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[News Thetan]

Scientology Church hires reporters to investigate newspaper - Washington Post
21 February 2010, 8:35 pm

After decades of digging into the Church of Scientology, reporters and editors at the St. Petersburg Times are accustomed to being denounced by its leaders.

But they find it unsettling that three veteran journalists -- a Pulitzer Prize winner, a former "60 Minutes" producer and the former executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors -- are taking the church's money to examine the paper's conduct.

While the journalists have promised an independent review, the Times has refused to cooperate, saying their work will be used to fuel the church's ongoing campaign against the Florida paper.

"I ultimately couldn't take this request very seriously because it's a study bought and paid for by the Church of Scientology," says Executive Editor Neil Brown. "Candidly," he adds, "I was surprised and disappointed that journalists who I understand to have an extensive background in investigative reporting would think it's appropriate to ask me or our news organization to talk about that reporting while a) it's ongoing, and b) while they're being paid to ask these questions by the very subjects of our reporting."

Steve Weinberg, the former IRE executive who has taught at the University of Missouri's journalism school for a quarter-century, says he was paid $5,000 to edit the study and "tried to make sure it's a good piece of journalism criticism, just like I've written a gazillion times. . . . For me it's kind of like editing a Columbia Journalism Review piece."

He says their agreement requires that the church publish the study in full, if it decides to make it public, but that "the contract says the church has the right to do nothing with it except put it in a drawer." That means Scientology leaders have an out if the recently completed study isn't to their liking.

Weinberg acknowledges that the "unusual situation" gave him pause, saying: "It certainly wouldn't be something just any reporter would do. My role was more limited, and I can certainly use the money these days."

Church spokesman Tommy Davis says he recently received the approximately 20-page study and that it will not necessarily be made public. It was commissioned, he says, because "we wanted to get an outside view" of the situation. Davis, who would not disclose how much the reporters were paid, calls the report highly critical of the Times stories on the church.

Asked about Brown's view that the study could not possibly be objective, Davis says: "It's easy for the St. Pete Times to pop off and say that, but oh, please. It's a normal thing. It's done all the time." He likened the effort to CBS hiring an outside panel to investigate Dan Rather's 2004 story on George W. Bush and the National Guard, which the network later retracted. That report was a self-examination, however, and was made public.

more at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/21/AR2010022103692.html?hpid=news-col-blog

[wynot]

I will buy a dozen hot, fresh, Krispy-Kreme donuts for the first person to post a published copy of these reports. We'll likely see the Coca-Cola company admitting to the hired murders of union organizers in Brazil* before Scientology lets those things out! (Assuming these three are truly objective reporters.)

[* Not saying they did, but they were accused of it. And I don't imagine they would admit it, even if it were true, nor would I expect them to.]

'til later;
wynot

[News Thetan]

Media Backtalk: Howard Kurtz on the Media -- Scientology, more - Washington Post
22 February 2010, 12:30 pm

Scientology Church hires reporters to investigate newspaper
 Q.
How much of a backlash will this be for Carollo, Szechenyi, and Weinberg?

  A.
Howard Kurtz writes:

For those who missed this morning's column, I write about how the Church of Scientology hired three veteran investigative journalists to dig into its longtime adversary, the St. Petersburg Times. They have produced a report that the church may or may not make public. I don't know if there will be a backlash or not. The journalists told me they had complete editorial freedom and viewed this as a legitimate assignment, even though they were being paid by one party in an ongoing dispute.  It would be easier to judge their claims if the report was made public.

additional Q&A follows at http://live.washingtonpost.com/media-backtalk:-howard-kurtz-on-the-media.html

[News Thetan]

Scientology hires Pulitzer and Emmy winners - Majikthise (blog)
22 February 2010, 1:19 pm



Scientology hires Pulitzer and Emmy winners

Via Gawker:

Howard Kurtz, in the Washington Post, reports that the cult hired Steve Weinberg, the former executive director of non-profit Investigative Reporters and Editors, Russell Carollo, who won a Pulitzer in 1998 for a series on medical malpractice that appeared in the Daily News of Dayton, Ohio, and Christopher Szechenyi, an Emmy-winning former TV producer. (They possibly saw this job advertisement.)

