. There isn't anybody who isn't irreparably damaged. Here's a clip of a little girl talking to a UN soldier in, in front of one of the mass graves.
UN SOLDIER: Did you see what happened?
GIRL: They put all the Tutsis in the ground and in the pit latrines.
UN SOLDIER: Did you know them?
GIRL: My friend Anton is there with his whole family.
UN SOLDIER: If he was your friend, don't you miss him?
GIRL: No! He belongs in a pit latrine. It's natural. He was a Tutsi.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Given that the story ends on a note of absolute despair, is there any technique, including a love story, that you think would be able to keep the audience there?
NICK HUGHES: There is nothing positive about genocide. You can't come out with some glimmer of hope. Genocide is all negative. It is all dark and evil, and the suffering that people go through is beyond imagination. But, if there's some understanding and some sympathy and, and there's some belief that Rwandans are human beings amongst an international audience, then that's -- that's a great step.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Nick, now that you made the film that you wanted to make, do you think you can find a way to forgive yourself a little bit?
NICK HUGHES: Well, I-- it's not really a matter of forgive--
BROOKE GLADSTONE: I guess what I mean is--
NICK HUGHES: Yeah?
BROOKE GLADSTONE:-- it's obvious that you came away with an enormous burden, and a sense of responsibility that you don't feel you've fulfilled, and that the rest of the Western community in Rwanda certainly didn't fulfill, and you made this film. So my question is, is can you leave it alone now?
NICK HUGHES: Well, it-- the film gives me an opportunity to speak about Rwanda, but I don't get the opportunity to go back and stop by the side of the road and pick up a child who's going to be murdered by the MRND and take him out of the country to safety -- and, nor does anybody else get that opportunity to do that again. And nobody said anything about stopping it happening next time. So no, I don't think there is anything really to feel positive about or redeemed about. Not at all. The genocide is the opposite of redemption. There is no redemption. You can't go back. Those people are dead, and it will happen again.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Nick, it's been a pleasure talking to you.
NICK HUGHES: Thank you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Photojournalist and documentarian Nick Hughes. His film, One Hundred Days, premiered in 2002. [MUSIC]
BOB GARFIELD: Up next, waxing poetic about cars, and unmasking the wag.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media, from NPR. [FUNDING CREDITS] BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. This week, the annual Pulitzer Prizes were awarded, and among the many worthy recipients, the unlikeliest was Dan Neil, car critic for the Los Angeles Times. Unlikely, because the criticism award always goes to critics of the arts -- except for the one year it was awarded to a media critic -- but also because auto reviewers tend to be regarded with a certain suspicion, since most newspapers depend on the goodwill of car dealership advertisers. But Dan Neil is the Oscar Wilde of auto reviewers. In his columns, cars serve ably as metaphors for our culture. To wit:
DAN NEIL: Why do I like the Benz wagon? For me, whose personal life has often resembled the save-my-baby skit with the clown fireman, the station wagon connotes a settled domesticity, peace and stability devoutly to be wished. Singledom has certainly lost its luster. There's also something deeply appropriate about wagons. They are big enough to enclose my life, but not so big as to suggest a fear of something left behind, as huge SUVs seem to do. Station wagons are kind of like SUVs after years of therapy. [LAUGHTER] So what you-- I find myself doing is kind of identifying not so much the mechanical deficiencies and surpluses of a particular car, but how it fits in to people's lives, what it says about them, and whether it says something you would like it to say about you. For instance, this week I'm driving a Chevy SSR pickup -- it's kind of a postmodern hot rod pickup truck. It's like a pickup truck from Toontown. I mean you, you, you feel ridiculous driving it. [LAUGHTER] I feel that it's one of those vehicles that you would drive once, park and sell. [LAUGHS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Now, as you just described, you seem to love cars, but individual cars can frequently leave you cold, and that's difficult, many people say, for car critics, because auto advertising is so important, and of course there's a story floating around about you. Could you tell us about the last column you wrote for the Raleigh News & Observer back in 1997?
DAN NEIL: Sure. I actually worked in classified advertising when I was working for the News & Observer, and I produced an advertorial section, and I wrote the column for them. I didn't ask anybody, and nobody read it behind me. It just appeared in the paper. And, you know, my column was really crazy, and this one time I, I wrote a story about having intimate congress in the back of a Ford Expedition. I said at the time, you know, we both had our seat belts on; it was safe sex, [LAUGHTER] and actually they didn't think it was that funny at all. So, my boss called me in and said okay, that's it. You are on super-super, double dutch probation. Basically he was saying to me that I was going to have to be vetted by the advertising boss, and this I declined to do. And so after a few months of passive resistance, they fired me. And by the way, the News & Observer on the other side of the church/state wall, the news side, is a very, very honorable and respectable, you know, operation. At issue, though, is whether or not newspapers who produce these advertorial sections, you know, whether their hands are clean on this issue overall.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:We spoke to Keith Bradsher who's the author of the book High and Mighty about SUVs, and he says that, among critics, auto reviewers are the most likely to be compromised by the industry they cover; that they're often quitting their jobs to take industry PR jobs for big bucks. Do you think that's true, and did that ever tempt you?
DAN NEIL: It is absolutely true. The entire environment is incestuous. They introduce new cars. They fly journalists in and put them up at really nice hotels and, you know, treat them to experiences that they would never possibly in a million years, they, they wouldn't even be allowed in these hotels ordinarily. You know, and then they let 'em drive the cars, and then they go away, you know, and that's not supposed to affect their judgment. What's surprising is not that it does affect their judgment but that so often it doesn't affect their judgment. I forget who said it, but some politician said if you can't take their money and vote against 'em anyway, you're no damn good. [LAUGHTER] But it is a compromised business, and it is also true that newspapers are under a great deal of revenue pressure on this score, and so yeah, a favorable editorial/advertorial content is often created to satisfy that need.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Which you frequently don't provide.
DAN NEIL: Oh, almost never. I'm really ornery.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Does the industry hate you?
DAN NEIL:No! No, the manufacturers are tremendous about this. You know, like General Motors, right? You know, this thing that I'm driving that's a just awful vehicle, this SSR-- they know that, you know, I may hate that vehicle, but I may like something else, and I think it's worth it to them.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: I think you're too important in Los Angeles for them to lean on you too hard.
DAN NEIL: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, maybe, but my importance is a relatively recent phenomenon.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You mean in the last week? [LAUGHTER]
DAN NEIL: Yeah. And I expect that there will be diminishing returns. You know, I won't be getting the best table at Spaga's next week. [LAUGHTER]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Congratulations, Dan Neil.
DAN NEIL: Thank you very much. It was a pleasure to talk to you, Brooke.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Dan Neil is automobile critic for the Los Angeles Times and recipient of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. BOB GARFIELD: A few years ago, a group of researchers at the University of California at Berkeley were fed up with widespread academic dishonesty. So they invented a technology that could finger students who were using the internet to craft cut-and-paste term papers. That software, called Turnitin, works by matching up a string of 8 or more words with original sources to catch the copycats. It is very popular in the halls of academe. Now there's a new professional grade version of Turnitin known as iThenticate, beloved by lawyers because its data-sifting power quickly spots white collar thieves with sticky fingers for intellectual property. So what would happen if this software were applied to journalists? John Barrie is the president and founder of iParadigms LLC which developed iThenticate, and is here to tell us. John, welcome to the show.
