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  Not wanting to contemplate fecal soup for weeks on end, I wasn’t even tempted to write about this story. But I did take notice when it ran on 60 Minutes. In those days of pre-cable TV, 60 Minutes was by far the most influential news program in the United States. It could make you a star, or ruin your life, in a single Sunday evening episode. The broadcast of March 29, 1987, featured correspondent Diane Sawyer narrating as follows:

  “Tomorrow morning, if you buy a chicken at any supermarket, the chances are better than one in three that the chicken you pick out will be carrying bacteria called salmonella, which this year will kill hundreds of people and cause thousands more to come down with a kind of flu…. And what is the USDA doing about it? Well, we went to some of USDA’s own employees to find out, and they told us that some chicken producers regularly violate health standards and that the USDA looks the other way.”

  The whistle-blower who led GAP into this investigation was Dr. Carl Telleen. A USDA employee since 1960, Telleen grew concerned about the potential spread of salmonella after USDA relaxed regulation of chicken processing in 1978. The industry had wanted permission to use new technology to remove chickens’ innards, even though the new technology meant that carcasses still contaminated with fecal matter would merely be dunked in chlorinated water afterwards, not properly cleaned. When Telleen kept objecting to this practice, his superiors transferred him from Kansas to Washington, DC. Telleen, 65, suspected that the transfer was a veiled attempt to induce him to retire. Instead, he used his new posting in the nation’s capital to spread his warning, à la Paul Revere, that salmonella was coming, salmonella was coming, unless the USDA changed course.

  GAP and Telleen’s revelations—especially once amplified by 60 Minutes—led to wholesales changes in how Americans purchased and prepared chicken as well as substantial reforms in industry practices and government’s regulation of same. Per usual, GAP collaborated with public interest groups and a range of news media outlets as part of its “strategic legal campaign.” The response of workers in both the poultry industry and the USDA illustrated another emerging truth about GAP’s mode of activism: the more whistle-blowers it publicized, the more whistle-blowers came forward. This virtuous circle eventually led GAP to represent some six hundred whistle-blowers in the poultry sector, enough to achieve a sizable public effect.

  “We succeeded in getting several corrupt USDA managers forced out of their jobs,” Devine later recalled. “That led to another wave of whistle-blowers. We got another bunch of plants shut down on the West Coast because there was so much filth. That led to more whistle-blowers in the Midwest who started to read about us through the trade journals. Then we had a piece on 60 Minutes in the spring of 1987 and repeated that summer. That resulted in our doubling the number of statements from inspectors and workers…. These people are willing to take the risks, to stick their necks out to get this problem solved.”

  America’s Palace Court Press

  Years later, I worked with GAP whistle-blowers on one of the biggest journalist scoops of my career. Like Snowden and Drake’s later exposés, this scoop also revolved around the 9/11 tragedy—specifically, the US government’s shocking lack of preparedness against terrorist attacks. The scoop also schooled me on what I would come to recognize as a pattern: most whistle-blowers first try to raise their concerns through official channels; they speak out publicly only after the system fails to respond, and then they face savage retaliation from that very system. “Whistle-blowers don’t start out as dissidents,” says Devine. “Usually, they are the ones who believe most strongly in the institution where they work. That’s why they speak out—to help the institution live up to its mission. It’s the indifference and retaliation from management many whistle-blowers face that can turn them into dissidents.”

  My scoop was published in Vanity Fair, in part because some of the stories told by GAP’s whistle-blowers were not just frightening but freighted with a black humor that was undeniably entertaining.

  For six years prior to 9/11, “red teams” of fake terrorists working for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) had tested US airport security by trying to sneak bombs and weapons onto commercial airline flights. According to Bogdan Dzakovic, a former security specialist on the FAA Red Team from 1995 to 2001, the fake terrorists succeeded more than eight times out of ten. Some of the worst security performances were at Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington, DC, an airport often used by members of Congress and other senior government officials; security at Reagan National was breached 85 percent of the time during inspections in 1998.

  One time, Dzakovic recalled, he and his colleagues “decided to push through an alarmed door and then wait around to get caught so we could see how the security system reacted.” The Red Team agents took their positions, Dzakovic forced the door open, and the alarm started ringing. Thirty seconds passed, then a full minute. No airport security arrived. The alarm kept blaring as passengers strolled past. After fifteen minutes, the Red Team agents gave up in disgust.

  Dzakovic and other Red Team members repeatedly warned their superiors that the United States was a sitting duck for terrorist attacks. But FAA officials buried the Red Team’s reports, because, Dzakovic charged, the FAA was concerned more about keeping airplanes flying than about ensuring real security.

  “The only thing that surprised me about September 11 was that it didn’t happen sooner,” Dzakovic told me. “The civilian-aviation security system was and remains basically an expensive façade. It makes the flying public think it’s being protected—you know, all the theater of standing in line at airports and taking off your shoes—but it doesn’t do much to deter serious terrorists.”

