Jack Shafer

Yesterday, The Daily was first to name Karen Kraushaar as one of the two women who worked with Herman Cain at the National Restaurant Association and accused him of sexual harassment. As the Poynter Institute’s Kelly McBride wrote, Business Insider and the Daily Caller repeated the Daily‘s report that Kraushaar had made the sexual harassment claim, and NPR got her to confirm her identity as “Woman A.” Shortly thereafter, Kraushaar was talking to the New York Times, and the whole world knew who she was.

For what good reason was Kraushaar’s identity concealed in the first place?

Politico, which broke the sexual harassment claims story on Oct. 31, didn’t really explain why it did not name the accusers in its scoop, reporting only that it had “confirmed the identities of the two female restaurant association employees who complained about Cain but, for privacy concerns, is not publishing their names.”

Why grant accusers anonymity for reasons of “privacy,” but not the accused? It makes no sense, especially in the Cain episode. No legal finding of sexual harassment was made, and the only evidence that Cain committed sexual harassment is that cash settlements of $35,000 and $45,000 were reportedly paid to the two accusers. But that’s no evidence at all—the cost of defending a sexual harassment charge is so steep that paying severance of $35,000 is a bargain even if a case has little merit.

Mind you, I’m not saying that the charges against Cain have no merit. I’m as open to the argument that he created a hostile environment of sexual harassment as defined by the law as I am to other interpretations of his alleged conduct (that he’s fresh, that he’s a masher, that he’s a creep on autopilot, that he’s wicked Uncle Ernie, that he’s stepped out of line too many times, and that you’d rather have your daughter walk 10 miles home barefoot in the snow than to accept a ride home from him).

But I’m also open to the possibility that he’s no rampaging sexual monster—and you should be, too.

Politico’s decision to bestow a privacy setting on the accusers put Cain in a tough position. If he names them in an attempt to refute the charges he opens himself to charges of “violating” their privacy. By not naming them, he resigned himself to fighting phantoms.

As a phantom-fighter, Cain has not impressed, I should add. Combing through the various defenses he mounted, I was struck by their non-denial denial quality. Cain kept saying that he had not committed sexual harassment and that appears to be legally true. I know of no legal finding of sexual harassment against him. By definition, his alleged encounter with Sharon Bialek would not rise to a case of sexual harassment because she wasn’t working for him or with him at the time. (It may qualify as sexual assault, although it would have been difficult to prove as many have noted.) The question people want answered is not whether his behaviors fall under the definition of sexual harassment but whether he routinely violates current socio-sexual norms in the workplace. And Cain knows it.

Another Cain accuser—one who did not file a sexual harassment complaint—told her story to the Associated Press and the Wall Street Journal last week. “She said the behavior included a private invitation to his corporate apartment” and that he had “made sexually suggestive remarks or gestures,” according to the AP. Both the AP and the Journal gave the woman anonymity because she feared “retaliation.”

Retaliation? What sort of retaliation? The accuser described in the AP and Wall Street Journal no longer works for Cain, so he can’t directly retaliate. Obviously, he could hire detectives or others to stalk and bully his accusers. But assuming that Cain knows who has made the charges—and I think that’s a safe assumption—he’s already in a position to stage such retaliation if they ask reporters for anonymity. The fears of retaliation are a journalistic fig leaf, designed to serve reporters who want to coax a story out of reluctant sources. Few sources are ever beyond the long arm of the accused bent on retaliation.

You could say that Bialek and Kraushaar are suffering a kind of retaliation now as the press questions the motives of Cain’s accusers. The AP reports today that Kraushaar filed a second complaint against employers at the job she got after leaving the National Restaurant Association, making her look like a bit of a serial accuser. Bialek, meanwhile, is being cast as a post-bankruptcy gold-digger in the press.

I doubt very much whether any of the accusers are much appreciating the scrutiny being directed at them. I know I wouldn’t. But that doesn’t mean the press should conceal their identities. Under our system of law, bringing accusations of wrongdoing and other acts of whistleblowing is not an easy thing, nor should it be. It requires stamina and patience, and a willingness to be cross-examined. As it should! Sometimes false accusations are brought and the accused is innocent. He is just as deserving of justice as the accuser.

The shape of the Cain debate and the press treatment of the accusers both imply that we think sexual harassment is such an incendiary offense that we must observe a taboo against naming accusers. It also implies that we think that those accused of sexual harassment are so all-powerful in today’s culture that they can destroy accusers via “retaliation.”

I reject both of those views with the same vehemence that I reject the idea that women who bring civil charges of sexual harassment in the workplace must be treated like delicate flowers that will wilt and expire if scrutinized. If you’ve ever filed criminal or civil charges—or sat on a jury—you don’t need me to tell you that justice is never easy. The accused have the right to meet their accusers in court, even when it makes the accusers uncomfortable, a standard that the press—allegedly a bastion of openness and reproducible results—should observe, too. Privacy for accusers is a cop-out.