JOHN BARRIE: Thank you very much, Bob.
BOB GARFIELD: I'm going to go confessional on you for a moment. When I was in high school, and this is a shameful episode, and I apologize to all involved, but everybody else in my German class had to write a, an essay on Beethoven, and almost to a, a student they went to the World Book Encyclopedia and plagiarized the essay therein about Ludwig von Beethoven. I alone, in this entire class, had the foresight and intellectual rigor to plagiarize from the Grolier Encyclopedia which was much more obscure, and they all got caught, and I didn't, and-- I live with that guilty memory to this day. Is there an equivalent these days of being able to go to the more obscure source to cheat from?
JOHN BARRIE: There is so much information on the internet from, you know, World Book Encyclopedia to the encyclopedia you may have taken from to, you know, the most obscure books that you could even imagine, and interestingly enough, even if those primary sources are not on the internet, so many people have taken from sources like that, incorporated that into their work, posted that work on the internet, that maybe our technology really doesn't find the book that you've taken your material from, but it's found another source that's quoted that book, which then ultimately leads the faculty member or the editor or you name it, to the original source that you cheated from.
BOB GARFIELD:Let's talk about the Hartford Courant. One of its op-ed contributors who was the president of Central Connecticut State University, Richard Judd, had plagiarized from several sources for an opinion piece he wrote for that paper. Tell me the Judd story.
JOHN BARRIE: The journalist from the Hartford Courant gave us a call, and she said well, one of the stories that we published in our newspaper has been found to contain some factual inaccuracies and some possible plagiarism, and we're doing a follow-up piece regarding that story, and I said well I'd be happy to answer your questions, but you may be interested, just for the heck of it, to run this piece through our iThenticate system just to see if you've missed any bits and pieces. She took us up on our offer and ran it through the system, and the thing lit up like a Christmas tree, and that led to the resignation of Mr. Judd from Central Connecticut State University.
BOB GARFIELD:I'm a columnist in my other job, and what would happen if I randomly took a paragraph from my column or one of my columns in its entirety and ran it through iThenticate? Is there any chance that you would get a false positive? I mean I know I haven't stolen from anybody (since high school). Is there a chance that some random assemblage of words would trigger a, you know, a false accusation?
JOHN BARRIE: The probability of stringing the same sixteen words together by chance that somebody else has strung together is less than one in a trillion. It's just not going to happen. And the probability of stringing, let's say, the same paragraph together somebody else has by chance is on the order of our sun exploding. Our technology will not begin to flag anything until we see at least eight contiguous words matching another source.
BOB GARFIELD:In the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal and USA Today and so forth, many news organizations have declared publicly that they're going to be more vigilant. Is that enough alone to deter plagiarism, or is the need for iThenticate or similar digital watchdogs an absolute necessity?
JOHN BARRIE: The addition of other human editors, the addition of ombudsmen, the addition of a whole warehouse of people screening articles is not going to make a dent in this problem. It won't deter anybody from committing the same acts, and in my humble opinion, what the New York Times has done is essentially set themselves up for another Jayson Blair incident. Again, this is a digital problem, and it really can only be addressed by some type of digital solution.
BOB GARFIELD: How many news clients do you have at the moment, vetting their own reporters?
JOHN BARRIE: As I mentioned earlier, the Hartford Courant is really the first large newspaper that has signed up for iThenticate.
BOB GARFIELD: This time next year how many you think you'll have?
JOHN BARRIE: The majority of them.
BOB GARFIELD: All right. Well, John, thank you very much.
JOHN BARRIE: I really appreciate it. Thank you.
BOB GARFIELD: John Barrie is the president and founder of iParadigms LLC which created and markets iThenticate. [MUSIC] BOB GARFIELD: Last month. Toby McDaniel of the Springfield, Illinois, State Journal-Register was writing about a controversial city tax increase. One passage in his column read as follows: "One wag doesn't think aldermen went overboard on the tax hike. 'Get real!' he quips. 'Seven million dollars won't patch all the potholes.'" Oh, those devilish wags. They're so waggish, and not just in Central Illinois. From the New York Times to the London Times, from the South China Morning Post to the Kentucky Jewish Post and Opinion, from Air Safety Week to Hot Rod, 'one wag' is among the most quoted personalities in journalism.
GENE WEINGARTEN: A wag is the fat guy at the desk next to you.
BOB GARFIELD: Gene Weingarten, while reasonably trim himself, is that fat guy...resident Washington Post funnyman whose various one-liners have more than once found their way into other people's stories. Because he's the humor columnist, free to crack wise unimpeded, he needn't resort to blind quoting, but other journalists are less at liberty to associate themselves with zingers, lest they compromise their objectivity or poison the well with the sources getting zinged. Rita Zekas, for instance, entertainment writer for the Toronto Star, has quoted one wag 28 times over the past 15 years.
RITA ZEKAS: (Exasperated) Yes, I have. They're a code for one specific wag. I'm not going to attribute it to him, so I made him one wag. He is one wag.
BOB GARFIELD: AKA Rob Salem, Toronto Star TV critic and Zekas's longtime boyfriend.
BOB GARFIELD: I understand you are one wag.
ROB SALEM: [LAUGHS] Ah, busted, at last.
BOB GARFIELD: You've been outed, man.
ROB SALEM: Well, yes. Sadly, it's true.
BOB GARFIELD:But the story does not end here, because contrary to Gene Weingarten's assertion, there is no reason to assume that one wag is always the fat man or the boyfriend or one of the cynical boys and girls on the bus. Often enough, it is the reporter himself, laundering his own witticisms through the attribution to an anonymous supposed third party.
JEFFREY DVORKIN: Journalists are like the eunuch in the harem.
BOB GARFIELD: Jeffrey Dvorkin is NPR's ombudsman.
JEFFREY DVORKIN: You know, we have all of the responsibility and none of the pleasure. So, every once in a while, if we're allowed to be waggish, I think it satisfies our instincts to be amusing as well as informative...I've said it myself.
BOB GARFIELD:Mind you, Dvorkin is the listening public's in-house advocate on matters of journalistic behavior, and he fesses up. That's partly because he is an honest man who well understands the challenges facing reporters in the field, and partly because he's a Canadian, a foreigner to our shores, and therefore infected with dangerous foreign ideas. In Canada, a database search reveals, one wag is saying and quipping and wryly observing just everywhere: The National Post, Hamilton Spectator, Edmondton Sun, Vancouver Sun, Montreal Gazette, Regina Leader-Post, Ottawa Citizen, Calgary Herald and-- Rita Zekas's Toronto Star. Jeffrey Dvorkin.
JEFFREY DVORKIN: It's a funny Canadianism, and I think originally a Britishism that has crept into the language, at least in those parts of the Commonwealth that still call the Queen our Queen.
MARTIN WALKER: One of the things about this British Empire --it's the gift that keeps on giving.
BOB GARFIELD: UPI editor in chief Martin Walker believes one wag has his origins on Fleet Street, where historically reporters have been devilish, ruthless and, often, too drunk to remember who quipped what. In fact, Walker's quoted one wag himself.
