Investigative Reporting Faces Obstacles

By: Randy Dotinga For a quarter-century, U.S. investigative reporters and editors have met to compare notes on what they can accomplish. This year, they turned to another topic: What they can't do.

Along with the ubiquitous tip sheets came grim assessments of threats from both within and without. Reporters say they face a federal government bent on keeping information to itself in the war on terror, as well as a newspaper industry more worried about profits than Pulitzers -- and less likely to send someone out to file a Freedom-of-Information Act (FOIA) request in the first place.

"Newspaper management has become business management. It's not a special business anymore," said Los Angeles Times Editor John S. Carroll, who made a few surprisingly blunt remarks June 1 at the Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) annual conference here.

Despite cutbacks at news organizations across the country, the convention still managed to attract nearly 1,100 people, including dozens of free-lancers and TV journalists.

Carroll pointed out, however, that worries about profit-conscious newspapers are hardly anything new. Carroll recalled his days at the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader, which soft-pedaled the biggest story of the 1960s. Staffers used to joke that they would run this correction one day: "It has come to the editor's attention that the Herald-Leader forgot to cover the civil-rights movement."

According to Carroll, "It's a mistake to think there was a golden age when publishers didn't care about profits. It wasn't the Garden of Eden back then." In fact, public-service reporting is better than ever today, he said -- but a declining number of newspapers engage in it.

"I would prefer a world in which newspapers were locally owned," said Carroll, whose present paper, the L.A. Times, and former paper, The Sun of Baltimore, got snapped up by the Chicago-based Tribune Co. in 2000. The "vice" of chains is that "they're greedy, and they want money, and they want to squeeze their publications to death." To laughter, he added, "That's true of every chain -- except the one I work for."

Jerry Ceppos, vice president of news at Knight Ridder and former editor of the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News, commented, however, that at his company he had "ideas of expanding investigative reporting rather than contracting." An audience member then challenged him to say where he could find the money for expansion.

Even the best editors in the world may be humbled by the new powers of the federal government. Reporters who cover national security told IRE audiences that their jobs became much harder after Sept. 11, especially in the wake of an October memo by U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft that was perceived as setting stricter guidelines regarding FOIA requests.

Government officials "don't return our calls or letters," complained Seth Rosenfeld, who covers federal courts for the San Francisco Chronicle. "What we're observing is a real big change in the government response. The Ashcroft memo tells every federal bureaucrat that, 'If you don't want to release [a document], we'll defend you in court.'"