Jack Shafer

Does the Internet make you anxious? Do you lie awake nights worrying that Russian hackers are turning your children into sex slaves? Have you had the feeling that your iPhone is spying on you?

You’re not alone, Adam Thierer of George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, would have you know. In a working paper he posted on the Web yesterday titled “Technopanics, Threat Inflation, and the Danger of an Information Technology Precautionary Principle,” Thierer outlines the dread that many have for the Web. The fears are real, of course. People do get robbed on the Web. Individuals have lost their privacy on the Web. Companies and governments have been hacked by thieves and foreign agents.

But surveying the hacks and rip-offs, Thierer finds that for reasons both psychological and political, the severity of most intrusions has been exaggerated. Attributing the overreactions to “moral panics” linked to new technology (“technopanics”), he writes convincingly that “there is no evidence that the Internet is leading to greater problems for society than previous technologies did.” That’s not to say that you’ve got no right to be flipped out about apps pinching your address book or your photos without your express permission, or about Facebook accessing your phone’s text messages without explicitly saying so, or about Google using a browser flaw to bypass your privacy settings, or about Google and 104 other companies tracking you as you pad around the Web.

You have every right to be flipped out, Thierer counsels. Yet the best way to deal with these nightmares is not with Federal Trade Commission rules or new legislation but “societal learning, experimentation, resiliency, and coping strategies,” he writes.

The beating heart of Thierer’s paper is the belief — which I endorse — that societies tend to twist themselves into moral panics when confronted with something new or unrecognized that they don’t understand. “A moral panic occurs when a segment of society believes that the behavior or moral choices of others within that society poses a significant risk to the society as a whole,” is how one academic quoted by Thierer defines it. The current panics over the Web are just the latest manifestation. Thierer continues:

This pattern has played out for dime novels, comic books, movies, rock-and-roll music, video games, and other types of media or media platforms. While protection of youth is typically a motivating factor, some moral panics and technopanics transcend traditional ‘it’s-for-the-children’ rationales for information control. The perceived threat may be to other segments of society or involve other values that are supposedly under threat, such as privacy or security.

The standard reaction to moral panics — and technopanics — by pundits, legislators, activists, and others is for society to “do something” to eliminate or regulate the new menace. The calls to “do something” invariably inflate the dangers posed by a new social wrinkle or technological innovation. The recording industry got blackmailed in 1985 into sticking warning labels on their product. Hollywood dodged the threat of government censorship with its movie-rating system in 1968. The V-chip, which nobody uses, got installed on all new TVs to protect the kiddies from smut and violence. The broadcast TV networks get bullied into creating “family-friendly” programming in the early evening in the mid-1970s.

The Thierer paper is especially good on how “threat inflation” is used to blow genuine problems like hacking out of proportion, as allusions are made to “Digital Pearl Harbors,” “cyber Katrinas,” and “cyber 9/11s” lurking just around the corner. The best recent example of threat inflation is the overreaction to the failure of a water pump in the Midwest that the Washington Post described thusly in a headline: “Foreign hackers targeted U.S. water plant in apparent malicious cyber attack, expert says.” As it turns out, the “expert” was wrong. As it turned out, the pump wasn’t manipulated by a Russian cyber-attacker. It failed by itself and only looked like a Russian attack because a water plant contractor was logging onto the plant’s system to check it while traveling in Russia.

Thierer’s paper documents and shoots down other such Web-era technopanics: The fears that MySpace and Facebook were becoming “predator’s playgrounds”; that 85.5 percent of online images were pornographic; that RFID technologies were designed to track and control the masses; that Rupert Murdoch’s takeover of DirecTV would give him dictatorial programming power over cable companies (instead, Murdoch quickly sold DirecTV after pursuing it for years).

We fear the new for sound psychological reasons: Until you understand it adequately, something new could be a genuine danger. Inflating the threat posed by something new based on anecdotal evidence isn’t completely irrational: There’s probably no way the Web can hurt you or your children if you ban it from your life.

