The Hidden Influences on Journalism: From CIA to Corporate Bias

Show Transcript

Dan Luzadder: Does CIA Manipulate the Media?

[00:00:00] Bob Gatty: Hey guys, welcome to our podcast. Today our topic is the news media, specifically issues of corruption and its manipulation for ideological reasons. Our guest is investigative journalist, Dan Luzadder, author of the Manchurian Journalist, which examines the media and how journalists, upon whom we rely for factual information and insight, are influenced by special interests and government agencies, including the CIA.

[00:00:31] Dan says he began drawing a paycheck as a journalist at age 17. He worked at night police beat on a gritty daily by age 19. He became a columnist and investigative reporter covering crime, corruption, prisons, and political mischief. He's got a Pulitzer to his credit and a National Public Service Award from the American Bar Association for exposing corruption in federal courts.

[00:00:59] Dan even negotiated for lives of hostages on death row one night. He covered Columbine and numerous high profile investigations, freelanced with the New York Times and the New York Daily News, and is now at work on an investigative documentary on a series of cold case crimes. As a journalist, Dan's greatest skill is getting inside controversial and secretive organizations.

[00:01:26] We'll learn more about that. Dan, Welcome to the Lean to the Left podcast.

[00:01:31] Dan Luzadder: Thank you, Bob. Thanks for having me. 

[00:01:34] Bob Gatty: It's my pleasure, my friend. It's always good to talk to an old guy who is a journalist. 

[00:01:41] Dan Luzadder: Are fewer of us around than there used to be. 

[00:01:44] Bob Gatty: That's right. That's right.

[00:01:46] Anyway tell me about the Manchurian journalist and what it's all about, my friend. 

[00:01:53] Dan Luzadder: I took a freelance assignment for a magazine that was owned by the Church of Scientology. 

[00:01:58] Bob Gatty: Huh. 

[00:01:59] Dan Luzadder: A number of years ago. And they were complaining about the coverage of the church and declared it to be biased.

[00:02:07] And I took a look at their arguments in the wake of a book by Lawrence Wright. Called Going Clear, and which also became a podcast by Alex Gibney. So I took a look at his coverage, I looked thoroughly at his book on the Church and the history of media coverage of the Church. And there were substantial numbers of things that the Church was arguing that I found to be relatively credible.

[00:02:34] The bias that was expressed by certain elements of the media toward the church seemed pretty clear. And as I started looking into Lawrence Wright's coverage of the church, I found holes in his investigation. And that, that led me to take taking a harder look at who he was personally. And so I discovered in the course of that, that Lawrence Wright had a number of undisclosed issues about his past as a journalist.

[00:03:06] And as I pursued that line further the book really evolved as a study of journalism and the influence that occurred on journalists in the wake of World War II and the And I, I discovered a network of recruitment of journalists into publishing, into the media, by friends of the elite establishment who were also well connected to the CIA.

[00:03:34] And then I discovered that Lawrence Wright's own path had followed that recruiting. Operation. Okay. As he detailed in the memoir that he wrote. 

[00:03:45] Bob Gatty: Okay. Did that form the basis of your book? 

[00:03:50] Dan Luzadder: It did. So the book is really about journalism. It's the Church of Scientology is an illustration of how I think we have allowed reporting criteria to deteriorate a little bit, maybe more than a little bit.

[00:04:05] And Lawrence Wright is an example of something that existed that we know very little about, which was this interest that the intelligence community had in what was published domestically. Yeah. The CIA's charter allows it to do a lot of things internationally, but it's not supposed to be propagandizing the American people domestically.

[00:04:29] And The evidence that I uncovered of these programs, the people who were involved in them, how they functioned which was done through a long period of time of research of classified and declassified documents and FOIA documents and various parts of our history that are not focused on, this picture began to emerge.

[00:04:53] And it has affected, this recruiting process affected even our more left leaning publications. Rolling Stone Magazine. The New Yorker, Texas Monthly, and a lot of media outlets were involved with people who were interested in seeing a particular ideology promoted. 

[00:05:14] Bob Gatty: Sounds like what's going on with Fox News these days.

[00:05:17] Dan Luzadder: We're certainly in an era where we are surrounded by misinformation and disinformation, so much I think, to the point that we don't know what to trust or what to believe. 

[00:05:28] Bob Gatty: I think that's true and I've seen repeatedly people complaining and expressing concern about who to believe or what news outlet to believe when it comes to political news, for example.

