It might be possible for a non-journalist looking at proposed new Pentagon rules for beat reporters to wonder why they are controversial. How is it a problem to insist that Pentagon reporters report only what is officially released by the Pentagon? Isn’t that what a Pentagon reporter does?
But good beat reporters aren’t stenographers. They are professional journalists, protected by the First Amendment, whose job it is to watch the government on behalf of the public. They are not there merely to repeat what government officials say.
A Pentagon memo released last month declared that reporters must sign a contract agreeing that department information must be “approved for public release by an appropriate authorizing official before it is released, even if it unclassified.” Those who refuse to sign the form, or do so and then violate the terms, could lose their access to the Pentagon and all U.S. military bases. And reporters have been told their credentials will be revoked if they don’t sign the form.
I reached out to a veteran beat reporter and former colleague to help explain why it is crucial that the government not be allowed to control the flow of information about how taxpayer dollars are spent.
WBEZ Chicago political reporter Dave McKinney has spent most of his 40-year career covering Illinois government leaders. And he has documented corruption on both sides of the aisle, from former Republican Gov. George Ryan to former Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich to former Illinois House Speaker Mike Madigan, a Democrat. All were convicted of corruption.
McKinney said reporters cannot fulfill the role of government watchdogs if they submit to government control.
“I think the people inside the Pentagon and the press corps who understand what the basic tenets of journalism are really in a bind right now, because they answer to the public,” McKinney said. “What this policy seems to be depriving the public of is an independent information source about one of the biggest areas of expenditure in our government.”
He said that beat reporters, who devote all their efforts to covering one thing, are uniquely qualified to vet information that comes their way from different sources.
“Beat reporters are like sponges,” he said. “They absorb all of this information about the entity that they cover.”
When a government official or agency falls short, or worse, it is often sources deep inside the bureaucracy who help uncover it. And it is seasoned beat reporters who can best uncover and properly vet these sources, ensuring that whistleblower information is accurate and documented, McKinney said.
“Over multiple investigations, there have been people I talked to who were either cooperating with the government or had inside knowledge about a public office holder and their behavior or the behavior of people around them,” he said. “Being able to verify (information) through other sources enables us to pull back the curtain on the behavior of an elected official, and that’s just a fundamental tenet of American democracy that we we want to have. We want to have governments that are strong enough to endure the level of scrutiny that good journalists give.”
One of the many scandals McKinney covered was a series of deaths at an Illinois-run veterans’ home. The facility was so old that problems with plumbing were causing residents to contract Legionnaire’s Disease, some of them fatally. State officials did not tell family members about the risks, not wanting to “cause a panic,” McKinney said.
“My point bringing this up is that the state of Illinois that ran this home had basically assured everyone there was a safe place, and they continued to say that it was a safe place, even as people were dying,” McKinney said.
“You can imagine in a scenario where, from a political standpoint, the person in charge of that Veterans Home of the State of Illinois didn’t want to have to take account for the blunders that happened there, the fatal blunders, right?” he said. “But that’s what journalism does. Journalism gets at the root causes of things that happen. And we explain to the public about what happened here, why it happened, what can be done in a case of a tragedy like this to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.”
Although McKinney has never covered the Pentagon, he imagined the same thing happening with, say, a flawed weapons system.
“You can imagine if you’re a reporter there and you pick up details about a particular kind of aircraft where there are a lot of problems, where there are numerous crashes and pilots are dying,” he said. “You wouldn’t be able to critically go look at that, potentially.”
Government officials and defense contractors might be inclined to sweep mistakes like this under a rug, to protect their jobs or profits.
“If you don’t have the ability to critically look at things like that, and obtain data, and analyze the data in an upfront, honest way … that’s not what journalism is.”
McKinney said his closest experience with something like the proposed new Pentagon press corps rules happened when he accompanied the governor of Illinois on a trade mission to Cuba.
“One of the things that we had to do there was obtain a license from the Cuban government in order to practice journalism there,” he said. “That is a foreign thing. We don’t have to get a license to do journalism in America, right? And so when we get restrictions about freedom of the press and freedom of speech, we are entering a realm that is comparable to what people in communist countries and dictatorships have to deal with.”
John Carpenter is a former newspaper journalist, and has been a full-time beat reporter in a number of areas, from crime and courts to city halls and school boards.
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