But banishment is not how we generally handle risk. We accept the small chance that we’ll be injured or killed in a car accident, or a plane flight, or crossing an intersection on foot without becoming hysterical about cars, planes, or walking. When we’re at our best — when the press and TV aren’t scaremongering us with hysterical coverage, when self-serving advocacy groups and threatened businesses aren’t hyping the problems into menaces — we’re able to make incremental adjustments to whatever new potential perils are posed by media. Children approach new media with optimism, their elders with pessimism, forgetting that they, too, were optimistic about new media when they were young.

I shortchange Thierer’s insights with this summary. He’s no Pangloss about new media and new technology, and is probably as worried as the next guy about some hacker draining his bank account. Yet he’s right when he says that more damage can be done by prematurely straitjacketing new media with complex new laws and regulations. If smartphone owners want to share their address books and photos with app makers in exchange for a free service, there’s no reason laws and regulations can’t allow them to make that deal without a lot of bother.

Because Thierer’s paper is so good, I’ll let him have the last, unpanicked word. “Transparency and disclosure are … the superior options for most online safety and privacy concerns,” he writes. “To the extent regulatory policies are deemed necessary, they should sunset on a regular basis unless policymakers can justify their continued existence.”

******

Send your Social Security number, date and place of birth, mother’s maiden name, and the name of your first pet to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. All other suckers can tweet the information via their Twitter accounts and include my Twitter handle in their message. Sign up for email notifications of new Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns and subscribe to this hand-built RSS feed for corrections to my column.

PHOTO: A journalist checks the U.S. Senate’s website after it was attacked by Internet hackers in Washington, June 13, 2011. REUTERS/Stelios Varias

I love WikiLeaks — by which I mean that any organization that helps ferret out the secrets of states or the nefarious secrets of corporations deserves a cozy place in my heart. But as anyone who has experienced my love can tell you, it’s not always lovely. So I don’t feel bad at all about taking the business end of my press-crit rake to the latest WikiLeaks project, “The Global Intelligence Files.”

The Files contain in excess of 5 million emails from the Texas-based private intelligence firm Stratfor. WikiLeaks appears to have obtained the email from the hackers at Anonymous, who nicked the haul late last year. There may be great stuff in the 5 million emails, but the files released thus far, which International Business Times puts at 194 emails, underwhelm.

We learn, for instance, that Coca-Cola asked Stratfor for some intelligence on the animal-rights group PETA in 2009 in relation to the coming Winter Olympics in Vancouver: How many PETA supporters in Canada? How inclined toward activism are they? What relation does PETA Canada have to PETA U.S.A? Stuff like that. Stratfor’s vice-president for intelligence, Fred Burton, purportedly shares that he knows about a classified investigation of PETA operatives that the FBI has produced and that he’ll see what he can “uncover.” Another Stratfor employee assigns an intern to the project. In WikiLeaks lingo, this amounts to Coca-Cola “Contracting Stratfor to Spy on PETA.” If asking an intern to look up some information constitutes spying, you could say that I’ve been in the espionage business for 30 years and my operatives have probed hundreds of government bodies, public institutions and corporations. This particular WikiLeaks dump should probably be taken to the dump and dumped.

International Business Times has condensed today several of the Stratfor emails into straightforward, compact stories whose headlines may sound sensational but then fail to deliver. The IBT story “Stratfor Monitored Bhopal Activists ‘Yes Men’” alleges that Stratfor “monitored and analyzed” both Bhopal activists and the Yes Men political prankster group on behalf of Dow Chemical, which now owns the Bhopal chemical plant. I wouldn’t put anything past Dow, but keeping an eye on your political opponents doesn’t seem beyond the bend. Likewise, “Stratfor Plotted with Goldman Sachs to Set Up Investment Fund” glimmers with journalistic possibility, but swap out the word “Plotted” for “Planned” and you’ve captured the gist of the story. Again, there is a safe bet that something nefarious may be going on here; when an outfit like Stratfor teams up with Goldman Sachs, they don’t intend to stage teddy bear picnics. But wouldn’t it make supreme sense to pair an intelligence gatherer with an investing operation? Where is the story?

