Scoops and Revelations
To find them, you need a good compass and great receptors.
The freedom to break “news” energizes journalism and democracy. But breaking new ideas should matter even more. “Ideas” can be more flexible and dynamic than the dominant conventional wisdom. Without new ideas, today’s deluge of new information and “data points” merely scrambles old ways of thinking without improving public “intelligence. It just overwhelms wise reckoning and decision-making.
For most journalists, breaking new ideas is a pretty daunting prospect. Often, it’s beyond their reach because, writing on tight deadlines, often about situations they were thrown into without much preparation, reporters must work from whatever story lines are already in their heads and the heads of their readers and viewers. In other words, they have to draw from conventional wisdom or, depending on their news outlet, a dominant ideology. Doing so makes their work sensible to readers or viewers who are busy, too, and who often want their preconceptions confirmed. But such writing doesn’t always facilitate useful public give-and-take or, with it, democracy.
Conventional wisdom can be scrambled by events such as the 9/11 attacks, the near-meltdown of the American economy during the 2008 presidential campaign, the Tea Party and, later, the MAGA invasion of Congress, a national debt-ceiling stand-off, and, of course, the 2020 pandemic. The rise of Trump and the persistence of Trumpism have underscored much of the media’s own entrapment in conventional ideas. It’s at such times, when the best lose all conviction and the worst are filled with passionate intensity, that most journalism is a very rough first draft of history, at best.
Yet, like Orwell in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War, serious reporters and essayists produce not just “news” but also interpretive narratives and analyses that help us to see what conventional wisdom would have missed or denied. To accomplish this, a journalist needs historical memory and even intellection to establish the contexts and parameters for reporting that’s rich as well as clear. That’s why the best preparation for journalism is a strong liberal education.
Here are some of my reports on situations where historical memory and informed judgment benefited me as a reporter or commentator and, I’d like to think, benefitted some of my readers.
1. Exposing fraud in the election to succeed Shirley Chisholm in Congress.
The first time I understood how to break news came one Saturday morning in 1982, when I walked into the Brooklyn Board of Elections as a Village Voice writer and saw supporters of Brooklyn State Senator Vander Beatty “checking” voter registration cards in a Democratic primary election for the retiring Rep. Shirley Chisholm‘s historic Bedford Stuyvesant congressional seat. Beatty had reportedly just lost that race to a State Senate colleague, Major R. Owens.
But Beatty, a classic “povertycrat” whose anti-racist rhetoric had given him a “pass” from elite liberals who were too timid to pay closer attention, as well as a pass from the corrupt, mostly white Brooklyn Democratic Party machine, had been endorsed for the Democratic nomination by the New York Times and by most elected Democrats in Brooklyn. What his campaign workers were doing that morning at the Board of Elections was forging signatures on voter-registration cards which they were supposedly just checking. Beatty‘s lawyers would then submit those forgeries to a judge as evidence that Owens had rigged the votes on Election Day. Beatty would sue to invalidate Owens’ victory.
I hadn‘t merely stumbled upon these shenanigans. A political operative with whom I’d had many conversations about the election called me and tipped me off. A Voice cover story of mine on Beatty‘s long record of corruption had been published shortly before the primary and had played some role in Owens‘ victory. All that my informant needed to say on the phone that morning was, “Get your ass down to the Board of Elections right now, and see what the Beatty people are doing.”
I’d had to defend my Voice expose of Beatty on the local NPR station. One vehement Beatty supporter who’d called in, insisting that my expose of Beatty’s record was little more than white-liberal manipulation, was the Rev. Al Sharpton, who I’d later get to know well. But if I hadn‘t rushed down to the Board that Saturday morning, knowing what to expect there, Beatty would have won his suit in Brooklyn‘s compliant, complicit, Democratic Party machine-dominated judiciary, and black politics in Shirley Chisholm‘s district would have taken an emblematically bad turn. So a lot was at stake in my reporting what I was seeing. “Look at it this way,” said my tipster; “[Beatty] is either going to jail or he‘s going to Congress.”
The party machine‘s hack judges did rule for Beatty in the local and appellate courts. But my reporting stoked a lot of controversy that packed the courtroom with Owens supporters. New York Times columnist Sydney Schanberg read my Voice account and alerted the rest of the world. The Democratic Party and its judges started to do what they’d supposedly been elected and appointed to do in the first place: a month later, New York‘s highest court overturned the earlier rulings for Beatty.
