Behind the Leak

Organizations victimized by unauthorized disclosures often obsess about the real motivation of media leakers.

News outfits like to dub their sources "whistle blowers" and paint them as paragons of virtue.  Often, that's not the case.

There is an interesting new book out called "Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat."  In it, author Max Holland contents that the prime source for Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein during Watergate, Mark Felt, was not motivated by a desire for good government or to thwart powerful men doing bad deeds-- he simply wanted a promotion.  Felt imagined himself as the replacement for FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and, according to the book, saw leaking as a means to that end.

"The portrait of Felt that emerges when we follow this thread does not resemble any of Bob Woodward's depictions," Holland writes.  "Felt held the news media in contempt and was neither a high-minded whistle-blower, nor was he genuinely concerned about defending his institution's integrity."

"Woodward believed that he and Felt were on the same side, allies in the struggle to expose the facts and larger truth.  For Felt, however, their relationship was simply a means to the end of becoming FBI director.  If that end was best served by salting the information he gave Woodward with details that had only a casual relationship with the facts, so be it."



What lessons can government agencies, corporations, large institutions and others draw from the Felt Affair when they are the subject of leaks?  Only this: it doesn't matter what the motivation of the leaker is.

Sure, if you can identify the leaker (something which took about a third of a century in Deep Throat's case) and prove that they have some self-serving motive --  you can undercut them a bit and perhaps keep them from being honored on the cover of Time Magazine.  But in the end, the media don't care about the motivation -- they care whether the information they receive is true or, if it cannot be proven true or false, whether it is plausible and dramatic.  Once that test has been met the leaker's damage will be done.

 
So while an organization inevitably will spend time and effort trying to track down and discredit its critics -- their time is better spent dealing with the facts.






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h/t Secrecy News

Berkely Police's Bad Rap

Anyone in the news needs a thick skin. You need an emotional bullet-proof vest to allow minor inaccuracies, mistaken comments and criticisms to bounce off you.

But if media mistakes about you are more than minor -- you have a right and sometimes an obligation to push back.  No sensible person, however, would do what Berkeley California Police Chief Michael Meehan just did.


According to the Oakland Tribune, Meehan didn't like the wording of a story he read late at night on the paper's website.  So he sent a police sergeant to knock on the reporter's door at 12:45 AM to demand the article be changed.

The dust-up happened after Meehan spoke to an angry community meeting trying to explain why the police were slow to respond to calls from a man who eventually was beaten to death by a deranged individual in February.



The original article apparently said that Meehan had apologized for the slow police response.  The police chief sent the sergeant to rap on the reporter's door, however, to insist that he had only apologized for being slow at explaining why the initial response had appeared to be slow.  Ah well, then.  Great reason to scare the crap out of the reporter and his family.

The journalist in question, Doug Oakley, was understandably upset at the late night visit, initially thinking that perhaps a relative had died.

What Meehan's order was not censorship but was intimidation of the worse kind. This is what happens to reporters in Iran, Syria or China.  Reporters are roughed up, shot at and sometimes killed and wounded covering stories.  But rarely are they and their families terrorized in a democracy. 

There is nothing wrong with officials trying to correct what they believe to be an inaccurate story.  Often, someone like Meehan will call the reporter’s boss and point out the inaccuracies, slanders and outright falsehoods in a story.  That’s fair game.  Journalists today can lose their jobs when they screw up a story in a major way.  That’s the way it should be.  Oakley's error, however, seemed more of a misdemeanor than a capital crime.

We recommend – when you think a reporter has egregiously wronged you, go to his boss or his boss’s boss.  You’d be surprised how often that gets results. But pick up the phone or send an email -- not a sergeant. 

Meehan later apologized explaining that he ordered the midnight door pounding at a reporter’s home because he was “tired” and “overzealous” about making sure accurate information got out.

We highly recommend that Meehan go through media training.  It might save him in his next job.   If this is the way he acts when tired he is not likely to be in his current position much longer.

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h/t Poynter

TV Interviews: Not Childs Play

Being interviewed on live TV is not easy. It is doubly hard when you are a "remote" guest and you can't see your interviewer.

The video below shows how NOT to do it. The clip is of Rhode Island U.S. Senate candidate, Barry Hinckley, and his five-year-old son Hudson, being interviewed by Fox News Channel's Neal Cavuto. Hinckley elected to put the kid in a campaign advertisement talking about the burden of the national debt. One can argue the wisdom of putting a young child in scripted ad like that -- but clearly it is high risk to ask him to appear live on TV.

Turns out the five-year-old does a better job than his Dad at mastering the interview. It is clear that Barry Hinckley did not do what we teach -- which is to pick a point on the camera's lens or the square TelePrompTer that is in front of the lens. Eye contact is a must without looking like you are a deer in the headlights.

Barry shifts his eyes around throughout as if he were looking for a sniper. The candidate continually looks off to the left -- where more than likely there is a TV monitor or perhaps a member of his staff or his wife. Bad move Barry.

To make matters worse -- much worse -- notice how the candidate's lips move when his son is talking. Looks like he rehearsed expected questions with the boy and mouthed answers along with the kid while Hudson was replying to Cavuto. Perhaps Barry thought there was a close-up on his son at those moments and viewers wouldn't catch his ventriloquist act.  The only question here is: which one is the dummy?

The French, They Are Different

American trial lawyers are often stumbling blocks for communication.
Too often we see attorneys unnecessarily tell their clients to "take the fifth"
 -- not only in court but also with the media.

Even when lawyers speak out themselves on behalf of those they defend, they frequently say little of interest.

But the French -- it appears they are quite different.

Today's example comes to us from
Al Jazeera  (of all places) which has
a story about Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund, who was accused of rape in New York last year (the charges were eventually dropped) and is now being questioned in France about his alleged involvement with a prostitution ring.

Al Jazeera says Henri Leclerc, lawyer for Strauss-Kahn, told French radio in December that his client did not know that the women who were at parties he attended were prostitutes.

"He could easily not have known, because as you can imagine, at these kind of parties you're not always dressed, and I challenge you to distinguish a naked prostitute from any other naked woman."

Well, that is an interesting defense.  Strauss-Kahn would probably call it the naked truth.


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