MARTIN WALKER: At least once. On occasion we've all felt that the joke was just so good it had to be shared. It's one of those very useful phrases like when one has just arrived in some riot-torn city and you're on your way from the airport in a taxi, and you're interviewing the taxi driver, you will talk about "local observers said."
BOB GARFIELD: In other words, a half truth, if a fairly benign one. The Washington Post's Gene Weingarten.
GENE WEINGARTEN:You're talking as though this is some sort of journalistic sin. We're telling the truth. Is the person saying as one wag, who is not myself, said? I believe that it is a sin so negligible, so minuscule that it doesn't exist.
BOB GARFIELD:That gets to one last thing about one wag. The caustic hilarity so compelling as to justify journalistic, let's say, sleight of hand, is usually not especially, you know, hilarious. A month ago, after Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin toned down his previous outrage at a scandal occurring under his predecessor, the Toronto Globe and Mail's Rod Mickleburgh was moved to quote One Wag.
ROD MICKLEBURGH: Quote. "It's the beginning of his post-Mad As Hell tour," quipped one media wag, referring to the anger Mr. Martin displayed in the days immediately after a sensational report by Auditor-General Sheila Fraser revealed the extent of the sponsorship scandal. Pretty good quip, I thought.
BOB GARFIELD:Yeah. Just let me catch my breath. What if I assert that the elaborate qualification and explanation of the quote in the subsequent clauses kind of took some of the impact from its pithiness?
ROD MICKLEBURGH: Ah, you yanks. Get a healthcare system. It's a good, strong, powerful, funny line, and I'm sticking with it.
BOB GARFIELD: Quipped one wag. [THEME MUSIC UP & UNDER]
BOB GARFIELD: That's it for this week's show. On the Media was directed by Katya Rogers and produced by Janeen Price, Megan Ryan and Tony Field, and edited-- by Brooke. Dylan Keefe is our technical director, and Rob Christiansen our engineer; we had help from Derek John. Our webmaster is Amy Pearl.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Arun Rath is our senior producer and Dean Cappello our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. You can listen to the program and get free transcripts and MP3 downloads at onthemedia.org, and email us at onthemedia@wnyc.org. This is On the Media, from NPR. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
GENE WEINGARTEN: As one wag, who is not myself, said?
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Finally this week, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice appeared in Congress before the 9/11 Commission and the world. As Court TV, it was alternately dull, contentious and gripping.
RICHARD BEN-VENISTE: Did you tell the president, at any time prior to August 6th, of the existence of Al Qaeda cells in the United States?
CONDOLEEZZA RICE: First let me just make certain--
RICHARD BEN-VENISTE: If you could just answer that question, because I only have a very limited-- [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
CONDOLEEZZA RICE: Well, first-- I, I understand, Commissioner, but it's important-- [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
RICHARD BEN-VENISTE: --did you tell the president--
CONDOLEEZZA RICE: -- it's important that I also address-- [APPLAUSE]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: This weekend, various assessments of Rice's effectiveness in fending off the charges of former counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke, but what about the overall impact of these televised hearings? Have they changed the media's and the public's view of the Bush administration, of the Congress? John Dean, former counsel to President Nixon, testified during the Watergate Hearings, and he watched them closely, just as he's watched the 9/11 hearings. Mr. Dean, welcome back to the show.
JOHN DEAN: Thank you. Pleasure to be with you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So could you compare and contrast these hearings with the Watergate Hearings as media event?
JOHN DEAN: There's no question that the Watergate Hearings were extensive, they were actually even protracted. There was massive media coverage. It was reality television before reality television, and it really was educational, and that was one of the aims of the committee. In later talking to Sam Dash about it, this is what they hoped to do --they built their case very slowly, and then went public with it.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Sam Dash, of course, was chief counsel to the Senate Watergate Committee, and actually he told us that he carefully staged the hearings as a detective story, beginning with the burglaries, then bringing out the accusers, like yourself, and ending with the accused. Do you think that these recent hearings use that same structure?
JOHN DEAN: To some degree, there was some similarity in the structure, because Richard Clarke had met with several members of the Commission for I think something like 18 hours. Yet, they also had a number of documents that had been supplied, and in a sense, Richard Clarke is the accuser. He's accusing Mr. Bush of not really being very vigilant about terrorism until after 9/11. Condoleezza Rice's role was to defend that.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:If you look at the hearings as theater, certainly Rice's testimony was intended to be the climax. Did you get that sense of satisfaction as a viewer from watching it?
JOHN DEAN: Well, I think she was a good witness theatrically. She's very eloquent and well-spoken, and she managed to sit there for almost 3 hours and say almost nothing. She knew how to play the game. She'd been carefully briefed. She couldn't have done what she did in the hearings in a courtroom. A judge would have held her in contempt if she'd have tried to go on those extended answers, and at one point, as you'll recall, Senator Kerrey, Bob Kerrey, said "You're filibustering," and that's exactly what she was doing.
BOB KERREY: So-- [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
CONDOLEEZZA RICE: Since we have a point of disagreement, I'd like to have a chance to address it-- [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
BOB KERREY: Well, no, no - no-- actually there's going to be - we have many points of disagreement, Dr. Clarke, but we'll have a chance to just-- [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
CONDOLEEZZA RICE: Sandy-- I think-- [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
BOB KERREY: -- we'll have a chance to do in closed session. [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
CONDOLEEZZA RICE: I--
BOB KERREY: You can't - please don't filibuster me. I, you -- it's not fair. [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
CONDOLEEZZA RICE: Do you mean--?
BROOKE GLADSTONE: During the Watergate Hearings, they had as much time -- as many hours as they needed --to grill a witness. Here they were only given 10 minutes, so as long as she filled that with some measure of verbiage, she would be safe.
JOHN DEAN: And she knew how to play to the camera and force him back down. If this had been a closed hearing, he would have prevailed, and she would not have been able to embarrass him into letting her continue to filibuster. She knew that here was a commissioner couldn't be beating up on her and telling her to start answering the questions without looking like he was getting overly aggressive and being partisan, when he was just trying to use his time effectively, so she prevailed, and it was the cameras that really enabled her to do that.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Once again, could you compare that with the way that the Watergate Hearings were conducted?
JOHN DEAN:There, there was no time limit. For example, I'd originally planned to go up and summarize my testimony in maybe a half hour on the first day of my appearance. Instead, they said no, we want you to read your testimony. So I had to read my testimony. It took 8 hours. With the 9/11 Hearings, given the fact they were constrained, she was effectively able to use the time.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Here's what Sam Dash told us was the recipe for a satisfying viewing experience and also, I guess, a successful legal proceeding.
SAM DASH: I knew exactly what my questions were going to be, and I knew exactly what the answers were going to be so that I could put it in a form that this would come out like a story, and I think it succeeded in the sense that the American people were glued to their television sets, waiting for the next episode.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Were you glued to the TV set when watching the 9/11 Hearings? Did it pay off for you?
JOHN DEAN: No. By no means did it.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: What do you think the principal lesson for the public has been so far?
JOHN DEAN:Well, what I took away from the hearings is that this is an example of secrecy. This is an example of putting forward what appears to be an open statement of what's going on, when in fact it really is not. No new information came out. The only thing the public learned was the name that was on the briefing paper that apparently the Bush administration is now reluctantly going to make available.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: The title that stated flatly that Osama bin Laden was looking to attack within the United States.
