MURDER OF 2 LAS VEGAS POLICEMAN BY APPARENT RIGHT-WING FANATICS AGAIN BRINGS BACK MEMORIES OF DISTURBING INTERVIEW

As we learn more about the apparently extreme right-wing, anti-government political leanings of the husband and wife shooters who brutally murdered two Las Vegas policeman as they sat eating pizza for lunch on Sunday, I can't help but again think back to an interview I conducted in 1971 as a young reporter at the The Louisville (Ky.) Times over breakfast with William C. "Wild Bill" Sullivan, who was then the head of the Domestic Intelligence Division of the FBI and the No.3 man inside the bureau.

The last time this disturbing interview came to mind was immediately after the Boston Marathon bombing more than a year ago, when, frankly, I feared that it had possibly been the work of right-wing domestic terrorists like those who planted the truck bomb that destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City in 1995. As we all know now, that was not the case and the bombing has been blamed on brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev,  two Muslim transplants who came to the United States from Kyrgyzstan in the old Soviet Union.

But now, in the wake of the Las Vegas murders, I find that the memories of that interview are haunting me again, particularly when I think about how much more vocal and visible the anti-government, right-wing fringe has become through demonstrations like those at the Bundy Ranch in Nevada in April. Among those who came armed to help "protect" scofflaw rancher Cliven Bundy from the federal government was Jerad Miller, who with his wife Amanda, murdered Las Vegas police officers Alyn Beck, 41, and Igor Soldo, 31, at a CiCi's pizza parlor and then killed a civilian at the Walmart across the street before taking their own lives.

The evening prior to the 1971 interview, Sullivan delivered a speech that I covered. Before the speech, I had made a request for the interview which Sullivan granted for the following morning in the restaurant at his hotel in downtown Louisville. When I arrived, Sullivan was sitting at a table with two other agents, both from the Louisville FBI office. I introduced myself and when Sullivan invited me to sit, the other agents got up and moved to another table, where I sensed they were keeping a careful eye on me.

A Massachusetts native, Sullivan resembled and sounded very much like James Cagney, one of my favorite movie stars.

At first, I felt a little uncomfortable. Here I was, a reporter with long hair and drooping, Zapata mustache, a little more than a year out of college where I had participated in numerous anti-Vietnam War protests and had built a healthy distrust of the FBI and suspected that they probably had a similar distrust of me. But Sullivan quickly put me at ease -- probably a skill he learned from his interrogation techniques.

For more than an hour we conducted a wide ranging interview on a variety of topics of interest to both of us. I was fascinated by the man because of the history of his work with the FBI, particularly in the area of counter intelligence, which he began to specialize in almost immediately after joining the bureau shortly after the start of World War II when he was dispatched to Spain as a counter-intelligence officer. During the war he chased Nazi spies. Afterward, from the 1940s into the 1950s, he headed FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's efforts to ferret out the alleged Communists among us and, at the same time, led the bureau's efforts to crush the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan -- an activity he felt a strong commitment to. In the 1960's, Hoover had Sullivan turn his counter intelligence skills against the Civil Rights movement, including the secret wire tapping of Dr. Martin Luther King, and the anti-Vietnam War movement, an effort that he admitted to me he had little stomach for. For more than two decades, his career in the FBI had been dedicated to chasing down the nation's enemies, both real and perceived, on both the right and the left.

Finally, as the interview wound toward a conclusion, I asked: "Given your experience, if there was ever really a threat to the nation's government as we know it, where do you think it will come from, the right or the left?"

He collected his thoughts for a moment and then spoke.

"I don't really see the left as a threat," he said. "The 'left' as we know it today is made up of some well-meaning, but largely ineffective politicians and bunch of over-educated college students who will eventually grow up to be bankers and stock brokers and will moderate their views. Basically, the left is a just bunch of socially concerned wimps.

"If there is ever to be a real threat to our government as we know it, to the Constitution, to our liberties and the principles we hold scared, it will come from the right. There are people there with serious money and more power than you might expect. They have the potential to be ruthless and they know the issues that can be raised to swing the fearful and ignorant to their side," he said, concluding the interview.

Although I was surprised by his candor, his views -- which he had taken to frequently expressing even though they ran counter those held by his boss -- apparently did not go unnoticed by Hoover. Despite their years of friendship, several months after our interview Sullivan arrived at the FBI headquarters in Washington one morning to find his nameplate removed from his office door and his tenure with the bureau terminated.

