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This chapter presents the results of the study of three large national newspapers with high circulation and big reputations for excellence. They are the New York Times (NYT or Times), the Washington Post (Post or WaPo), and the Wall Street Journal (WSJ or Journal). One might expect these high-achieving, well-funded news organizations to be the largest producers of watchdog journalism. This chapter considers that to be true, although not quite as much as one might think. Although the large papers were the highest producers of deep accountability reporting in the study group overall, they were surprisingly low producers during the early study years. And although their reputations were always high, a look back with hindsight shows that even the largest, strongest newspapers faced challenges in producing a steady stream of watchdog reporting during the time covered by this research.

This chapter looks at how two newspapers used unnamed sources in reports leading up to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. When Iraq's weapons of mass destruction failed to materialize, critics on the left and from within journalism chastised the New York Times and Washington Post for overly credulous, unnamed source-laden investigative reporting appearing on their front pages in the buildup to the war. The newspapers responded by revisiting their unnamed sourcing practices, but not until more than a year after the invasion. These self-assessments generated attention around two problems negatively impacting prewar coverage: the calculated press management strategies of the Bush administration, and the willingness of the competing newspapers to reproduce official statements anonymously. The complex problems marking the journalist-unnamed source exchange come to light through these efforts to attach blame both to the sources and the journalists.

In this chapter, the author talks about his family background and professional life as a journalist. He was born in Baltimore, Maryland, although he grew up in Youngstown, Ohio. His father, Simeon S. Booker, was General Secretary of the Colored Branch of the Baltimore YMCA while his mother, Reberta Waring Booker, belonged to a generation of nationally-known educators. His maternal grandfather, Dr. James Henry Nelson Waring, a medical doctor and a renowned educator, was involved in YMCA work during World War I. The author reflects on his time at Virginia Union University, his first experience in the South and his first adult view of real segregation; his successful application for the Nieman Fellowship; his stint at the Washington Post; and his joining the black-owned magazines Ebony and Jet.

Surrogate motherhood can be viewed as a classic social problem in its life history. Newspaper stories about surrogate parenting appeared only alternatingly in the early 1980s. The combined coverage provided by the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post totalled 15 articles in 1980, 19 in 1981, 8 in 1982, and 25 in 1983. National public opinions polls indicate the impact of the Baby M case in etching surrogacy indelibly onto the national consciousness. A Gallup poll conducted during the 1987 trial found that 93 percent of those surveyed had heard of the Baby M case; 79 percent of the respondents in a Roper poll claimed they had read or heard enough about the case to feel they knew what it was about. The rise and fall of surrogacy as a national social problem can be measured by more than the news coverage the issue received.

This chapter argues that American media have been complicit in the two-decades-long success of the denial of global warming. That the media have failed is a fact established by scholarly research. In 2004, researchers tested the premise that press coverage of global warming among national newspapers had misled the public. They concentrated on four leading national newspapers—the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal—searching databases for the phrase “global warming” in news stories appearing between 1980 and 2002. They concluded that “adherence to the norm of balanced reporting leads to informationally biased coverage of global warming. This bias, hidden behind the veil of journalistic balance, creates both discursive and real political space for the U.S. government to shirk responsibility and delay action regarding global warming.” The remainder of the chapter discusses how prestige newspapers give space to global warming denial; and other fields of science that suffer from media anti-science bias disguised as balance.

Chapter 1 analyzes news media coverage of President-elect Donald Trump’s visit to the Carrier furnace assembly plant in Indianapolis in December 2016. The plant became Trump’s symbolic beachhead in his “plan” to save jobs, only after the steelworkers there gained national visibility for efforts to prevent outsourcing of their jobs to Mexico. The news media, including CNN, Fox News, NBC, and the Washington Post, emphasized stories of grateful white men whose jobs had been saved by Trump, playing into his(and the conservative media’s) public relations narrative. A few news organizations continued to follow the story when Trump’s promises to save jobs at Carrier fell short by hundreds of workers and the local union president accused Trump of lying.

This essay examines how the Washington Post dealt with the tension between its duty to inform the public and its desire to protect national security when it received documents leaked by Edward Snowden. The essay describes the push-and-pull between the media and the government. Journalists try to advance the public’s right to know, particularly about potential government encroachment on civil liberties, and the government tries to defend the security of the country while respecting civil liberties. Reporters with a bias for public disclosure voluntarily withhold certain documents and details based on a careful consideration of harm, and intelligence officials with a bias toward secrecy do not fight every disclosure. The Post’s coverage of the Snowden leaks provides an opportunity to gain insights into how to navigate the inevitable conflicts between journalists’ desire to inform the public and the government’s desire to protect its secrets from foreign powers.

