MIKE PESCA: From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. Brooke Gladstone and Bob are away this week. I'm Mike Pesca. Inside Baghdad's heavily fortified International Zone this week, the Iraqi government inched closer to a constitutional democracy, as a political convention settled on the makeup of interim Parliament. Though those negotiations were tense, they were overshadowed by even greater tension in the southern city of Najaf. U.S. and Iraqi forces there faced off against follows of Shiite cleric Moqtada Al-Sadr who were holed up in the Imam Ali Shrine, one of Shia Islam's most sacred sites. The news of the fighting was full of ultimatums, tentative truces and aerial bombardment reflecting the general fog of war. While Al-Sadr's tactics are vexing, his motivations are well-known, but still he tends to be treated as an international man of mystery. Here's an AP story from Thursday. "What's clear about radical Iraqi cleric Moqtada Al-Sadr is he wants power, U.S. officials say. What's less certain is what he wants to do with that power or how far he'll go to get it. As the U.S. government struggles to understand Al-Sadr and his motives, that uncertainty is complicating efforts to end one of the greatest threats to stability in Iraq." But what's truly puzzling, according to University of Michigan history professor and blogger Juan Cole, is the aura of inscrutability that surrounds Moqtada Al-Sadr.

JUAN COLE: If they're confused, they're not paying attention, in terms of overall questions of what he wants, what he envisages for the future. I think he's been very clear and very consistent. He wants the United States out of Iraq - now - immediately. He considers the country to be occupied. He considers the occupation to be illegitimate. Beyond that, he would like an Islamic state in Iraq, probably somewhat similar to what exists in Iran, but independent of Iran and under Iraqi Shiite control.

MIKE PESCA: So if the government does and should understand what he wants, does the coverage of Moqtada Al-Sadr reflect an understanding on the part of U.S. journalists?

JUAN COLE: On the whole I, I think they probably don't much understand him or where he's coming from. The fact is, most U.S. journalists who are covering Iraq don't know Arabic, many of them don't have long experience in looking at the country, and they don't tend to cover major speeches that people like Moqtada give. For instance, in the middle of August, Moqtada Al-Sadr gave a two hour interview on Al Jazeera, and I didn't see any reporting coming out of that in the western press at all.

MIKE PESCA: And now I'm going to ask you a military question, but it actually leads to a media question, and the question is, in your blog, JuanCole.com, you write that you don't see why the U.S. had to press the issue against Moqtada Al-Sadr and his followers right now.

JUAN COLE: That's correct. In my view, if his militia was a problem, it was a problem out in those Shiite cities -- Kut, Amara, wherever they were. And if they were a problem, then they should have been dealt with there on the streets of Kut. Instead, the Americans in April suddenly announced that they wanted to kill or capture Moqtada Al-Sadr. He had given strict instructions to his people not to tangle with the American troops, and there were no incidents to speak of until April, and before that he was, you know, a relatively minor figure in national terms. But by attempting to kill or capture him, they impelled him to then launch an insurgency, I think to make the point that he wasn't going to go quietly, and then his popularity soared, so that one opinion poll in May found that 68 percent of Iraqis had a favorable opinion of him. And I think it's probably gone up again this month.

MIKE PESCA: Now here is the media question: is the western media, who in Iraq is unsafe, unable to speak the language, unable to defy their protectors, the U.S. military -- are they not sufficiently asking the very question that you are asking -- why go after Moqtada Al-Sadr now?

JUAN COLE: Well, it's the kind of question that is difficult for the press to ask. For one thing, if they did the ask the U.S. officials or the Iraqi interim government, they probably would just get stonewalled. But I would say that there is a tendency in the American press generally to follow the lead of the Bush administration policy spokesperson, and so the Bush administration maintains that Moqtada Al-Sadr is a danger to Iraqi political and civil society and must be dealt with. That tends to then set the tone for the stories that follow, although there are notable exceptions. For instance, this week John Burns and Alex Berenson of the New York Times did an extremely important story on how the fighting began in Najaf. The story they put together is that this was a local initiative by a local Marine commanders and the local U.S.-appointed governor of Najaf, and that it presented the higher-ups with a kind of fait accompli, you know, because then people on up the chain of command would have to say, "Well, okay we're going to pull the Marines back." And that's a difficult thing to do in these kinds of situations. And so then the United States is in a position of assaulting Najaf, which is a holy city to Muslims around the world. I've seen person-on-the-street interviews on Arab satellite television in Egypt, for instance, where people were saying "This is an American attack on Islam."

MIKE PESCA: And is the Arab press or Arab television like Al Jazeera emphasizing this aspect of the fight?

JUAN COLE: Oh, yes. Absolutely. But they don't have to play it up very much, because it's already there in the Arab and Muslim publics. Within Najaf, things look different, you know? The people of Najaf don't like the Mahdi militia. They want to get rid of them. And they may even be grateful to the Marines for this fighting. But the farther away you get from Najaf, even within Iraq, among Shiites, the worse it looks. And then if you get outside Iraq, it looks just completely horrible. So it's a public relations disaster for the United States, no matter how it turns out.

MIKE PESCA: Thank you very much for joining us.

JUAN COLE: You're very welcome.