[00:05:42] And I frankly, I don't blame them because I find the same thing as I look at media coverage of controversial issues that involve politics. . And I just don't know if it's that standards have changed in journalism school or if Or what it is. What do you think?

[00:06:03] Dan Luzadder: I don't think so much standards have changed as the institution of journalism in this country has changed so dramatically. We've lost institutional knowledge. Yeah. As we've seen newspapers close and we've seen local media outlets struggle They've not had the advertising revenue, the historical revenue, to support vigorous journalism, and so newspaper staffs have declined, and people who came up in the business like I did, where mentors taught you things to do and not to do, I think that system is virtually gone now.

[00:06:42] Bob Gatty: That is a real shame, because I just think back at my own experience, and you say mentors, I had people that really helped me along the way, too. I had one case where I went, this is a little off topic. But it's funny, I think. Anyhow, I came back from, I was working for a daily newspaper called the Greensburg Tribune Review, which is just outside of Pittsburgh.

[00:07:08] And I don't know, I was in my early 20s, I had just been at this paper for maybe a month or two. And I had been covering a school board meeting, I think it was, and I came back to the newsroom And the night editor came over to me, put his arm around me and said, Hey, Bob, I got the story of the century for ya.

[00:07:30] And I said, yeah, what is that? And I'm thinking, were you ever a Boy Scout? 

[00:07:36] Dan Luzadder: Was I? 

[00:07:37] Bob Gatty: Yeah. No? Okay. When I was a Boy Scout, they sent me on a snipe hunt. A snipe hunt, there is no such thing. But you go out in the woods with a paper bag and you try to catch these non existent snipe. So I'm thinking this guy is sending me on a snipe hunt because I was just new.

[00:07:57] No. I had to go out to this little community called Kecksburg, where there was a flying object, an unidentified flying object, that had supposedly landed. And so I covered that story, and it has followed me ever since. And I keep getting requests to be interviewed on TV and everything else to talk about what I saw that night.

[00:08:25] When that UFO supposedly landed in the farmer's field in Kecksburg, PA. Anyway, I don't know why I told you that but 

[00:08:35] Dan Luzadder: It's funny how stories like that follow you. Yeah When I was a young police reporter, I did a story about a man who perished in the county jail And that story was xeroxed and passed from inmate to inmate Across the country.

[00:08:50] I got letters from inmates then and really started my investigations into state and federal prisons as a result of that obscure story. 

[00:08:59] Bob Gatty: Oh, that's interesting. It really is. Okay. So anyway, you you said your investigation into media coverage of the Church of Scientology led to the exposure. of a Cold War era recruiting network in media and publishing by the intelligence community.

[00:09:18] Now, and so you were talking about the CIA. The idea of a connection between media and the CIA is just almost unbelievable. 

[00:09:30] Dan Luzadder: Antithetical. Yeah. It is, and seems so. And I have to say that I never considered that. I had read what Carl Bernstein had written in The Rolling Stone about Operation Mockingbird the infiltration programs that recruited journalists.

[00:09:48] And I think he wrote at the time, that was 1979, that 400 and some journalists in the country had been either recruited, were friends of, And that came up in congressional hearings, those issues were talked about, the various major news media outlets opined against the idea of using journalists in foreign countries to develop intelligence, and it was something of a scandal that was forgotten about.

[00:10:20] And there were pledges that process would be stopped, and they wouldn't do that anymore, but it just went underground. So when I started looking at Lawrence Wright and his history, I read his memoir, and he told a story about how he graduated from Tulane University. It was during the Vietnam War. He, Didn't believe in war, even though his father was a decorated military veteran, and so he became a conscientious objector.

[00:10:51] And he described going to the American University in Cairo to fulfill his conscientious objector service. And he talked in his memoir about the path that he took. Like with any story I've ever done as an investigative reporter, I started pulling apart the pieces to see what was plausible and what was implausible.

[00:11:11] And I discovered that his timeline was a little fractured. Okay. He said that he won his conscientious objector status on the strength of an essay he wrote to the Dallas draft board as to why he did not believe it more, it was morally correct to go to war. And I started talking to conscientious objectors of that era all over the country who said, Wow, they had to go through hearings, bring witnesses.