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I sketched out some of these thoughts this afternoon in a Poynter chat with Kelly McBride and Mallary Tenore. Make your complaints against me public by tweeting at my Twitter feed. Or send them via email to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. 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: Sharon Bialek speaks during a news conference accusing Republican presidential hopeful Herman Cain of sexual harassment in New York, November 7, 2011. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

Washington’s anonymous sources are disagreeing with one another today.

In the lead story in today’s New York Times (“U.S. Debated Cyberwarfare in Attack Plan on Libya”), the anonymous sources tell reporters Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker that the issue of whether or not to attack Libya with cyberweapons was “intensely debated” by the Obama administration last March.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post‘s catch-up story by Ellen Nakashima that runs on A5 in today’s print edition, disputes an important element of the Times revelation. Relying on its own anonymice, the Post piece confirms that a cyberwarfare debate took place but asserts unequivocally that the debate “did not reach the White House” according to Pentagon officials. [Emphasis added.]

Obviously, either the Times or the Post owes its readers a correction because the administration cannot have “intensely debated” cyberwar against the Libyan military at the same time that it did not. Such  a fundamental contradiction screams out for a follow-up story by both papers, but will we see them?

Probably not, because the whole genre of anonymously sourced Washington journalism avoids the basic accountability that comes with on-the-record attribution. Speak an untruth on the record to a Washington reporter and he will hound you for an explanation. Speak the same untruth to a Washington reporter as an anonymous source and the reporter will probably insist on taking you to lunch to pump you for more information and only gently chide you for your misdirection.

Washington reporters care for, feed, and coddle their anonymous sources because reporters here outnumber important sources by at least 100 to one. The lopsided supply and demand permits important sources to dictate the terms of engagement, and anonymity is one of the terms they often demand. Anonymity allows them to dictate or spin a story to their advantage while suffering no liability for what they say.

The reporters behind the opposing stories are talented and deeply tapped in. Timesmen Schmitt and Shanker are particularly well versed in the subject of cybercapabilities, having recently published a book about the Pentagon’s secret wars against Al Qaeda. The Post‘s Nakashima similarly has a number of solid bylines on the topic of cyberwar to her credit.

But the differences between the two stories are dramatic. The Times makes it sound as if the Pentagon and the White House conducted a spirited trans-Potomac conversation about contaminating the Libyan military’s computer grid, which means the Obamaites were open to the idea. The Post makes the discussion sound more like a Pentagon rap session than deliberations over escalating the Libyan war. (Odd, isn’t it, that the decision to bomb radar installations—and kill people in the process—came easily, but the decision to dispatch a virus to infect those same radars and not kill people is still on-going? But that’s the topic of a different column.)

The Times piece gives credence to the Post‘s interpretation in several passages, most notably writing that “the cyberwarfare proposals were rejected before they reached the senior political levels of the White House.” If the proposals reached only junior political levels of the White House, it seems misleading to describe those conversations as “intensely debated” inside the “Obama administration,” which is what the Times does. Other reasons to speculate that the Times inflated its story: The “previously undisclosed debate” took place “among a small circle of advisors” and, “The debate about a potential cyberattack against Libya was described by more than a half-dozen officials.” So the “debate” was small and the sourcing pool was small, too.

But there’s a case to be made for the Times‘s interpretation of events. The Post‘s equally anonymous story was published after the Times‘s, which was posted to the Web on Monday, so one way to critically read it is not as a news story but as an answer by the Post‘s White House anonymous sources to the Times‘s Pentagon anonymous sources. Viewed this way, the Post and its sources are saying, move along, never happened, to the assertion by the Times and its sources that we came this close to declaring cyberwar.

The Post‘s account invites skepticism if only because its biggest news—that the debate did not reach the White House—is ascribed to “officials.” Well, of course “officials” are the sources, as opposed to stumps and rocks. But in which bureaucracy–Pentagon or the White House–are these “officials” located?

When anonymous sources duel like this in the pages of the Times and the Post, there’s often a more nuanced power struggle going on than the press corps can detect. Not to get all Rashomon on you, but the identity of a story’s sources is as important as what the sources said. When a newspaper fails to name its sources—as the Times and the Post did today—it invites skepticism, disbelief, doubt, and suspicion from readers, making press critics of us all.

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Rat out anonymice with email to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. See also my vermin-free Twitter feed. (This RSS feed rings every time a new Shafer column goes live. This hand-built one rings every time a correction is filed.)

PHOTO: A laboratory mouse. (Credit : Dennis Thiele/University of Michigan)

Alaskan anonymice. Joe McGinniss got knocked by reviewers—me included—for relying so heavily on anonymous sources for his new book, The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin. Today he strikes back at his critics in the opinion pages of USA Today, citing Bob Woodward, New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson, and Huffington Post media reporter Michael Calderone on why journalists must get anonymice to squeak about the powerful if they’re going to get the story.

In mounting his defense, McGinniss lunges for the “speaking truth to power” cliché and hugs it as if he’s drowning and it’s the only safety buoy bobbing in sight. In the case of McGinniss’s coverage of Palin, who resigned from the office of governor in July 2009, the more appropriate catch phrase would be “speaking truth to those out of power.” Since 2009, Palin has held little power outside of her TV appearances, her reality TV show, her two best-selling books, her sporadic bus tours, and a threat to run for president. By such a wobbly yardstick, even Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich can almost be considered “powerful.”