JOHN DEAN:That's correct. There may have been some other nuances and details, and it's clear that, because of the different position that Richard Clarke and Condoleezza Rice are taking, I think the Commission's going to sort this out and tell us what really is the truth.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:They were interesting and unlikely main characters for this drama, I think. We didn't expect Condi to appear at all, and Richard Clarke just seemed to emerge full-grown from the head of Zeus.
JOHN DEAN: Isn't that what makes theater most interesting, when characters walk on you don't expect.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Thank you very much.
JOHN DEAN: Thank you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: John Dean, former counsel to President Richard Nixon. His new book is called Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush.
BOB GARFIELD: In a press conference Wednesday, we caught this exchange between a reporter and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
JOURNALIST: Aren't you having a more difficult time making the case that things are going well in Iraq?
DONALD RUMSFELD: Things are, are -- we're trying to explain how things are going, and they're going as they are going, and we are-- we're here, pointing out what's taking place in the country. Some things are going well, and some things, obviously are not going well.
BOB GARFIELD:On Wednesday, that was an understatement. As the week wore on, the situation only got worse with Shiite militias partially controlling three southern cities, Marines fighting house to house in the Sunni city of Fallujah, and foreign civilians being kidnapped by Iraqi militiamen. But Rumsfeld stayed on message through it all, downplaying the bad and emphasizing the good, as did his staffers at the Coalition Provisional Authority press office in Baghdad. On Thursday, we caught up with Washington Post correspondent Anthony Shadid in Nasariya. Shadid has been filing from Iraq for the past year, and this week, won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. Anthony, congratulations.
ANTHONY SHADID: Thank you.
BOB GARFIELD: According to the Associated Press, the Coalition press office in Baghdad is led by Republican Party operatives and, and staffed largely by people with GOP ties. The New York Times noted that high-ranking British officials are concerned that, quote, "events are orchestrated with the American political agenda uppermost in mind." Can you talk about your experience with the Coalition information machine in Iraq and in what ways that has hindered your reporting or just colored it.
ANTHONY SHADID: I guess there's a couple things that strike me about my interaction with it over the, over the past year -- obviously there's an ideological component there. I mean it's part of an administration that's very political and politically aware. I think that drives things less than the isolation that the CPA deals with, and I think that is-- isolation at times is startling. You understand their isolation. I mean it's a - it's a very precarious, curious situation here. But I think they're -- they have lacked an ability to get out, to get around, to sense what's going on in the street, to sense what's going on in other cities, and I think you know time and again that's caught up with them, that they've been caught u-- you know, unaware of the speed of events, the pace of events, like we've seen this week in just a matter of days.
BOB GARFIELD:Concerning the security situation, you are someone who spends very little time in press conferences and a lot pounding the pavement. There is increasingly lawlessness throughout Iraq. Four American journalists were kidnapped for several hours earlier in the week, and a day later a Japanese journalist was kidnapped. Is this affecting your ability to get to the story?
ANTHONY SHADID: You know, it is. It's definitely more precarious now than it's ever been. And even when you talk to people, all they can think about is your safety. They're worried about, you know, the danger that you're, you're putting yourself in. I think it's going to pose a real challenge to, to reporting here, because I think there's almost a, a reflexive, you know, reaction by journalists to, to harden themselves, and what I mean by that is, you know, possibly to have armed escorts, to fortify the places that they're working from. And while it's understandable, there's a risk in isolating ourselves from the story, and you know perhaps it's inevitable, but you know we, we do run the risk of falling into the same isolation that we may have criticized the, you know, the CPA for and not understanding how the story's changing and how it's moving on the ground.
BOB GARFIELD:On the flip side, there seems to be a growing reliance on reporters from Arab television stations who have become on the scene reporters by proxy because Western reporters simply can't safely get access to the story. What implications does that have, do you suppose?
BOB GARFIELD:Some coverage is politicized. There's no question about it. And, and if it's in a context that might be different from the context that Western reporters are used to reporting on, that's how I think, you know, a lot of this is information - information itself is useful, and you know we don't have a person in Najaf right now. We have an Iraqi reporter down there who's done a fantastic job. He's been able to get details. He's himself in an incredible, you know, dangerous situation. [BACKGROUND NOISE UNDER] And we feel really lucky that we have him there, so I guess I right off just don't see any far-reaching implications of that. I think any time you have second hand information, it's less preferable than first hand information, but we are reaching a point where it is, it's too dangerous in parts of this country to simply go into.
BOB GARFIELD:In your piece in Thursday's Washington Post, you, you wrote about the increasingly fuzzy line between civilians and combatants in Sadr City, the Baghdad slum where so much fighting has been going on since last weekend.
ANTHONY SHADID: You go into Sadr City and you realize the implications of what, you know, of what's ahead perhaps. You know, I think the U.S. government often wants to personalize these conflicts -- they're against one man, they're against Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden or Moktada al-Sadr -- but what we see in Sadr City, it's not that easy for the people that are in that neighborhood. There's an almost kind of a knee jerk reaction to arresting clerics. It reminds people of, of Saddam's government. It's, it's distasteful to them. I think when you see civilian casualties mount -- we've seen more than 60 people killed there since Sunday -- there's, there's a sense that even if you don't have a lot of love for Moktada al-Sadr, you have, you know, a certain affinity for your neighbors, basically, who are coming under fire. And that's where you see the nature of the opposition I think changing and becoming very fluid.
BOB GARFIELD:I want to talk to you about the language of reporting in a situation like this. As the nature of the combatants themselves is changing, seemingly before our eyes, does the language of your reportage change with it? Who's the enemy and how do you describe him?
ANTHONY SHADID: You know, that's an interesting question, because it's one thing that we really never understood before, I think, is the nature of opposition to the U.S. occupation. [DOG BARKING BACKGROUND] I think we all felt it was driven by remnants of the government, in the beginning. Even though there was a different component later with the suicide bombings. You know, now it's - we're seeing in Fallujah what looks to be popular resistance at a certain level, [DOGS BARKING] and I think it's going to be even more complex as time goes on, and I think it's not easy to put them into neat and tidy categories.
BOB GARFIELD:You know, I've always known that some day I would interview a war correspondent with a dogfight going on in the background, but I never expected it to be a fight between actual dogs.
ANTHONY SHADID: [LAUGHS] They are loud dogs, I have to say.
BOB GARFIELD: [LAUGHS] Well, Anthony, thank you very much. Congratulations, again.
ANTHONY SHADID: Thank you.
BOB GARFIELD: Anthony Shadid covers Iraq for the Washington Post. He spoke to us from Nasariya. He is the winner of this year's Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Coming up, why Iraqi journalists can't catch a break, and how the most powerful pictures can obscure the real details of tragedy.
BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media, from NPR. BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Three weeks ago, three men working for the Arab satellite news channel Al Arabiya were at the scene of a rocket attack on a hotel, waiting for permission to film. The Coalition said no, and as they pulled out to leave, another car suddenly passed them, trying to break through the U.S. Army barricade. Ahmed Abdul Kassim was driving the Al Arabiya news van -- when he heard shots, he pressed hard on the gas pedal and sped himself and his colleagues to safety. At least he thought he had. When he was far enough away to slow down, he realized that both of his passengers were dead. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, as of Friday, 11 journalists have died in Iraq in 2004, all of them from the Middle East. Dan Murphy reports from Baghdad for the Christian Science Monitor, and he's covered the story. Dan, welcome to the show.
