Journalists See An Alarming Trend In Terror Warnings

Journalists say the Bush administration has been pushing the recent spate of scary stories about possible new terrorist attacks.

"Right now they're putting out all these warnings to change the subject from what was known prior to September 11 to what is known now," says CBS's national security correspondent, David Martin.

But national security adviser Condoleezza Rice calls that notion "simply not true. We haven't talked about it among ourselves. We've just answered the questions. We've just reported the facts as we know them. We've been saying all along that we could not assure that another attack would not take place." There was, Rice says, "no secret meeting" on press strategy.

"This is largely media-driven," says White House spokesman Adam Levine.

Whatever the origin, it's clear that this sort of reporting -- based on murky claims often described as intelligence "chatter" -- is extraordinarily difficult.

"It's a double layer of mystery," says Newsweek's Evan Thomas. "The press doesn't really know what the government does in secret, and the government doesn't really know because its information is put together from amorphous patterns. Everyone is pretty much in the dark."

In the space of several days, there were reports that another attack on America is almost certain (Dick Cheney), that nuclear weapons will one day be used (Donald Rumsfeld), that suicide bombers are next (FBI chief Robert Mueller) and that the Statue of Liberty and Brooklyn Bridge could be targets (unnamed officials). Senior officials may have been responding to press questions, but they are practiced in the art of finessing such questions.

"We didn't want anybody to be complacent," Rice says. "Obviously post-September 11 everyone has a heightened sense of how information will play. I'm not surprised that's the case with the press, too."

There was little reaction in 1998 when Time's Elaine Shannon, citing intelligence sources, wrote that Osama bin Laden "may be planning his boldest move yet -- a strike on Washington or possibly New York City."

"Everybody I've been covering for years has been telling me, 'It is only a matter of time,' " Shannon says. Still, she says, "we have always laced the story with plenty of caveats. The officials we're talking to have made no bones about their own reservations."

But sometimes they give mixed signals. Shannon recently reported an FBI warning about possible attacks against large apartment buildings -- which, she says, an FBI spokesman strongly denied before the bureau confirmed it days later.

Even with qualifiers and caveats, though, media headlines tend to create the impression that an attack may well be coming. CBS's Martin, who broke the story on President Bush having received an intelligence briefing last August about possible plane hijackings, notes that some recent threats are based on accounts by captured bin Laden aide Abu Zubaydah -- and could amount to disinformation.

"If you have a detainee in Guantanamo Bay telling you there's going to be an attack on the Statue of Liberty, chances are it's a crock," he says. "But are you going to ignore it after September 11? It's impossible to ignore. . . .

"You have Condi and other senior administration officials on background, telling anyone who will listen about this 'chatter,' which anyone familiar with intelligence knows is synonymous with communications intercepts."

Can the media strike the right balance? For years, says Thomas, "I almost had a paragraph in my computer about how the threat was coming and experts were warning the U.S. They were all related to Osama. . . . After a while it was sort of crying wolf and no one was paying any attention."

Flying Blind?

Justice Department officials are ticked off at Dan Rather.

On the "Imus in the Morning" radio show last Wednesday, the CBS anchor said that Attorney General John Ashcroft "just before September 11 started taking private aircraft. . . . Well, that would indicate that somebody somewhere was getting pretty worried. . . . Why wasn't it shared with the public at large?"

Justice spokeswoman Barbara Comstock calls Rather's comments "irresponsible," saying: "The implication here is outrageous. He's acting like the attorney general found out there were going to be hijackings and started to fly on private planes." She says CBS and other news outlets were told days earlier that the warnings in early 2001 concerned Ashcroft's personal safety, not hijackings, and that his family kept flying on commercial jets.

Rather called Don Imus back Friday to protest that he "never said the attorney general was warned specifically about 9/11 threats and therefore covered his own security." But Rather escalated the dispute instead, insisting that Ashcroft's conduct "doesn't look particularly good" when contrasted with the failure to warn American passengers. "Maybe it would be better for him to spend a little less time trying to sully up my reputation in a way and cover his backside and more time trying to get things straight."

Going Soft

Despite the publicity surrounding the recent threats, network news has returned to its old ways.

On the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts, national and international stories have fallen by 35 percent since October, to half of all stories, says the Project for Excellence in Journalism. Lifestyle coverage, which had basically vanished, again makes up 20 percent of the broadcasts. In short, the evening news "now looks much as it did before September 11," the study says.

The pattern is similar on the morning shows, where hard news has fallen by more than half since October and celebrity and lifestyle coverage is up threefold. Still, these programs carry more hard news than they did last summer.

All this is a dramatic change from last fall, when television news turned decidedly serious. Critics said it couldn't last, and they were right.

Not surprisingly, coverage of military stories is up threefold on the evening news, to 15 percent of all stories, since last summer. But coverage of domestic issues such as health care is down by almost half, to 10 percent of all stories. And one in five stories involved such lighter fare as male nannies on NBC, El Nino predictions on CBS and America's fattest cities on ABC.

Mystery Man

The Washington Times has printed two Middle East stories in recent weeks by Sayed Anwar -- which, it turns out, is a pseudonym.

"He said his life would be in danger," says Deputy Foreign Editor Willis Witter, adding that the stringer has also written for the paper under his real name. "He's very good. He's broken some pretty good stories for us."

In the May 13 Times, the writer accused a group of now-expelled Palestinian militants of preying on Christians through "a two-year reign of terror that included rape, extortion and executions." Australian Broadcasting correspondent Tim Palmer says the piece included rumor and unconfirmed charges -- as he concluded when an Australian legislator demanded to know why he hadn't reported the information. Witter says he would "defend every word."

Managing Editor Francis Coombs says future "Anwar" stories will carry a disclaimer, and adds, "A legitimate case could be made that we at least should have informed the reader."

Downer

The Cybercast News Service last month ran a satire -- helpfully labeled "satire" -- that began as follows:

"A top researcher says a new study strongly suggests the music of country singer Patsy Cline contributes to depression, suicide and violent behavior by women." This was according to "Dr. Lenore Morose, head of the Womyn's Studies Department at Radcliffe College."

On May 17, Newark Star-Ledger columnist Larry Hall wrote a dead-serious piece complaining about the work of Dr. Morose. "That's a stretch," he wrote. "You could make the same argument about scads of other singers." The paper has run a retraction for lifting -- and misreading -- the story.

Ejected

New York Post sports columnist Wallace Matthews lost his job after writing a column accusing the tabloid's gossip columnist, Neal Travis, of "deplorable journalism" for printing a rumor suggesting that Mets catcher Mike Piazza is gay. (Travis didn't name Piazza, who has dismissed the rumor.) Matthews, who posted his column online after the paper refused to run it, says he quit; the Post says he was fired for "insubordination."