Silicon Insider: Newsweek Gets Flushed

May 19, 2005 -- -- How could Newsweek get the Koran in the Guantanamo toilet story so wrong?

Easy. Let me count the ways …

Let's leave aside for the sake of this column the obvious hypocrisy of Islamicists rioting and murdering over the rumored desecration of a copy of the Koran -- when they happily destroy and defile any Bible they get their hands on.

Let's also only briefly acknowledge that nobody at Newsweek -- or in the Bush administration, which apparently knew this story was coming -- had any idea this little throw-away item would turn into a cultural bombshell. Nor, I suspect, did you or I or the hundreds of thousands of other Newsweek readers even give it second thought ... until the riots started in Kabul.

What I do want to discuss in this column is why Newsweek (in particular, its veteran reporter Michael Isikoff) screwed up. Why it did so at the worst possible moment; with the worst possible consequences, and in the most predictable way -- and what lessons this screw-up holds for the emerging blogosphere.

I've been an investigative reporter for newspapers, and the editor of other investigative reporters for a magazine. And as I've watched the Newsweek story (and the CBS National Guard story before it) unfold, I've felt more than a little déjà vu: there, but for some great partners, good editors and some cold-blooded lawyers, went I.

Ever since Woodward and Bernstein -- maybe even since Henry Stanley and Ida Tarbell -- so-called "investigative reporting" has been the gold standard of American journalism and the aspiration of every ambitious young reporter. You sit there in the newsroom, typing out the latest dreary city council meeting or high school basketball or quarterly earnings story and you dream of breaking that big, multi-part front page story that cracks open the dark secrets of your community, pulls down the crooked big-shots, and saves innocent victims from a life of poverty and oppression. You win the Pulitzer Prize, get a private office with a door you can close, and nobody cares if you don't come into the office more than a couple times each week and don't file more than a couple stories a year -- because you are working on The Next Big One.

Indeed, there are great stories of institutional corruption, hidden crimes among the powerful and unexposed inequities out there, and thank God we have crusading journalists to expose them.

But the reality of investigative reporting is a long way from the fever dreams of cub reporters.

Isolation and Reporting Realities

For one thing, there is the eerie isolation of the process itself. Everybody else in the newsroom knows exactly what they are doing -- attending the shareholders meeting, covering the fire downtown, reporting on the baseball game … while you are trying to find a guy who may have heard something about a rumor involving some group that doesn't show up in any legal documents. I spent long nights in a lonely, scary railroad yard waiting for some vigilante cops who never showed up (and may have never existed). More pertinent to the Newsweek fiasco, I once found myself in a college professor's office, along with a competitor from USA Today, after he called to say he was convinced that a well-known mass murderer had been one of his students -- only to have him finally admit that he couldn't find any records of that student.

Much scarier are the stories that turn into self-fulfilling prophesies. Once, my partner, Pete Carey (one of the great investigative reporters, and a two-time Pulitzer winner) and I, while tracking down a story about sweatshops in Silicon Valley, found ourselves each day encountering more and more people who had just heard something about that illegal activity. After two weeks of ever-growing excitement, it suddenly hit us that, like lost men walking in a circle, we were running into our own story coming back at us.

Then there is the paranoia. Once, while we were looking into espionage and revolutionary/crime groups in Silicon Valley, I was told by the FBI that it would be watching me to find out what I learned about one such group -- and that I should understand that the nasty crowd I was tracking would have no hesitation in coming into the newsroom and killing me at my desk. I spent a lot of time during those months looking over my shoulder.

For first time investigative reporters, there is often an accompanying case of Cop's Disease, where the dewy innocence falls from your eyes and you find yourself driving down the freeway, looking at the people in the cars around you and thinking: "Criminals. Every damn one of them. They've all got something to hide." Veteran investigative reporters sometimes become avenging angels, judge and jury for their targets -- monomaniacally stalking perceived evil-doers, doing whatever it takes to get the goods on someone who is "dirty." I once knew a reporter who, having failed to nail a bad guy in print, took to calling him at night to say, "I'll get you some day."