MIKE PESCA: Juan Cole is a professor of history at the University of Michigan, and his blog is JuanCole.com. [MUSIC]
[TAPE FROM OLYMPICS COVERAGE PLAYS]

MAN: "I want to win the gold medal as much as I want to mother a child." That is Svetlana Khorkina. She loves the attention. We're going to miss her, and she's going to miss this.

MIKE PESCA: The Super Bowl is to sports as the Olympics are to-- well, it should also be sports --but the Olympics look like a sporting event. If you get close enough, they smell like a sporting event, and they frequently involve pulled groins. But still, there's something about the Olympics which just doesn't feel like sport. Neil Pilson, now a sports media consultant, oversaw several Olympics when he was president of CBS Sports in the 1990s.

NEIL PILSON: The Olympics are probably closer to being an entertainment property than a sports property, and as an entertainment property, you are looking for that much broader audience.

MIKE PESCA: The Olympics simply don't work like other sporting events, as we experience them. That is to say, they're not debated on sports talk radio. The highlights aren't shown endlessly on ESPN, and because of time delays, it's pretty hard not to know who won beforehand. Seventy-five percent of the people who watch most TV sports are men. Sixty percent of Olympics viewers are women. As a result, while the Olympics make a lot of money for NBC and draw on all sorts of non-traditional sports fans, they turn out not to be especially appealing to the foam-finger-waving, statistic-devouring, season-ticket-holding, typical American fan.

JIM JACKSON: Although, yeah, I'm rooting for the United States to do well in the Olympics, I'm just not as interested, really.

SCOTT ZIGLER: It all depends on what's on against it. If it's a baseball game and the Yankees are on, I'd rather watch that than the Olympics.

MIKE PESCA: Jim Jackson from Massachusetts and Scott Zigler from Pittsburgh were busy shopping this week at the Yankees' team store in midtown Manhattan. If anyone should be watching the biggest televised sporting event of the summer on TV, it's these two men -- huge fans of football and baseball. But they're not watching much. Neither is WFAN's Mike Francesa, co-host of the most popular local sports radio show in America. By all rights, he should love the Olympics. He vividly remembers Sugar Ray Leonard and the Spinks brothers winning gold in Montana in '76. But these days--

MIKE FRANCESA: If I didn't watch one minute of the Olympics, I would not feel cheated. I really wouldn't.

MIKE PESCA: For one thing, Francesa says in prime time NBC doesn't play the sports he likes --boxing, basketball, synchronized swimming --just kidding about the last one. Also, Francesa and others like him are more outcome-oriented than your typical Olympics viewer.

MIKE FRANCESA: The taped aspect is very difficult for the regular sports fan. There's nothing a sports fan hates more -- is to get a result and then watch an event.

MIKE PESCA: But NBC's statistics show that ratings actually go up for taped events if the news of an American victory gets out beforehand. In other words, the same thing that drives traditional fans crazy, drives Olympic fans to the TV. And "Olympic fans" is the right phrase, according to former sports exec Neil Pilson. He points to a sport like beach volleyball, which gets a 1 rating normally. But during the Olympics it gets a 5 or a 6. And in prime time, beach volleyball gets a rating of 16 to 18.

NEIL PILSON: The American public is interested in the Olympics, and not necessarily in specific sports.

MIKE PESCA: What's great for NBC is death for other outlets trying to cover the Olympics. Because NBC paid over three quarters of a billion dollars for the rights to these games, Olympic Committee imposes strict limits on anyone else who wants to use footage. As a result, even though producer David Brofsky makes sure the Olympics are well covered on his network, ESPN, there's a high degree of difficulty.

DAVID BROFSKY: We can't show footage until after 3 a.m., and on any one given day, we can only show it for 24 hours.

CHRIS WRAGGI: It's a video medium, you know, with television [LAUGHS] so-- not having the movie pictures --I mean to me, it's always a bit ridiculous to have to show still photos. That I don't like to do. So yeah, I don't put as much into it as we probably would.

MIKE PESCA: Chris Wraggi does the 6 and 11 o'clock sportscast on WCBS-New York. Things are a lot different at CBS compared to his old job at NBC.

CHRIS WRAGGI: If your with the rights-fees network, it's heaven on earth. If you're not, or even if you're with an affiliate, forget about it. You'd rather be dragged over hot coals.

MIKE PESCA: As for the viewer, the Olympic Games often become a little like the biathlon -- first, it's a test of endurance. You carefully avoid radio, internet and random snatches of conversation which mention who won. Later, the exact opposite -- you concentrate steadily, knowing if your attention is drawn from NBC for a moment, you won't be able to watch highlights anywhere else. Of course the alternative would be a little jarring. Imagine ESPN Equestrian Tonight analyzing game film of the New Zealand rider totally blowing her trot half pass. For a little over two weeks every four years, the sports world and the TV sports world become a little unfamiliar. But eventually, badminton goes back to being something you play at a barbecue, and the Indians are a team from Cleveland, not the silver medalists in the men's double trap. [OLYMPICS THEME MUSIC]

MIKE PESCA: Up next, one journalist who refused to chase down rumors, use anonymous sources or let anyone go off the record. He wasn't fired. In fact, he's now remembered as one of the greats of the profession. You can listen to On the Media on line and get free transcripts and MP3 downloads at onthemedia.org. This is On the Media from NPR.
MIKE PESCA: This is On the Media. I'm Mike Pesca. On Wednesday, reporters who covered Wen Ho Lee, the American scientist falsely accused of spying for China, were fined by a federal judge for not revealing who their sources were. A week earlier, Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper was ordered to jail for not revealing who leaked the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame. Cooper is now free, pending appeal. News organizations have decried the tactics of prosecutors who are compelling reporters to give up their sources. We know what the prosecutors and judges think about all this, but what do the leakers think? Daniel Ellsberg is among American journalism's most famous leakers. He brought the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and 19 other newspapers in 1971. Daniel Ellsberg, welcome to On the Media.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Glad to be here. Thank you.