McGinniss brags in the op-ed that he interviewed about 200 people in Alaska and quoted more than 60 in the book. As I read The Rogue, I kept track of the number of anonymous sources that he cited and came up with more than 50. It seems to me that a book that isn’t about national security or whose information isn’t cocooned beneath a corporate veil, such as The Rogue, should have had a better ratio than 60 named sources to 50 unnamed ones. McGinniss builds the case in his book and his op-ed that Sarah and Todd Palin deal vindictively with people who cross them, although to the best of my knowledge none of their victims have been fished out of Cook Inlet.

It doesn’t bother me that McGinniss relied heavily on anonymous sources for reporting his book but it does bug me that he gave them such voice and prominence in the telling of his story. Just because an anonymous source says something doesn’t make it true; just ask Judith Miller. In many cases, anonymous sources have less of an incentive to tell the truth than someone speaking on the record because they know nobody is going to find them out. Also, on-the-record quotations are easier to verify than anonymous ones. McGinniss knows this. Must I go on?

As for McGinniss’s USA Today kicker—”And let’s remember, without Deep Throat, there wouldn’t have been any Watergate hearings, and Richard Nixon would never have resigned”—this is absolutely wrong. Deep Throat wasn’t the essential source that broke the Watergate story, as W. Joseph Campbell (and others) have reported. McGinniss could pick up a copy of Campbell’s 2010 book, Getting It Wrong: Ten of the Greatest Misreported Stories in American Journalism or click through to this piece on Campbell’s blog. As Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein write in All the President‘s Men, Woodward’s discussions with Deep Throat were “only to confirm information that had been obtained elsewhere, and to add some perspective.”

Netflix switcheroo. Having named his DVD rental service “Netflix” instead of “PostalFlix,” company founder Reed Hastings consciously telegraphed the electronic future of his company. So, having contemplated this transition from the beginning, how could he so completely bollix the decision to halve the company into two entities, Qwikster for DVDs and Netflix for streaming, and then today announce that he’s stitching the twins back together and calling his one big baby Netflix again?

I can’t think of any parallel in business history that compares to the Netflix debacle. Hastings’s mistake was to bundle a new service—video streaming—into the Netflix classic product in 2007 and charge no additional price as long as subscribers didn’t exceed defined viewing thresholds (six hours for $5.99 a month subscribers and 18 hours for $17.99 a month subscribers). Netflix is a flat-rate viewing service, Hastings actively signaled to his customers.

Had Hastings charged a nominal extra sum for streaming from the beginning, indicating to customers he was launching a second, new product that he was discounting to his DVD customers, few would have griped. That would have left him free to increase the streaming fee as the size and quality of his streaming library grew and as he expanded the number of hours of streaming per customer. I don’t recall any cable TV subscribers threatening to bomb Comcast offices when pay-per-view was introduced as a separate, paid product decades ago.

People don’t really protest for long if you start charging for something that was once considered free, just as long as you haven’t mistakenly bundled it with a paid product. Take, for example, the low resistance to the New York Times‘s recent imposition of a pay wall for its Web site. The Times could have pulled a Netflix and split itself into two different products—the paper edition and the Web edition—and started charging separately for each. Instead, it started charging for the free service—targeting the excessive free-riders who had no moral right to object to the shakedown—but left undisturbed its relationship with paid print subscribers, who were encouraged to use as much of the Web edition as they like.

Although he’s killing Qwikster, Hastings is still sticking to his previously announced price increases, which is what most riled his customers in the first place. The company won’t restore its relationship with its customers until they accept the higher prices as normal—and with $1 a night rentals at Redbox and online alternatives at Amazon, iTunes, and Hulu, that won’t be soon.

Ask an expert. This week’s installment of “Ask an expert” taps political reporter David Weigel, my former colleague at Slate. Hey, Dave, what’s the biggest difference between the Tea Party movement and Occupy Wall Street? Dave’s answer: “The Tea Party, from the outset, had a satisfactory political outcome in sight/mind. Namely, beating Obama and winning Congress.”

FOIA update. On Sept. 22, I wrote a piece about the critiques of Al Jazeera the State Department and the Defense Intelligence Agency wrote in 2005 and whose existence were revealed in diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks. I filed FOIAs the next day with both State and DIA requesting copies of those critiques, which the cables say a State Department officer shared with Al Jazeera, and promised to keep you up to date on the FOIA process.

Today, the State Department confirmed via the U.S. Mail that it had received my request and would notify me after it had retrieved and reviewed the material.

Nice turnaround, State! That’s 10 working days! Now, get on the case, DIA! (For RSS updates on my FOIA request, add this to your feed.)

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The DIA will probably deliver its response with a drone. Send yours via email to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. I stream all day on my Twitter feed. (This RSS feed rings every time a new Shafer column goes live. This hand-built one rings every time a correction is filed.)

PHOTO: Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin is reflected in the window of her SUV in Portsmouth, New Hampshire June 2, 2011. REUTERS/Brian Snyder