Jack Shafer

Last night, NBC News investigative reporter Michael Isikoff published a revelatory article based on an undated 16-page Department of Justice “white paper,” representing the arguments contained in classified memos produced by the Obama administration that describe the criteria that must be met before the administration plans the killing of a U.S. citizen.

Who would have surrendered such a sensitive document about the president’s “kill list” to NBC News?

It’s a valid question, and a little bit silly at the same time. Not to diminish the intrepid reporting of Isikoff — who should be made the grand marshal of the next Tournament of Roses Parade for his scoop — but Washington often leaks in directions to further stoke policy fires that are already burning. (See this taxonomy of leaks compiled by Stephen Hess.) Such a Washington fire has been burning for many months, with Congress demanding that the Obama administration explain its targeted killings of U.S. citizens. Yesterday, before the Isikoff story broke, 11 senators sent the president a formal request that any and all legal opinions devised by the White House about the targeting of citizens be forwarded to the Judiciary and Intelligence Committees.

This request makes the senators, or members of their staffs, prime suspects of the leak. Isikoff’s story does not discourage that interpretation. He reports that the leaked white paper was given to “members of the Senate Intelligence and Judiciary committees in June by administration officials” and that a “source with access to the white paper, which is not classified, provided a copy to NBC News.” Like any good journalist, Isikoff squirts ink in the water to help camouflage a possible source by quoting the boilerplate outrage of the deputy legal director of the ACLU about the white paper. The ACLU has sued the administration for the memos, Isikoff reports, leaving the careful reader to speculate that perhaps the ACLU obtained the white paper and gave it to him.

The timing of the leak inspires further speculation. President Obama’s nominee for CIA director, John Brennan, goes to Capitol Hill on Thursday for his confirmation hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Depending on how you torque it, the leaked white paper arguably gives drone-architect Brennan a little breathing room by blunting the demands for the classified documents. That’s the sentiment behind a statement issued by Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) today, in which she says the white paper (and other documents and briefings) have allowed the Intelligence Committee, which she chairs, “to conduct appropriate and probing oversight into the use of lethal force.” Or, the leak could enrage other senators who feel that the administration hasn’t been sufficiently candid with them, and prompt them to draw Brennan and the administration into a memo showdown. As Josh Gerstein reported yesterday in Politico, Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a member of the Intelligence Committee, had previously promised to press Brennan on the targeted killing policy.

For more than a century, rich guys who think they’re smarter than the rich guys who came before them have been buying money-losing publications under the impression that by spending more money than their deep-pocketed predecessors, they’ll turn the red ink black. This tradition, whose ranks include such modern vanity moguls as Mortimer Zuckerman (Atlantic, U.S. News & World Report), Sidney Harman (Newsweek), Arthur L. Carter (Nation, New York Observer), Philip Anschutz (San Francisco Examiner, Weekly Standard), David Bradley (Atlantic, National Journal), Michael Bloomberg (Bloomberg Businessweek), Richard Mellon Scaife (Pittsburgh Tribune-Review), and Martin Peretz (New Republic), gained a new adherent about a year ago when Chris Hughes, a Facebook co-founder whose net worth currently bounces around in the vicinity of the half-billion mark, purchased the New Republic.

Since then, Hughes has followed the century-old script to a T, wheel-barreling a load of cash into the magazine, replacing the top editor with the former top editor, adding staff, opening a New York office, making plans to move his Washington staff to a nicer home, and ordering a makeover of both the magazine and website. This week, those redesigns debuted, with the magazine getting slicker and thicker, and the website receiving a sumptuous transformation that makes the competition look like they’re squatting on GeoCities sites.

Like the rich guys who have come before, Hughes has also set the goal of making the magazine profitable in “a couple years.” Making money is a wonderful ambition for the New Republic, which was losing about $3 million a year several years before Hughes began the current expansion, according to Martin Peretz’s ex-wife, Ann Peretz. Everybody should make money! But the ambition is more loony than it is wonderful. In today’s publishing environment it’s almost impossible for a journal of opinion or national general-interest magazine that’s not part of a larger magazine group that handles ad sales and back-office matters (e.g., Time Warner and Time; Condé Nast and the New Yorker and Vanity Fair) to maintain profitability.

Just as farmers plant and reap with the seasons, political journalists consult the calendar for the best time to scatter seed and harvest, with second-term inaugurations being the preferred juncture to deploy temple-tapping discussions of the “second-term curse,” the notion that special doom awaits any modern president who wins the White House a second time.