Owens later said that he’d felt as if he‘d been in Mississippi throughout that long post-election ordeal. He served honorably in Congress for a decade and a half, retiring in 2006. Beatty was convicted in federal court of corruption unrelated to his election scheme. In 1990, he was assassinated by a non-political rival. It‘s all in my four stories linked here. When Owens died in 2014, I attended his funeral, and I wrote this about his courage and my education in that election.
One of the lessons I learned in those long, hard months is that even bona-fide scoops may not interest most reporters and editors if the information is coming from the “wrong” side of the tracks and from informants who lack the right connections. Moreover, the larger implications of a story have to be made bluntly clear. The truth-tellers have to persist against conventional wisdom and indifference. Sometimes only a very dedicated, passionate, and therefore somewhat biased advocacy journalist will persist, but journalism counts on an even deeper commitment to get the truth out against settled odds.
I learned, too, that even persistence can fail if a writer hasn‘t enough historical memory and good judgment to find “the story” in a deluge of rumors and impressions. Many people will resist even incontrovertible evidence if its implications run against their preconceptions and therefore seem to “make no sense”. Journalism must “break” not only news but also newer and better understandings of what it’s reporting. In the Beatty case, telling the story effectively meant shattering many whites’ (and blacks’) knee-jerk indulgence of black corruption by someone like Beatty who knew how to play upon their preconceptions.
If the Beatty/Owens story had unfolded in 2012, not 1982, might a Twitter strategy by the Owens camp have accomplished what only a lone reporter like me was able to accomplish? Maybe, but only if the Owens side were trained and organized to do more than just enter the Board of Elections and confront the Beatty operatives who were forging signatures. There would still have been a need for well-informed reporting and for a communications strategy to make clear to voters and the media that democracy itself was at stake in the outcome.
2. Blocking a dubious indictment of New York Senator Chuck Schumer.
During the same year that I wrote about the Beatty/Owens race, evidence of serious flaws in a pending indictment of New York Congressman (now Senator) Charles Schumer fell into my lap, this time wholly through a “conflict of interest” of my own that made the story hard for me to report. I wound up having to do it not as a journalist but as a lonely citizen, writing guest columns for a small Brooklyn weekly, The Prospect Press.
No other journalist seemed engaged or motivated enough to report the story thoroughly, partly because it involved malfeasance by other journalists: I couldn‘t tell the story in the Village Voice, for which I’d been freelancing regularly, as in the Beatty-Owens matter, because other Voice writers were wrongly trying to gin up an indictment of Schumer, whom they disliked intensely for not being “progressive” enough and for having slighted them publicly. Voice writers were urging and helping an ambitious and receptive young U.S. Attorney for Brooklyn, Edward Korman — who’d recently brought down Congressman Fred Richmond with some marginal help from me (as described in one of my Voice essays linked in “A Sleeper Sampler” and here ) to make Schumer his next “catch.”
My Voice colleagues were pursuing Schumer for moralistic and personal reasons with scant legal justification, but I knew this only for a reason that weakened my own credibility: My girlfriend was working in Schumer‘s district office and was giving me his side of the story. It took me awhile to conclude that Schumer wasn’t a corrupt Vander Beatty or Fred Richmond. Not surprisingly, the only people who were inclined to believe that Schumer was innocent had reasons of their own to distrust Voice muckrakers and/or the U.S. Attorney. To grasp the injustice of the case, one had to shed the righteous conceits of “white hat” muckrakers and prosecutors — no easy feat, since they were doing plenty of good things in other cases. One had to know that the criminal justice system itself is susceptible to abuse if its skeleton of laws lacks the cartilage of extra-legal trust and integrity among prosecutors, journalists, and the public.
My columns in the small neighborhood weekly, The Prospect Press, played some role in alerting people in the Justice Department and the courts to the flaws in the pending Schumer indictment, which was instigated not only by partisan Republicans but also by leftist muckrakers. Eventually, the indictment was closed down by senior Reagan Justice Department officials after Schumer’s attorney, Arthur Liman (later the Democratic counsel to the congressional Iran-Contra commission) went to Washington and confronted them with incontrovertible truths about the inquiry.
