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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.

This chapter details how, in July of 1970, the author received a letter from Washington Post foreign editor John Anderson inviting him to Washington for interviews and a tryout at the newspaper's expense. Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee had been transforming the Post from a second-tier newspaper into a rival to the New York Times, and had been attracting “great talent” by paying them good salaries and giving them a lot of editorial freedom. The author worked at his tryout tasks for three days, mostly shaping wire service and other copy from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The job offer arrived in late September of 1970. The chapter then looks at the author's first few days at the Washington Post, where he was assigned to the foreign desk and given responsibility for the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and other parts of the Communist world.

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.

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.

This chapter describes how the Washington Post granted the author a year's sabbatical from the summer of 1976 to write a book about Yugoslavia. He also had a fellowship from the Wilson Center. The author's goal with his book, The Yugoslavs, was to make sense of the country where he was born. He chose to write in a hopeful spirit, to attribute Yugoslavia's ills to the Communist dictatorship that had ruined his family's life. The author then returned to the Post in the summer of 1977, going back to his job at the foreign desk, writing stories and analysis from Washington, particularly on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. During this time, the Post had embraced post-Watergate success and celebrity. The Yugoslavs, published in 1978, garnered positive reviews, including a front-page review in the New York Review of Books.

This chapter highlights the author's return to Moscow as the Washington Post's correspondent. The mood in Moscow had changed; the seventy-four-year-old Leonid Brezhnev, in power for seventeen years, was surrounded by an aging leadership that valued stability and its privileged way of life. Though the Kremlin was still spouting the same rhetoric about Communism marching toward a bright future, there was an air of disillusion and resignation all over Moscow. As the severe Moscow winter of 1981–82 took hold, the weather matched a deepening chill in US–Soviet relations. The Kremlin lambasted Ronald Reagan for “a campaign of hatred” against the Soviet Union and for wanting to “hurl the world back to the dark ages of the Cold War.” The chapter then considers how the author's relationship with the US embassy in Moscow deteriorated as his analysis began often to diverge from that of the embassy and the CIA.

This chapter discusses the author's experience covering Russia's new tsar after the first handover of power in the Soviet Union since 1964. As the sole correspondent for the Washington Post in Moscow, the author felt under even more pressure. Yuri Andropov admitted that the Soviet economy had failed to meet its targets for the past two years, blamed “inertia” and “adherence to old ways,” and characterized many Communist Party objectives as containing “elements of separation from reality.” Andropov also oversaw a limited debate on economic reforms and talked about greater discipline and material incentives for better performance. The author's stories detailed how Andropov set about replacing Leonid Brezhnev's bloated secretariat with aides from the KGB, moved KGB personnel into political jobs, and sent many of the old guard into retirement. The main obstacle was that although Andropov appeared to have consolidated his personal authority with the support of the military and the KGB, he had yet to gain control over the party bureaucracy and the approximately eighteen million Communist Party members accustomed to privileges that they did not want to lose.

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.

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 chapter details how, though the author loved the Washington Post and could not imagine quitting, his lack of enthusiasm for covering intelligence, the FBI investigation, and the Post's reaction had exhausted him and left him dispirited. Thus, he took a job offer from U.S. News & World Report, when it decided to reopen its Beijing bureau. Though the author had long disliked the group journalism of newsmagazines, this was not his first thought. He immediately saw it as a possible way to be with Louise Branson in China much sooner. The chapter then looks at how the author witnessed the start of the events leading up to the Tiananmen Square uprising and massacre. It all started on April 15, 1989, when the Chinese Politburo member Hu Yaobang died at age seventy-three. With his death, Hu became a symbol of a yearning for Gorbachev-style reforms in China.

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.

This chapter addresses how the author was assigned to the intelligence beat. He protested, pointing out that it would be hard to cultivate sources within an intelligence community that had been embarrassed by his Andropov scoop and by his reporting from the Soviet Union. However, Ben Bradlee insisted on giving him the position. In July of 1986, with his book now finished and with him scheduled to return to the Washington Post, the author proposed another story that would help him see more of Louise Branson and delay his start on the intelligence beat. It involved Kurt Waldheim, the former UN secretary general who was then president of Austria. Rumor had it that he had served with Nazi forces in Yugoslavia during World War II and had been accused of war crimes by Tito's government. The 1947 indictment was rumored to be stored in the basement of the UN building in Manhattan.

This chapter highlights the author's legal battle against Time magazine. Throughout 1993, he was frustrated by delay after delay as it became clear that Time's strategy was to defer proceedings indefinitely, to wear him down and drain not only his resources but his spirit. Another obstacle he encountered was the Washington Post itself. Bob Kaiser, the managing editor, had told the author that the Post would not help him financially if he proceeded to sue Time. When he decided to sue in London, Kaiser said the paper opposed it as a matter of principle because the paper did not agree with British libel laws. Because of this, Washington Post staff were barred from getting involved, which meant that no one could testify on the author's behalf. Nevertheless, the author began to collect witness depositions. Later, the court required discovery, an exchange of information and documents that had been subpoenaed. This revealed that the only outside witnesses to support Time were two former employees of the CIA: Robert Gates and Colin R. Thompson. Finally, Time proposed a settlement that included an apology; the author reluctantly accepted even though he wanted to expose Time's brand of journalism.

This epilogue reflects on the author's biggest regret: that he sacrificed his first wife and his son to his ambition. He also regrets subjecting his second wife, Louise Branson, to decades of standing by him as he insisted on quitting the Washington Post, as he lost his way as a journalist, fought the Time allegations and risked their financial ruin, and descended into lengthy bouts of depression. Nevertheless, he considers himself one of the luckiest men in the world to have reported for a great newspaper with a self-confident editor who embodied everything he felt journalism meant: being bold, speaking truth to power, telling it like it is. Today, with the plethora of media outlets and with social media liberally spewing out rumors, opinions, and propaganda that are not edited or fact checked, the author is reminded of the distortions of the Soviet propaganda machine or the wild ravings in the Yugoslav media before that country's collapse. Many news outlets, including the Post and the New York Times, continue to adhere to good journalistic principles, but with so much less influence in today's fractured society.

This prologue details how the author, a journalist, received a phone call from Bob Kaiser, the new managing editor of the Washington Post. Kaiser announced that Time magazine was preparing a story for the 1992 Christmas issue suggesting the author had become a Soviet agent while serving as the Post's bureau chief in Moscow. The author was on vacation in London after two years of reporting and writing about the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia. He then received another phone call, this time from former Post editor Ben Bradlee, who offered encouragement and his hunch that the CIA was behind the story. The author's theory is that it might be retribution for the scoop that had embarrassed the top CIA brass, the story the author had filed from Moscow on February 10, 1984, indicating that Soviet leader Yuri Andropov might have died.

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.