And so on. “Israeli Commandos Have Destroyed Iran Nuclear Facilities, says Stratfor” doesn’t say much more about the emails it’s based on than can be gleaned from the headline. “Stratfor Says Attack on Iran a Euro Crisis Diversion,” also from IBT, is completely conjectural. “US Ambassador to Russia ‘Scared to Death of Putin’“ is a second-hand report. “Stratfor Predicts Huge Oil Profits from Attack on Iran” states the obvious. If this is intelligence, I don’t want to get anywhere near stupidity.

One could make a case that this maxim — “Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations” — expressed by Stratfor Vice-President Fred Burton, exudes the sinister. But read the context. Burton is making a joke while he apologizes for having stolen someone’s lunch (“Amy’s Pesto Tortellini”) from the office kitchen’s freezer.

Over at the Nation, Greg Mitchell has corralled an early set of first reactions to the Stratfor emails by the reporters who cover this beat. Talking Points Memo‘s Carl Franzen complains of a lack of “major revelations from the documents yet, unlike Wikileaks’ previous notable dumps.” Wired‘s Danger Room tweeted: ”Wow, these #Stratfor emails are really hot stuff. Next up: [Stratfor CEO] George Friedman’s coveted tapioca pudding recipe.” The most trenchant critique of the Stratfor emails came from Carl Bildt, foreign minister of Sweden, who tweeted this objection to a Stratfor email about him: “Wikileaks released obscure email saying I’m ‘super tall, has photographic memory and is very smart’. Isn’t this slightly ridiculous?”

The closest WikiLeaks has come to making news today is the London Telegraph story that refers to Stratfor emails that make a variety of assertions about what Pakistani intelligence knew about Osama Bin Laden’s residency in Abbottabad and Hugo Chavez’s health. How much of the contents of Stratfor emails is true and how much of it is speculation or plain wrong is anybody’s guess. As Dan Murphy points out in his Christian Science Monitor piece today, the claims that Stratfor is some sort of “shadow CIA” — a label that Stratfor doesn’t really discourage — must also be balanced with what we know about the organization. “I’ve found some Stratfor analysis to be flat wrong,” he writes. It’s safe to bet that some Stratfor emails are probably superflat wrong.

Today’s email dump and the first set of stories based on them aren’t a complete waste because they help demystify both WikiLeaks and Stratfor. Both organizations are capable of doing “good” work. But little of that is on display here.

******

How long would it take to read 5 million emails? Send your guess to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. My Twitter feed takes only minutes to read each day. Why aren’t you following me? Is it because you worry that I’ll turn your IP address over to Stratfor? Sign up for email notifications of new Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns and subscribe to this hand-built RSS feed for corrections to my column.

PHOTO: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange speaks at a news conference in London, Feb. 27, 2012. REUTERS/Finbarr O’Reilly

Philadelphia has gone all hinky at the prospect of an investor group headed by former governor, former mayor, former district attorney, and former head of the Democratic National Committee Ed Rendell purchasing Philadelphia Media Network, the company that owns the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Philadelphia Daily News and Philly.com. The Rendell group includes powerful local businessmen and assorted politicos, causing Philadelphia magazine’s Paul Davies to fret that such a sale would result in newspapers “viewed as a direct extension of the Democratic Party and Chamber of Commerce.”

Davies’s prediction that the new publishers would interfere in editorial matters was quickly preempted by editorial interference from Philadelphia Media Network’s current publisher, Gregory J. Osberg, whom the New York Times has already caught butting in on coverage.

Philly journalist Tom Ferrick maps the web of conflicts of interest the Rendell group would weave as owners: “[H]ow do you cover Rendell if he is chairman of your board? … George Norcross is the Democratic power of South Jersey. Watch what you say about him. Lew Katz has many diverse holdings — all of which could be sensitive topics to cover.” Non-Rendell bidders bring similar baggage to the deal: 94-year-old billionaire Raymond Perelman has teamed up with his billionaire son Ronald Perelman to buy the company; Raymond’s estranged son, Jeffrey Perelman, is said to be making his own offer; and developer Bart Blatstein wants a shot, although Raymond Perelman and Blatstein complain that they’ve been frozen out from bidding by the current owners.