I am so disappointed that a former executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors associated himself with Scientology.

IRE is the premiere professional organization for investigative journalism. (I'm a proud member.)

The defining moment in IRE's history was the 1976 murder Don Bolles of the Arizona Republic. After Bolles' death, his IRE colleagues threw themselves into the Arizona Project, a massive collaborative investigation to expose organized crime in Arizona. I mention this because it exemplifies core values of IRE: investigative journalists working together for justice.

Obviously, it's no reflection on IRE that its former executive director went on to work with Scientology.

It's just sad and ironic that Steve Weinberg chose to help Scientology investigate other journalists, namely reporters at the St. Petersberg Times. The paper won a Pulitzer Prize for its critical coverage of Scientology.

Weinberg told Howie Kurtz that the Scientology gig was just a job like any other.

Steve Weinberg, the former IRE executive, who has taught at the University of Missouri's journalism school for a quarter-century, says he was paid $5,000 to edit the study and "tried to make sure it's a good piece of journalism criticism, just like I've written a gazillion times. . . . For me it's kind of like editing a Columbia Journalism Review piece."

He says their agreement requires that the church publish the study in full, if it decides to make it public, but that "the contract says the church has the right to do nothing with it except put it in a drawer." That means Scientology leaders have an out if the recently completed study isn't to their liking. [WaPo]

This report is nothing like a piece for the Columbia Journalism Review. It's a weapon in Scientology's war against its critics, and it's naive or disingenuous to pretend otherwise.

Now, Scientology can spin the report any way it wants, or bury it, and say that prize-winning investigative journalists signed off on it. They bought Weinberg's seal of approval for a mere $5000.

Scientology is taking a page out of the corporate playbook: loosely associating itself with independent experts in order to piggyback on their prestige. Big Pharma loves to recruit famous doctors and researches to give this kind of "independent" advice. Nobody tells the doctors what to say, but the company always gets the final cut. Whatever the advisers say can and will be used to hype the drug. If a doctor believes this is a great drug that will help lots of people, she may not mind being used in a commercial. That excuse doesn't work for Scientology.

more at http://majikthise.typepad.com/majikthise_/2010/02/scientology-hires-pulitzer-and-emmy-winners-to-dig-up-dirt-on-enemies.html?cid=6a00d8341c61e653ef01310f2aebab970c

[News Thetan]

Scientology Hires Reporters to Investigate St. Petersburg Times - WUSF 89.7 News
25 February 2010, 6:15 pm

The Church of Scientology is deploying a new weapon in its three-decade battle with the St. Petersburg Times: award-winning investigative journalists.

Those reporters completed their own review of the newspaper's coverage of Scientology, but church officials won’t release it.

In 1980, The St. Petersburg Times won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the secretive religion, headquartered in Clearwater. Since then, church officials have said the newspaper’s coverage is unfair.

So church officials decided to do something about it, according to spokesman Tommy Davis.

“To be honest, I think we just took a playbook from the media,” Davis said. “Media pay reporters all the time to investigate things.

“So we thought it warranted some investigation, and so we hired some reporters to investigate. It’s pretty straightforward, in that regard,” he said.

Those reporters are Christopher Szechenyi, an Emmy-winning television producer from Boston, and Russell Carollo, a Colorado-based reporter who won a Pulitzer for uncovering medical malpractice in the military.

They called Neil Brown, executive editor of the St. Petersburg Times, who refused to answer their questions.

“We were surprised and a little disappointed that they felt it was a good idea to stop what we were doing and cooperate on an independent review of our work,” Brown said, “particularly when I, only upon pressing them, found out they were being paid to do it by the Church of Scientology.