[00:11:37] It was a very difficult process, but Wright managed to do it on the strength of an essay. Then I started looking at his family history and discovered that his father worked for one of the most prominent Cold War warriors in the country. He owned or had founded a little bank in Dallas, and Lawrence Wright's father went to work for that bank.

[00:11:59] And that bank turned out to be, according to sources that I developed that were part of that bank and familiar with it, a non official cover for domestic operations at CIA. 

[00:12:11] Bob Gatty: I bet you were real popular with these people. 

[00:12:14] Dan Luzadder: I was not extremely popular and Lawrence Wright, I I talked with him on several occasions, but he declined to be interviewed about the book and about the history.

[00:12:23] And so did Alex Gibney the filmmaker, and so were many of Lawrence Wright's friends. In fact, he published a book. I think on Twitter at the time that said I was not a journalist, but a private investigator that had been hired by the church to stalk him, which wasn't true. And I pointed out to him that it wasn't true.

[00:12:44] And I continued right up to the publication of the book to try to get him to talk to me about these issues. 

[00:12:50] Bob Gatty: Okay.

[00:12:50] So anyway, to sum this up a little bit, you say there's a cultural Cold War led by the CIA and the State Department, political strategy involving major news outlets, magazine and book publishers, designed to propagandize the American public, challenge socialism and communism, and preserve an elite establishment. 

[00:13:15] Dan Luzadder: That's a fairly good synopsis.

[00:13:18] I think what one thing that's relevant is that being led by the CIA is a bit of a misnomer because the CIA, I think was the product. of certain thoughts on domestic protection by elites within the society, including John McCloy, who the New York Times described as the chairman of the establishment.

[00:13:44] He was the governor for the occupation of Germany after World War II. He was assistant secretary of war under Roosevelt and and Stimson. He Was very influential in what happened in the wake of the prosecutions of Nazis for war crimes. But he was also head of the Ford Foundation, of the Rockefeller Foundation, of Chase Manhattan Bank, of Of major, the World Bank, major institutions, and he was a good friend of a, he was a friend of a man named Robert Story, who was the Chief Trial Prosecutor in Nuremberg, who was head of the American Bar Association, who used the facilities of the State Department to help recruit people who had Acceptable political ideas ideological perspectives that were consistent with what these individuals believed, And we find Robert Story then intimately connected to Lawrence Wright's history.

[00:14:50] Okay. Robert Story was also the man who helped prevent a prosecution of anyone in Texas for the assassination of JFK. He was very influential in the formation of the Warren Commission. And we don't see him in history very much. He was head of the Board of Foreign Scholarships for the State Department, and the Board of Foreign Scholarships was used as a recruiting tool for people overseas to bring them into our Western culture.

[00:15:18] Some of those people were involved in book publishing in foreign countries. And many of the people who were aligned with McCloy, Story, Alan Dulles, the head of the CIA, John Foster Dulles, part of that elite establishment in control of banks and other institutions that helped shape the American perspective on who we were, what we were, and what our imperatives were.

[00:15:46] Bob Gatty: Do you think any of that raised any significant questions about the assassination of JFK? 

[00:15:55] Dan Luzadder: I do. I think one thing I noticed 

[00:15:59] Bob Gatty: Talk to me about that. 

[00:16:01] Dan Luzadder: When I was reading Lawrence Wright's memoir, his conclusion that he was writing about Dallas and in part in his memoir and why people hated Dallas in the wake of the assassination, his conclusion was Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

[00:16:16] I think that was, very much a perspective out of Dallas that was represented by this sort of establishment view. I think we've seen plenty of evidence to conclude that Lee Harvey Oswald didn't act alone. There's more to know that we've never been privileged to know because of classified materials.

[00:16:38] Bob Gatty: Got a suspicion about it? 

[00:16:40] Dan Luzadder: Do I have a suspicion about it? 

[00:16:42] Bob Gatty: Yeah. 

[00:16:42] Dan Luzadder: I think there was a a conspiracy to, to eliminate Kennedy because of his efforts toward detente, toward disarmament and toward dismantling the war machine. 

[00:16:55] Bob Gatty: So the conspiracy would have involved the CIA? 

[00:17:01] Dan Luzadder: There are people who speculate that the CIA was involved.

[00:17:04] There are people who speculate that Alan Dulles knew what was going on. That it was a rogue element within the CIA that conducted those operations. I don't think we will ever get a definitive answer to that. Those are the kinds of questions that need to be asked. And that's one of the things I think does not happen in mainstream journalism is the appropriate questions are not asked.