  Meanwhile, fake terrorists were also attacking the Los Alamos National Laboratory and other US nuclear weapons facilities. Located in the mountains of New Mexico, Los Alamos was the government’s main facility for processing plutonium, the key ingredient in nuclear weapons. Rich Levernier, a war games specialist at the Department of Energy (which oversees the nuclear weapons program) was tasked with testing the facilities’ preparedness against terrorist attacks.

  Once a year, Levernier’s mock-terrorist squads (made up of US military commandos) would assault Los Alamos. Neither side in these engagements shot real ammunition; harmless laser weapons were used. Nevertheless, the exercises were deadly serious. Levernier’s attackers were ordered to penetrate the facility, capture its plutonium, and escape; the facility’s security forces were expected to repel the mock attackers. “In more than 50 percent of our tests,” Levernier told me, “we got in, captured the plutonium, got out again, and in some cases didn’t fire a shot, because we didn’t encounter any guards.” To add insult to injury, in one war game Levernier’s forces took the captured plutonium away in a Home Depot shopping cart.

  This, despite the fact the Los Alamos security forces were told months in advance exactly what day the “terrorists” were coming.

  Vanity Fair published my exposé in November 2003, a turn of events that illustrates another important but rarely acknowledged aspect of whistle-blowing in the United States: the difficulty of getting the nation’s most powerful news organizations to publish or broadcast information that the government or other powerful interests do not want publicized.

  Before I approached Vanity Fair, my article was rejected by two other top national magazines. Indeed, the article was spiked by the New York Times Sunday Magazine, even though the magazine’s editors had approved my initial proposal to do the story and even flew me to Los Alamos to investigate the whistle-blowers’ allegations firsthand. The Times magazine killed my article at the last minute, after I’d returned from Los Alamos, submitted my manuscript, and my immediate editor and I had revised it to where we were happy with it. That editor and I were waiting to hear whether the piece was going into the following week’s issue or a future one when he emailed to say that the editor-in-chief had decided the story “didn’t work.” I was never told the reason, despite requesting an ex
planation.

  Of course stories get killed all the time, sometimes for defensible reasons. But the fact that my article later appeared in Vanity Fair—as competitive a place to publish as then existed in the US news media—suggests that something else may have been to blame.

  I believe that this episode illustrates another point of Snowden’s: in the United States, the supposedly free, independent, “liberal” press is often none of those things. The New York Times and other large news organizations are more linked with the government than not—more inclined to share, or at least grant the benefit of the doubt to, the worldview and policies of top government officials than to challenge them.

  I don’t make this argument on the basis of hearsay or personal pique. In the 1980s, I interviewed 175 White House and news media officials for my book, On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency, and I have freelanced for mainstream media organizations and closely observed their behavior throughout my career. I wish to emphasize that there are many honorable journalists working inside the mainstream media. But the institution as a whole follows certain rules—rules that generally are unwritten but clearly communicated by editors’ decisions about which stories and journalistic approaches get published and prioritized and which do not.

  The mainstream news media’s unspoken definition of responsible coverage of the government begins with this rule of thumb: quote a government official whenever possible. It further advises, in the name of balance, give equal time to both major parties. Obviously, this latter directive has become less true for overtly partisan outlets such as Fox on the right and MSNBC on the left, but the larger point holds. Paul Krugman, the Princeton University economics professor who doubles as a New York Times columnist, has repeatedly skewered the media’s insistence on bipartisan balance and holding both political parties equally to blame, even as the facts of a given news story recommend no such “balanced” approach.

  Further rules of thumb: downplay or ignore information and points of view that come from outside the centers of political and economic power. Rely all but exclusively on the opposition party to provide any critical comment of the government; if the opposition party largely agrees with the government on the matter at hand, so will most mainstream news coverage. Thus mainstream coverage largely reflects how the dominant sectors of the Democratic and Republican parties in Washington define a given issue, no matter how much this framing might contradict verifiable facts or common sense.

  This approach to journalism skews mainstream media coverage in at least two ways: First, the coverage of any president is only as critical as the opposition party chooses to be; and second, coverage of specific issues reflects not so much reality as what the two major political parties say is reality. Thus both Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, since they faced opposition parties that were rarely aggressive, faced relatively little negative coverage. By contrast, George H. W. Bush and especially Bill Clinton and Barack Obama encountered much tougher coverage thanks to the harsh, relentless criticism they faced from the opposition parties during their administrations.

  As for the coverage of specific issues, David Hoffman, a White House correspondent for the Washington Post, pointed to Reagan’s doubling of the military budget—and the Democrats’ refusal to object—as “the perfect example” of how the press accepts the Washington establishment’s spectrum of debate rather than presenting independent analysis. “We fill the paper with stories on the margin of issues, not sweeping overviews,” Hoffman told me. “If you went through the paper and stamped every story whether it was 2 degrees, 5 degrees or 360 degrees [off the center of the debate], you would see a lot of 2 degree stories.”

