CRAWFORD GRIFFIN - Never Stay Silent

Rob Reiner's Shock and Awe is easy to file away as another Iraq War prestige drama, but watching it through a journalism lens turns it into a lesson we've seem to forgotten. The film tracks the small Knight Ridder Washington bureau, John Walcott, Jonathan Landay, Warren Strobel, and Joe Galloway, as they spend 2002 and 2003 reporting against the grain of every major paper in the country on the que stion of whether Iraq actually had weapons of mass destruction. The four of them turned out to be right. Almost everyone else turned out to be wrong.  Government Influence on the Press A government preparing for war has to win the story. It needs public consent, congressional authorization, and allies abroad, and all of those depend on the version of events it's selling. The press' job is to push back on that story, to test the claims, demand the evidence, and report it loudly when the two don't line up. Those goals don't coexist.  Dick Cheney on Meet the Press What Sh...

The United States has a longer tradition of protecting whistleblowers than most Americans realize. As legal scholar Ruth Ann Strickland notes in the First Amendment Encyclopedia , roughly forty federal laws have been passed to shield employees who expose government and corporate wrongdoing, a legislative history that stretches back to the Revolutionary War itself. Yet despite this deep institutional commitment, the government has repeatedly prosecuted the very people these laws were meant to protect, turning a wartime espionage statute into one of the most powerful tools for silencing dissent in American history. The Continental Congress In 1778, the Continental Congress passed what scholars consider the world's first whistleblower protection law, after naval officers Samuel Shaw and Richard Marven exposed their commanding officer, Commodore Esek Hopkins, for torturing British prisoners of war. Congress not only vindicated the officers but also paid for their legal fees. The princi...

Mervyn LeRoy's 1931 film Five Star Final is nominally a story about a New York tabloid, but anyone who has sat through one of our journalism history lectures will recognize it as something larger: a condensed case study in how American newspapers got themselves into the ethical mess they keep trying to climb out of. The Gazette, the fictional paper at the center of the film, is stalling. Its managing editor, Joseph Randall, and its publisher, Mr. Hinchcliffe, decide to revive a twenty-year-old scandal, Nancy Voorhees's long-buried murder case, not because it is news, but because it will move papers.   The Shadow of the Penny Press and Yellow Journalism The Gazette is a direct descendant of everything we learned about. The Penny Press Era of the 1830s established two ideas that never really left the industry: that newspapers could operate independently of political patronage, and that large circulation was the business model. That second idea, "to sell more no matter the co...

The first issue of the Boston News-Letter , published April 24, 1704, prominently displaying 'Published by Authority' at the masthead. On April 24, 1704, Boston postmaster John Campbell launched a modest single-sheet newspaper that would survive for 72 years and establish the foundation for American journalism. The Boston News-Letter wasn't flashy, independent, or particularly controversial, but it was something more important: it was sustainable. A Postmaster's Safe Bet The Boston News-Letter's modest format: a single sheet measuring 8 by 12 inches, printed on both sides. According to journalist, Isaiah Thomas (1749-1831), Campbell had been writing handwritten newsletters to colonial governors since 1700, but printing them required a different approach. Every issue prominently displayed "Published by Authority," modeled on London's official Gazette . The royal governor pre-approved each issue; this wasn't independent journalism by any means, but...

When I was a kid, my parents would tell me that the reason they named me "Jon Crawford Lloyd Griffin" was because it would make great name for a senator. It always made me excited because it made me feel like I was destined for greatness. However, being five years old, the only senators I knew of were the Ottawa Senators (the NHL team). As I grew up, the dream of playing in the NHL began to seem less and less realistic, but a new passion began to blossom.  My sisters and I at my high school graduation. I was born and raised in Raleigh, North Carolina along with an older and younger sister. We grew up in the suburbs of North Raleigh, spending majority of our time outside playing with our neighbors. It was a special neighborhood (Stonemoor) filled with young families and kids the same ages as us; to this day, my family's closest friends are the ones we met in Stonemoor. Us boys spent hundreds, maybe thousands of hours playing outside, specifically street hockey.  It's a...