MIKE PESCA: Do you think any of these reporters should be giving up their source?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: No. If they did, in fact, promise confidentiality, I think they should defend that privilege and take it up to the Supreme Court, if necessary. The, the ruling that, that there is no journalistic privilege, the Branzburg vs. Hayes ruling in 1972, is very questionable, and it deserves to be re-considered.

MIKE PESCA: Do you think there should be a general reporter's shield?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Yes.

MIKE PESCA: How much should the shield depend on the nature of the information that was leaked?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Well, circumstances do differ here. We have, in the case of the leak of Valerie Plame's name, and some other cases I could mention, what I would say are genuinely dangerous, damaging leaks, hurting our national security far beyond any public interest that's served by putting out that information. And those leaks were made, of course, it seems at the very highest level. They also violate laws. There is a law against putting out the identity of an intelligence operative, and I don't oppose that law. The fact is, there is a law, and it is legal at this point for the prosecutor to be subpoenaing these reporters. He certainly is within his legal right, and that warns us, by the way, of what we should expect if we get a broad official secrets act, which we don't have, that criminalizes all leaks. We do have laws that criminalize leaks of intelligence identities or communications intelligence or nuclear weapons data, and I, as somebody who was a source of classified information, and do believe that my leak, my revelation was, was very much in the public interest, I'm not against those narrow laws, which I didn't violate, as it happened. So, in this case, we have the question then of whether the source of the leak should be subject to prosecution and I would say that they should.

MIKE PESCA: And if any of the journalists in the Plame case were, indeed, compelled or if they just felt that they should identify their sources, do you think that that would have a chilling effect on all of leaking and all of journalism, or just reflect poorly upon their ability to get future leaks?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: If they gave in to the legal process here that confronts him with jail -- if they don't reveal -- that certainly would have a chilling effect generally. This is not a simple [LAUGHS] ethical question. I don't say there is a simple rule for this. Here is one aspect of this people, I think, are missing. Reporters who did not give a confidentiality pledge to a particular source are certainly not bound by another reporter's pledge, and if there are reporters, and I'm sure there are, who do know the identity of those sources, the people who violated that good law here in this case, or who can find it out, they should be investigating that -- who endangered our security? And they should print it.

MIKE PESCA: As a leaker, I'm going to assume that if a reporter gave up his source - for instance, if Matthew Cooper gave up his source - you as a leaker would never, ever turn to him.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: No, pardon me. The idea that an absolute promise is essential, where the leak involves saving lives, where the leak involves major issues of life and death and avoiding a war, ending a war -- absolute confidentiality, thus protecting the source, should not be the sole requirement. And it was not for me. As somebody who was prosecuted for a leak, I can say certainly that I expected to be prosecuted, and by the way, I never demanded absolute confidentiality, and of course I didn't get it. I would like to see more such leaks. In fact, I would like to see people right now who believe that there are documents that show lies, people should, at risk to themselves, consider doing what I wish I'd done much earlier, and that is, going to the press with documents and revealing those. And I very much applaud the, the person who did give the Taguba report, without which we would not yet know of the abuses in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, and there'd be no chance of changing them.

MIKE PESCA: Daniel Ellsberg, thank you very much.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Thank you.

MIKE PESCA: Daniel Ellsberg is the author of Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.

MIKE PESCA: Fifteen years ago this summer, American journalism lost one of its greatest practitioners, Isador Feinstein Stone, byline I.F. Stone, known to friends as Izzy. Stone worked at papers large and small in the 1930s. He was the Washington editor of The Nation magazine in the '40s, and in 1953, out of a job, and with his name on a Senate list of "typical sponsors of Communist front organizations," he launched I.F. Stone's Weekly, right out of his house. Before long, what was called a highly personal radical publication established itself as a must-read for Washington insiders. On the Media's Megan Ryan looks back at the work of I.F. Stone.

MEGAN RYAN: This summer, as news organizations reconsider their coverage in the run-up to war, I.F. Stone's reporting offers an object lesson. According to Victor Navasky, now publisher of The Nation, Stone's M.O. was different from any other Washington correspondent.

VICTOR NAVASKY: He declined to go to any off-the-record briefing, and he'd hang out outside, and then he'd talk to the people who heard it, [LAUGHS] and he wasn't bound by any off-the-record rules. He wouldn't accept what they told him. He then would go and check it out. He got scoop after scoop that way, and they were sort of -- they were the opposite of insider journalism. They were kind of an outsider's putting things in context.

JACK NEWFIELD: I.F. Stone said "Don't go to anybody's house. Don't become friends with anybody. Don't become a captive of your sources.

MEGAN RYAN: That was his advice to Jack Newfield, author and longtime columnist for the Village Voice.

JACK NEWFIELD: "You don't need these big shots." He says. "I've never trusted anybody in the Cabinet. I've never listened to a presidential aide. Live like a monk. Be isolated. Just read the record. Government documents its own crimes."

