All the News That's Fit to Regurgitate

I'm not that smart. I'm not that educated.

And I'm certainly not that connected.

So it never fails to perplex me when a news story begins making headlines years after I became aware of it. Can our nation's journalists really be less informed than me??

Case in point: You may have heard last week about a new scandal emerging over the 9/11 Commission. It was in all the newspapers and the network evening newscasts.

As it turns out, the Commission's executive director, Philip Zelikow, had close ties to the Bush administration, essentially serving as a secret White House mole to whitewash any accountability from the Final Report.

Incredible, right? Who knew?

A lot of people. For four years now.

Back in early 2004, as the Commission's work was really getting going, a group of 9/11 widows known as "the Jersey Girls" did some due diligence on Zelikow.

It didn't take any shadowy meetings in parking garages with nervous whistleblowers for them to learn that he had been a member of the Bush administration. All it took was a Google search.

And every library in America contained a copy of Zelikow's 1995 book Germany Unified and Europe Transformed, co-authored with Bush's national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. A search of Amazon.com was all that was needed there.

This was a commission investigating what went wrong with our national security, so the work of national security adviser Rice would obviously be one of their major focuses.

Was there a conflict of interest? A proverbial fox guarding the hen house? How naive does one have to be to answer, No? Of course there was.

And what did these charming, impassioned widows from New Jersey do with their discovery? They made a stink.

Demands to Chairman Tom Kean for Zelikow's removal. Press releases to ever journalist working the Commission "beat". Interviews in front of every video camera running in the hall outside the hearings.

The response? The silence would have blown out your ear drums.

So here we are, 2008, and the major media has uncovered this shocking "new" story. "Extra, extra. Read all about it. The Commission director's work was tainted by his relationship to the Bush Administration! Can you believe it??"

Had they made this discovery in '04, the resultant political pressure would likely have forced Kean to replace his executive director.

It's called Watchdog Journalism. It's the only kind of journalism that ever mattered.

Not "They report. You decide." Rather "They report, catch the scumbags in the act, and prevent them from doing the bad thing they almost got away with."

Today, we only have "After It's Too Late" Journalism. "Oh Well" Journalism.

I learned about Zelikow in 2004 from those fringe, unreliable folks on the Internet that the respectable journalists are always warning us about. Then, I made a movie.

Press For Truth is a documentary telling the story of the Jersey Girls. It made Zelikow's conflicts crystal clear when it premiered in 2006.

OK, it wasn't a hit. Certainly not financially. My pocketbook will attest to that.

But it got a few prominent reviews. Played a few theaters. A couple U.S. satellite channels. A million views on GoogleVideo.

Most importantly, our executive producer Kyle Hence made sure it got into the hands of the news media, plus every member of Congress. Barack Obama later confirmed he had watched it.

One day, I got a call from a producer at the most respected news program in the world. He had heard good things about Press For Truth from some of his friends and would be taking a look that night. He was considering doing a segment on the subject.

The voicemail he later left me said it all: "I don't see what the story is here."

The sad thing is, I believe him. He really didn't see a story. So why could I point to at least a dozen stories here?

As the reporting last week demonstrates, there was certainly a story in Zelikow's conflict of interest.

The "hot scoop" the major media has now uncovered, I was reporting back in 2006. Yet the importance didn't register, only a year ago, to a top news producer. So what has suddenly made it newsworthy?

"We don't have reporters in America. We have repeaters," the BBC's Greg Palast told us when we interviewed him for the movie. "They will literally take press releases and reprint them."

I would adjust that statement slightly to say we only have reporters in America. We have no investigators.

In other words, to modern journalists, it's a prosecutor's job to investigate. If said prosecutor finds enough evidence to file charges, then they can report the charges and later about the trial.

It's a commission or Congressional inquiry's job to investigate. When that body has released their findings, modern journalists can then report those findings.

They, too, can report allegations made by one public figure against another and then report the other side's retort. But whose job is it to hash out which side is correct and which side is lying? Apparently, an investigator. Certainly not a reporter.

So how did the Zelikow story finally break last week? New York Times journalist Philip Shenon wrote a book.

For those who want to be investigators, rather than reporters, book authorship (along with documentary filmmaking) is now the only place to turn. Much of the great journalism of the past decade has come not through our newspapers but through our paperbacks.

The problem with it is that it doesn't allow for real-time watchdogging. Books that come out years after the event can only serve to clarify the historical record, not "catch them in the act". Just more After It's Too Late Journalism.

The New York Times wouldn't print their own reporter's story until Shenon published it as a book. Look at the coverage closely, and you'll notice the story being reported isn't that Zelikow whitewashed our only independent 9/11 investigation. The story is that "Times reporter Shenon's new book features stunning allegations of whitewashing by Zelikow."

It's subtle. It's the difference between "reporting" and "investigating".

And it all comes down to whose ass is on the line. If the Times runs an original piece of investigative journalism, they suffer any consequences. If they wait until they can report on the findings of a book, then Shenon alone, and his publishers, have their necks on the chopping block.

As a brief aside, I noticed one of the recent articles about Shenon's book recounted an incident in which Henry Kissinger, having just been appointed chairman of the 9/11 Commission, was confronted by the Jersey Girls, who had learned that he had connections to the Bin Laden family. He ultimately resigned.

To most readers, this was a brand new story. Most interesting to me, it was almost a word-for-word transcript of a scene from our movie.

The Jersey Girls have seen Press For Truth many times now. What I suspect happened is that, when asked by Shenon about the Kissinger incident (for the 500th time), the widows simply regurgitated the scene nearly verbatim, perhaps with the same pauses and emphases.

A 2008 news article based on a book based on an interview whose phrasing was based on a documentary based on original interviews with the same interviewees back in 2005. How post-modern. How modern journalism.

The people in power know the press works this way. That's the reason they've been as bold as they have in recent years. Whose gonna stop 'em?

An investigator might, but a reporter never will.