Stories Can Cause Shockwaves

Then there are the unforeseen consequences. You expose a bad guy, and only afterward realize that his kids have to go to school the next day. Probably the single most important investigative story I ever worked on, an original series on toxic chemicals in the electronics industry, written with the late, great Susan Yoachum, changed the nature of high-tech forever, cost companies hundreds of millions for new anti-pollution systems, made the workplace safer and probably saved many lives. But it also set off the waves of hysteria, fear, phony lawsuits and cynical union organizing that have bedeviled the industry ever since.

Meanwhile, an expose I wrote about a major semiconductor company improperly testing military chips while distracting government inspectors, ran in The New York Times, was read on the evening news … and had no discernable effect whatsoever. The Feds needed the chips.

Investigative reporting is like crack: once you've tried it, you never want to do anything else. But the cost in isolation, stress, paranoia and fear can be devastating. As the editor of what became the most important story ever written about the Internet and child pornography, I regularly took late night calls from the reporter, an old friend, who would be sitting in a bar trying to burn the computer images of the day out of his brain. Spend enough time with cops and you find yourself defending them from the citizenry; spend enough time with robbers and you forget that most of them are lying sociopaths.

Now, take all of this, and wrap it in celebrity, professional fame, big money and the need to perpetually top your last Big Story, and you have the life of a full-time, big media investigative reporter. The best of these men and women -- and Newsweek's Isikoff is one of them -- are very bright, intellectually rigorous, fearless and endowed with a unique, laser-like personality that bores right down to the core of every person or topic they encounter. They typically aren't very likeable people, but they are the best at what they do.

Unfortunately, they are also on a treadmill that will only stop when they are thrown off. They must forever top their last big story -- and that, combined with the intrinsic paranoia of the profession and the pugnacity that makes them challenge the biggest guy in the room (notice how all of these scandals have the same target: the Bush administration) -- almost always leads them to make an error. In Isikoff's case, a fatal one.

Through Fact-Checking a Must

What saves most investigative reporters from reaping the whirlwind of their own frenzied obsessions is tough editors who keep them on track, who demand supporting facts for untethered speculations, and who apply some much-needed perspective. That, and good libel lawyers.

I remember sitting in a windowless office, seething and nearly in tears, as I watched my managing editor and the newspaper's attorney go through my story and cut out every sentence that I couldn't support with a legal document or a confirmable quote from a named source. Half the story was quickly lined out for oblivion. It was like watching my heart being sawed out of my chest. I hated those people then ... and I bless them now. They saved my career many times over.

But when you are a big-time investigative reporter, with a long string of famous exposes, who is going to call you to task? Who is going to point out to you that it is impossible to flush a book down a toilet? Who is going to ask you for the name of your source? Or for a document in support of his claim?

Isikoff blew it. Newsweek blew it. And, as the latest reporting scandal, it is yet another reminder of the serious flaws in the Mainstream Media, including a distorted sense of privilege, declining quality and a dangerous star system. Once again, in helping expose this mess, the blogosphere has shown that it is an important new force in our society.

But the blogosphere should itself beware. It too is gaining privilege and power and creating its own superstars. But as yet it has no tough old managing editors or steely-eyed libel lawyers to keep it honest -- only peer pressure and competition.

With lives at stake, let's hope that's enough.

This work is the opinion of the columnist and in no way reflects the opinion of ABC News.

Michael S. Malone, once called “the Boswell of Silicon Valley,” most recently was editor at large of Forbes ASAP magazine. He has covered Silicon Valley and high-tech for more than 20 years, beginning with the San Jose Mercury-News as the nation's first daily high-tech reporter. His articles and editorials have appeared in such publications as The Wall Street Journal, The Economist and Fortune, and for two years he was a columnist for The New York Times. He has hosted two national PBS shows: "Malone," a half-hour interview program that ran for nine years, and in 2001, a 16-part interview series called "Betting It All: The Entrepreneurs." Malone is best known as the author of a dozen books. His latest book, a collection of his best newspaper and magazine writings, is called "The Valley of Heart's Delight."