In the following years, he became steadily more publically critical of Hoover and his counter-intelligence activies -- dubbed COINTELPRO -- including testimony critical of the bureau and Hoover before the Senate Intelligence Committee in 1975.

Sullivan died in November 1977 when he was accidentally shot in the neck by a hunter, who said he mistook the former FBI agent for a deer, despite the fact that his rifle had a powerful scope, as he walked in the woods near his home. His death has long been considered by some to be "suspicious."

In his obituary, The New York Times described Sullivan as "the only liberal Democrat ever to break into the top ranks of the bureau."

Over the 43 years since that interview, Sullivan's words of caution regarding the extreme right have come back numerous time to haunt me. They did so in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, the bombing at Centennial Park in Atlanta during the Summer Olympics in 1996 and in 2010, when a disgruntled government hater flew a plane into the IRS building in Austin, Texas.

Now, in the wake of the Las Vegas shootings, the Sullivan interview is again as fresh in my mind as it was moments after it was concluded in 1971.

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IS CNN HEADED FOR ANOTHER BLACK EYE?

Could CNN -- which has been nailed several times in recent years for lack of transparency or jumping the gun without all of the facts in it's reporting on certain stories -- be headed for another black eye for possibly failing to check into or to reveal details of former U.S. Army Sgt. Josh Korder's military background before giving him pretty much free rein in calling Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl a deserter?

Shortly after Bergdahl's release on May 31, after five years in Taliban captivity, CNN aired an interview with Korder, who served in the same unit with him, in which the former sergeant accused Bergdahl of being at best a deserter and "at worst a traitor." Although CNN and other media outlets have since broadcast or written about other former soldiers making similar accusations, Korder remains as the center of the political maelstrom swirling around Bergdahl's release in exchange for the release of five Guantanamo Bay detainees.

Now. a new undercurrent is percolating with regard to Korder and his accusations. Beginning last Friday, a number of liberal websites started reporting that Korder received a "less than honorable" discharge from the Army and suggesting that his type of discharge may be providing him an ulterior motive for lashing out at Bergdahl. Thus far, I can find no evidence that CNN or any other "mainstream" media outlet has reported anything about this.

How true this tidbit of information regarding Korder is I can't say since I haven't had time, or really even the need, to do any research into it myself since I'm retired and no longer a member of the active news media.

However, if it is true, it's something that should have been checked out before Jake Tapper's original CNN interview with Korder was aired and should have been revealed in conjunction with that interview. That would have been the proper and transparent thing to do. It seems to me, that if this information is true, viewers were entitled to know it in order to help them assess how much of what Korder said -- despite having signed a non-disclosure agreement with the Army -- to believe.

Throughout my nearly 35 years as at various editor levels at newspapers, I always insisted that reporters look into the background of those who came forward to provide information for "GOTCHA" stories and to, at least briefly, reveal in those stories anything possibly negative in the accuser's background that readers ought to know as they weighed the veracity of the accusations.

The need to do that as a matter of credibility was one of those things drummed into my head by editors during my reporting years at the Louisville (Ky.) Courier-Journal & Times -- sister morning and afternoon newspapers that were among the first to have a written and strictly enforced news department code of ethics.

If CNN failed to run a background check on Korder, including looking at the type of Army discharge he received, it was significant example of lackadaisical basic reporting and the viewing public has a right to expect better from a media organization that still has loads of resources and bills itself as the nation's premiere all-news network.

If a background check was run by CNN and Korder was honorably discharged, that fact -- to insure fairness to Korder, who they should have known would come under attack from Bergdahl defenders -- should have been reported somewhere in connection with the original Tapper interview.

If a background check was run and it was learned that Korder received a "less than honorable" discharge and that information was not revealed as part of the Tapper interview, CNN richly deserves any black eye that might develop as a result of its failure to do so.

If you want to know more about what constitutes a "less than honorable" discharge, there is an easy to understand explanation of it here:  http://usmilitary.about.com/od/justicelawlegislation/l/aadischarge1.htm

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HOLD THE PHONE!

It's funny what will sometimes set a person's -- particularly a journalist's -- memory banks in motion.

This morning, my friend Scott Maier, who is now senior public information officer at the University of California, San Francisco, posted this photo on Facebook with this accompanying text: "Yes, these still exist where I work. Anyone remember, or ever use them?"