[00:17:30] Bob Gatty: Oh, I think you're right there. That's for sure. Tell me a little bit more about this investigation that you did with the Church of Scientology. That was for Freedom Magazine, right? 

[00:17:42] Dan Luzadder: I ran into a another journalist when I was living in Denver, I had started freelancing, he was working for the Denver Post and knowing they were downsizing at the Denver Post, he was looking for freelance work and he had come across Freedom Magazine and done a couple stories for them and he said they were looking for an investigative reporter who Had wider experience than he could offer And was I interested in talking to them and I said sure i'll talk to anybody once and so they the church contacted me they started Offering me various arguments and asking me if I would look into this media bias thing And as I got further into it, I saw reasonable elements to describe that Raise questions I didn't get into Lawrence Wright until well after his book was published on the church, and then after the documentary by Alex Gibney, and then I began to look harder on Freedom's behalf at what those issues were and what they meant, which is what led me to break off then into this area involving the discoveries of his history and his undisclosed history.

[00:18:48] Bob Gatty: Okay. A minute ago, when we were off before the show started, you were telling me about when you were involved with that hostage situation in the prison. Tell me more about that and how that came about and what it involved and whatever happened. That's, that was an interesting story.

[00:19:08] Dan Luzadder: I was a columnist for seven years at a medium sized paper in Indiana. 

[00:19:14] And 

[00:19:14] it was during the, my column writing days that I began to explore some issues that came to my attention involving the sexual abuse of women in the Indiana State Women's Prison. And I wrote extensively as a columnist 

[00:19:28] about those situations, which led me to look into human rights issues in the state prisons. And I wound up developing a vast source network within the state prisons, which is one of the things, as we were talking about journalism and it's in the demise of institutional knowledge, Building sources and doing more than just calling people on the phone and asking their response to things.

[00:19:53] Source networks are important, and I had such a thorough source network in the state prisons that inmate clerks prison guards prison officials who were unhappy with certain things that were going on, and certainly vast numbers of inmates would write to me. I would look into their cases. I would write stories about the prison situation. So I was well known within the state prison system, negatively by the Department of Correction, but positively by some inmates who wanted stories told. And so I was sitting in the investigative office one afternoon, and the phone rang, and it was the assistant commissioner for the Department of Correction.

[00:20:30] And he said, we have a hostage situation in Michigan City, and they're asking that you come in to, to do the Negotiations. And I said okay. They said can you have the newspaper's helicopter fly you up to Michigan city, which was 150 miles away. I said the newspaper doesn't have to have a helicopter.

[00:20:49] They said the state police helicopter is busy, but we'll put a squad car outside. So they put me in a squad car and ran me signal 10 for 150 miles an hour or 150 miles at about a hundred miles an hour to Michigan city state prison. 

[00:21:04] Bob Gatty: Wow. 

[00:21:05] Dan Luzadder: I went on to death row. I conducted these negotiations pretty much by myself between bars with the inmates and they, the hostages were being brought out onto a tier above me and they would hold a news, hold a a shiv to their throats to show me they meant business.

[00:21:23] But mostly they were concerned about the conditions of confinement. So our Our talk I spent the evening talking with Ray Wallace, who had killed a family of four, and he was the prime negotiator. And during the course of the investigation, I asked him about his crime. The course of the negotiations, I asked him about his crime.

[00:21:45] He told me about killing the family and the two kids, and I asked him why. He killed the two kids, and he said, because he didn't want them to grow up without parents. I always tried to maintain a pretty cool objectivity whenever I was reporting, and, but I am a father of three and his description affected me.

[00:22:07] And later on, he wanted me to come back to the prison to write more about conditions of confinement, and I just put it off, partially because of it. But That night when the negotiations ended, they had me walk with the the guards back to put the inmates back into their cells to make sure nobody was beaten or abused, and I still had 15 minutes at the end of that to make the last deadline at the newspaper. So I called my story in and it bannered the paper the next morning. And that was exciting journalism. But the real lesson I learned from that story was about keeping a promise because I put off going back to death row to talk to the inmates for several months, and then I got involved in investigating child abuse at a state juvenile facility.