  In the Reagan years, this tendency of the mainstream media to act as a stenographer to power meant that Reagan’s characterization of Central American death squads as “freedom fighters” went largely unchallenged, just as President Bill Clinton’s subsequent claims that financial deregulation was a win for bankers and consumers alike escaped critical scrutiny. This same tendency helped the Bush-Cheney administration drive the nation to attack Iraq in the name of eliminating “weapons of mass destruction” that turned out not to exist (just as many outside critics alleged). Likewise, it shielded President Obama (and the Congress) from sustained criticism of the bailout of Wall Street bankers but not of the millions of average homeowners the bankers damaged following the 2008 financial crash.

  In short, mainstream US news organizations tend to function like a palace court press. As key members of the palace court society known as official Washington, their coverage reflects the points of view held by the powers that be instead of providing an independent picture. To the rest of us, the sky may be blue and the grass green, but unless powerful figures within the palace court affirm it, you won’t hear that from the Washington press corps.

  “Hiding That Story Changed History”

  But isn’t the New York Times an exception, given that it published the Pentagon Papers? And the first authoritative account of the Bush-Cheney administration’s warrantless surveillance programs? And any number of other stories that challenge Washington policies?

  Perhaps, but it is only a partial exception. If you plumb the history of the New York Times and the centers of political power, you find all too often a cozy relationship. The picture that emerges is one of great hesitance if not reluctance on the part of senior Times executives to challenge what the president of the United States and top aides claim is true. Ellsberg relates this story in his memoir, Secrets, making clear that while the newspaper did the journalistically correct thing in the end—defying Nixon’s threats and publishing the Pentagon Papers—it was a close call.

  For his part, Snowden was appalled by the backstory to the Times December 2005 article on warrantless surveillance; he later cited it as a primary reason why he favored Poitras and Greenwald rather than the Times with the documents he secreted out of the NSA. Snowden knew that the Times reporters who uncovered that December 2005 story, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, had in fact completed their article and submitted it to their editors in autumn 2004—weeks before Bush’s 2004 bid for re-election and more than a year before the editors at last published it. Furthermore, Times editors ran the piece in December 2005 only after Risen called their bluff by saying that he was going to break the scoop himself in his forthcoming book, State of War.

  “Hiding that story changed history,” Snowden told Greenwald. Correctly or not, Snowden believed that if the Times had published the Risen-Lichtblau article before the 2004 election, its revelations about Bush and Cheney’s warrantless surveillance could have sparked enough public displeasure to perhaps cost the president and vice president the election. Thus Snowden decided to pass the NSA documents to two independent journalists rather than to the most powerful newspaper in the world. In effect, Snowden concluded that the New York Times of 2013 was no longer the Times that had published the Pentagon Papers in 1971 and could not be trusted to do justice to the story Snowden was risking his life to expose.

  A news outlet as powerful as the Times can change history not only by hiding stories but also by mistakenly hyping them. One of the most shameful episodes centered on the Times’ relentless championing of claims that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein possessed “weapons of mass destruction” and therefore had to be overthrown before he could use them. Times reporter Judith Miller wrote many of these stories, relying on information provided by Ahmad Chalabi and other Iraqi exiles eager for Hussein’s ouster, even as she ignored or disparaged copious evidence to the contrary.

  Much of Miller’s published information was inaccurate, as the Times finally admitted in an Editor’s Note in 2004. By then, however, the colossal damage had been done. The United States was mired in a war that still is creating chaos and casualties in the region. During the tension-filled run-up to the disastrous invasion of Iraq, Miller’s bogus stories—appearing on the front page of America’s most influential newspaper—helped sway elite opinion, shape the coverage provided by t
he rest of the media, and build the case for war. Notwithstanding their disdain for the supposedly liberal press, Bush-Cheney administration officials frequently cited the Times’ articles to bolster their arguments for invading Iraq. After all, if even “liberals” were saying Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, it had to be true, right?

  Nor was the Times alone in its deference to government power, in Snowden’s view. “After 9/11,” he said, “many of the most important news outlets in America abdicated their role as a check to power—the journalistic responsibility to challenge the excesses of government—for fear of being seen as unpatriotic and punished in the market during a period of heightened nationalism.”

  It made sense, then, that Snowden’s disclosures appeared first in a British, rather than an American, news outlet. Further, it made sense that the Guardian was the outlet in question, for the newspaper had a long, distinguished history of aggressively challenging the powers that be in many spheres. And as a newspaper of the left, the Guardian was comfortable criticizing not only the administration of right-wingers George W. Bush and Dick Cheney but also that of center-leftist Barack Obama.

  There are, however, exceptions to the American media’s usual posture of deference, which is how my article on GAP’s nuclear and airline security whistle-blowers eventually came to appear in Vanity Fair. Graydon Carter, the magazine’s editor, was by no means cavalier about the terrorist threat; he and his family lived only a few blocks from the former site of the World Trade Center. As a responsible editor should, he had my article vetted by outside experts. And while Carter’s Vanity Fair devoted most of its pages to celebrating the rich and famous, he was one of the few senior mainstream editors who did not buckle beneath the intimidating political climate fostered by the Bush-Cheney administration in the wake of 9/11. Once Carter was satisfied that my article did not unwittingly provide information useful to terrorists, he didn’t hesitate; he published.