Davies, Ferrick and former Inquirer reporter Buzz Bissinger aren’t Chicken Littles when they say the Philadelphia newspaper sky is falling. It is falling. Or, rather, has fallen. Nationwide, newspaper advertising revenues are half of what they were in 2005. Gross profits of the Inquirer‘s parent company dropped from $120 million in 2010 to $4 million last year, as Ferrick notes. The company sold for $139 million in 2010, but after offloading its downtown headquarters for $23 million,  the current owners would be fortunate to get $50 million for the whole caboodle today.

If any city needs an independent news organization to dig out political corruption, it’s Philadelphia. But with no established, out-of-town publishers or philosopher kings queuing up to bid for Philadelphia Media Network, the city should count itself half-lucky that its plutocrats, magnates and sharp-shivved pols want to save it. But only half-lucky. There’s no way that any owner can bring back the Inquirer‘s glory of past years, when the Knight Ridder chain owned it (1969-2006). The only conceivable reason to spend $50 million on a sunset business like a newspaper company is that you could squeeze $50 million worth of value out of the existing assets when the company croaks.

In his 2004 book, The Vanishing Newspaper, Philip Meyer calls the conversion of a newspaper’s assets, including the goodwill embodied in its good name, “slow liquidation.” A proprietor simply cuts circulation, cuts pages, sells the presses and outsources printing, and cuts labor costs by dumping staff until one day — poof! — the paper vanishes. (The Philadelphia company is already doing most of that.) Is there $50 million of value locked up in the two dying newspapers and website that make up Philadelphia Media Network?

That might sound like a lot of money to you or me, but for billionaires like Ron Perelman, $50 million is chump change. If the purchasers are making a purely political move, owning the Philly megaphone could be a bargain. Consider this: Interest groups and political parties spent half that amount — $25 million — on influencing just the outcome of the 2010 Pennsylvania senate race. Because newspapers continue to be read by older consumers, who vote in larger numbers than do the young, paying $50 million for two regionally dominant newspapers that could help turn future elections looks like a bargain. There are other rewards to reap from owning a newspaper: blocking unflattering investigations, suppressing embarrassing information and shaping the public debate. As readers catch on and the publications become so small they can go down the swirly on one flush, $50 million could be a wise, if cynical, investment.

Of course, turning the Inquirer and the Daily News into purely partisan sheets violates everything professional journalists hold sacred. But seeing as there are fewer professional journalists working at newspapers every day, there are fewer of them around to protest the heresy that’s about to go down. Yet converting the Inquirer and Daily News into journals of the Democratic Party would merely return them to the 19th century, when newspapers relied on political money for their support.

“Before the advent of the modern mass media in the late 19th century, when newspapers made serious money from advertising, most newspapers depended on political money,” says James McGrath Morris, biographer of Joseph Pulitzer, in an interview. “It either came in the form of direct payment or in valuable printing contracts from the local or state government. They made no secret of this. Their names often reflected this relationship. In Missouri, for instance, there was the Missouri Republican and the Missouri Democrat … In cities like New York, the newspapers rivaled the power of party bosses.”

Press scholar W. Joseph Campbell points out in an interview that newspaper publishers (Warren G. Harding) and owners (William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer) even used their positions to launch political careers. The godfather of the politics-journalism fusion, late-19th century British journalist William Thomas Stead, did them one better in promoting his sincere belief in “government by journalism.” Stead was a bit of a nut, but his innovations had a huge influence on Hearst.

Politics and journalism were two sides of the same coin in the 19th century, says Morris: “Successful editors became elected politicians, and out-of-work politicians became newspaper editors.”

As strange as that crossover may sound to our 21st century ears, politicos have been refashioning themselves as TV newsers for several decades in the contemporary era, replaying scenes from the yellow journalism period. Partisan operators like Bill Moyers, Bill Bradley, Diane Sawyer, Tim Russert, David Gergen, Chris Matthews, George Stephanopoulos, Paul Begala, Susan Molinari, John Kasich, Joe Scarborough, Al Sharpton, Jennifer Granholm, Pete Williams, and others have made the switch to “news.” On Fox News Channel and MSNBC, the concentration of politicians in journalist disguise has reduced the two outlets to stand-ins for the Democratic and Republican parties.