Well, of course, being almost 70, I remember them and, as a reporter in the pre-cell phone era, used them frequently. In fact one of those stupid working pay-phone booths was every bit as important -- although frequently far less reliable -- a reporting tool in those days as a "smart phone" is today. Back then, a good reporter had to be just as resourceful as, and sometimes a whole bunch sneakier than, today's reporters when it came to beating the competition on a breaking story -- something that could become a bit problematic back in the phone-booth era.

As I prepared to respond to Scott's post, my memory banks kicked into motion.

Back in 1973, I was the crime and courts reporter for the now long-defunct afternoon paper The Louisville (Ky.) Times and, as part of my beat, covered the Jefferson County Circuit Courts. At the side entrance to the circuit courts building, there was one, and just one, phone booth.  When covering a particularly big, "hot" trial, I had to rely on that phone booth as my primary mode of contact with the rewrite desk to call in and retop and update my story between each of the paper's four daily editions.

When I first was assigned to the beat, I often found that when I'd come dashing out of a courtroom and head to the solo phone booth to call in a story update, it would be in use by some lawyer or other miscreant. That would sometimes cause me to miss a deadline which was never something that sat too well with my direct boss, Assistant City Editor Harold Benjamin. So, after several ass chewings as only Ben, as he was known, could deliver them -- and remember, this was long before dyspeptic HR twits had much say or any sway over what happened in the newsroom -- I decided that I would have to find a means of making certain THE phone booth was not in use when I needed it. Let's face it, one can take just so much brutal verbal abuse before the resourceful and creative juices begin to flow.

It didn't take me long to come up with a solution.

First, I "acquired" an official Southern Bell "OUT OF ORDER" hang tag. Then, whenever I was covering a major trial that required me to call in regular updates to the rewrite desk -- yep, newspapers had those back in the day, staffed by generally older, burned-out reporters who took notes or dictation from their colleagues in the field and made sure that stories that needed it got retopped in time to meet deadlines -- I would hang it on the phone booth to discourage use by others. As an added measure of insurance, I would also unscrew the mouthpiece cover from the receiver, take out the speaker and pocket it just in case someone didn't believe the sign and tried to make a call anyway.

Then, when I needed the phone, I simply removed the sign, reinstalled the speaker, dropped my dime in the coin slot and dictated my update. When finished, I'd check to make certain no one else was around and remove the speaker from the mouthpiece, rehang the sign and head back into court.

Was this fair to others in the media who were covering the same trial and might need a close by phone? Nope, but I did in particular love the way it drove the reporters from the three local TV news stations nuts.

Was it ethical? Well, I'll let you be the judge of that.

Did I feel bad about doing it? Although I hate to admit it, not in the least because it helped me to get the job done and keep each of the daily editions of The Louisville Time current and relevant in their coverage of big, important trials at a time when that mattered every bit as much as it does today.

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Blog Readers: If you enjoy reading my postings here on The Ancient Newspaper Editor, I sure would appreciate if you'd consider subscribing to or following the blog. It's easy to do and there are several options for doing so. If you look on the right side rail, you'll see the "Subscribe to" buttons and a "Subscribe by email" button. Just click any of those and follow the instructions. If you are a Google+ user you can click on the "Follow" button right under my profile picture and follow the instructions. Or, you can click on the "Google+ Add to Circles" button next to my photo and add me to your circles and get notifications of new blog entries when I post them. Also, please share the blog with your friends and colleagues.  Thanks for giving this consideration.

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Your thoughts and/or comments are welcomed.

PLACEMENT OF CORRECTIONS IS AS IMPORTANT AS PUBLISHING THEM

In the latest post on his media blog, "The Buttry Diary," under the headline "Corrections should be accurate, not misleading," my friend Steve Buttry has an interesting discussion regarding just how transparent the corrections most newspapers run should be. His position essentially is that they should be as transparent as possible, short of creating a finger pointing blame list or giving the name of the person or persons responsible for the error that required correcting.

Since I am pretty much in full agreement with what Steve has to say in the post, I want to avoid a repetitive, me tooish discussion. So, I suggest that you read his post. Here is the link: http://stevebuttry.wordpress.com/2014/06/02/corrections-should-be-accurate-never-misleading/

Buttry notes that the genesis of this post was a Twitter discussion about corrections that I guess I entirely missed. To be honest, since my retirement a little over a year ago from my position as editor of The Monitor in McAllen, Texas, I am not as connected on a daily basis with newspaper industry discussions as I used to be. So, after reading Steve's post, I did some "research" into the discussion on Twitter and on other media-related blogs to bring myself up to speed.