[00:23:00] And found in looking at old records Ray Wallace the inmate negotiator, I found him in the records of the Indiana Boys School. And his roommate at the boys school had been Charles Manson, I discovered. And so I, I wrote to Ray and asked him if he would talk to me about his experience at the boys school, and he sent me a two word reply, and we never spoke again.

[00:23:25] Bob Gatty: I guess the two word reply was pretty clear. Negative response 

[00:23:31] Dan Luzadder: well in journalism classes I would remind students that if you're going to make a promise as a journalist, You better keep it because you may close off sources that could be very valuable to you later on. 

[00:23:42] Bob Gatty: Yeah, that's true Absolutely. So you taught journalism?

[00:23:46] Did you 

[00:23:47] Dan Luzadder: I did it at indiana university part time while I was Doing investigative reporting in indianapolis and I taught at metro state college in denver Part time when I was working for the rocky mountain news there 

[00:23:59] Bob Gatty: You've had quite a career, haven't you? 

[00:24:01] Dan Luzadder: It's been a very interesting career. Wow. I started out as a police reporter, and I was I grew up in an evangelical Christian environment.

[00:24:10] I'd never seen anything particularly dramatic. And from the first night I was on police beat, all that changed. I began to see the real world among common people and their ordinary lives. And it really taught me a lot of lessons about how you convey what and how you report on it. 

[00:24:30] Bob Gatty: We have a lot in common, man.

[00:24:32] I grew up in a conservative, Christian, fundamentalist environment, too. As a matter of fact, my dad was a preacher. 

[00:24:42] Dan Luzadder: Really? 

[00:24:42] Bob Gatty: Yeah. He tried growing up as a preacher's kid, man. 

[00:24:46] Dan Luzadder: I can only imagine. 

[00:24:49] Bob Gatty: Oh man, I'll tell you what. So I, my brother and I got in trouble one time because there was a evangelist that had come, and they were doing services every night for a week or whatever it was.

[00:25:01] And we had to go, my brother and I, and my sister, one sister, we had to go every night to each of those services and sit in the front row. And my mom made me wear a white suit. And one, one time the thing was going on for so long that my brother and I decided it was time for the guy to shut up. So we had whistles.

[00:25:26] We had like football whistles and we blew them.

[00:25:31] My dad had an army belt and he used it on me. Oh, 

[00:25:38] He wasn't fooling around, man. I'll tell you that 

[00:25:40] Dan Luzadder: you had no doubt what 

[00:25:41] Bob Gatty: he was not a happy man. 

[00:25:44] Dan Luzadder: That reminds me of a story of my own. I went to a youth religious retreat, and not too far from where our little country church was, and several of the other boys and I found Buckeyes out along the trail, and we picked them up, and they were having fun.

[00:26:02] When we went back in, they had a big fireplace going in the room and we decided it would be a good idea to throw our Buckeyes into the fire, which we did. And so during the prayer, the Buckeyes began to explode and it set sparks and fire around the room and and the prayer got more fervent.

[00:26:21] Bob Gatty: I'm sure tell people who don't know what Buckeyes are. 

[00:26:24] Dan Luzadder: Oh Buckeyes grow on trees and they're not good for much except exploding. 

[00:26:31] Bob Gatty: There's some kind of nut, right? 

[00:26:32] Dan Luzadder: Yeah, some kind of nut. Ohio. There's a lot of Buckeyes in Ohio. 

[00:26:37] Bob Gatty: Oh, that's why that's why it's called the Buckeye State, maybe? 

[00:26:39] Dan Luzadder: That's right.

[00:26:41] Bob Gatty: Oh, look, we uncovered that. That's, talk about investigative journalism, man. 

[00:26:47] Dan Luzadder: Investigative journalism, isn't any longer what it was when I was working for daily newspapers. 

[00:26:52] Bob Gatty: Yeah, I think you're right. 

[00:26:53] Dan Luzadder: You know when I left indianapolis in the wake of an investigation I did into into a trade school that was Ripping off the federal guaranteed student loan program for hundreds of millions of dollars and channeling that money into political campaigns part of that money 

[00:27:17] Bob Gatty: Who'd have thunk anything like that could happen, right?

[00:27:19] Dan Luzadder: Yeah, as if it could happen. And those stories were okay with the management of the Indianapolis Star, but then when I took on a state judge who had granted a divorce to the CEO of this company under very favorable terms, my life got complicated. And the judge was on his way to the state Supreme Court.

