Use of confidential sources. Watergate story showed how to do it right way
By John Ferrugia
Guest Commentary
Article Launched: 06/02/2005 01:01:00 AM
This week's revelation that Deep Throat was a top FBI official who directed Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein through the Watergate maze has again brought to the fore the debate over the use of unnamed, confidential sources. This will likely be one of the major topics of discussion as the national Investigative Reporters and Editors meeting begins in Denver today.
Clearly, The Washington Post could not have continued to move the story forward without the information provided by W. Mark Felt, the FBI's second-ranking officer, who had access to key investigative files. But it is important and instructive to understand, from Bernstein's perspective, just how Felt's information was used.
Referring to the book "All the President's Men," which detailed the Post's investigation, Bernstein noted: "You see there that Felt/Deep Throat largely confirmed information we had already gotten from other sources." That is exactly what sets the Post's reporting apart from the journalistic fiascoes in recent months which have resulted in embarrassment for both CBS News and Newsweek magazine.
The CBS case involved documents critical of George W. Bush, purported to have been written by his National Guard commanding officer. CBS had the documents vetted selectively by favorable handwriting experts who had no expertise with typefaces or typewriters. Before the story ran, CBS got no independent confirmation that such a document was produced by anyone in the National Guard unit.
Perhaps most damning was that several days after the story aired, CBS interviewed the commanding officer's former secretary, who said the documents weren't authentic. As the story began to unravel, CBS admitted the documents had come from a confidential source: a longtime critic of the president who had reason to attack him. In the end, CBS may have gotten the same story by using Woodward and Bernstein's method of simply tracking down everyone associated with the military unit and interviewing them. Yet, CBS reporters and producers never authenticated the documents nor did they track down sources concurrent with the questionable documents until after the story aired.
And, finally, not one of the experienced senior producers stood up and asked the obvious questions. The changes implemented at CBS News make it clear this was an abuse of the use of confidential sources.
In the second case, a brilliant investigative reporter from Newsweek wrote a story alleging U.S. military investigators had found that American interrogators at the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had flushed a copy of the Koran, the sacred Muslim text, down a toilet. The incident was alleged to have been noted in a military command report.
The most disturbing aspect of this story is not that it was based on confidential sources, but that the reporter apparently had never seen a copy of the report. What's more, the story was based on a single confidential source.
Where were the editors at Newsweek? Just because I or any other reporter have been right 100 times in the past doesn't mean we don't need someone questioning us every step of the way. How could anyone be sure a single source, no matter how reliable in the past, wasn't honestly mistaken?
Unlike Woodward and Bernstein (and Ben Bradlee, then the Post's executive editor), the reporters in these stories weren't using confidential sources to confirm information; they were using confidential sources as the only source of unconfirmed information. That's not about the use of confidential sources; it's about sloppy reporting, and should be a warning to all of us who have the hubris to believe that when we are working at the top of our game, we are immune from rookie mistakes.
John Ferrugia is an investigative reporter for KMGH-Channel 7 in Denver.
|