Like most predictions, this one is for suckers. To begin with, the definition of a second-term curse has become so elastic that anything from a few policy setbacks to death can be interpreted as fulfillment of the curse. Even the definition of a second term has been debased by those who call vice presidents who complete a dead president’s term and win one on their own — Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Harry Truman  and Lyndon Johnson — two-termers.

Also, as David Greenberg recently argued in The New Republic, the audit of supposedly failed second terms usually neglects to mention the triumphs, such as President Bill Clinton’s foreign policy successes in Kosovo and Northern Ireland in his second term, President George W. Bush’s winding down of the Iraq war in his second and President Ronald Reagan’s retreat from “Strangelovean apocalypticism” that created a soft-landing place for the collapsing Soviet empire.

Deadspin’s exposé of Notre Dame star linebacker Manti Te’o's nonexistent girlfriend — which does double duty as an exposé of the dozens of news outlets that accepted his word that she had been injured in a car wreck and then died of leukemia — doesn’t conclude that Te’o was simply the victim of a hoax or that he became a willing accomplice in the deception.

But the ultimate subject of the investigation, written by Deadspin’s Timothy Burke and Jack Dickey, is not the collegian at the center of it but the press corps, which swallowed the girlfriend story whole. Just a little more early pushing by reporters and a few skeptical questions by editors would have separated the bogus from the true, as the piece amply illustrates.

Of course, few reporters have the time or energy to contest every statement of fact from their subjects. Date of birth, place born, schools attended, honors won, jobs worked, countries visited, political and religious views and other aspects of personal history too numerous to catalog usually originate from the mouths of news subjects when they’re first interviewed. Because part of journalism is the business of discovering lies — and because the human soul is a deceitful thing — reporters know that everybody tends to fudge their pasts. Actors might make themselves a little younger in an interview. Law school attendees might encourage you to believe they graduated when they did not. Someone who climbed one major mountain peak might suggest he had climbed several.

At about noon today, the Atlantic put on a very snug hair shirt, issuing a statement of apology and regret for having posted on its website Church of Scientology “Sponsor Content” yesterday.

The Scientology advertisement, composed by tone-deaf propagandists unable to write a sentence about the church’s alleged worldwide expansion without including a superlative – “unparalleled,” “unrelenting,” “unprecedented” (twice) – was taken down just before midnight after being up for about 11 hours. (See Erik Wemple’s tick-tock.)

A cached version of the Scientology advertorial is preserved on freiz.it, but be forewarned that there isn’t much there to interest you unless you’re an admirer of the church and love to read nice but bland things about it, or you detest Scientology and enjoy nothing better than to have a good laugh at the church’s expense and that of its “ecclesiastical leader,” David Miscavige. It’s really that lame.

I can feign as much excitement as anybody in the press corps when the president nominates someone to a vacancy in the Cabinet or the Supreme Court. But when deadline time comes, I really don’t care who gets nominated; unless there are outstanding warrants for the arrests of the nominees, the president should be allowed to hire and fire, as long as we can fire him.

The rest of the press pack, alas, does not have that luxury. They must tackle every nomination with the same fervor they gave to their previous nomination stories, which isn’t as difficult as it may seem. All they need to do is update and rearrange their old copy to confirm with Shafer’s First Law of Journalistic Thermodynamics, which states, “Copy can be cannot be created or destroyed, it can only change form.”

A full three months before President Barack Obama got around to nominating former Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel to head the Defense Department yesterday, the trial balloons had been lofted to test Hagel’s suitability to the position, and the press corps busied itself dusting off its nomination-coverage templates and completing the blanks. Hagel’s nomination did not catch anyone by surprise; few such nominations do, since the White House and others maintain comprehensive short lists for the day a Washington appointee dies or resigns. By virtue of her age (79) and her announced intention to serve on the Supreme Court as long as her hero, Justice Louis Brandeis, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has encouraged White House short-listers to prepare for her departure and the arrival of a new justice by 2014.

Why is Andrew Sullivan selling? And what are his readers buying?

Sullivan, maestro of the popular blog The Dish, pulled off the impossible this week. After announcing that he was breaking free from his bosses at the Daily Beast and would henceforth finance the site with $19.99 annual subscriptions from readers, he collected about $400,000 in two days from nearly 12,000 Dish enthusiasts, some volunteering more than the suggested amount. Published since April 2011 by the Daily Beast, and before that by the Atlantic, and before that by Time, The Dish now returns to its 2000 origins as Sullivan’s indie project.

If you admire journalism and entrepreneurism, you’ve got to be pulling for Sullivan and his five employees and two interns to pull down the $900,000 he says he needs to operate The Dish for a year. As Sullivan states in his declaration of independence, the rewards of his success won’t fall just on The Dish: “The point of doing this as simply and as purely as possible is precisely to forge a path other smaller blogs and sites can follow.”