MEGAN RYAN: Newfield, who was a student in the leftist group Students for a Democratic Society when he first met Stone, said his approach comes directly out of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, and perhaps, practical necessity.

JACK NEWFIELD: He said "Well, it's partly involuntary. My hearing is so bad, I can't hear what people whisper to me at fancy cocktail parties, and I can't hear what witnesses say at congressional hearings."

MEGAN RYAN: But he could read. In Navasky's words, "Stone was an investigative reader. He read and read to the last word of every public document, uncovering stories hiding in plain sight." Here's how Stone explained it to Bernard Kalb in a 1971 interview.

I.F. STONE: Well, I'd build a file, a temporary file. I'd read off a lot of papers and try to read the record, and I'd try to read the hearings, and when I spot something interesting, I run downtown, ask a question, make a phone call, try to talk to people a bit. I try to do some research. I try to provide fresh perspective and radical perspective and independent perspective on the news.

MEGAN RYAN: Of course, attending briefings, rubbing shoulders with the powerful and using deep background sources are all useful practices. They generate the stories that fill the front page and powerful exposes from Watergate to the horrors at Abu Ghraib. But according to Todd Gitlin of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, Stone's way was very different. Gitlin calls it "second order journalism," scrutinizing the reporting of others.

TODD GITLIN: In other words, the sort of critical enterprise that Izzy Stone was responsible for was symbiotic with good journalism -- looking for consistencies and inconsistencies, juxtaposing the claims made by different news organizations, treating the news, in short, as something other than sacred text -- dis-assembling it.

MEGAN RYAN: Victor Navasky remembers how Stone worked a big story in 1957, when test ban negotiations were going on between the U.S. and Russia. The official line from the government was that the underground nuclear tests conducted in the United States would be undetectable 200 miles from the site of the blast. But Stone, reading to the last word of every dispatch, knew it just wasn't true.

VICTOR NAVASKY: He noticed, in a so-called "shirt tail," one of these little paragraphs that appears after the main story -- unrelated to it -- filed from the AP -- not by the writer of the original story -- that Geiger counters, or whatever the machinery was that picks up these tremors, were registering hundreds and thousands of miles away. So he started calling around, and then he went up to the Bureau of Standards, and he got a major scoop out of this which became a front page story, cause he then went back to the Defense Department, and they had to confirm that their original statement was wrong, and they changed the press release they put out, and so he not only reported news, he made news.

MEGAN RYAN: There was a lesson to be learned from this and many classic I.F. Stone stories, and it resonates today in the work of every journalist who Stone mentored. Jack Newfield.

JACK NEWFIELD: Well Izzy is, is the person who taught me that all governments lie.

MEGAN RYAN: Bernard Kalb talked to Stone about government lies when he interviewed him in 1971, after the New York Times had run with the Pentagon Papers. [TAPE PLAYS]

BERNARD KALB: Who were the liars in your point of view?

I.F. STONE: Well, Lyndon Johnson, above all. There's just no doubt that Lyndon Johnson lied to the press. They didn't need access to the White House private papers to know what every reporter in this town knows -- how often Lyndon gave false impressions to us at press conferences. Very false impressions.

BERNARD KALB: False impressions. Lies?

I.F. STONE: Sure. What other word is there for false impressions? I mean if you, you catch a guy in front of a bank, and he just robbed a vault and you say what are you doing there and he said I'm waiting for a streetcar, and yes, he was waiting for a streetcar, but he's just robbed a bank -- he didn't tell you that part of it -- is he a liar, or just - is he just a man who's given you an incomplete briefing? Which is it?

MEGAN RYAN: Izzy's dis-engagement with the powerful enabled him to ask questions like that, and lately, we see the consequences of not asking. In July, the New York Times editorial page took a cold, hard look at its own pre-war coverage and concluded, quote, "We did not listen carefully to the people who disagreed with us. Our certainty flowed from the fact that such an overwhelming majority of government officials, past and present, top intelligence officials and other experts were sure that the weapons were there. We had a group think of our own." Just a week ago, the Washington Post gave their media reporter, Howard Kurtz, a page one platform to criticize their own pre-war coverage. Pentagon correspondent Thomas Ricks is quoted, saying "There was an attitude among editors: 'Look. We're going to war. Why do we even worry about all this contrary stuff?'" Here's what Stone said in 1971 about the coverage of the Vietnam War.

I.F. STONE: I'm making a blanket indictment about Washington. This has been the best-covered war we were ever in. The coverage from the field has been superb. But here in Washington, on the whole, the press crowd has been a big herd which has been committed to the government, involved in propaganda, and didn't even know it. A lot of these people, you see, they think they're being objective. They really think so, when what they're really doing is accepting the conventional wisdom, the pre-conceptions and premises of the government as gospel without even realizing it. [TAPPING FOR EMPHASIS] A man has to come clean with his readers. You have to show where you're committed. You have to show your point of view.

MEGAN RYAN: Izzy held deep political convictions, but he believed, most of all, in full disclosure of the government and of himself. That passion fueled his reporting and sharpened his vision, allowing him to see past his colleagues on the major stories of his time. As early as 1942, he described the actions of Nazi Germany as "a murder of a people so appalling that men would shudder at its horrors for centuries to come." He was ahead in covering McCarthyism, the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War. He reveled in the pursuit of truth, and when Jack Newfield asked him if he liked what he did, Stone said "I have so much fun, I ought to be arrested." For On the Media, I'm Megan Ryan.

