AT&T Whistleblower Blows Whistle on L.A. Times

[Ian David]

Mark Klein, the former AT&T engineer who says he has proof that the telecom was spying on the internet at the behest of the government, tried to tell his story to the L.A. Times, but the story was spiked by an editor -- at the behest of the nation's top spooks, according to an ABC News story on Klein. The documents later made their way to the New York Times, which ran this story on the documents in April 2006. Klein also approached the Electronic Frontier Foundation with his documents in January, and they became central to the civil liberties group's lawsuit against AT&T for alleged illegal wiretapping.

Wired News independently acquired a significant subset of the documents and published them in May 2006, something ABC News fails to mention in their story.

The journalistic back story to these NSA stories is an extremely revealing glimpse into how the nation's largest newspapers, which largely had little problem running poorly sourced and false stories about Iraq and WMD, sat on or buried stories that questioned this administration. Remember that the New York Times, which first broke the story of the wiretapping in December 2005, has yet to explain in any detail why it sat on the story for a full year after the government asked it to.

Klein is slated to appear on Nightline tonight, where much attention will likely be paid to former L.A. Times editor Dean Baquet's decision in 2005 to kill the story that L.A. Times reporter Joe Menn had been working on for months. Klein says Baquet killed the story after talking with then-NSA chief Gen. Michael Hayden and then-Director of Intelligence John Negroponte. Baquet, who now head the New York Times's Washington bureau, confirms he spoke with government officials but says he spiked the story since the paper couldn't make sense of the technical documents. Menn declined to comment to ABC News for the story.

More:
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/03/att_whistleblow.html

[Dover]

1. Interesting timing. Running concurrently with this wiretapping story is Frontline's, News Wars

which features the LA Times in a very sympathetic light, as it does it's ex-editor Baquet (who just wants to be free of the obligations to shareholders, and to be a public servant..to tell the truth).
It laments the dying off of real reporting which the major newspapers provide and which is not available through any other source. But what of this killing off of the stories their own reporters provide? Does anyone buy that Baquet's LA Times staff couldn't make sense of those AT&T documents, and yet went to the time and expense to put a reporter on that story for so long?

The News Wars story does mention people's overall disenchantment and mistrust of news in general, but chalks that up to continuing downsizing problems and cuts to their investigative reporting units of the major news divisions, etc. due to their 'ownership' by wall street, beholding to stockholders. Or maybe it's the public's fault...their 'craving' for infotainment.

While there might be some truth to that, it is not the whole story. There are other reasons for their lost trust/readership. And this story of the AT&T wiretapping is a perfect example. They don't cover the news that people want to know about, that IS in the public interest. And it doesn't mention the relationship the press now has as a foot soldier of a government which is also beholding to (owned by) corporations, and neither of which is any longer a public servant.

And this is also one reason people have moved to the internet for their news and to foreign sources.