But the questions remain: what is Sullivan selling and what are his paying readers (he calls them “members”) actually buying? More nudge than paywall, The Dish “freemium” subscription system will give non-members a limited number of free “Read On” clicks for longer posts each month, after which they’ll be reminded that they really should consider paying $19.99. “Everything else on the Dish will remain free. No link from another blog to us will ever be counted for the meter — so no blogger or writer need ever worry that a link to us will push their readers into a paywall,” Sullivan writes. But cheapskates who want to avoid paying and evade The Dish’s nagging can just use their RSS readers to consume the complete site.

Once they get started, gun debates take but a few minutes to mutate into rhetorical riots in which responsible gun owners accuse their critics of wanting to confiscate their guns and anti-gun activists damn all gun owners as accomplices to murder. The debate-to-riot progression was replayed once again following the Dec. 14 Newtown, Connecticut, school massacre, when into this volatile atmosphere stepped the nearby Gannett-owned Westchester Journal News, publishing a Dec. 23 story and a map detailing the names and home addresses of every pistol permit-holder in New York’s Westchester and Rockland counties.

Undeterred by the fact that the handgun data was, by state law, a matter of the public record, aggrieved gun owners retaliated. A crowdsourced map of the home addresses of Journal News employees — including their home and work phone numbers when found — went up. The site also listed the names and addresses of the paper’s local and national advertisers, suggesting Journal News readers write letters threatening to boycott their goods and services unless the Journal News took its map down. The New York State & Pistol Association urged a boycott of all Gannett enterprises, asserting that the map had “put in harm’s way tens of thousands of lawful license holders.”

Neighboring Putnam County has rejected the Journal News‘ request for its pistol permit-holder list. “[T]he egghead editors at the Journal News can kiss my white, Irish behind,” said State Senator Greg Ball, backing the county’s resistance.

Senator Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) went out in a blaze of mush last week in her farewell speech from the Senate floor. Snowe, the last of Washington’s militant centrists, lamented the demise of bipartisanship in the Senate and the rise of divisiveness in the chamber. Although she didn’t blame anybody in particular for the erosion of comity — after all, naming names is uncivil — it wasn’t really necessary. Everybody knew she was talking about other, more doctrinaire Republicans.

Snowe sought to indemnify herself by saying she wasn’t looking back on “some kind of golden age of bipartisanship” and wasn’t “advocating bipartisanship as some kind of an end unto itself.” Then — like the Janus-faced centrist she is — Snowe looked back lovingly on the golden age of bipartisanship and compromise that passed Medicare and the Civil Rights Act and shook her pre-drenched hankie for the lost “art of legislating.”

In her misery, Snowe has ample company. Political scholars Thomas E. Mann of the Brookings Institution and Norman J. Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute have written a whole book (excerpted here) documenting the “dysfunction” Republicans have visited upon Congress with their non-compromising, extremist, anti-bipartisanship, gridlocking ways. Acknowledging that the Democratic Party has abandoned the center, too, Mann and Ornstein offer that at least since Bill Clinton was in office, the party has “hewed to the center-left” on important issues.

“It’s inevitable that some first reports will be wrong,” Dan Rather warned viewers on Sept. 11, 2001, as he and his colleagues at CBS covered terrorist attacks on New York and Washington in real time.

Before the day was over, CBS had confirmed the Rather maxim by launching several very wrong reports into the ether. Rather and colleagues reported that a car bomb had exploded outside the State Department in Washington; that a United Airlines flight had “crashed into the vicinity of or at Camp David”; and that the FBI had arrested two people in a truck with explosives near New York’s George Washington Bridge. “Enough explosives were in the truck to do great damage to the George Washington Bridge,” Rather would go on to say. It wasn’t just CBS muffing the story. NBC News repeated the George Washington Bridge story (before taking it back), and NPR and ABC News reported the nonexistent State Department bomb, with ABC News citing senior law enforcement officials and the Associated Press.

None of these doozies turned out to be true, of course, making a sage of sorts out of Rather. If only we had had him on the air to warn us last Friday, as the networks, newswires and newspapers reported on the Newtown, Connecticut, school massacre. Among the firstest and the wrongest on the story was CNN. At 11:17 a.m. on Friday, @CNN tweeted, “CNN’s @SusanCandiotti reports the suspect is Ryan Lanza and is in his 20s,” and Candiotti repeated the finding on air shortly after 2 p.m. with a caveat that the information came from a source and that it had “not been confirmed by the state police.”