Voices
Dark Side of
the Moon
Why a Leak from the White House has NASA Reporters Crying Foul
It was a classic eye-catching, front-page, above-the-fold story. A Washington newspaper reports that the president will soon announce a major and costly new initiative, in an article full of details gleaned from unnamed senior administration sources. But the story behind the UPI/Washington Times scoop also provides a glimpse into how hard this administration works to circumvent the mainstream press.
The unusual January 8 article was authored not by traditional journalists, but by two writers openly sympathetic to President Bush, to NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe, and to the space program. It revealed that the president intended to retire the space shuttle as soon as the space station is completed, build a new spaceship to take astronauts back to the moon, and eventually land humans on Mars. The article appeared six days before the presidential announcement. In a follow-up series of three features, the two reporters, Keith Cowing and Frank Sietzen, described specific White House meetings and quoted what the participants said during them in the months leading up to Bush’s announcement.
It was an astonishing leak from an administration that prides itself on strict information control. Reuters and other publications had written that the president would soon propose major changes to the nation’s space program, including a return to the moon and a trip to Mars. But the extensive detail in the UPI/Washington Times story caught the small cadre of reporters who cover NASA by surprise. “They got a big scoop and they got it mostly right,” says John Kelly, who follows NASA for Florida Today. But some of Cowing and Sietzen’s colleagues cried foul, claiming that the big exclusive was a payoff for a year of sycophantic reporting. With his biting commentary and conservative bent, Cowing is the Matt Drudge of space. He’s a former NASA employee who founded the Web-based NASA Watch in 1996, and from that position harshly criticized a former NASA chief, Dan Goldin, as well as the Clinton White House. Of late, Cowing has been enthusiastic about the leadership of O’Keefe, who is a protégé of Vice President Dick Cheney.
Cowing can also be a vociferous critic of space reporters (including this one), lacing his recent editorial comments about their stories with words and phrases such as “idiotic” and “what have you been smoking?” NASA Watch is a must-read for reporters covering the beat. But reader beware. Eric Pianin of The Washington Post says: “In the past year or two, NASA Watch has served as an advocate and booster of NASA, and it takes shots often at journalists seen as too aggressive.”
Sietzen once directed communications for the National Space Society and has worked for nearly twenty years on space trade newsletters and magazines. Criticism of their scoop is pure sour grapes, he and Cowing insist. They were onto the Moon-Mars story last fall while writing about a White House review of NASA’s future for NASA Watch and Spaceref, a Web-based information source affiliated with NASA Watch. Sietzen says that a senior administration official telephoned and complained that “if you continue to write about this, you could derail it all.” When they initially refused to stop, Sietzen says, the official offered them unprecedented access to high-level internal discussions on NASA’s future. In exchange, they agreed to wait until twenty-four hours before the president made a public announcement about the Moon-Mars plans before publishing their story, and to include quotes by a senior administration source. “It was a classic sort of embargo,” says Cowing. But if another publication was about to go with the story, they were freed from the embargo restraint.
Sietzen, who has worked as a stringer for UPI, approached Phil Beradelli, the wire service’s deputy science and technology editor, with the news. “This was a major story, and we were interested,” Beradelli says. Had the news been highly critical of the agency, he adds, he likely would not have assigned stringers. “But I gave them more leeway, since there was no good reason for the administration to mislead them.” Sietzen says what followed was “a truly bizarre experience” of meeting sources in bars and airports in late fall. “We spent a month piecing it all together.” By December, after Beradelli confirmed the facts to his own satisfaction, the article was ready to go.
When Reuters moved its more general story on the afternoon of January 8, UPI published its piece two hours later, since it was obvious the news was leaking. The Washington Post subsequently gave credit to UPI for being the first to get the details.
The small community of reporters and policy-makers who follow the space program assume that O’Keefe was the source for the articles. Sietzen admits that their news article and subsequent features give a “NASA-centric” view, though he won’t name his source. NASA’s public affairs chief, Glenn Mahone — who insists that he wasn’t the leaker — declines to say if O’Keefe was their source. Mahone adds that he was “a little bothered” by Cowing’s and Sietzen’s story, since it preempted the president’s speech at NASA headquarters six days later to such a large degree.
But White House officials say privately that they were more than bothered. “We were shocked that NASA would do this — particularly given the way this White House controls the message,” says one. No witch-hunt to find the leak ensued. The same White House official says that he and his colleagues assume O’Keefe was the source, but that he had the green light from a senior official to give the information to a sympathetic reporting team working for a wire service and newspaper known for its conservative bent.
Sietzen has little sympathy for the mainstream media’s complaints. “Is this administration less inclined to give a scoop to The Washington Post?” he asks. “Probably. And if that means I might get a couple of phone calls to level the playing field, fine.”
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