DAN MURPHY: Thanks for having me.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Al Arabiya is now considering legal action against the U.S. because of the death of those two newsmen.
DAN MURPHY: That's correct. It's not just the deaths of the newsmen; it's the fact that the American report on it exonerated the soldiers involved, and there were enormous discrepancies between the driver who survived the attack's account of what happened and the official American account of what happened. Certainly it's the case that if you go to Al Arabiya's offices now, there is a much greater anger towards the U.S. military and the U.S. government in general than there was before.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Arab journalists seem to be caught in the middle. You tell the story of a cameraman who was stringing for an Arab news outlet who was given a tip from insurgents who told him that they had just blown up a U.S. Humvee. He rushed to the scene -- can you describe what happened next?
DAN MURPHY: Absolutely. He went out, you know, like a lot of these stringers out in difficult areas, he has a camera, he works alone, and he's paid to get great footage of the latest attacks, and very often that makes the news, because that's what people are interested in seeing. So he rushes out to film it, the Americans on the scene are immediately suspicious, they think he's gotten there too soon, and he gets questioned about how he knew that something had happened, and they think maybe these people have foreknowledge of the attacks. Eventually he is allowed to leave, and he dispatches footage to Baghdad where it can be distributed to his station. The 5 o'clock news update hour comes and goes, and for whatever reason, they didn't use that footage, but he got paid a visit by the guy who gave him the call who were upset that their handiwork hadn't been on the air. They came into his place, and they had guns, and they threatened him.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: What is the impact of being pressured from both sides on these journalists?
DAN MURPHY:It's a sensitive subject, but I know that one large station has actually chosen not to use a lot of the good footage that it gets because of the allegations they've gotten from the Coalition that they tend to know too much, and that maybe they have foreknowledge of attacks. On the other side, in terms of the insurgents being upset with what you report or show footage of, I think it's very, very difficult for them to anticipate what's going to make those folks happy, so the Arab journalists say that they're trying to play it straight down the middle, and, and try to convince everybody that they're neutral parties, just the way any other journalist would. But it's not clear to what extent they're succeeding in doing that.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:We spoke about Al Arabiya and Al Jazeera as well-established news services that have been caught in between the two warring parties. Is this also true of the nascent Iraqi media?
DAN MURPHY: Certainly average Iraqi journalists will feel under threat. The interesting thing is, is there have been a number of attacks in recent months on translators and drivers and fixers for Western journalists. These are people that are Iraqis that help foreigners get the stories here. There have been 3 or 4 people like that killed in, let's say, the past month of six weeks, and they've clearly been targeted by insurgents. This category of people I'm talking about working with the Western journalists work in Baghdad a lot, just like we all do, but I'll come home to my safe compound, you know, hotel with protection around it at night, and these guys go back and they live in their Iraqi neighborhood, and people that want to do them harm know the street that they live on and, and that's how they get targeted.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Right. Dan, thank you very much.
DAN MURPHY: Thank you very much.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Dan Murphy reports from Baghdad for the Christian Science Monitor. BOB GARFIELD: Jim Lewis has always believed in photography. The journalist and novelist has often written about photography and has done quite a bit himself, most memorably at the scene of a horrific atrocity last summer in Congo. There was a time he believed that such awful pictures, pictures such as emerged from the murder of four Americans in Falujah two weeks ago, were crucial for documenting the horrors of war. But no longer. The Fallujah images and the journalistic handwringing over them prompted Lewis to write this week on Slate.com why graphic documentation of violence doesn't necessarily help anyone understand the story.
JIM LEWIS: Part of the problem with printing photographs like this is that they tend to strip away any of the context which would help anybody actually understand the story. You know, what did these guys look like before this happened? You know, what were they traveling in? What part of town were they in? How many people actually were there? All of that gets lost in the grisly sight of these bodies hanging from a bridge. I just think that, to the extent that it's the function of journalism to explain things to people, photographs like this do less explaining than one might otherwise wish.
BOB GARFIELD: You're thinking on the subject changed based on your own work in Eastern Congo.
JIM LEWIS: Mm-hmm.
BOB GARFIELD: You were there almost a year ago. Tell me about your experience.
JIM LEWIS:Yeah, it was based in a little town called Bunyan, and we went out of town one day, myself and another reporter and a photographer up into the hills outside of town where we had heard that there had been a massacre, and we got there, and there was, and-- there was nobody else there except for the people who had died, and they had been-- not just killed but dismembered and, and in a particularly horrific way. And after I had finished sort of taking my notes, and the people I was with had other work to do, I didn't know what to do, and I was just kind of standing around, and took out my camera and took a lot of photographs.
BOB GARFIELD:So-- what you had in your camera was--something-- shocking, something extraordinary. At what point did you know that your mind had changed and that whatever these pictures were, they were not something to be shared with a mass audience?
JIM LEWIS: I would be talking to friends and family and people that I worked with and trying to explain what was going on in the Congo and what I had seen, and I would show them these photographs along with others, and I just found that-- they got in the way of, of trying to tell the story I wanted to tell, and that in fact rather than clarifying the story, the shock of the photographs had a tendency to derail both my telling of the story and other people's understanding of it.
BOB GARFIELD:In your piece in Slate, you referred to a story where a, a man killed himself, and that the suicide was captured by the security cameras in his building, and then somehow found their way to an internet site that traded in, in shocking video footage and so forth, and the mother of the victim I believe was beside herself wondering how her son's death could turn into a sort of pornography.
JIM LEWIS: What I mean by pornography is just that the fact that such a thing exists on film at all is often so surprising to people or so--shocking or-- exciting or whatever it may be, that it tends to overwhelm the information that the pictures would otherwise actually convey.
BOB GARFIELD:Now I, I saw the Fallujah pictures when they were first published and aired and they were genuinely horrifying. But I must say I was not as moved by them as I was by a single line in a single wire story about one of the kidnappings in Iraq. It was of a Jerusalem resident who evidently also has a, a United States' driver's license, and the kidnappers, to prove that they had this guy in custody, were showing his passport and his U.S. driver's license and, and his-- supermarket frequent shopper's card. And the very quotidian nature of a supermarket frequent shopper's card was so humanizing for me, that I, I, I got very choked up; far more than I did from the most graphic pictures emerging from the war.
JIM LEWIS: I have much the same sort of reactions. I used to think that only a photograph can really accurately convey what goes on in a war, and that anything less than absolute explicitness would amount to a kind of whitewashing, and I think in fact that's simply not true. A well-written paragraph can be just as informative and just as horrifying and, and just as touching but doesn't run the same kinds of, of risks.
BOB GARFIELD: Well, Jim, thank you very much.
JIM LEWIS: Thank you.
