USA Today has some explaining to do. This morning, it walked back — and seriously called into question — a critical portion of the reporting in its blockbuster May 11 page one story, which claimed that the National Security Agency “has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA Today.”
In the initial piece — and this seems to be where the problems began — reporter Leslie Cauley asserted that the “three telecommunications companies are working under contract with the NSA.” (Emphasis ours.) Those three companies, Cauley reported, were AT&T (which recently merged with SBC), Verizon and BellSouth.
This morning, the paper reported that, based on follow-up reporting, it “has now concluded that while the NSA has built a massive domestic calls record database involving the domestic call records of telecommunications companies, the newspaper cannot confirm that BellSouth or Verizon contracted with the NSA to provide bulk calling records to that database.” (Emphasis ours.)
USA Today reports that it followed up with the sources who had initially provided information about the NSA program (many of whom remain anonymous), and “All said the published report accurately reflected their knowledge and understanding of the NSA program, but none could document a contractual relationship between BellSouth or Verizon and the NSA, or that the companies turned over bulk calling records to the NSA.”
A story that accompanied the editor’s note concedes that five members of the congressional intelligence committees the paper spoke to in its follow-up investigation “said they had been told in secret briefings that BellSouth did not turn over call records to the NSA, three lawmakers said they had been told that Verizon had not participated in the NSA database, and four said that Verizon’s subsidiary MCI did turn over records to the NSA.”
So it looks like one of three companies initially fingered might be off the hook, and a second is implicated only through another company that it purchased in January. But the question of who told reporter Leslie Cauley that the companies contracted with the NSA remains unanswered. Indeed, the question isn’t even broached in the editor’s note. And we’re still looking for answers to other questions, as well, including: If the paper doesn’t feel confident enough to stand behind a major part of its story now, what made it confident enough to run it back in May? Where did this talk of “contracting” come from, and what exactly does the word mean? Is Leslie Cauley, who reported the original piece but not most of the follow-ups, and was listed only as a contributor to today’s explanatory piece along with six other reporters, in hot water?
“She is still on the story,” USA Today‘s editor, Ken Paulson told CJR Daily this afternoon. “Two things happened. When Bell South released their statement [that they did not have a contract with the NSA], Leslie had to go back and talk to her sources again, so she has continued to work on the story.”
As for the necessity of the note the paper ran this morning, Paulson said that it was only “intended to be responsive to the statements” that Verizon and BellSouth issued, saying that they had not contracted to turn bulk phone call records over to the NSA, “so our note was intended to be responsive to those statements.”
It’s also noteworthy that Cauley’s May 11 piece relied heavily on anonymous sources, a practice that burned the paper in 2003 when its star reporter, Jack Kelley, was found to have made up parts of stories, including quotes, hiding some of his fabrications behind various unnamed sources.
As a result of the Kelley fabrications, editor Karen Jurgensen left the paper and Ken Paulson was installed in her place. Once in, Paulson instituted a new policy policy requiring that one of the paper’s five managing editors must agree to the use of each unnamed source. As he explained to Editor & Publisher in 2004, “the managing editor has to make a judgment that the source is absolutely essential to the story and the value to readers outweighs the potential damage to our credibility.” Before the new rules, reporters were only required to tell their “direct supervisor” the identity of their anonymous source.
Paulson told CJR Daily that this policy “was absolutely applied here. Every source was identified to a senior managing editor, and everything that source had to say was discussed at length with that senior managing editor.” He refused to offer any comment on Cauley’s use of anonymous sources in the story, or if one or more of the sources turned out to be wrong.
We — that’s us and you — need to know a lot more than USA Today has told us about this. Clearly, a system of internal safeguards set up with the best of intentions by the newspaper’s went badly awry on this one.
We just don’t know how or why — which, at the end of the day, is what conscientious journalists everywhere need to know, and what the paper has an obligation to explain.
Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.