Chapter 4 focuses upon the institutional framework that Gordon Brown and his chief economic advisor, Ed Balls, put in place to make the Treasury the pilot agency of New Labour’s political economy. Insofar as the newly established Department for International Development (DFID) was concerned, this would ensure that it was the Chancellor, rather than the Secretary of State for International Development who would design New Labour’s international development policy. Yet the role that the Treasury played in ‘internationalising’ New Labour’s domestic political economy went beyond the conquest of other Whitehall departments. Brown took the macroeconomic blueprint – the ‘new economic architecture’ – that he had mapped out at home, to a number of key international financial actors abroad. This blueprint would create, in Brown’s mind, ‘a new Jerusalem’, a biblical phrase that the Chancellor used to describe the vision that he had of a world free from poverty, debt and disease. Embedding this vision into the orthodoxy of the ‘post-Washington Consensus’, Brown wanted to maintain not only a clear transmission of policy but also a distinct institutional ‘lock-in’, and a set of global governance arrangements that would provide the framework for the policies explored in the following three case study chapters.

The first of these case study chapters in chapter 5 draws parallels between the economic framework designed by Treasury officials at home and ‘the new international economic architecture’ that Gordon Brown was keen to pursue abroad. This would provide the basis for a new approach to debt relief to reform the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative. The new Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative would be conditional upon recipient countries meeting their obligations towards this new economic architecture, designed by Brown and based upon the principles of the ‘post-Washington Consensus’. This approach however, ran counter to many within civil society who viewed the issue of debt relief in ‘moral’ rather than simply ‘economic’ terms. In meeting with these different faith groups, NGOs and other debt activists, Brown certainly appeared sympathetic to such claims but the biblical language of forgiveness, justice and redemption that he used in speaking to these audiences differed from when he spoke in altogether more punitive terms to the international financial institutions. Here Brown spoke of the need for greater stability, demanded that indebted countries recognise their financial obligations, and urged greater surveillance by the International Monetary Fund of these countries national accounts.

This chapter discusses how the author's freelance writing for the Herald Tribune was affected when the New York Times bought out its fifty percent partner the Washington Post. It explains that his weekly column for twenty years was reduced to biweekly and his articles were being scrutinized for the “hook,” or their relevance to major contemporary events. The chapter discusses the author's interview with a Lebanese guitar player and Mustafa Zadeh, a jazz pianist from Azerbaijan.

On the day that the June 2006 issue of Wired magazine was released, the publication’s technology director searched the web for the word crowdsourcing, the subject of an article by contributing writer Jeff Howe. He took a screenshot of what he found, a total of three brief mentions, and forwarded it to the author, advising that Howe save it as a “historical document.” Howe didn’t have to wait long to see history in action. Within nine days Google was returning 182,000 hits. Nor was it a fleeting fad. Three years later the number had multiplied to 1,620,000, with regular appearances in the mainstream media, from the Washington Post to Fox News, where crowdsourcing was averaging two hundred new mentions each month. There’s a simple explanation for the neologism’s success. Howe had detected a trend and given it a word. The backstory, which Howe posted on his personal blog, crowdsourcing.com, supports this notion: In January Wired asked me to give a sort of “reporter’s notebook” style presentation to some executives. I had recently been looking into common threads behind the ways advertising agencies, TV networks and newspapers were leveraging user-generated content, and picked that for my topic. Later that day I called my editor at Wired, Mark Robinson, and told him I thought there was a broader story that other journalists were missing, ie, that users weren’t just making dumbpet-trick movies, but were poised to contribute in significant and measurable ways in a disparate array of industries. In what Howe characterizes as “a fit of back-and-forth wordplay,” he and Robinson came up with a term that riffed off the title of a business book popular at the time, James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds, while also suggesting opensource software and corporate outsourcing. When “The Rise of Crowdsourcing” was finally published six months later, the last of these three roots was explicitly evoked in the teaser: “Remember outsourcing? Sending jobs to India and China is so 2003. The new pool of cheap labor: everyday people using their spare cycles to create content, solve problems, even do corporate R & D.”

This introductory chapter discusses the shocking photographs from Abu Ghraib depicting American military personnel and their prisoners. Though the story broke on April 28, 2004, when CBS's 60 Minutes II aired the Abu Ghraib photographs, this was not the first time the public was made aware of torture after September 11. As early as December 26, 2002, the Washington Post ran a story about secret CIA detention centers, and on March 31, 2003, the Nation led with a cover story entitled “In Torture We Trust.” However, it was the Abu Ghraib photographs that finally caused the scandal, the congressional hearings, the calls for impeachment, and the widespread national debate on the ethics of torture. As powerful images, they also posed questions about violence, truth, and ideology that could not be easily answered.