BOB GARFIELD: Jim Lewis is a novelist living in Austin, Texas. His article, "Front Page Horror," appeared last week on Slate.com. BROOKE GLADSTONE: It's been 10 years since the Rwandan genocide; a hundred days of ruthless slaughter that left perhaps a million dead. Mostly the outside world sat that one out. But in commemoration of the anniversary, this month a flood of memorials, specials, documentaries and feature films are filling the ether. Now, it seems, the West is ready to remember. But two years ago, we interviewed Nick Hughes, a photo-journalist who was among the first to try and convey the experience in a way that people might comprehend. Hughes had already made many documentaries of the horror, but this time he and his co-producer, Eric Kabera, who lost 32 family members to the genocide, wanted to find a new way to tell the story, so they hired witnesses -- Tutsis and Hutus -- as actors - and created a love story to put a human face on the slaughter. The result was One Hundred Days. [CLIP PLAYS]
MAN: Get rid of women and their baby rats. Don't leave any rats for the future. [CROWD CHEERS] The time for work is now. [CHEERS] What we have waited for is happening! [CHEERS Hutu power, power! Hutu power! [DRUMS AND MUSIC]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Director Nick Hughes joins us now from Rwanda. Welcome to the show.
NICK HUGHES: Thank you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So you're a documentary cameraman who's covered the war in Rwanda. You have hours and hours of powerful footage of the genocide. Why did you decide to tell the story of such a dramatic historical event as a fictional drama?
NICK HUGHES: I, I worked on so many documentaries after the genocide, and in many ways a documentary is the best way to tell the history of such an enormous event, but documentaries about Rwanda aren't watched, and if they are watched, they're watched by people who already know and have assumptions about Rwanda, and therefore you're preaching to the converted, and A Hundred Days is made to explain in a dramatic form, to explain what happened to - in Rwanda - to an audience that has no interest in Rwanda.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Two of the most important characters in A Hundred Days are Josette and Baptiste, both young lovers. Was this lovers subplot a way of drawing people in?
NICK HUGHES: You know, love is a universal theme. The audience, even if they're in Tokyo or Toronto can immediately relate to the hopes and fears of that couple.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:I'd like to share with you my reaction to the movie. It seemed to me that when you cleaved closest to the actual events, it had the most impact, and when you moved off to the plots that you had imposed to attract the audience, because the actors were, frankly, rather wooden, it was when my mind began to wander.
NICK HUGHES: Indeed. I mean none of the actors are professional actors. But they are Rwandan, and they were portraying something under whose shadow they lived and from which they had lived. Maybe the film fails on this, and maybe we should have had very professional actors, but they weren't going to be Rwandan. Some people find the acting wooden; some people find that because they're Rwandan acting their own story, twice as powerful.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:I was fascinated by your use of the extraneous characters who came through the, the UN soldiers, the journalists. You have journalists -- people holding cameras -- just as you, yourself, did during the actual genocide -- scattered all through. [SOUNDTRACK FROM A HUNDRED DAYS]
MAN: Yes, hold on, hold on -- [SHOUTING] Catherine! Just wait right there. [RUNNING]
WOMAN: Who were they?
MAN: They were friends! Mr. Kabera was not liked! He was in an opposition political party.
WOMAN: Is that why they killed him?
MAN: I, I don't know - maybe, maybe. I, I don't know. Maybe.
WOMAN: Who killed him?
MAN: I, I can't tell! I don't know!
BROOKE GLADSTONE: They're generally in the way; they're irrelevant; they're taking no moral stand, and they have no impact on what's going on around them -- it's as if they were dropped from the moon.
NICK HUGHES: Yeah, well I think that's exactly what happens - you had UN soldiers from the West; you had aid workers; you had ex-pats; you had journalists -- all of them betrayed the Rwandan people. The media took absolutely no part in the genocide and in exposing it to the international community. It brushed it off with cliches, caricatures. The aid workers, 99 percent of them, just got on the plane and left. The ex-pats just left their servants to be slaughtered and evacuate--while they evacuated their dogs. And the UN who were there, brought in to protect the Tutsi population -- to keep the peace -- just ran away. And there's a worrying thing, I think, at the moment that the -- particularly in the media--in film, in documentaries, in books -- is that there is now a sort of myth-making about Westerners in Rwanda -- that somehow they suffered. They didn't suffer at all. I didn't lose anybody there. You know --compared to someone who lost their entire family - generations slaughtered in a, in a month.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:It's clear that you don't have much respect for those characters who wander through your story. You don't pay much attention to them at all, and yet you, yourself -- when you were there -- videotaped a machete-wielding man beating a woman and her daughter pleading for their lives -- and it was broadcast all over the world in 1994. Do you think it did nothing?
NICK HUGHES: Well, it was something very, very small. I mean I didn't save anybody. I didn't put my camera down and save any children. And nor did anybody else. And, and nor did those people who, who sat at home and watched those two women being murdered -- watching their television in, in Europe or America -- nothing happened. There was no great outcry for something to be done.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:In an effort to tell your story in a way that would be popular and not cheapen or distort it, you tried to cleave a sort of middle course. You put in a love story, but you offered no redemption for any of the characters. There isn't anybody who is saved. There isn't anybody who isn't irreparably damaged. Here's a clip of a little girl talking to a UN soldier in, in front of one of the mass graves.
UN SOLDIER: Did you see what happened?
GIRL: They put all the Tutsis in the ground and in the pit latrines.
UN SOLDIER: Did you know them?
GIRL: My friend Anton is there with his whole family.
UN SOLDIER: If he was your friend, don't you miss him?
GIRL: No! He belongs in a pit latrine. It's natural. He was a Tutsi.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Given that the story ends on a note of absolute despair, is there any technique, including a love story, that you think would be able to keep the audience there?
NICK HUGHES: There is nothing positive about genocide. You can't come out with some glimmer of hope. Genocide is all negative. It is all dark and evil, and the suffering that people go through is beyond imagination. But, if there's some understanding and some sympathy and, and there's some belief that Rwandans are human beings amongst an international audience, then that's -- that's a great step.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Nick, now that you made the film that you wanted to make, do you think you can find a way to forgive yourself a little bit?
NICK HUGHES: Well, I-- it's not really a matter of forgive--
BROOKE GLADSTONE: I guess what I mean is--
NICK HUGHES: Yeah?
BROOKE GLADSTONE:-- it's obvious that you came away with an enormous burden, and a sense of responsibility that you don't feel you've fulfilled, and that the rest of the Western community in Rwanda certainly didn't fulfill, and you made this film. So my question is, is can you leave it alone now?
NICK HUGHES: Well, it-- the film gives me an opportunity to speak about Rwanda, but I don't get the opportunity to go back and stop by the side of the road and pick up a child who's going to be murdered by the MRND and take him out of the country to safety -- and, nor does anybody else get that opportunity to do that again. And nobody said anything about stopping it happening next time. So no, I don't think there is anything really to feel positive about or redeemed about. Not at all. The genocide is the opposite of redemption. There is no redemption. You can't go back. Those people are dead, and it will happen again.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Nick, it's been a pleasure talking to you.