Twenty five years later, in 2007, I had reason to tell the whole story again, this time in TPM, as Schumer, by then on the Senate Judiciary Committee, was investigating Bush Administration efforts to politicize U.S. Attorneys‘ prosecutions of Democrats (such as himself, back in 1982). By 2007, the “cartilage” of trust and professionalism in prosecutions had worn thin, but I may have been the only reporter willing to recall that Schumer had been a victim of a politicized, prosecutorial and media investigation. My story is no longer online at TPM, but the site’s founder and editor Josh Marshall promoted it there. I’ve saved the piece, and it’s right here, exactly as it ran at the time.
Schumer has many faults, and his record can be criticized fairly by people to his left as well as his right. But trying to “nail” him — as the Voice reporters crowed that they were doing, through selective prosecution for a minor indiscretion that many of their own ‘heroes’ in politics also committed, was a miscarriage of journalism’s public trust.
3. Exposing a pundit’s primary colors
In 1996, people were puzzling over the identity of the anonymous author of a political sizzler, the novel Primary Colors, which was scathing in its revelations about a fictional American president who was clearly a stand-in for Bill Clinton. I had a strong hunch that the author was Joe Klein, a prominent Newsweek columnist and television commentator, and I called Washington Post media columnist William Powers with my suggestion that “Anonymous” was none other than Klein. Powers published my charge in his column, and I kept on reaffirming it, even though Klein’s vehement denials convinced most in the news media that he hadn’t written the book. (“It wasn‘t me; I didn‘t do it,” he told CBS News flatly. (CBS taped me for that same broadcast insisting it was Klein, but his denial was so firm that the network never ran my interview.)
So I wrote a column that began, “May I remind Joe ‘I didn‘t do it‘ Klein of O.J. Simpson‘s vow that he will ‘leave no stone unturned‘ until he finds Nicole Brown Simpson‘s killer?…. If Klein didn‘t write Primary Colors, let him devote his far-more-considerable investigative skills to finding the author.” No one would publish that column, and this was long before blogging, so I had no way to make my argument in public unless I could persuade someone else in the media to run with it. Had I been able to post my column online, it might have prompted a lot of commentary and investigation, but because I wasn’t able to do that, my arguments lost traction. Only months later, when a reporter discovered the novel’s original paper manuscript with Klein‘s handwriting on it, did he confess that he’d written the novel and had lied about it.
What had made me so sure of his authorship all along? Again, historical memory and informed judgment played an important part. I’d often read and admired Klein‘s columns in New York magazine, and I remembered his characteristic locutions and obsessions about liberals and race, some of which popped up in the novel. When I saw an op-ed column in the Baltimore Sun by David Kusnet, a former speechwriter for Bill Clinton, voicing a suspicion similar to mine about Klein, I read the novel closely, and, Klein just kept jumping off the page: In a passage of the novel that presents the maunderings of a feckless, aging hippie-cum-leftie holdover from the 1960s, Klein’s narrator can’t help thinking, “Yikes.” The minute I saw the word in that context, I said, “That’s Joe!” and called Bill Powers, whose Post column introduced the “Kusnet/Sleeper theory” that Klein was the author. (Klein called me immediately and left an exasperated voice-mail message: “Jim, I don‘t have a patent on the word Yikes‘!”)
As in the Beatty case, most journalists, who were inclined to trust the denials of a famous colleague such as KIein, weren‘t as open as Powers was to Kusnet’s and my cross-examinations. I’d ventured into a gray area in which I “knew” the truth thanks only to historical memory, literary acumen, and seasoned political judgment; I couldn’t prove that someone else hadn’t done a brilliant job of emulating Klein’s style. Only months later, when the discovery of Klein’s own notes on his own manuscript forced him to confess his authorship at a press conference, did I have the satisfaction of being there and seeing him look away. In a Wall Street Journal column published soon after that (It’s on the pdf with the Powers column that’s linked above,) I offered my interpretation of why he‘d lied so vigorously and what’s at stake for journalism and politics in that kind of fudging.