[00:27:41] Okay. He had been picked for that evolution, and I uncovered problems in his court, including bribes and other mischief. 

[00:27:50] Bob Gatty: Oh. And 

[00:27:50] Dan Luzadder: so he sued me for libel. Okay. And the newspaper's attorney was a friend of the judge, and he tried to inhibit the reporting about him. Okay. And so when the libel suit came, I resigned From the star and was picked up immediately by the Rocky Mountain News in Denver.

[00:28:13] Long story short, before I left, the Chief Justice of the State Supreme Court called me and had me come down to his office and he said, I hear that you're thinking about leaving and I think that'd be a bad idea. He said, we're coming behind you on this judicial issue, but it's going to take a while. I said, too late.

[00:28:33] I've already taken a job in Denver. So a year later, they brought charges against the judge and he became the first sitting judge in Indiana to be removed for cause of the history of the state and the libel suit went away, but I'd already changed over to to a new environment. 

[00:28:51] Bob Gatty: I guess popularity was never one of your concerns.

[00:28:54] Dan Luzadder: Never at the top of the list. I think I was seduced by journalism as a young man. I was seduced by the idea that you could tell colorful stories, truthful stories about people that, People were interested in hearing that, and you could find a lot more that was worthy of reporting by getting away from government, getting away from, the idea of just straight, factual, inverted pyramid news stories, and you can write more interesting, and that's what I did.

[00:29:28] Bob Gatty: So for people who, I'm sorry, go ahead. I was just 

[00:29:31] Dan Luzadder: going to say my daughter, who's now a lawyer in Kathlamet, Washington, encouraged a collection of my columns and she put that together and it was published about the same time as the Manchurian journalist, it was called Street Talk, the name of 

[00:29:46] Bob Gatty: the column.

[00:29:47] Okay. Okay. So that's what's behind you there on the table. 

[00:29:51] Dan Luzadder: That includes some of the material from the Pulitzer that I shared in 83 for coverage. 

[00:29:57] Bob Gatty: Good. Congratulations. That's great. Okay. Actually I wrote a book too with another guy. And it was a collection of my blogs from my, what then was called Not Fake News.

[00:30:10] Blog site and that, that book was called Hijacked Nation, Donald Trump's Attack on America's Greatness. And yeah, I was pretty proud of that. And folks, by the way, that's still available on Amazon. So let's see. I want to know whether you think that unbiased independent journalism being in nobody's pocket, is simply an American, idea that is no longer possible, or whether it still is possible.

[00:30:46] What are your thoughts about that? 

[00:30:48] Dan Luzadder: I think it is possible. 

[00:30:49] But I think we have to change some perspectives on how we do that. 

[00:30:54] Bob Gatty: Okay. 

[00:30:54] Dan Luzadder: Journalism has had an interesting history in this country, and we saw, I think local ownership of newspapers, despite the fact that local owners might protect local sources.

[00:31:09] They, I remember working on the the wire desk or the copy desk and various times and you had to make sure That the liquor store ads didn't go on the same page as an accident report involving liquor, so those kinds of things were protected and you didn't want to say bad things about the local grocer who bought full page ads every day.

[00:31:32] Sure. But for the most part, when you were writing about government, when you were writing about politics, when you're writing about malfeasance or corruption, local owners didn't necessarily stand in your way. And they would follow that story where it led. I think things have changed now, dramatically, because we don't have the staff on the surviving newspapers. We don't have the experience on surviving newspapers that once was there. And we certainly don't have the institutional knowledge and the mentors who teach you how to develop sources that trust you and that you trust so that you can respond to stories and write what is factual in a timely way.

[00:32:15] But I think. There have been some experiments and not for profit organizations developing. journalistic opportunities. I think that might be a way to go. Certainly the advertising model is not going to sustain newspapers anymore. 

[00:32:32] Bob Gatty: No, it's not. The internet has taken care of that. And then the trend towards corporations purchasing these little local papers that people have come to rely on and trust.

[00:32:44] And all of a sudden those papers are being infused with ideological positions of one kind or another, correct? 

[00:32:53] Dan Luzadder: Media has slipped over into a confusion between factual reporting and commentary. 

[00:32:59] Bob Gatty: It has. 

[00:33:01] Dan Luzadder: I may listen to Progressive Station certainly more than I listen to Fox News, because I don't trust Fox News to be accurate, but I realize at the same time that, that some liberal outlets are dealing with The same sorts of problems perspective.