NICK HUGHES: Thank you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Photojournalist and documentarian Nick Hughes. His film, One Hundred Days, premiered in 2002. [MUSIC]
BOB GARFIELD: Up next, waxing poetic about cars, and unmasking the wag.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media, from NPR. [FUNDING CREDITS] BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. This week, the annual Pulitzer Prizes were awarded, and among the many worthy recipients, the unlikeliest was Dan Neil, car critic for the Los Angeles Times. Unlikely, because the criticism award always goes to critics of the arts -- except for the one year it was awarded to a media critic -- but also because auto reviewers tend to be regarded with a certain suspicion, since most newspapers depend on the goodwill of car dealership advertisers. But Dan Neil is the Oscar Wilde of auto reviewers. In his columns, cars serve ably as metaphors for our culture. To wit:
DAN NEIL: Why do I like the Benz wagon? For me, whose personal life has often resembled the save-my-baby skit with the clown fireman, the station wagon connotes a settled domesticity, peace and stability devoutly to be wished. Singledom has certainly lost its luster. There's also something deeply appropriate about wagons. They are big enough to enclose my life, but not so big as to suggest a fear of something left behind, as huge SUVs seem to do. Station wagons are kind of like SUVs after years of therapy. [LAUGHTER] So what you-- I find myself doing is kind of identifying not so much the mechanical deficiencies and surpluses of a particular car, but how it fits in to people's lives, what it says about them, and whether it says something you would like it to say about you. For instance, this week I'm driving a Chevy SSR pickup -- it's kind of a postmodern hot rod pickup truck. It's like a pickup truck from Toontown. I mean you, you, you feel ridiculous driving it. [LAUGHTER] I feel that it's one of those vehicles that you would drive once, park and sell. [LAUGHS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Now, as you just described, you seem to love cars, but individual cars can frequently leave you cold, and that's difficult, many people say, for car critics, because auto advertising is so important, and of course there's a story floating around about you. Could you tell us about the last column you wrote for the Raleigh News & Observer back in 1997?
DAN NEIL: Sure. I actually worked in classified advertising when I was working for the News & Observer, and I produced an advertorial section, and I wrote the column for them. I didn't ask anybody, and nobody read it behind me. It just appeared in the paper. And, you know, my column was really crazy, and this one time I, I wrote a story about having intimate congress in the back of a Ford Expedition. I said at the time, you know, we both had our seat belts on; it was safe sex, [LAUGHTER] and actually they didn't think it was that funny at all. So, my boss called me in and said okay, that's it. You are on super-super, double dutch probation. Basically he was saying to me that I was going to have to be vetted by the advertising boss, and this I declined to do. And so after a few months of passive resistance, they fired me. And by the way, the News & Observer on the other side of the church/state wall, the news side, is a very, very honorable and respectable, you know, operation. At issue, though, is whether or not newspapers who produce these advertorial sections, you know, whether their hands are clean on this issue overall.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:We spoke to Keith Bradsher who's the author of the book High and Mighty about SUVs, and he says that, among critics, auto reviewers are the most likely to be compromised by the industry they cover; that they're often quitting their jobs to take industry PR jobs for big bucks. Do you think that's true, and did that ever tempt you?
DAN NEIL: It is absolutely true. The entire environment is incestuous. They introduce new cars. They fly journalists in and put them up at really nice hotels and, you know, treat them to experiences that they would never possibly in a million years, they, they wouldn't even be allowed in these hotels ordinarily. You know, and then they let 'em drive the cars, and then they go away, you know, and that's not supposed to affect their judgment. What's surprising is not that it does affect their judgment but that so often it doesn't affect their judgment. I forget who said it, but some politician said if you can't take their money and vote against 'em anyway, you're no damn good. [LAUGHTER] But it is a compromised business, and it is also true that newspapers are under a great deal of revenue pressure on this score, and so yeah, a favorable editorial/advertorial content is often created to satisfy that need.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Which you frequently don't provide.
DAN NEIL: Oh, almost never. I'm really ornery.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Does the industry hate you?
DAN NEIL:No! No, the manufacturers are tremendous about this. You know, like General Motors, right? You know, this thing that I'm driving that's a just awful vehicle, this SSR-- they know that, you know, I may hate that vehicle, but I may like something else, and I think it's worth it to them.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: I think you're too important in Los Angeles for them to lean on you too hard.
DAN NEIL: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, maybe, but my importance is a relatively recent phenomenon.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You mean in the last week? [LAUGHTER]
DAN NEIL: Yeah. And I expect that there will be diminishing returns. You know, I won't be getting the best table at Spaga's next week. [LAUGHTER]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Congratulations, Dan Neil.
DAN NEIL: Thank you very much. It was a pleasure to talk to you, Brooke.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Dan Neil is automobile critic for the Los Angeles Times and recipient of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. BOB GARFIELD: A few years ago, a group of researchers at the University of California at Berkeley were fed up with widespread academic dishonesty. So they invented a technology that could finger students who were using the internet to craft cut-and-paste term papers. That software, called Turnitin, works by matching up a string of 8 or more words with original sources to catch the copycats. It is very popular in the halls of academe. Now there's a new professional grade version of Turnitin known as iThenticate, beloved by lawyers because its data-sifting power quickly spots white collar thieves with sticky fingers for intellectual property. So what would happen if this software were applied to journalists? John Barrie is the president and founder of iParadigms LLC which developed iThenticate, and is here to tell us. John, welcome to the show.
JOHN BARRIE: Thank you very much, Bob.
BOB GARFIELD: I'm going to go confessional on you for a moment. When I was in high school, and this is a shameful episode, and I apologize to all involved, but everybody else in my German class had to write a, an essay on Beethoven, and almost to a, a student they went to the World Book Encyclopedia and plagiarized the essay therein about Ludwig von Beethoven. I alone, in this entire class, had the foresight and intellectual rigor to plagiarize from the Grolier Encyclopedia which was much more obscure, and they all got caught, and I didn't, and-- I live with that guilty memory to this day. Is there an equivalent these days of being able to go to the more obscure source to cheat from?
JOHN BARRIE: There is so much information on the internet from, you know, World Book Encyclopedia to the encyclopedia you may have taken from to, you know, the most obscure books that you could even imagine, and interestingly enough, even if those primary sources are not on the internet, so many people have taken from sources like that, incorporated that into their work, posted that work on the internet, that maybe our technology really doesn't find the book that you've taken your material from, but it's found another source that's quoted that book, which then ultimately leads the faculty member or the editor or you name it, to the original source that you cheated from.
BOB GARFIELD:Let's talk about the Hartford Courant. One of its op-ed contributors who was the president of Central Connecticut State University, Richard Judd, had plagiarized from several sources for an opinion piece he wrote for that paper. Tell me the Judd story.
JOHN BARRIE: The journalist from the Hartford Courant gave us a call, and she said well, one of the stories that we published in our newspaper has been found to contain some factual inaccuracies and some possible plagiarism, and we're doing a follow-up piece regarding that story, and I said well I'd be happy to answer your questions, but you may be interested, just for the heck of it, to run this piece through our iThenticate system just to see if you've missed any bits and pieces. She took us up on our offer and ran it through the system, and the thing lit up like a Christmas tree, and that led to the resignation of Mr. Judd from Central Connecticut State University.
BOB GARFIELD:I'm a columnist in my other job, and what would happen if I randomly took a paragraph from my column or one of my columns in its entirety and ran it through iThenticate? Is there any chance that you would get a false positive? I mean I know I haven't stolen from anybody (since high school). Is there a chance that some random assemblage of words would trigger a, you know, a false accusation?
JOHN BARRIE: The probability of stringing the same sixteen words together by chance that somebody else has strung together is less than one in a trillion. It's just not going to happen. And the probability of stringing, let's say, the same paragraph together somebody else has by chance is on the order of our sun exploding. Our technology will not begin to flag anything until we see at least eight contiguous words matching another source.