4. Somewhere over the Rainbow: What Rudy Giuliani exploited (including me?)
A lot of my work has involved not only breaking news but trying to scope out societal learning curves a little ahead of their time. How a public’s interpretive frames rise and fall interests me as much as events that we recount before we can weave into those frames. As a Daily News columnist in 1993, I “knew” — not from polls, and not from crime statistics, and not from performances by politicians and protestors, but from years of immersion in black and white-ethnic neighborhoods in the city’s outer boroughs — that Rudolph Giuliani would defeat New York‘s first African-American mayor, David Dinkins, in that fall‘s election. The Daily News columns that I wrote about the mayoral campaign were insistent and combative, sometimes too much so. They cut against the conventional grain, as had my accounts of developments involving Chuck Schumer and Joe Klein.
Shortly before Giuliani won, I enlarged my analysis by comparing New York‘s electoral upheavals with those in other cities. A cover story in The New Republic was the first instance of my “breaking” a new idea and interpretation, instead of just news. The article became national news in itself, setting off a long train of columns, reviews, and appearances in which I challenged left-liberal assumptions about politics and race that had made Giuliani’s ascent unthinkable and that, years later, would keep many of the same people from understanding why Donald Trump might well win the 2016 presidential election. I charged that some “progressive” thinking during Giuliani’s 1993 mayoral campaign was unduly rigid and myopic in assigning blacks revolutionary roles that very few blacks had any desire to fulfill.
Most such bad thinking presumes that having a skin color automatically signifies having a particular “culture” and certain political views. In 1997 I wrote Liberal Racism against such presumptions. The book prompted interviews on NPR and with The Atlantic and many debates, plunging me deeper into arguments and acrimony, sometimes on the PBS News Hour, on the Charlie Rose Show, in my NPR “All Things Considered” commentaries. Some of my commentary is on this site in the section, “Why Skin Color Isn’t Culture or Politics.”
For one of my scoops in this vein I visited Rockefeller Foundation archives in Tarrytown, NY to look into the background of Prof. Leonard Jeffries of the City College of New York, whose diatribes about Jewish complicity in the slave trade had been fanning a spark of truth into a political conflagration in 1993. I read letters and memos written by Jeffries’ early funders and enablers and wrote a not-wholly unsympathetic column for The Daily News on his “Deep Roots of Resentment”. But in The Nation I admonished some on the left for indulging Jeffries in ways that could only end up strengthening the political prospects of a Giuliani or a Trump. And in 2022, when Giuliani himself had pretty clearly crossed the line between legal truth-telling and fantastical, conspiratorial Trump-serving, I wrote “I Once Backed Rudy Giuliani — and I know What’s Happened to Him,” for The New Republic.
5. Another side of 9/11 – and of November, 1948.
Bringing memory and judgment to bear on news sometimes yields small discoveries that matter only later. Shortly after the ordeal of New York firefighters on 9/11, I noticed that their department’s emblem, the Maltese Cross, is a relic of medieval battles between the Knights of Malta, who were Christian Crusaders, and Muslim Saracens who were trying to block their way to the Holy Land. That struck me as a haunting precedent for George W. Bush‘s brief characterization of Americans’ confrontation with Islamicist terrorists after 9/11 as a “crusade.” Bush soon dropped the term and the implicit analogy, and no one but me mentioned the fire-fighters’ Maltese Cross. Read the third column on this link of my columns from The New York Observer.
Similarly, in 2002, Republican Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott‘s praise of Strom Thurmond‘s 1948 Dixiecrat presidential campaign, which almost cost Harry Truman that election against his Republican opponent Thomas Dewey, unleashed a deluge of commentary. But news analysis of the 1948 election in 2002 never mentioned the “fourth party” in that election that had also endangered Truman by drawing away liberal Democrats just as Thurmond was drawing away conservatives. When the History News Network published my account of the Communist-backed presidential bid of Henry Wallace, who’d been FDR‘s vice-president for a term, nothing happened. The silence seemed yet one more instance of conventional wisdom’s inability to accommodate dissonance, because “the story” of the moment was all about nailing the racist Thurmond and Lott. But maybe the silence also reflected a touch of professional embarrassment at having missed the full story of Truman‘s near-defeat.