In 1974 and 1975 two books (The Ultra Secret and Bodyguard of Lies) were published. These books alerted the general public for the first time to some of the secrets of Bletchley Park’s wartime activities, and caused a great sensation. These developments provided me with an excuse to enquire again about the possibility of persuading the British government to declassify the Colossus project. This second account describes how, following a partial such declassification, I received official permission in July 1975 to undertake and publish the results of a detailed investigation into the work of the project. As a consequence, at the 1976 Los Alamos Conference on the History of Computing I was able to describe in some detail, for the first time, how Tommy Flowers led the work at the Post Office Dollis Hill Research Station on the construction of a series of special-purpose electronic computers for Bletchley Park, and to discuss how these fitted into the overall history of the development of the modern electronic computer. The present chapter describes the course of this further investigation. In the spring of 1974 the official ban on any reference to Ultra, a code name for information obtained at Bletchley Park from decrypted German message traffic, was relaxed somewhat, and Frederick Winterbotham’s book The Ultra Secret was published. Described as the ‘story of how, during World War II, the highest form of intelligence, obtained from the “breaking” of the supposedly “unbreakable” German machine cyphers, was “processed” and distributed with complete security to President Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and all the principal Chiefs of Staff and commanders in the field throughout the war’, this book caused a sensation, and brought Bletchley Park, the Enigma cipher machine, and the impact on the war of the breaking of wartime Enigma traffic, to the general public’s attention in a big way. The book’s single reference to computers came in the statement:… It is no longer a secret that the backroom boys of Bletchley used the new science of electronics to help them . . . I am not of the computer age nor do I attempt to understand them, but early in 1940 I was ushered with great solemnity into the shrine where stood a bronze coloured face, like some Eastern Goddess who was destined to become the oracle of Bletchley.

Shilts finally addresses his addiction to alcohol and marijuana, including in-patient rehabilitation and Alcoholics Anonymous. Shilts grapples with the death of his friend Gary Walsh from AIDS, and the unexpected death of his mother. Shilts offers a first-person account of physical abuse he suffered as a child for an anthology edited by actor Suzanne Somers. Shilts is passed over for inclusion in the documentary version on the life of Harvey Milk, while rights sold to his Milk bio languish and a film is never produced.

The big news in the Twitterverse on October 19, 2009, was the sighting of the pentagigatweet. Sent by an out-of-work dotcom executive named Robin Sloan, the six-character text message, a bit of banter between friends, garnered more attention than the war in Afghanistan or the swine flu pandemic. “Oh lord,” it read. The message was sent at 10:28 a.m. PST. By 3:47 p.m. a CNET news story proclaimed, “Twitter hits 5 billion tweets,” quoting Sloan’s two-word contribution to telecommunications history, and noting that he’d geekily dubbed it the pentagigatweet. The following day newspapers around the world, from the Telegraph in England to Il Messagero in Italy, had picked up the story, yet the most extensive coverage was on Twitter itself, where nearly 30 percent of the estimated 25 million daily messages referenced the benchmark. The numbers were impressive. But more remarkable than the level of popularity achieved in the mere thirty-eight months since the microblogging service launched in 2006 was the degree to which those who used it felt responsible for building it. The megatweeting greeting the pentagigatweet was a sort of collective, networked navel-gazing. In the days following the five billionth text message Twitter was atwitter with self-congratulation. That sense of personal investment, essential to Twitter’s growth, was entirely by design. As Jack Dorsey explained in an interview with the Los Angeles Times about the company he cofounded, “The concept is so simple and so open-ended that people can make of it whatever they wish.” Dorsey based the service on his experience writing dispatch software and his insight that the best way to observe a city in real time was to monitor the dispatches coming from couriers and taxis and ambulances. Twitter was created to put that experience in the hands of ordinary citizens, literally, by asking people to periodically send in text messages by mobile phone answering the question “What are you doing?” All participants would be able to follow the stream of responses. In other words, Twitter was formulated as a sort of relay, utterly dependent on the public for content.

At the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, an archivist named Herb Pankratz specializes in queries about the thirtyfourth president’s exopolitics. Pankratz assumed this responsibility because of his expertise in transportation. Since exopolitics involves diplomacy with visitors from other planets, his colleagues deemed him the best qualified person on staff to field questions, of which there are many, since Ike is alleged to be the first president to have negotiated directly with aliens. Neither Pankratz nor anyone else at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library is able to confirm these historic events. They tell researchers that the president’s presumed first meeting with extraterrestrials, on the evening of February 20, 1954, was in fact a dental appointment. They inform people that Eisenhower’s emergency departure from the Smoking Tree Ranch, where he was vacationing, was on account of a chipped porcelain cap on his upper right incisor, broken when he bit down on a chicken bone, not a secret meeting at Edwards Air Force Base with aliens requesting that he end America’s nuclear weapons program in order to protect the space-time continuum. The archivists have no record of the words with which Ike rebuffed his celestial guests without causing an intergalactic diplomatic rift, nor of the accord he allegedly reached with a different alien race later that year, allowing them to borrow cows and humans for purposes of medical examination, provided that they return the specimens unharmed. The lack of documentation has not been taken as want of evidence by organizations such as the Exopolitics Institute. On the contrary the information gap has only further convinced them of a governmental cover-up, extending to the present day, a “truth embargo” involving not only Secretary of State Hillary Clinton but also the United Nations. As a conspiracy theory exopolitics is barely worthy of a B movie. Even without asking how these extraterrestrial ambassadors have avoided public exposure for over half a century, one might legitimately wonder why the world’s governments have so persistently hidden them, and why beings of allegedly superior intelligence have proven so complacent.