BOB GARFIELD:In the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal and USA Today and so forth, many news organizations have declared publicly that they're going to be more vigilant. Is that enough alone to deter plagiarism, or is the need for iThenticate or similar digital watchdogs an absolute necessity?
JOHN BARRIE: The addition of other human editors, the addition of ombudsmen, the addition of a whole warehouse of people screening articles is not going to make a dent in this problem. It won't deter anybody from committing the same acts, and in my humble opinion, what the New York Times has done is essentially set themselves up for another Jayson Blair incident. Again, this is a digital problem, and it really can only be addressed by some type of digital solution.
BOB GARFIELD: How many news clients do you have at the moment, vetting their own reporters?
JOHN BARRIE: As I mentioned earlier, the Hartford Courant is really the first large newspaper that has signed up for iThenticate.
BOB GARFIELD: This time next year how many you think you'll have?
JOHN BARRIE: The majority of them.
BOB GARFIELD: All right. Well, John, thank you very much.
JOHN BARRIE: I really appreciate it. Thank you.
BOB GARFIELD: John Barrie is the president and founder of iParadigms LLC which created and markets iThenticate. [MUSIC] BOB GARFIELD: Last month. Toby McDaniel of the Springfield, Illinois, State Journal-Register was writing about a controversial city tax increase. One passage in his column read as follows: "One wag doesn't think aldermen went overboard on the tax hike. 'Get real!' he quips. 'Seven million dollars won't patch all the potholes.'" Oh, those devilish wags. They're so waggish, and not just in Central Illinois. From the New York Times to the London Times, from the South China Morning Post to the Kentucky Jewish Post and Opinion, from Air Safety Week to Hot Rod, 'one wag' is among the most quoted personalities in journalism.
GENE WEINGARTEN: A wag is the fat guy at the desk next to you.
BOB GARFIELD: Gene Weingarten, while reasonably trim himself, is that fat guy...resident Washington Post funnyman whose various one-liners have more than once found their way into other people's stories. Because he's the humor columnist, free to crack wise unimpeded, he needn't resort to blind quoting, but other journalists are less at liberty to associate themselves with zingers, lest they compromise their objectivity or poison the well with the sources getting zinged. Rita Zekas, for instance, entertainment writer for the Toronto Star, has quoted one wag 28 times over the past 15 years.
RITA ZEKAS: (Exasperated) Yes, I have. They're a code for one specific wag. I'm not going to attribute it to him, so I made him one wag. He is one wag.
BOB GARFIELD: AKA Rob Salem, Toronto Star TV critic and Zekas's longtime boyfriend.
BOB GARFIELD: I understand you are one wag.
ROB SALEM: [LAUGHS] Ah, busted, at last.
BOB GARFIELD: You've been outed, man.
ROB SALEM: Well, yes. Sadly, it's true.
BOB GARFIELD:But the story does not end here, because contrary to Gene Weingarten's assertion, there is no reason to assume that one wag is always the fat man or the boyfriend or one of the cynical boys and girls on the bus. Often enough, it is the reporter himself, laundering his own witticisms through the attribution to an anonymous supposed third party.
JEFFREY DVORKIN: Journalists are like the eunuch in the harem.
BOB GARFIELD: Jeffrey Dvorkin is NPR's ombudsman.
JEFFREY DVORKIN: You know, we have all of the responsibility and none of the pleasure. So, every once in a while, if we're allowed to be waggish, I think it satisfies our instincts to be amusing as well as informative...I've said it myself.
BOB GARFIELD:Mind you, Dvorkin is the listening public's in-house advocate on matters of journalistic behavior, and he fesses up. That's partly because he is an honest man who well understands the challenges facing reporters in the field, and partly because he's a Canadian, a foreigner to our shores, and therefore infected with dangerous foreign ideas. In Canada, a database search reveals, one wag is saying and quipping and wryly observing just everywhere: The National Post, Hamilton Spectator, Edmondton Sun, Vancouver Sun, Montreal Gazette, Regina Leader-Post, Ottawa Citizen, Calgary Herald and-- Rita Zekas's Toronto Star. Jeffrey Dvorkin.
JEFFREY DVORKIN: It's a funny Canadianism, and I think originally a Britishism that has crept into the language, at least in those parts of the Commonwealth that still call the Queen our Queen.
MARTIN WALKER: One of the things about this British Empire --it's the gift that keeps on giving.
BOB GARFIELD: UPI editor in chief Martin Walker believes one wag has his origins on Fleet Street, where historically reporters have been devilish, ruthless and, often, too drunk to remember who quipped what. In fact, Walker's quoted one wag himself.
MARTIN WALKER: At least once. On occasion we've all felt that the joke was just so good it had to be shared. It's one of those very useful phrases like when one has just arrived in some riot-torn city and you're on your way from the airport in a taxi, and you're interviewing the taxi driver, you will talk about "local observers said."
BOB GARFIELD: In other words, a half truth, if a fairly benign one. The Washington Post's Gene Weingarten.
GENE WEINGARTEN:You're talking as though this is some sort of journalistic sin. We're telling the truth. Is the person saying as one wag, who is not myself, said? I believe that it is a sin so negligible, so minuscule that it doesn't exist.
BOB GARFIELD:That gets to one last thing about one wag. The caustic hilarity so compelling as to justify journalistic, let's say, sleight of hand, is usually not especially, you know, hilarious. A month ago, after Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin toned down his previous outrage at a scandal occurring under his predecessor, the Toronto Globe and Mail's Rod Mickleburgh was moved to quote One Wag.
ROD MICKLEBURGH: Quote. "It's the beginning of his post-Mad As Hell tour," quipped one media wag, referring to the anger Mr. Martin displayed in the days immediately after a sensational report by Auditor-General Sheila Fraser revealed the extent of the sponsorship scandal. Pretty good quip, I thought.
BOB GARFIELD:Yeah. Just let me catch my breath. What if I assert that the elaborate qualification and explanation of the quote in the subsequent clauses kind of took some of the impact from its pithiness?
ROD MICKLEBURGH: Ah, you yanks. Get a healthcare system. It's a good, strong, powerful, funny line, and I'm sticking with it.
BOB GARFIELD: Quipped one wag. [THEME MUSIC UP & UNDER]
BOB GARFIELD: That's it for this week's show. On the Media was directed by Katya Rogers and produced by Janeen Price, Megan Ryan and Tony Field, and edited-- by Brooke. Dylan Keefe is our technical director, and Rob Christiansen our engineer; we had help from Derek John. Our webmaster is Amy Pearl.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Arun Rath is our senior producer and Dean Cappello our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. You can listen to the program and get free transcripts and MP3 downloads at onthemedia.org, and email us at onthemedia@wnyc.org. This is On the Media, from NPR. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
GENE WEINGARTEN: As one wag, who is not myself, said?
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield.
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- April 9, 2004
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An 11-year-old and his 3D printer
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Conservative Bloggers Vindicated, Advice for Leakers, and More
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A Source for Sources
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Angelina Jolie's Secret Test Results
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AdBlock Plus: The Internet's Ad Gatekeeper?
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Brooke Gladstone + Cyndi Lauper
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Web Only Audio Extra - TV Cord Cutters
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The Totally Legal Subpoena
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A Journalistic Civil War Odyssey