The partisan TV cable news channels and the prospective partisan papers in Philadelphia differ in one dramatic way: The TV news channels make real money, and the partisan press generally doesn’t. Even so, if Team Rendell wins the Philly property, it should mimic some of the techniques that lend TV cable news credibility: Just as a pro-wrestling match puts at least two combatants in the ring at a time to make the fight work, TV cable news producers always enlist somebody from the other side for Sean Hannity or Rachel Maddow to rough up. A partisan Philly paper that’s in the tank for its owners but listens to the other side wouldn’t be my first choice. But if it were my only choice, it wouldn’t be completely worthless.

Partisan funders don’t always produce bad journalism, as proved by the non-profit ProPublica, founded by Herbert and Marion Sandler and supported now by others. You’d have to grow several additional arms to become more left-wing than the billionaire Sandlers. And yet the ProPublica operation has hardly become the left’s political tool. This is not to suggest that Team Rendell could possibly match ProPublica’s success or even want to. Rendell may be talking about building a “firewall” between the newsroom and its new owners, but that’s laughable. Why buy a part of a newspaper if you can’t have any influence over it?

As currently constituted, the Rendell consortium has too many separate interests on board (revisit the Davies piece) to remain stable if the deal goes through. If the developer who has invested in the Philly papers runs up against the politicians who are part of the consortium, somebody will have to give. Like most economic cartels, the Rendell coalition will eventually spin apart because each member will think and act like his stake makes him the boss.

The great deal that Rendell and the other machers think they’re making with their offers for Philadelphia Media Network may be an illusion. As James McGrath Morris puts it. “If Rendell really wants to shape the future of media and gain power from it, the place to start is certainly not with an antique notion of news dissemination.”

If I were the kind of writer who liked to make predictions — and I’m not — I’d say that if Rendell wins the day, the Philly properties will, after a shakeout period, eventually revert to a single majority owner. This would return ownership to the status quo ante of the 1957-1969 period, when Walter Annenberg owned both the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Daily News. But those new owners won’t be in the position of strength that Annenberg enjoyed. He got away with punishing his enemies and rewarding his friends in the pages of his papers — and made money while doing so — because advertisers and readers had few alternatives.

But that’s not the case today. The golden era in which every city could support a general interest daily newspaper that could both make lots of money and produce lots of quality journalism is passing. As a lover of newspapers, that pains me. But it’s the truth.

******
How long until the Philadelphia Inquirer shows up on Antiques Roadshow for an appraisal? Please don’t send your prediction to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. My Twitter feed will go dark for one day if Team Rendell succeeds. Sign up for email notifications of new Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns and subscribe to this hand-built RSS feed for corrections to my column.

PHOTO: Pennsylvania Governor Edward G. Rendell speaks at a rally in Pittsburgh, September 23, 2009. REUTERS/Eric Thayer

Why did Deep Throat leak to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward?

Woodward and Carl Bernstein write in their 1974 book, All the President’s Men, that Deep Throat shared his secrets to “protect the office” of the presidency and “effect a change in its conduct before all was lost.” Woodward amended his source’s purely patriotic motives in his 2005 book, The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate’s Deep Throat. In it, Woodward held that Deep Throat — whom he confirmed was W. Mark Felt, a former high-ranking FBI man who outed himself as the leaker — supplied him with information to protect the FBI from the meddling Nixon White House. That harmonized with the rationale offered in A G-man’s Life: The FBI, Being ‘Deep Throat,’ and the Struggle for Honor in Washington, Felt’s 2006 book published with the guiding hand of a co-writer (Felt was 92 and suffering from dementia): that Deep Throat leaked to Woodward to “spark a broader investigation” by the Justice Department of the break-in.

