After collecting some 33,000 signatures, a group of activists say they are ready to deliver a petition to the Washington Post on Wednesday, asking the paper to disclose to the public that the paper’s owner Jeff Bezos not only works with, but profits from the CIA.
Started by the progressive online organization RootsAction, which advocates for economic fairness, equal rights, civil liberties, environmental protection and defunding endless wars, the petition says that “a basic principle of journalism is to acknowledge when the owner of a media outlet has a major financial relationship with the subject of coverage.”
Signed by people from all over the country, including Washington Post readers, the petition simply asks for the Post to “include full disclosure that the sole owner of the Post is also the main owner of Amazon — and Amazon is now gaining huge profits directly from the CIA,” in “substantial and substantive coverage” of the intelligence agency.
Although Washington Post’s Executive Editor Martin Baron refused to meet with the petitioners for even 10 minutes on Wednesday, including their spokesman Norman Solomon, co-founder of RootsAction, founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, author, and media critic, Solomon says he still plans to deliver the petition to the Post’s headquarters in downtown Washington, D.C. at 11 a.m. EST.
Solomon says he’s bringing a printout of the petition, which includes thousands of pages of comments from those who signed the petition, and will remain at the Post’s headquarters for a while in order to talk to Washington Post journalists and correspondents coming in and out of the building, as well as those who have gathered to cover the delivery of the petition.
Full disclosure
In an email exchange with Solomon, which was made public last week, Baron said that the newspaper doesn’t need to routinely inform readers of the CIA-Amazon-Bezos ties when reporting on the CIA, and said that if the paper did include such disclosure, it would be “far outside the norm of disclosures about potential conflicts of interest at media organizations.”
John Hanrahan, a former executive director of The Fund for Investigative Journalism and former reporter for the Washington Post, the Washington Star, UPI and other news organizations, agreed that the request is outside the norm, but said the situation it tries to deal with is also way outside the norm.
“We’re not dealing here with a situation in which, say for example, a Post reporter has a spouse who works for the CIA and who would clearly be covered by the Post’s conflict of interest standards.
“But those standards do not cover this absolutely extraordinary situation in which the newspaper is owned by one of the world’s richest men, a man who also is the founder and majority stockholder in the world’s largest on-line retailer, and that retailer has a lucrative cloud data storage contract with the CIA — and wants even more contracts with this super-secretive spy agency.”
In response to Baron’s email, Solomon also pointed out that “few journalists could have anticipated ownership of the paper by a multibillionaire whose outside company would be so closely tied to the CIA.”
But Baron maintained that the paper’s coverage of the U.S. government and its agencies, including the CIA, has remained “aggressive” and has not been compromised since Bezos took over.
In a follow-up email to Solomon, Baron gave some examples of times when the Post would disclose its CIA connection, which includes “CIA contracting practices, the CIA’s use of cloud services, big-data initiatives at the CIA, Amazon’s pursuit of cloud services as a line of business, and Amazon corporate matters in general.”
Solomon responded by asking what “directly relevant” meant, since “Given that few agencies are more secretive than the CIA — and even the most enterprising reporters are challenged to pry loose even a small fraction of its secrets — how do we know which CIA stories are ‘directly relevant’ to the fact that Amazon is providing cloud computing services to the CIA?”
In an interview with MintPress, Solomon noted that given that the petition makes a minimal request, he asked, “What does it tell us when the top editor has rejected it?” Answering his own question, Solomon said it’s “significant” Baron rejected the request in the petition because it exposes deeper issues.
Jeopardized reputation
While many activists have highlighted the dangers that exist when the media works closely with a government agency, many have pointed out that the Washington Post-CIA connection is especially concerning since the paper is one of, if not the most, important political media outlets in the U.S.
Since Bezos has only owned the Post for about five months, Solomon says it’s not clear whether its coverage of the CIA has been affected, and said that he and other media critics will continue to monitor the paper’s coverage.
However, Solomon added that ownership tends to affect media coverage and pointed out that when Rupert Murdoch bought the Wall Street Journal people argued the paper’s coverage wouldn’t be affected, but it has been.
Solomon said the tricky part about media owners is that they relay their messages from the top down in regards to what journalists can and can’t do, including which news topics they can cover. But he says in most cases, the journalists are not getting memos from the bosses themselves.
What’s unique about the Post-CIA connection, Solomon said, is that while an ideological incentive has always motivated some to buy newspapers, Bezos and other billionaires are now buying media outlets because there is an economic incentive.
“American journalism has entered highly dangerous terrain,” he said. “The Post is supposed to expose CIA secrets. But Amazon is under contract to keep them. Amazon has a new $600 million ‘cloud’ computing deal with the CIA.”
When Baron pointed to a recent piece in the Post that discussed the CIA’s hidden involvement in Colombia’s fight against Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia rebels, including a fatal missile attack across the border in Ecuador, as an example of a time when “neither the NSA nor the CIA has been pleased with publication of their secrets,” Solomon said that it’s unclear how unhappy the CIA is about the article.
“Have they complained? Launched a leak investigation?” he said. “Calling the leaker a traitor? No. It’s very unclear,” Solomon said. “That says something.
“I’m sure the CIA will continue to be unhappy about some stuff the Post does,” he added, before pointing out that even before the Bezos takeover, several of the Post’s writers and columnists have staunchly promoted CIA policies.
Journalism’s long affair with the CIA
While both Solomon and Hanrahan acknowledge that there is no “golden era of journalism,” they both agree that how the Post decides to handle this situation could set a dangerous precedent for other media outlets. Both also pointed to an expose Carl Bernstein, a former Washington Post reporter, wrote for Rolling Stone in 1977, in which Bernstein exposed hundreds of CIA connections to the news media.
“After creation of the CIA in 1947, it enjoyed direct collaboration with many U.S. news organizations,” Solomon said. “Citing CIA documents, Bernstein wrote that during the previous 25 years ‘more than 400 American journalists … have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency.’ He added: ‘The history of the CIA’s involvement with the American press continues to be shrouded by an official policy of obfuscation and deception.’”
Solomon said this is concerning since “extreme media cohabitation with the CIA has declined sharply” in the last few decades, but simultaneously, especially during the time period leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, “many prominent U.S. journalists and media outlets have continued to regurgitate, for public consumption, what’s fed to them by the CIA and other official ‘national security’ sources.”
“I never like to tell anyone what to do,” Hanrahan said, “but might suggest that reporters who cover CIA issues routinely insert into their major pieces a sentence or short paragraph laying out the Bezos/Amazon/CIA connection — and then argue with their editors about why they believe such a disclosure is necessary if the editor wants to take that out.
“I can’t imagine a Post editor actually telling a reporter to go easy on the CIA, but a message could be subtly conveyed institutionally to give a reporter the feeling that it is not a good career move to cross certain lines in reporting on the CIA.”
He added that “this lack of disclosure is also bad news for Post reporters who have to cover the intelligence community or who have overseas assignments, often in areas experiencing civil wars or great unrest, since often these reporters are “accused by the local populace of being CIA agents even when there is no such connection.”
Hanrahan said that ultimately the mere existence of the Post/Bezos/Amazon/CIA connection is bad enough. And while he recognizes that “Disclosing this connection in news stories about the CIA doesn’t make the issue go away,” he says that “at least the Post would be owning up to such a connection rather than burying it in occasional stories about Amazon’s CIA contract.”