[00:33:19] If you're engaged in commentary, more than factual reporting, your perspective is out there on the table. And it's equally important to the facts that you're reporting. And I'm disturbed by that. 

[00:33:30] Bob Gatty: Yeah you and I are not the only ones in preparation for this conversation with you, I did a little research online about 15 minutes ago and I, and I saw a survey that said that half of Americans believe national news organizations intend to mislead, misinform, and persuade people to adopt a particular point of view through their reporting.

[00:33:57] Do you really think that's true? 

[00:34:00] Dan Luzadder: I don't know how you would establish intent. 

[00:34:03] Bob Gatty: Yeah. 

[00:34:04] Dan Luzadder: I think you have to work backwards and see, the history of the coverage and how it leans one way or another, the bottom line is what's factual and what is not factual. How do we determine that?

[00:34:17] How do we use sources and how do we document those things? So much of the journalism I see today is simply, that's characterized as investigative reporting, is simply picking up the phone and calling someone and asking their opinion. Yeah. Or maybe you ask a few more people for their opinion. That's not investigative reporting.

[00:34:36] It's looking behind the story. It's looking behind what the facts are and determining as best you can what's right, what's wrong. 

[00:34:45] Bob Gatty: I look at the local papers here in South Carolina where I live and it's just very disturbing because these First of all, they're just young kids, mostly, that are the reporters on these small papers.

[00:35:00] And they have no experience, but, there'll be a story about some bad thing that occurred and the whole story will just be based on a press release that came out from the police department with no follow up, no effort. There might be a line in there that says our effort to contact X, y or Z was unsuccessful at press time or something like that. But nevertheless, there doesn't seem to be any follow up. And then those stories go away and you never hear anything more about them. And man, that wasn't the case when I was a reporter. And I know it wasn't the case when you were either.

[00:35:39] Dan Luzadder: And that's part of the problem institutionally, I think. Is now, I live in Cannon Beach, Oregon, small town. There's some changes going on here resulting in. From tourism. They want to expand the police department. 

[00:35:53] Bob Gatty: Yeah. 

[00:35:53] Dan Luzadder: If I want to walk down and ask the chief of police to produce some records on this or that, his first reaction I know would be those aren't public record.

[00:36:04] We don't know what's public record and what isn't anymore. We don't have the reporters walking down to the police department and saying, I want this report and I expect you to give it to me. And if you don't give it to me, I'm going to file a public records request. And if I have to, I'll sue you to get it.

[00:36:22] We don't have that kind of thing going on. We're, we've lost a lot of that. And so police departments, they can routinely ignore young reporters and they hand them a press release and this is all you're going to get. Reporters job is to go out and talk to the people themselves that press release is about.

[00:36:43] What about the victim? What about the perpetrator? What about the situation? We don't do that anymore. We just, we have so few people reporting. Yeah. They're handling five or six stories a day. And so they rely on press releases. 

[00:36:57] Bob Gatty: Yeah. That's true. Okay. So what needs to happen for the media to regain people's trust?

[00:37:02] Dan Luzadder: It needs to reinvigorate itself. It needs, we need a reporting network in which people know how to report. They know what their access availabilities are. They know how to develop sources. Journalists from schools I think Are witnessing the fewer and fewer number of jobs to send people to in journalism.

[00:37:25] And so they turn to public relations or other aspects of writing or reporting that still don't preserve the however flawed it was, the institutional system that produced news that actually found, uncovered news. and so we've lost. 

[00:37:45] Bob Gatty: Yeah. Okay, let's talk a little bit about your book. Where can people your two books, where can people get them?

[00:37:52] Dan Luzadder: They're available on Amazon Barnes Noble online and available from Trine Day, the publisher of The Manchurian Journalist. The book of columns is published by Britain Publishing in Ohio. the Buckeyes. And so they've been, both books were released in mid June.

[00:38:12] Bob Gatty: Okay. Great. All right.

[00:38:14] Thank you. I really do appreciate you being with us, Dan, on the Lean to the Left podcast. And I am not ashamed or embarrassed to say that it's the Lean to the Left podcast. 

[00:38:29] Dan Luzadder: Thank you very much for having me on. I've enjoyed it. And I always like to talk to another journalist that's in Swap Stories.

[00:38:37] Bob Gatty: Thank you very much. You're a lot of fun.