MIKE PESCA: By now, you may have heard that the governor of New Jersey is gay. No, wait -- I'm sorry. Test marketing shows the more palatable phrase to be: I am a gay American. Which, of course, caught the world and the press corps off guard. Not that he was gay. If you talk to the press in New Jersey, they'll tell you "Oh, I heard those rumors. But they were just rumors." What caught everyone off guard was that McGreevey would admit it. Now, if McGreevey had said "I am a corrupt American," that wouldn't have caught everyone off guard. Since that announcement, we've heard details about a relationship between the governor and Golan Cipel, the Israeli national who McGreevey picked to head New Jersey's homeland security department and who's now suing McGreevey. To help us sort all this out is Bob Hennelly, the New Jersey correspondent for WNYC. Welcome to On the Media, Bob.

BOB HENNELLY: Hi.

MIKE PESCA: Bob, do you think that mainstream news organizations, because they didn't want to out someone, wound up giving the governor a pass, almost?

BOB HENNELLY: I think what happened was the trajectory of Golan Cipel, who of course has been named by anonymous sources as the individual Governor McGreevey was referring to -- the fact that he had such a short tenure in state government and was out in a matter of months, made the media feel that they had done their job, and so really, at that point, it became a personal matter.

MIKE PESCA: The news media, you're saying, didn't force themselves to discover every aspect of why he was drummed out. The fact that he was gone was enough for them.

BOB HENNELLY: I think they felt, yeah, that he's out the door, and at this point, there's no reason in going after it. It is a private matter. I think the media referred to Cipel as, quote, the "special friend." I think that if you read the papers every day, like a good citizen, you would have come to the point of saying "This is strange."

MIKE PESCA: Well, now as you say, they used euphemisms like "special friend," which in the '50s was known to mean that it was a homosexual relationship. Are you saying the reporters who reported those stories strongly suspected that what was up was the governor was gay and doing lots of things to cover his tracks --and putting out hints to that effect?

BOB HENNELLY: All they were trying to establish was that this relationship made no sense on the ground; that the individual's resume did not hold up to the scrutiny that was required for this very important job. And day after day, they stayed on it. They even stayed on him to the point when he went down in terms of job level, although his pay stayed the same, as a special counsel to Governor McGreevey, and then they even pursued him as he got jobs on what we call State Street, which would be, you know, the equivalent of Lobbyist's Row in Washington, DC. So there was an attempt to try to, within taste, I think, make the situation available to readers to at least have some perception about.

MIKE PESCA: Did people ever put the question to Governor McGreevey, "Are you having a relationship, an affair with Golan Cipel?"

BOB HENNELLY: I know that there was a reference in the New York Times this past week to an unidentified reporter. I put that question directly to the press secretary who was there for the last year and a half. He said that he knows of no one that, on the record, asked the governor that question. There were a couple of names that popped up where people said on Press Row, in the State House, "So and so may have asked. I tracked it down, and they said they haven't." So we're still in pursuit of that person who would have been so pressing. There was a, a whole pattern of kind of corruption stories that had popped up and bad appointments that were there as part of the background for this story. So I think to some degree, one might say that Governor McGreevey has really had a new innovation where coming out was the, the most brilliant stroke of genius that you can imagine, because it totally dazzled the national media, which went for the question of his sexuality, which of course is what they're trained to do.

MIKE PESCA: But to what effect? How did it wind up helping McGreevey? Can it salvage his political career?

BOB HENNELLY: Not salvage, by certainly give him a controlled exit, and that's the thing. He has said that he is going to have a transfer of power that will end on November 15th. Well that's, you know, some 90 days to transfer power. Well the federal government has a transfer of power that's 80 days, and that's the last standing superpower. So it appears he's hanging in there. I think that what's interesting is that just a few days after this disclosure, Governor McGreevey's major campaign giver, Charles Kushner, a major developer and giver to the Democratic Party nationally, was convicted of multiple counts of income tax evasion, tampering with witnesses, and he'll probably get two years in jail. So, in essence, he's taken control of the media agenda. So now the likes of Oprah and Barbara Walters want to talk with him about his -- sexuality.

MIKE PESCA: [LAUGHS] Well, thank you very much, Bob.

BOB HENNELLY: Hey, thanks, Mike.

MIKE PESCA: Bob Hennelly is New Jersey correspondent for public radio station WNYC, which also produces this program. [MUSIC]

MIKE PESCA: Up next, how to mislead without lying, how John Kerry would change the direction of the FCC, and detente between India and Pakistan leads to a meeting of the musicals. This is On the Media, from NPR.
MIKE PESCA: This is On the Media. I'm Mike Pesca. George Bush may indeed be the first president since Herbert Hoover to preside over a net job loss, but one industry has boomed under his watch: people whose job it is to vet the words of politicians. The George W. Bush era is clearly the golden age of presidential vetting. At the age of 26, Bryan Keefer is already a veteran vetter -- he and his two partners run the website spinsanity.com. And they have all now written a new book called All the President's Spin. Bryan, welcome to OTM.

BRYAN KEEFER: Thank you very much for having me on.

