There’s a standard set of gripes that journalists hear from people who feel maligned by a story: “The information was taken out of context! We were misrepresented! We weren’t given the chance to tell our side of the story!”
But in the mini-scandal of how New York Governor Eliot Spitzer’s office used the press to spread damaging information about a political nemesis, State Senate President Joseph Bruno, it is the journalists at the Albany Times Union who are crying foul.
New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo released a scathing report last Monday on his office’s investigation into the use, by Spitzer’s top advisers, of state police to keep tabs on Bruno’s taxpayer-funded travel. In that report, the AG strongly implied that the Times Union abused the state Freedom of Information Law to protect its sources in the governor’s office.
But copies of the original FOIL requests, provided to CJR by Rex Smith, the Times Union’s editor in chief, suggest that the AG selectively quoted from the requests in a way that distorted the press’s role in this scandal.
The controversy started on July 1, when the paper ran a story by statehouse reporter Jim Odato on how Bruno had flown in state police helicopters, at taxpayer expense, from Albany to political fundraisers in New York City.
The revelation was based on flight records that, according to the piece, were released under the Freedom Of Information Law. Just four days earlier, on June 27, Odato had filed a FOIL request with Spitzer’s office asking for flight records on seven top state officials (including Spitzer and Bruno) after receiving a tip from what Smith says was “a source well known to Jim.”
Over the next week, Bruno loudly accused Spitzer of tracking him with state troopers, and then leaking the findings to the press. Spitzer and his office defended their actions, saying that the information released to the Times Union was simply matter of routine compliance with the FOIL request.
According to the Attorney General’s report, in mid-May, Spitzer’s state police liaison, William Howard, asked the agency’s acting superintendent to keep him informed of Bruno’s travels, claiming that the governor’s office had received a FOIL request for the information. In fact, all parties now admit, no such FOIL request existed at the time. State troopers who had driven Bruno around on days when he attended high-profile political events were interviewed by other officers, and this information was used reconstruct Bruno’s use of state aircraft.
These itineraries arrived at the Times Union on June 28 and 29, as part of the response to Odato’s FOIL request—which he filed after getting the tip on Bruno. Anyone who has worked with freedom of information laws, at the state or federal level, knows that requests don’t typically get such a prompt response. “They had it all ready to go. It was clear to me that the governor’s office wanted us to have this information,” says Robert Port, who runs the Times Union’s investigative unit. “It flew up a red flag. It made me more concerned that it was authentic, and that it was accurate.”
The article, headlined “State Flies Bruno to Fundraisers,” was published the Sunday before a week when Port and Odato were going to be out of the office on vacation. When the story proved to have legs, Smith says he e-mailed Port on the morning of July 4, asking Port to keep digging on the air travel story, “even if what we find doesn’t match the agenda of our sources.”
When Port and Odato came back in the office on Monday, July 9, they set to work on a follow-up. The next day, Odato sent another FOIL request to the governor’s office.
This report strikes me as a bit slanted toward the T-U, and fails to take into account key details and context which do not redound to the paper's credit.
Some key facts which are not considered in the CJR's report:
1) As a former journalist for national publications, who has filed many FOIL requests (both as a private citizen and through attorneys), I find the manner in which Odato's follow-up request was crafted to be peculiar. It is of course not unusual for reporters or attorneys to make "standing" FOIL requests, updated on a pro forma basis with agencies. It is, however, unusual for the terms of such FOILs to change in the manner in which the T-U's did: Namely, the paper's FOIL was updated to cover precisely those records which it had already been provided, yet it had not requested (see #3, below). This more than justifies the raised eyebrows in Cuomo's report, given that the Governor's people clearly had begun their damage control by the time of the second request.
2) The manner in which the T-U's FOIL requests was handled should have raised significant alarm bells at the paper that it was being used for political purposes. Consider the sequence of events:
* First, they received a juicy tip, which is both the lifeblood of journalism but also cause for skepticism about the motive of the tipster. No such skepticism seems to have been exercised, however.
* Second, they filed a FOIL request based on the tip, a request which was filled with great alacrity -- an alacrity which, by Mr. Smith's own admission, is highly unusual for New York State government. (More usual is for the press and citizens to be stonewalled by State government until they threaten a lawsuit, or at least nag very aggressively.)
* Third, not only was the initial FOIL filled with amazing speed, it also included records that the paper had not requested. This either (a) should have alerted the paper that something was irregular about the manner in which they were receiving this material, or (b) serves as evidence of a certain collusion with the Governor's staff to push a story against Bruno.
3) Since this story broke, the Times-Union has surely received many written comments -- pro and con -- on the story itself, as well as the paper's handling of the story. Certainly, there has been intense activity on the paper's message boards about the topic. However, the paper's website shows no letters published on the matter, despite several editorials from the paper which offer various defenses of its reporting.
4) The lapse finally admitted by Smith above -- keeping Odato on the story for several days after he became part of the story -- is one that readers, including me, brought to Smith's and ohter T-U's staffers' attention within a very short time of the story breaking. Nevertheless, Odato was kept on the story, as acknowledged above, far longer than was appropriate. This glaring lapse (which no student of journalism at Columbia would fail to recognize) calls into question the rest of the T-U's decisionmaking.
5) Finally, your article nowhere acknowledges that Mr. Smith is himself a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism. By not disclosing this fact, and Mr. Smith's contacts with the school, your story unfortunately opens itself up to the criticism of an institution protecting its own. This omission may be innocent, but it is nevertheless unfortunate.
Please note that I offer the following as a lifelong Democrat who donated heavily to the Spitzer campaign, and who would still like to see his campaign platform of reforming Albany succeed.
Posted by Hudson
on Tue 31 Jul 2007 at 09:48 PM
Here is one other excellent point which others have raised, which fits nearly into the above:
The CJR cites the T-U's FOIL requests in full as if they were somehow exculpatory. But these actually raise even more questions about the paper's role.
It is rather strane for Freedom of Information Law requests for State Police records to be filed with the Governor's communications director. After all, the State Police have a Public Information Officer to handle such matters; all agencies are required to appoint a Records Access Officer.
At minimum, the T-U knows from experience that going through an intermediary in a separate agency or department is normally not the way to get a timely response to a FOIL. That they were directed (or chose) to filter this through the Second Floor suggests more awareness of the partisan nature of the tip than the T-U has admitted to.
Posted by Hudson
on Wed 1 Aug 2007 at 08:07 PM