By 2010, Woodward’s appreciation of his leaker’s motives had expanded to include bureaucratic infighting. Woodward writes:

In brief, [Felt] knew there was a cover-up, knew higher-ups were involved, and did not trust the acting FBI director, Pat Gray. He knew the Nixon White House was corrupt. At the same time he was disappointed that he did not get the directorship. And I was pushing him and pushing him. [Emphasis added.]

This timeline of Woodward’s changing view of Felt appears in the opening pages of Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat (University Press of Kansas), a dandy, detailed book by veteran journalist Max Holland. Holland, who has mastered the Watergate corpus, rewinds the complete story of the break-in, the cover-up, and the press and FBI investigations to reveal Felt as a mendacious, manipulating, and opportunistic source. Yes, on occasion, Felt deliberately and repeatedly disinformed Woodward, who was oblivious to his lies at the time and wrote in All the President’s Men that “Deep Throat would never deal with [Woodward] falsely.”

Holland makes the persuasive case that Felt, who died in 2008, used the classic techniques of counterintelligence he learned as an FBI agent to destabilize his main bureaucratic opponent inside the FBI (Acting Director L. Patrick Gray) with his leaks to Woodward (and other journalists). The goal of his leaks was to nudge President Richard Nixon in the direction of appointing him FBI director instead of Gray.

Leak overturns once and for all the romantic, popular interpretation of the Watergate saga of one inside source risking it all to save democracy. “Nixon’s downfall was an entirely unanticipated result of Felt’s true and only aim,” Holland writes. Although Holland never disparages the enterprise of Woodward and Bernstein, acknowledging the impact their reports had on Judge John J. Sirica and the senators who formed an investigative committee, neither does he bow to them. “Contrary to the widely held perception that the Washington Post ‘uncovered’ Watergate, the newspaper essentially tracked the progress of the FBI’s investigation, with a time delay ranging from weeks to days, and published elements of the prosecutors’ case well in advance of the trial.”

Leak, to be published Mar. 6, vindicates journalist Edward Jay Epstein, one of the earliest critics of Woodsteinmania. In a Commentary piece published in July 1974, about a month after the Woodstein book came out, Epstein eviscerates what he calls the “sustaining myth of journalism.” Naïve readers believe that intrepid reporters expose government scandals by doggedly working their confidential sources. Of course such scoops do occur, but the more conventional route to a prize-winning series is well-placed leaks from well-oiled government investigations, which Holland maintains was the case with Watergate. Epstein’s essay looks especially prescient in the context of Holland’s book. Epstein believed at the time that Deep Throat was not one person but a “composite character,” but noted that Justice Department prosecutors “now believe that the mysterious source was probably Mark W. Felt, Jr. [sic].” But he accurately divines the primary motive behind the leaks, which he says were designed

… not to expose the Watergate conspiracy or drive President Nixon from office, but simply to demonstrate to the President that Gray could not control the FBI, and therefore would prove a severe embarrassment to his administration. In other words, the intention was to get rid of Gray.

Holland’s deft book reads like lightning — no prior Watergate scholarship required. Recasting Deep Throat as an avenger and not a patriot, Leak illuminates our understanding of the press by explaining why sources leak. Anonymous sources — especially Washington’s anonymous sources — almost invariably have an ax to grind, as Betty Cuniberti established in her classic August 1987 Los Angeles Times story. One unnamed Reagan administration official tells her that most Reagan White House leaks are “personal,” aimed at other White House officials. “There’s a great deal of infighting,” he tells her.

Reagan White House staffers who couldn’t get the president’s attention would slip “Message-to-Reagan” leaks to the press to generate news stories or press conference questions to which he would have to respond, Cuniberti writes. The art of the leak requires information to be packaged just right, she notes. A national security adviser who wanted to plant a story in the press — a so-called authorized leak — might avoid giving the information directly to a reporter because the reporter would rightly view it as a self-serving leak designed to advance the administration’s views. Even rookie reporters get suspicious of sources’ motives. Better to have a subordinate convey the leak to disguise the motive and make the information seem more authentically newsworthy.