MIKE PESCA: I'm looking at the cover of your book, and there's a picture of George Bush crossing his fingers, but you never use "lie" in the title of this book, so what exactly are you accusing the Bush administration of doing?

BRYAN KEEFER: Well, they're not really liars. You know, in the book I think we document two or three places where they've said something that they knew was untrue. What we've found was that they were very sophisticated misleaders, in the sense that they'll say things that are half-true or partially true or there's a little grain of truth, and because they don't lie, outright, the media very rarely calls them on it.

MIKE PESCA: And sow what are the ones that are just outright lies?

BRYAN KEEFER: George W. Bush would stand up after September 11th and say, "During the campaign I said in Chicago to the American people that only under three circumstances would I run a deficit -under war, recession or national emergency, and I never imagined we'd hit the trifecta." And it was his way of sort of defending himself from blame for the budget deficit which was growing and has grown since, and there's no record anywhere that he ever said anything like that during the campaign. White House reporters couldn't come up with it, the White House couldn't come up with it themselves. And so really it just didn't happen.

MIKE PESCA: So why do you think he says these things that are lies? Is that the real slip-up, because usually he's disciplined enough to go right up to the truth but not cross it?

BRYAN KEEFER: Karen Hughes writes in her book: "My first rule is -- you don't tell a lie. Because the media will call you if you lie, but they won't do it if you say something that's really heavily spun but may have a grain of truth to it."

MIKE PESCA: But I've seen so many stories comparing the things that the Bush administration said linking Saddam Hussein to September 11th -- it got played in the media as these were purposefully misleading statements. So did the fact that they didn't maybe commit the dictionary definition of "lie" really get them off the hook in that case?

BRYAN KEEFER: Well, you know, it got them off the hook before the war. What they really did is they exaggerated the certainty of what they knew. They would say "We know Saddam has weapons of mass destruction" when the intelligence reports really didn't tell them that. They told them well, probably. But probably doesn't sound very good in a sound bite. And so what they did is they really presented it as certain when it just wasn't certain at all.

MIKE PESCA: Now, the website which I go to a lot, Spinsanity, it basically vets everyone -- it does it for Bush - it does it for Kerry - it does it for media figures like Bill O'Reilly and Michael Moore -- but this book is all the president's spin and everything we've been talking about so far is about how the president lied. There is a long history of presidents perhaps embellishing the truth. So how come you're saying it's so unprecedented with Bush?

BRYAN KEEFER: Well, what they've done is they've taken what's sort of normal for presidents under fire, under scandal or during a campaign and made that their day to day M.O. in the way they govern the country and the way they present their policies. They've made this sort of image creation that Reagan was go good at -- the 24/7, you know, non-stop rapid response that Clinton was very good at under fire -- combined it with these misleading public relations tactics, and really taken this to an entire 'nother level.

MIKE PESCA: If this book were just about the campaign, and all the ads that people see -- have there been more lies coming out of the Bush side than the Kerry side, in your estimation?

BRYAN KEEFER: I would say Bush has been a little bit more aggressive, but there's plenty of spin to go around here, and Kerry has really adopted the tactics that Bush has pioneered in the White House -- picked up and that and really run with on this campaign season.

MIKE PESCA: In the interest of fairness, give me a good example of a Kerry whopper.

BRYAN KEEFER: Sure. Well he's said 3 million jobs have been lost under Bush. It's a classic example of taking a number and stripping it out of context, because that's the number for the private sector, or they say manufacturing jobs, sometimes. But Kerry has gone out and said "That's the overall number, you know, 3 million jobs have been lost," when really the number is down to about 1.1 -- there's still a net loss, but it's not nearly as large as Kerry has said it is.

MIKE PESCA: The most cynical part of me says - you know what -- he put that misleading figure out so that the correction stories would also reflect poorly on George Bush. [LAUGHS]

BRYAN KEEFER: Right. But it's amazing to watch the press try and cover this. The AP, even after getting the number correct, let Kerry continue to spin them, printed it as if it were a fact without any sort of contradiction for weeks after Kerry started saying it.

MIKE PESCA: One thing that I see is that people who have a horse in the race either way, they want the media to be more outraged by either Kerry's lies or Bush's lies, but they can't hammer it because if one side lies more, and then the media's always pointing it out, it really makes it seem like they're rooting for the other side.

BRYAN KEEFER: Well, the media has interpreted objectivity to often mean artificial balance. So what happens is when Bush says something like "The average tax cut was 1500 dollars," the media will print that, and then if they're going to contradict it, they'll go to some outside expert or maybe they'll go to the opposite campaign saying "No, it wasn't 1500 dollars. The average tax cut for people in the middle income bracket was a few hundred." But the problem is, is that when it's he-said, she-said, the readers don't really get a sense of who's right and who's wrong.

MIKE PESCA: But in the major papers of America, I see an effort to run features that they might call an ad watch or an ad check, where they tell you who's lying, as someone who's reported on campaigns, there's nothing we reporters like more than catching anyone in a lie.

BRYAN KEEFER: I mean, ad watch pieces are wonderful, as far as they go, but the problem is they're out of the news cycle, and when Bush says Kerry voted 350 times for higher taxes, eventually they do an ad watch piece and an op-ed kind of piece, and finally it finds its way into the news coverage a month later. And so the problem for readers is that they hear the misleading sound bite long before they hear it debunked. You know, the Annenberg Public Policy Center did a survey of voters in swing states in particular asking them about the claims that had been in ads, like the 350 votes for higher taxes, and they found that people believed them, for the most part.