Basically, the discussion involves two points of view.

As simplistically as I can put it, one of those points of view holds that when there is a mistake, it is the newspaper's and everyone essentially shares the blame. This is represented in corrections that are written something like this: "In a story published in Tuesday's Daily Bladder it was incorrectly stated that the mayor is dead. In fact, he is alive. The newspaper regrets the error." Blame is laid at no one in particular's doorstep, but the reader's natural assumption is that the reporter screwed the pooch.

The other point of view -- again as simplistically as I can state it -- acknowledges that when readers, who really don't know a whole lot about the internal processes of a newsroom, see a correction, they automatically assume the mistake was made by the person whose byline appeared on the story. Those who ascribe to this point of view -- including me and, apparently, Buttry -- believe that allowing readers to make that assumption when the error might not have been the reporter's fault creates an inaccuracy and is unfair to the reporter. In accordance with this school of thought, that same correction might be written this way if the error was made by the reporter: "In a story published in Tuesday's Daily Bladder it was incorrectly stated, due to a reporting error, that the mayor is dead. In fact, he is alive. The newspaper regrets the error." If the error had been created by an assigning editor or a copy editor while editing the story, the correction might read like this: "In a story published in Tuesday's Daily Bladder it was incorrectly stated, due to an editing error, that the mayor is dead. In fact, he is alive. The newspaper regrets the error."

Frankly, there is not really anything new in the discussion of these two differing points of view regarding how to structure a correction and the assigning of blame. It's been debated within the newspaper industry for decades.

However, what seems to be rarely discussed -- and is totally missing from the current back and forth -- is something that I think is every bit as important as publishing corrections and that is WHERE in the newspaper corrections appear.

Regardless of where they land philosophically on the issue of assigning blame for mistakes, most reputable newspapers believe they must correct them as a matter of preserving their credibility with both readers and news sources and do so, usually, in some anchored position inside the newspaper where readers can grow accustomed to regularly look for them.

This is good, but I don't think it's good enough for every error a newspaper makes.

Again, this is pretty simplistic, but I've always felt there are two basic categories of newspaper errors. First, there is what I regard as the "standard" errors which include things like name misspellings; correct last name, wrong first name; misattributions; pied type; typos; wrong addresses; and any other mistake that does not alter or change the gist or meaning of a story. The other category is any of a variety of what I'll call "HOLY CRAP, WE DIDN'T REALLY TO DO THAT" mistakes that are serious errors in fact that can adversely impact the truth or credibility of the story and may even go so far as being libelous. Such mistakes can occur even in connection with the most seemingly routine stories and can appear anywhere in a paper from deep inside to a main display page like Page 1, or the local, features, sports or business front.

Such errors absolutely should and must be corrected whether they are noted by a staffer, by a reader or by a news source who may have been the subject -- or victim -- of the error. Some newspapers may choose to run these needed corrections as part of their anchored list of standard "We Were Wrongs."

That might be considered "good enough" placement for the correction of even an egregious error in a story that appeared inside the paper since we train readers to look for corrections in those anchored spots. However, it's my belief that it isn't good enough for a serious error in a story that appears on a main display page.

I think, for instance, that if you erroneously report the mayor dead in a story appearing on Page 1, you need to correct it prominently on the same display page where it appeared. It's a matter of accuracy, of fairness and of the newspaper's credibility with readers and sources who frequently -- and often justifiably -- complain that we, like bad surgeons, tend to bury our worst mistakes.

If you get it egregiously wrong on Page 1, you need to set it straight on Page 1. To not do so could make it appear to readers and to the news sources used in the gathering of information for the story as though the paper is trying to hide or minimize its bonehead error in a story that was given prominent play. It's as much a matter of transparency as making it clear in the correction where in the process the error crept into the story.

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Blog Readers: If you enjoy reading my postings here on The Ancient Newspaper Editor, I sure would appreciate if you'd consider subscribing to or following the blog. It's easy to do and there are several options for doing so. If you look on the right side rail, you'll see the "Subscribe to" buttons and a "Subscribe by email" button. Just click any of those and follow the instructions. If you are a Google+ user you can click on the "Follow" button right under my profile picture and follow the instructions. Or, you can click on the "Google+ Add to Circles" button next to my photo and add me to your circles and get notifications of new blog entries when I post them. Also, please share the blog with your friends and colleagues.  Thanks for giving this consideration.

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Your thoughts and/or comments are welcomed.