Leak‘s persuasive position is that Felt gamed Woodward, making him think that he was on the side of the angels when what he was trying to do was screw his enemies and become the next J. Edgar Hoover. That’s not a criticism of Woodward or his Watergate work, which by the standards of any day was very good. I doubt that Woodward and Bernstein’s copy would have been remarkably different had they appreciated the degree to which Felt’s leaks were self-promoting.

Also, Felt was one of many Watergate sources for the Washington Post; the memory of the movie version of All The President’s Men makes him loom larger than he did in real life. In his 2011 book, Watergate’s Legacy and the Press: The Investigative Impulse, Jon Marshall writes: “Although Deep Throat became Woodward and Bernstein’s most famous source, he was hardly their only one.” (Bob Woodward contributes the foreword for Marshall’s book.) Barry Sussman, who was editor in charge of Post Watergate coverage, writes that “Deep Throat barely figured in the Post‘s Watergate coverage. He was nice to have around, but that’s about it.”

Nor was Felt’s gaming of Woodward unusual. Every source leaks for a reason, and it’s usually not about preserving the Constitution and the American way. As Stephen Hess writes, sources have many reasons to leak. They leak to boost their own egos. They leak to make a goodwill deposit with a reporter that they hope to withdraw in the future. They leak to advance their policy initiative. They leak to launch trial balloons and sometimes even to blow the whistle on wrongdoing. But until contesting evidence arrives, it’s usually a safe bet that a leak is what Hess calls an “Animus Leak,” designed to inflict damage on another party.

Mark Felt was not quite the master of the animus leak that he thought he was, as Holland notes. The White House figured out that Felt was leaking, but Nixon feared that firing him would do even more damage because Felt knew many of the politically explosive secrets that J. Edgar Hoover hoarded. Students of journalism — defined as anybody who consumes news — will profit from reading this Watergate redux: They’ll never read the phrase, “the source, who asked to remain anonymous,” the same way again.

******

Disclosure: A Leak footnote briefly discusses a column I wrote in Slate after Deep Throat was unmasked. (Some of the ideas in that column are reprised here.) If you have a headnote you’d like to share, send it to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. My Twitter feed is leak-free. Sign up for email notifications of new Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns and subscribe to this hand-built RSS feed for corrections to my column.

PHOTO: Former FBI Deputy Director Mark Felt waves to the press as his daughter Joan Felt (L) and grandson Nick Jones (R) look on from the front door of his home in Santa Rosa, California, May 31, 2005. REUTERS/Lou Dematteis

The “investigative series” that the conservative Daily Caller commenced this week about the liberal media watchdog outfit Media Matters for America and its founder David Brock accomplishes the impossible: It makes me sympathize with Media Matters and Brock.

This is no small accomplishment, as I’ve never thought much of Media Matters’ style of watchdogging or Brock’s journalism. I don’t mind Media Matters’ partisanship. Partisans often serve journalism by spotting unseen truths. I don’t dislike anybody over there; a couple of veteran journalists of my acquaintance produce copy for it. And I’ll be the first to admit that Media Matters’ giant media trawler captures much embarrassing — and occasionally useful — information about conservatives and conservative media.

That said, I always approach the group’s findings with the same reservations I do prosecutorial briefs or opposition research. What are the authors leaving out? Media Matters, like so many think tanks and watchdogs, is in the propaganda business. Yet even a propagandist deserves a fair hearing in the press. But the Daily Caller fails to clear even that low hurdle. As someone who routinely finds valuable nuggets in partisan media squabbles, I kept waiting to be shown something that wasn’t predictable political point-scoring. But it has yet to emerge.

The first installment in the series, which appeared on Sunday, relies on conjecture and anonymous sources to portray founder David Brock as a paranoid loon who hired bodyguards to protect him from death threats. Brock may indeed be bonkers, but you’ll find no proof of it here, only whispers. The piece claims Brock “struggles with mental illness,” but presents no evidence outside of anonymous sources referring to his alleged “bouts of what appeared to be mania” and a 2002 Drudge Report item that maintains he had a breakdown in 2001 and was treated in a psychiatric ward.