MIKE PESCA: The interesting thing [LAUGHS] about that survey is that people said you know I don't believe these ads; I know to take 'em with a grain of salt, but then when they say - well what about 350 votes, they say oh, well that's a fact.

BRYAN KEEFER: Right. Right.

MIKE PESCA: If George Bush wins this election, it will seem to him and his advisors that these tactics have been validated. Paint me the picture -- how will this all change if John Kerry wins the election?

BRYAN KEEFER: I mean the scary part is it may not change if John Kerry wins the election. You know, the incentive for politicians is, if you can game the system, and if you can get better coverage or less critical coverage than you probably deserve, go for it.

MIKE PESCA: Thanks very much, Bryan.

BRYAN KEEFER: Thanks very much for having me.

MIKE PESCA: Bryan Keefer, author of All the President's Spin, a spinsanity.com production. [MUSIC] MIKE PESCA: The media issues discussed by Bush and Kerry so far in the campaign have been limited to who reads more newspapers and whose ads are meaner. But recently, John Kerry said he'd like to shake things up at the FCC. Here's what he told the UNITY Convention of Minority Journalists in Washington, DC last month. [TAPE PLAYS]

JOHN KERRY: I'm against the ongoing push for media consolidation. I was in favor of the rollback. I voted against the expansion, and as president, as I said, I will appoint people to the FCC, and I will pursue a policy that tries to have as diverse and broad an ownership as possible.

MIKE PESCA: Mark Fitzgerald has written about Kerry's media policy for Editor & Publisher Magazine. Fitzgerald says the kinds of changes Kerry mentioned are quite doable.

MARK FITZGERALD: All he is really talking about is turning back the clock, literally, a few months, and there is legislation both before Congress and of course there was recently a federal court decision that told the FCC to go back and look at how they re-wrote the rules again.

MIKE PESCA: So for all the things a president can't do, if the other party controls the House and the Senate, some of these FCC regulations are something that Kerry can do. Why? Does he immediately appoint new commissioners? How does the FCC board work?

MARK FITZGERALD: The FCC has five members. The party in power has appointment of three, and the chairman, who is Michael Powell, right now, a Republican, would, if following tradition, resign as soon as Kerry took office, and Kerry would be able to appoint a chairman and another Democrat, so you would have three Democrats.

MIKE PESCA: Do you have any idea about who or even what type of commissioners Kerry would be looking for as an FCC appointee?

MARK FITZGERALD: Well, the told the people at UNITY that what he wanted was somebody that would be way more activist than we've seen on content in broadcasting. There's been a lot of attention, of course, to the Howard Stern situation here in Chicago, Mankow Muller, but in actual fact, the FCC has really not been too concerned with indecency, and this is something that both of the Democrats on the FCC have really tried to change. That's one reason that they've been so successful in forming this coalition of people from right to life and the NRA and social conservatives, right up to Michael Moore sorts of people, MoveOn.org, some of the media organizations that we're beginning to see.

MIKE PESCA: How would the change in the FCC board, assuming that it became 3-2 Democrat instead of 3-2 Republican -- how might that result in a change that we'd actually see in our media?

MARK FITZGERALD: You'd see it, I think, almost right away. A good example is: John Kerry has declared that he would like cable companies to be forced to price their options by each channel. You typically get big packages, and these packages are made in various ways. You'd be able to say, well I don't want the golf channel, and I'm not going to pay for it. I don't want A&E, and I'm not going to pay for it.

MIKE PESCA: Now when the FCC tried a little deregulation last year, a surprisingly bipartisan coalition rose up against it, and also surprising was the fact that the public woke up and noticed what was going on. I think that did surprise President Bush a little. So, if there was this groundswell of opposition to media deregulation, and if Kerry stands on the other side of the issue, why don't you think this has become a big election issue -- that Kerry has a stance that the people seem to like more than Bush's stance on the issue of media deregulation?

MARK FITZGERALD: That's a very interesting question. At UNITY, John Kerry answered this only in answer to a question -- he didn't bring this up as part of his speech. But I would say this: John Edwards actually spoke about this quite a bit during his own campaign. He has been more forward on this issue than John Kerry was.

MIKE PESCA: And do you think that part of the reason why he raised it, as you said, in response to a direct question, but hasn't made it a big campaign issue has to do with the fact that he does have to do some massaging with the actual media companies who will probably oppose what he's talking about -- maybe it has something to do with the fact that he's hoping for some good coverage from now until election day?

MARK FITZGERALD: Yeah, I think that what [LAUGHS] - as we've seen what happens with the media is that they don't necessarily punish somebody like this for bringing these things up. They simply don't bring it up themselves. The media has done a terrible, terrible job in telling the American people what was at issue here in 2003. In February of 2003, about four months before the actual decisions were to be made, a Pew poll found that 73 percent of Americans had no idea that there was going to be changes in who could own their local TV stations, who -- whether their local newspaper could own their local radio station, and that is absolutely the fault of the media, cause it just simply wasn't covered.

MIKE PESCA: All right. Well, thanks very much, Mark Fitzgerald, editor at large for Editor & Publisher. Thank you.

