Reporters could use help with asking the right questions

“All learning,” my father used to tell me, “begins with asking questions.”

It was one of the many “words-to-live-by” maxims that he drummed into my young head and that, I’m convinced, helped make me a journalist. It’s also a maxim that Murrey Marder and Barry Sussman, longtime journalists themselves, fervently believe in. At a time of life when the questions that concern most men involve their pensions and their prostates, Marder, 84, and Sussman, 69, have created a website designed to encourage other journalists to ask more, better questions of our public officials, corporate executives and others “in positions of power over people’s lives.”

Early questions posted on the site, NiemanWatchdog.org, which began last month, include:

* “Abu Ghraib aside, where is the reporting on [conditions in] U.S. prisons, once a model for human punishment but not any longer?”

* “Aren’t hair-trigger nuclear missiles [in the U.S. and Russia] a target for terrorists, and shouldn’t we be asking candidates for President and other offices their views” on how to deal with this threat?

* “What’s the progress with ‘Leave no child behind,’ and how is it working in your area?”

NiemanWatchdog.org appears under the aegis of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, founded in 1938 “to promote and elevate the standards of journalism in the United States.” The foundation is best known for bringing 24 journalists to Harvard annually for a year’s advanced study, but in 1996, it created the Nieman Watchdog Project, which began as a series of seminars, conferences and written reports.

The funds -- and the inspiration -- for the project came from Marder, a Nieman Fellow in 1950 and a longtime diplomatic correspondent for the Washington Post.

“It all goes back to 1964 and the Gulf of Tonkin resolution,” which essentially authorized President Lyndon Johnson to wage war in Vietnam, Marder says. “I was convinced from the beginning that if the press and Congress had fulfilled their proper watchdog function about that alleged ‘unprovoked attack’ on a U.S. destroyer by North Vietnamese torpedo boats, we would never have gotten into the scale of warfare we did in Vietnam.

“That weighed on me for the rest of my career,” Marder says.

He retired from the Post in 1985, and when his wife died 11 years later, he was left with no children but with a profit-sharing fund that contained about $2 million in Washington Post stock.

He decided it was time to do something about his longtime obsession, so he contacted officials at the Nieman Foundation, and out of their conversations came the Nieman Watchdog Project, financed with $1.3 million of Marder’s Post stock, “about two-thirds of what I had,” he says.

The early watchdog programs were well received, “but we only reached about 40 or 50 people at a time,” Marder says. “It was clear to me that to have any significant effect on journalism in the United States, we had to do something to try to imbue the culture with the sense that reporters have the obligation to examine forces that affect public life.”

Direction for watchdogs

When war in Iraq broke out -- and postwar efforts in Iraq bogged down -- Marder was “appalled -- stunned. The country went to war without proper examination of its purposes and goals by the press and Congress. It was Vietnam all over again.”

Marder’s dismay led to further discussions with Nieman officials, and these discussions led to NiemanWatchdog.org.

“I wanted to provide a stimulus for reporters to ask the right questions,” he says.

That’s where Sussman came in.

He’d also worked for the Washington Post, for 22 years -- most famously as the D.C. editor who supervised Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein when they uncovered the Watergate scandal.

“The best watchdog reporting in this country now is absolutely marvelous,” Sussman says, “but there are whole areas -- the environment, race relations, homeland security, poverty, the economy, the status and problems of American Indians -- that are left under-reported or unreported, vital areas for us as a society and a democracy, areas where reporters need a little better direction.”

Sussman, Marder and Bob Giles, curator of the Nieman Foundation, agreed that posting their concerns and suggestions as questions was the right approach since, as Giles says, “Probing questions are essential to informed reporting.”

At the moment, Sussman and Dan Fromkin, his deputy editor, are developing most of the questions, with some input from Marder. But they are also tapping experts at Harvard and elsewhere since, as Marder told me, “Academics always say reporters don’t ask the right questions. Well, OK, we’re saying, ‘You help create the questions.’ ”

Sussman says he doesn’t expect reporters and editors at the nation’s biggest and best newspapers to “pay much attention to us because they’ll have their own questions. But I think reporters and editors at regional and local and midsize papers who may not be used to routinely thinking along these lines may find us useful.”

Although I’m sure Sussman hopes the journalistic big boys will indeed pay attention to his website but doesn’t want to say so for fear of appearing arrogant, I do think papers below the top tier are a more likely audience. So I called the editors of several such papers last week. All agreed that NiemanWatchdog.org was a good concept.

Fine-tuning the site

“Watchdog journalism is one of the cornerstones of what we can do, both to make a difference in our communities and to separate ourselves from the other media,” says Rick Rodriguez, executive editor of the Sacramento Bee and vice president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

Karla Garrett Harshaw, editor of the Springfield (Ohio) News-Sun and president of ASNE, expressed similar sentiments -- with a couple of caveats.

“They have to be careful to come up with questions and stories that really would be asked by midsized and smaller papers,” she said. “I see that one of their questions suggests that reporters ask to see Reagan’s presidential papers,” many of which remain sealed under an executive order signed by President Bush in 2001.

“We might be interested in that, but is it really likely that a paper our size is going to do that story?”

Harshaw also said the editors and contributors on the website “have to make sure the questions are purely journalistic, not biased, not showing an ideological agenda.”

Here too she cited a question now on the website, this one from Brad DeLong, identified as a blogger and an economics professor at UC Berkeley. DeLong suggests that reporters “should be asking more about the goals of Bush administration economic policy because the results have been abysmal.”

As Harshaw rightly points out, “Certain Bush supporters would say the results have not been abysmal at all.”

Sussman says he’s “trying very hard not to let this become a left-wing or Eastern establishment website, but in an election year, it’s natural for some questions on controversial issues to be put in the context of an election campaign -- and if that gives the appearance of partisanship from time to time, I’m sorry. That’s not our goal.”

Their goal -- triggering more questions, spreading the watchdog function to more papers -- is journalistically admirable and societally valuable. If the editors can avoid the pitfalls Harshaw points out, NiemanWatchdog.org could become a welcome antidote to the lazy, lapdog journalism that so many news organizations now practice.

David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com. To read his previous “Media Matters” columns, please go to latimes.com/shaw-media.