“So they wanted us to participate in a study of our work paid for by the subjects of our work. It seemed odd at best,” he said.

Carollo and Szechenyi declined to be interviewed for this story. In a statement, they said they never misrepresented themselves or who they were working for. They also said they were paid in advance and had complete editorial control of their work.

In any case, the newspaper declined to cooperate with the investigation, saying it would fuel the religion’s ongoing campaign to discredit The Times.

“They have, at various points, threatened litigation against us for performing this kind of journalism,” Brown said. “When you’ve been threatened with lawsuits, it doesn’t make sense to have a conversation with subjects who are threatening you about the work.

“So, we ultimately had to say, this isn’t an independent, objective review, and we’ve got a lot of journalism left to do and we’re going to go forward with it.”

The reporters completed their review and turned it over for an edit to Steve Weinberg, a long-time University of Missouri journalism professor and former executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors.

He agrees with Brown that this arrangement is unique.

“This is unusual. I would presume that not many organizations that get covered seek and find investigative journalists who would then study the coverage,” Weinberg said.

Weinberg said reporters increasingly are being funded by nonprofit organizations, foundations and other non-traditional means, and the report in question is similar to stories he edited for journalism reviews.

“I never would have been interested in editing a story or a report that would be used as some kind of weapon by the Scientologists against any journalist,” Weinberg said.

The report has been turned over to the Church, which is refusing to release it to the public.

But that didn’t stop Davis from speaking about the report to Washington Post columnist Howard Kurtz, who broke this story Monday. Davis called the report “highly critical” of the Times.

In their statement, the reporters said Davis “did not accurately portray the full scope of our work” and urged the Church to release the report.

But they say they can’t talk about their findings, because of their contract with the Church.

Click here to listen to full interviews with Tommy Davis, Neil Brown and Steve Weinberg.

Full Text of Statement from Christopher Szechenyi, Steve Weinberg and Russell Carollo, Feb 25, 2010:

During an interview with the Washington Post, Scientology spokesman Tommy Davis discussed a portion of the findings of our independent review, and, in doing so, did not accurately portray the full scope of our work. We have urged the church to release the complete report of that review.

Because our full report has not been released, any characterization of our work is premature and purely speculative.

We are proud of the work we did. We took great care in insuring that our work was free of all outside interference by any entity, including the Church of Scientology. We insisted on and maintained the highest ethical standards of journalism. We constantly challenged each other to ensure we were upholding those standards. To that end, we insisted on being paid in full for our work before we started our examination.

As part of our efforts to uphold the highest ethical standards, we made the Times fully aware of our work and the conditions under which it was being conducted. We never misrepresented ourselves or who we were working for. We offered reporters and editors there several opportunities to hear in more detail about what we were doing and what we had found. We repeatedly offered them the opportunity to make their observations part of the report. We were prepared to meet with them in person in Florida on two separate occasions, but they declined.

more at http://www.wusf.usf.edu/news/2010/02/25/scientology_hires_reporters_to_investigate_st._petersburg_times

[News Thetan]

Don't call it journalism - Poynter.org
26 February 2010, 4:37 pm

Don't call it journalism

Poynter.org

It's all right for those three journalists to conduct an investigation for Scientologists. They just shouldn't call it journalism. Call it an investigation on behalf of a paying client. It's a shame that Steve Weinberg compared their taking money form Scientologists to investigate an organization Scientologists are suing to the new journalism organizations that are raising money from foundations to support journalism. Some people have suggested that those news organizations are going to have a hard time being independent of their funding sources. But most are trying desperately to be independent. Weinberg's claim that this project paid for by Scientology is in the same ballpark as those foundation-funded new groups just made it more difficult for them to claim integrity.

more at http://www.poynter.org/article_feedback/article_feedback_list.asp?id=178550

[Lorelei]

National Public Radio picked this story up and ran with it:

All Things Considered
Scientology Pays Reporters To Probe Newspaper
Scientology Pays Reporters To Probe Newspaper : NPR