MARK FITZGERALD: My pleasure.
MIKE PESCA: Several months ago, OTM reported on a war movie from India, Line of Control. The film flopped. Part of the reason was that the anti-Pakistan bias in the film didn't sit well with audiences at a time when relations between India and Pakistan are actually improving. In the last few months, a stream of Pakistani film stars, musicians and directors have been hopping over to Mumbai, the center of India's film industry, but it's not just the desire for good relations between the nuclear neighbors that's bringing Pakistani artists across the border. It's also the knowledge that the Pakistani film industry, dubbed Lollywood because of its base in the City of Lahore, is dying, if not already dead. Miranda Kennedy reports from Lahore on Pakistan's hopes for bringing its cinema back to life. [MUSIC FROM MEERA FILM PLAYS]

MIRANDA KENNEDY: Meera is one of Lollywood's highest paid actresses. At the wise old age of 24, she's already made almost 60 Lollywood films. [MUSIC UP] This one is a love story with some ten song and dance numbers. The lip synching is off and the color is bad, but Meera manages to execute some very sexy love scenes while fully clothed. Meera's just started working on her first Bollywood production, which she's shooting in Bombay, with Indian director Mahesh Bhatt.

MEERA: I just want to contribute to Pakistan and India for the betterment and for the peace. We are together. I don't want to belong to one industry. I just want to do international work. I want to be recognized as a Pakistani actress, India and Hollywood. Everywhere.

MIRANDA KENNEDY: Meera certainly won't get the international recognition she longs for by acting in Pakistani films. Lollywood only produces about 40 films a year, and it has no international audience. [LAHORE STREET NOISE] In the last decade, more than a thousand movie theaters have closed down in Pakistan. Still, in some areas, the streets are hung with hand-drawn movie posters, usually featuring women with big bosoms and blood dripping from their mouths. Movie-going is now restricted to men of the lower classes in city centers. Everyone else watches pirated DVDs of well-made Bollywood films in the safety and comfort of their own homes. They might as well, since the only things that differentiate Pakistani from Indian films these days is that they're not as well-made, and because of Pakistani censor board rules, they don't show drinking or nudity.

MAN: The boards are catering for masses--

MIRANDA KENNEDY: Faizan Peerzada is a Lahore-based filmmaker.

FAIZAN PEERZADA: Whether it's love or action, it's done the same way. The only difference that I see in Bollywood films is that they have more funds. They spend more money. They have better equipment, and they have been supporting an academy, so they get some training. They're able to make a good-looking film. Out here in Pakistan, the film industry had been left on its own.

MIRANDA KENNEDY: Before India's partition in 1947, both Bombay and Lahore were centers of Indian cinema. After Pakistan's creation, Lahore's film industry struggled to distinguish itself from Bombay's, but in the '60s and '70s, Pakistan's Islamist leaders began actively discouraging cinema. Military dictator Zia ul Haq forced most Lahore studios to close down. Bollywood has never recovered. To film producer, Shajjad Gul, it's a tragedy that Pakistani film hasn't succeeded in developing an identity of its own, unlike, say, Iranian cinema which developed a distinctive voice under an oppressive political regime.

SHAJJAD GUL: I think cinema is an identity of a country. It's a roaming ambassador of a country, which today Pakistan does not have.

MIRANDA KENNEDY: Shajjad's father founded Evernew film studios before partition, which soon became one of Pakistan's top studios. But in the last decade, in order to survive, Shajjad has had to turn to TV production. He's not alone. His industry colleagues now do everything from advertising soap to running a circus to make money.

SHAJJAD GUL: We consider ourselves filmmakers, but the existing situation has really forced us to just wait see what is in the offing, and we are very desperately wanting to open trade with India. I personally feel it's the only savior for Pakistani cinema today.

MIRANDA KENNEDY: In 1962, the Pakistan Film Producers Association asked the government to ban Indian films in Pakistan, which they were only too happy to do. Now, some 40 years later, the association has just asked Pakistan to repeal the ban. They say Pakistani theaters can't stay afloat by showing third-rate Pakistani films. They want to make it legal to screen Indian films and to co-produce films with Bollywood. But now, all Lollywood can do is wait for the Pakistani government to make up its mind. [HALL ROAD SHOPS WITH BOLLYWOOD MUSIC] Here, on Lahore's Hall Road, you can find pirated software for 30 cents, and DVDs of Bollywood films for not much more. The very day of a Lollywood release, a pirated copy of the film will run on one of Pakistan's domestic cable channels. Piracy has delivered another crushing blow to Pakistan's whimpering film industry. Now, it's up to its old enemy, India, to save it. Now, that sounds like the makings of a good Bollywood film. For On the Media, I'm Miranda Kennedy, in Lahore. [THEME MUSIC]

MIKE PESCA: And that's it for this week's show. On the Media was directed by Katya Rogers and produced by Megan Ryan, Tony Field and Derek John. Dylan Keefe is our technical director and Jennifer Munson our engineer. We had help from Anne Kossef and Mike Vuolo, and editing help from Sharon Ball. Our webmaster is Amy Pearl. Arun Rath is senior producer and Dean Cappello our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. Brooke Gladstone is managing editor when she's not on vacation. Bob Garfield is still on vacation, even when he's not on vacation. Both of them will be back here next week, and they'll be joined by special guest star Agnes Moorehead as Andorra. This is On the Media, from NPR. I'm Mike Pesca. [MUSIC TAG]