CJR

• Brief Encounters
  

  Breaking News: How the Associated Press Has Covered War, Peace, and Everything Else
  By Reporters of the Associated Press, with a foreword by David Halberstam
  Princeton Architectural Press
  432 pages, $35
  

  In this multi-authored new history of the Associated Press, Larry Heinzerling refers to his fellow foreign correspondents as “the infantry of international journalism.” In fact, the term “infantry” could be applied to the whole corps of AP staffers, past and present; they have served as journalism’s foot soldiers, reporting what needs to be reported, even when the world isn’t necessarily paying close attention, and even when it doesn’t provide them with much in the way of riches or glamour. In its century and a half as a nonprofit cooperative, the AP has produced relatively few celebrity journalists; indeed, staffers didn’t even get bylines until the 1920s.

  The AP has chosen a workable strategy for this volume, assigning its veteran reporters to tell war stories, in both the literal and the broader sense, about other reporters, preserving the tales and lore of, primarily, the AP’s work in the twentieth century. This means that credit is at last given to many who did brave but unacknowledged work, and that those who blundered are not spared. There are dozens of pictures from AP photographers, who have won a good many more Pulitzers than the reporters, and a warm recollection by David Halberstam of his friends at the distinguished AP Saigon bureau of the early 1970s.

  The United States v. I. Lewis Libby
  Edited and with reporting by Murray Waas, with additional editing and reporting by Jeff Lomonaco
  Union Square Press
  584 pages, $12.95 paper
  

  Murray Waas, a disciple of Jack Anderson, the ultimate outsider, has assembled a plump volume of the trial and grand-jury records in the case of I. Lewis Libby, chief of staff to the vice president, convicted in March of obstruction of justice and lying in the case involving disclosure of the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame. The transcripts make clear that Waas may have had less interest in Libby’s missteps than in the foibles of a cohort of Washington’s current insider journalists, among whom Tim Russert, Bob Woodward, Judith Miller (jailed for a time for refusing to testify), and Robert Novak (who first revealed Plame’s identity to the public), were the most celebrated. Their accounts of dealing with Libby and other members of the administration constitute an encyclopedia of insiderdom—the anonymous-source-concealment dance, the sometimes transparent charade of selective source protection, the willingness to be spun in exchange for access to power. Most embarrassingly, the trial revealed the far-from-precise methods of top-rank journalists—lost notebooks, illegible notes, shaky recollections. It could happen to anybody, of course, but these were supposed to be among the best.

  Managing the President’s Message: The White House Communications Operation
  By Martha Joynt Kumar
  The Johns Hopkins University Press
  345 pages, $35
  

  Not everybody may realize that during the seven years that The West Wing ran on network television, there was another, nonfictional White House operating in Washington. It is portrayed in Managing the President’s Message by Martha Joynt Kumar, who is a professor of political science at Towson University and a part-time fly-on-the-wall at the White House, where she has observed and evaluated presidential communications since 1995. Although she apparently had access to almost any White House staffer, she was closest to the press operation and found a home in the basement of the press room. She interestingly describes how controversies in the news looked from the inside, vividly recounting the travails of recent presidential press secretaries in dealing with increasingly recalcitrant reporters. In White House terms, for example, the I. Lewis Libby controversy played out less as a legal action than as a crisis of truth-telling for Scott McClellan, who, she asserts, lost his job because of it.

  Bill of Wrongs: The Executive Branch’s Assault on America’s Fundamental Rights
  By Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose
  Random House
  214 pages, $24.95
  

  Sadly, the unmistakable voice of Molly Ivins diminishes and all but vanishes in this last book to bear her name. It is nothing against her collaborator, Lou Dubose, or the book’s detailed recounting of abuses of civil liberties, to say that only the introduction is pure Ivins in the first person. She winningly recounts her fifteen years of going into the constitutional boondocks to speak on behalf of the First Amendment. She takes a last look at the current scene and avers that, were it not for her phlegmatic nature, she would be so freaked out she would be “staging a pitched, shrieking, quivering, hysterical, rolling-on-the-ground, speaking-in-tongues fit.” Well, even a little bit of Molly helps, but there won’t be any more. She died too young, at sixty-two, last January.

• Laurel to The Principia Pilot
  

  Laurel to The Principia Pilot for truth-telling under difficult circumstances. When rumors began to circulate that CEO Stuart Jenkins, who oversees Principia College, had been given a big pay raise, editor Caitlin Carpenter began digging. She soon found out that not only were the rumors true, but two trustees had resigned in protest. The resulting January 2007 piece was a departure from the school-funded Pilot’s usual role of covering campus happenings at the five-hundred-student, Christian Science-affiliated school in southern Illinois. It became the first of a series of articles on the controversy. (The same issue carried the unexpected news that college president George Moffett, who served as the titular publisher of the Pilot, would resign at the end of the year—more on that in a bit.) While the CEO complained of “inaccuracy and bias,” the biweekly continued to break news and frame the resulting governance debate. In April, the Pilot published an editorial letting the campus know that its access to relevant information had been curtailed, and that the editors felt they were being discouraged from reporting on “controversial” topics. The tension came to a head just before graduation, when a tipster gave the paper e-mails exchanged among Moffett, Jenkins, and the board of trustees showing that Jenkins had worked to strip Moffett of his power shortly before his previously unexplained resignation. The editors published a special issue that included the smoking-gun e-mails. Moffett told CJR that the night before the issue was to be distributed, Jenkins demanded that the paper be held back. (Jenkins says he doesn’t recall the conversation, as it was “very late at night.”) At 6:30 the next morning, Moffett says a trustee rang his doorbell to deliver a letter from the board “implying possible financial sanctions against me if I allowed the paper to be distributed.” Moffett refused to step in, and the Pilot hit campus the next day. This fall, after the paper published a letter by a former trustee who claims that Jenkins manipulated accreditation data to make Moffett look bad, the school’s administration launched an inquiry that could cost the Pilot’s faculty adviser his job. Jenkins resigned October 18, but he leaves behind a new committee that is determined to ensure that the Pilot adheres to a list of as-yet-undefined “standards.”

  Dart to Directorship, a boutique business publication aimed at corporate boards, for conflicted leadership. Former Forbes publisher Jeffrey Cunningham is the magazine’s owner, chairman, and sometime editor-in-chief. And he sits on several corporate boards. One of them is Countrywide Financial, the massive home-lending company now in shambles after its central role in the subprime mortgage meltdown. The magazine’s September issue carries a fawning interview Cunningham conducted with Countrywide’s CEO and founder, Angelo Mozilo (sample display copy: he “helped his customers realize their dreams by following his own”), without any mention of the two men’s business relationship, the company’s troubles, or its generous and controversial executive compensation—in 2006, Cunningham netted $369,308 from the company, and at year’s end had over $1.5 million in company stock. (After speaking with CJR, Cunningham amended the Web version of the article to reflect his board membership.) Cunningham also serves on the board of Jim Cramer’s TheStreet.com; until a recent redesign, the magazine’s Web site showcased a video of a Directorship-sponsored speech Cramer gave—again with no disclosure of their business relationship. And in March 2006, the magazine carried a four-page interview with the CEO of Institutional Shareholder Services, a corporate research firm, without disclosing that Directorship was undergoing what Cunningham later characterized as “general business discussions” with the firm. In an interview, Cunningham suggests that a conflict of interest is “only relevant when one side benefits at th