6. Forebodings about the New York Times
I wrote about journalism’s blind spots in a Daily News column in 1994, contending that the New York Times’ then-editorial-page editor Howell Raines was responsible for some of them. Raines is a talented writer, but I argued that his penitential Southern anti-racism sometimes got him tangled up in misplaced moralism. I set it again, at length, in 1997 in Liberal Racism, in a chapter on “Media Myopia.” At the invitation of an editor at the neo-con’ish (now defunct) Weekly Standard, I described a memorable instance of liberal racism at the Times. My sense of the problem with Raines was confirmed 10 years later, when he was brought down by the scandalously false reporting of Jayson Blair, a young black reporter whom Raines and other editors had indulged a few times too often.
By the time of Raines’ editorial demise I was no longer at the News, but I wrote an “I told you so” column in the Hartford Courant that was linked on sites such as Slate and reprinted even in the Jerusalem Post, whose editor at the time, Brett Stephens, had neo-con’ish reasons (not my reasons) for highlighting a crisis at a liberal newspaper.
Flawed though the Times is, I’ve defended what I once called “the blunder-bus on Eighth Avenue” on several occasions, perhaps most memorably in my takedown of Gray Lady Down, a book-length attack on the Times that was funded by right-wing foundations. Who needs the Times? We all do, still, for the things it does very well.
An ironic twist in the Raines debacle prompts a final observation: Interpretive scoops that break new ideas as well as news are pretty easily stolen. When 18 paragraphs of a Washington Post review that I’d written of Marshall Frady‘s biography of Jesse Jackson wound up under someone else‘s byline a few weeks later in the San Francisco Chronicle, the reasons were instructive, and depressing. Here’s my review, with accounts (by Howard Kurtz, then at The Washington Post and by Dwight Garner, now himself a book reviewer for the New York Times) of how the review was plagiarized. Years later, in the Hartford Courant column that’s the second of the pdf’s here, I explained what I think was at stake in this experience.
7. Early storm warnings about Rupert Murdoch’s assault on the American Republic
Ever since Rupert Murdoch bought the once-liberal tabloid The New York Post in 1977, displacing its pro-labor, pro-civil-rights editor James Wechsler (a relative of mine) with his own, mostly “Aussie” henchmen to transform the paper into a daily reminder that Australia was founded as a penal colony, I’ve argued that most Murdoch journalism poisons whatever body politic it touches. Beginning in 2007, when Murdoch was about to acquire The Wall Street Journal, I warned about him in several venues. I’ve collected those warnings as “Rupert vs. the Republic.” It’s important to understand why Murdoch’s destructive engines, which teach millions of Americans to fear and mistrust one another, are sometimes more powerful than the Constitution’s First Amendment protections of what he does. I’ve addressed the First Amendment problems in another section, “The News Media, the Public Sphere, and a Phantom Public.” But I mention the Murdoch disease here because, as some of the pieces here show, I saw it, as the redoubtable investigative reporter Dean Starkman did, when many other journalists did not.
8. Innocents Abroad? Or opportunists? Western liberal educators in illiberal regimes
One of my most exhausting ventures against a tide of institutional incomprehension and resistance was my opposition to Yale University’s joint venture with the National University of Singapore to establish a new, liberal arts Yale-NUS College there. In the early 2000’s, Yale administrators, eager to capitalize on Asia’s burgeoning, Ivy League-worshipping middle-classes, convinced themselves and others that they were bringing liberal enlightenment to the island city-state’s authoritarian regime and its tightly monitored populace. In truth, as I and other Yale faculty and a few brave Singaporean opposition leaders worked hard to show, there were more opportunistic intentions and conflicts of interest in the venture with Singapore than Yale’s leaders comprehended or were willing to face. All of my work on this is collected here in 36 pieces, some polemical, others rigorously investigative, and still others reflective.
Even if you’re not especially interested in Yale or Singapore, that venture is emblematic of others that have compromised American civic-republican premises and practices. I strongly encourage you to read the file’s introductory paragraphs and three other pieces: a) my opening salvo of March, 2012; b) my essay and podcast for the Carnegie Council on Ethics & International Affairs, on liberal education’s premises and dubious prospects in illiberal societies that lack a civic-republican ethos; and c) my Asia Sentinel post-mortem on the Yale-NUS venture when its closing was announced in 2021. The Carnegie Council essay has been republished in Normative Tensions: Academic Freedom in International Education, an anthology of essays on the subject.
On an entirely unrelated note: Sometimes the best way to re-tone one’s receptors and get ready for the next real scoop is to procrastinate!