Another anonymous source tells the Daily Caller that Brock “completely lost his shit” in a 2008 meeting outside of San Diego, causing “a lot of conversations about David’s mental health.” Another anonymous source — a “prominent liberal,” no less — tells the Daily Caller that Brock was “erratic, unstable and disturbing” at a 2010 meeting. The piece, written by Daily Caller Editor-in-Chief Tucker Carlson and staffer Vince Coglianese, also claims that: “At some point, Brock received a prescription for his condition” and cites an anonymous friend who says Brock wasn’t “trying to keep” his illegal drug use (including cocaine) “a secret.”

A Washington figure given to erratic behavior? On prescribed meds? Rumored to be imbibing illegal drugs? Given to grandiosity and terrorizing his staff? It sounds pretty standard to me and not much of a story. Stitched together with this anonymously sourced crap is the assertion that several prominent journalists and news organizations are pushovers for Media Matters findings, including MSNBC, Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent, Ben Smith (formerly of Politico and now editor of BuzzFeed), James Rainey of the Los Angeles Times, Sam Stein and Nico Pitney of the Huffington Post, Brian Stelter of the New York Times and Joe Garofoli of the San Francisco Chronicle.

The Daily Caller doesn’t bother to quantify in any way the alleged lapdogism of these reporters and outlets. Have they run with hundreds, scores or dozens of Media Matters tips? Or just a few newsworthy ones? A textual analysis backed by a Nexis dump could help prove the assertion, but the Daily Caller doesn’t bother to do the work, preferring to allow anonymous sources to call Smith, Sargent and others Media Matters dupes without testing the proposition.

Another installment in the series includes a breathless piece about an internal Media Matters memo to Brock and Media Matters President Eric Burns that called for the hiring of private investigators to probe the personal lives of Fox News Channel employees, the harassment of Fox News with “trackers” staking out the private and public spheres of Fox News employees and contributors, the deployment of “detailed opposition research” of Fox staff and executives, and attacks on them on Facebook. The Daily Caller confesses that its sources inside Media Matters “either don’t know or won’t say” how much of the memo was acted on beyond the fact that trackers went to events featuring Fox News employees, including Rupert Murdoch. Big deal!

More weak tea: One Daily Caller story claims that Ben Smith “curiously withheld key parts of the 89-page [planning] document” from the piece he published in Politico in March 2011 as “Media Matters’ war against Fox.” The implication here is that Smith’s failure to fully decant the document at the time or follow all of its leads makes him some sort of Media Matters lackey. That line of innuendo depends on believing that Media Matters is or was so important to the Ben Smith franchise that he would “curiously” withhold key parts of a document just to stay on the good side of Media Matters. Anything is possible in this universe, but I have a hard time imagining that Smith, whose cup overflows with material, would become beholden to Media Matters in a way that would cause him to spike newsworthy material. Smith declined to explain to the Daily Caller why he used some but not all of the memo material, but he need not be defensive: Usable material ends up on the journalistic cutting-room floor all the time for reasons of selection, the swing of the news cycle and happenstance. Case not proved.

The most laughable Daily Caller revelation comes in a piece titled “Inside Media Matters: David Brock’s enemies list,” which is based on an internal memo from the organization. The “enemies” include all of the usual Media Matters targets — Fox, Fox employees, conservative donors, conservative news sites, conservative think tanks and conservative politicians. A left-wing advocacy organization has chosen right-wing individuals and institutions as its enemies? So what?

The Daily Caller may still get the goods on Media Matters, although the journalistic tradition of leading a series with your strongest material argues against it. So far, the Daily Caller is attacking Media Matters with bad journalism and lame propaganda. As a great fan of the political hatchet job, all I can say is that David Brock’s organization deserves better.

*******

Erik Wemple scored a funny riff on the Daily Caller’s claim that some Washington journalists roll over for Media Matters, confessing in a “formal statement of guilt” that he too has picked up stories based on the group’s work. Send your confessions to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com and use my Twitter handle to feed me attacks on Fox News. Sign up for email notifications of new Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns and subscribe to this hand-built RSS feed for corrections to my column.

PHOTO: David Brock, courtesy Media Matters