Who Gets to Decide Whom the Media Is? Prologue

What’s Wrong With This Picture?

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.

John F. Kennedy

 

You may have noticed there were no pictures, video, audio, or written reports by me from the 2010 campaign trail after the primary.

Why?

My efforts to cover joint events of the various candidates were stymied by the refusal of campaigns to provide any information or grant access. I was effectively shut out.

Even our own former governor Gary Johnson, above, has appeared in only two televised debates because large media interests have deemed him, and others as insignificant to the electoral process.

This is the complete extent of my coverage of Diane Denish’s campaign; her yard sign on the first night that it could legally be posted.

I was unable to cover Albuquerque Public Schools’ gubernatorial candidates education debate, Friday August 19, 2010, or the Congregation Albert’s gubernatorial candidates debate Sunday September 29, 2010, because of the campaigns and organizers’ efforts to control who got to cover such events.

Problems covering public governmental activities have intensified and are widespread.

Covering public events such as fires, mayoral press conferences, and APS board and committee meetings, are met with access challenges that not only violate the spirit of the law, but the laws themselves.

Amongst: candidates' campaigns, elected officials, public information officers, and police officers, I have met a wall of resistance. In the two major parties; at the gubernatorial candidate campaign staff levels, I was deemed persona non-gratis.

The issue of who is the press has become more confounding recently, especially for governments, with the proliferation of online journalists. Part of the proliferation results from the number of journalists who are going online and into the social media as an extension of their corporate work or because they have had to change from their traditional media model.
Note:

Amendment I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The Constitutional word, “press” may be interchanged throughout this series with such words as: media, newspapers, mainstream media, radio, television, magazines, pamphlets, internet websites or weblogs (blogs), and any other forms of communications, which could apply as broadly as possible to be covered by the word press.

In all cases where someone in government tries to define who are, or what is the press, even in and especially in statute, refer back to the First Amendment’s “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of... or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press...”.

The number of daily papers continues to decline or alter. The recent decision by USA Today to change directions is an effort to stay in touch with their consumers caused by rapidly changing reliance on technology. Papers like: the Santa Fe New Mexican and their Political Reporters Steve Terrell's Roundhouse Roundup and Kate Nash's Green Chile Chatter, and Albuquerque Journal Reporter Dan McKay, has a blog, ”the City Hall Beat”, The Journal also maintains several blogs augmenting their print versions.

The magazine world is no exception, as US News  & World Report is changing from a weekly to eight issues a year, while increasing its online presence.

There is another aspect to be considered: mainstream media, newsprint, radio, and television offer advertising space to campaigns. Though campaigns and the media would deny it, the amount of money to be made by publishing and airing political advertising may weigh on the decisions of how deeply the media delves into the positions candidates hold beyond the limited talking point issues designed for 30-second advertising.

During the 2011 regular legislative session, Sen. David Ulibarri (D) Cibola, Socorro, and Valencia Counties, above right with Sen. Linda Lopez, Introduced Senate Bill 147, entitled, Providing for Alternative Publication of Legal Notices on an Authorized Web Site.

Chapter 14, Article 11 NMSA 1978; provided that the requirement of publication may be satisfied by posting on the authorized web site. Each qualified radio or television station shall without charge at least once a day between the hours of 5:00 a.m. and 10:00 p.m. announce the availability of legal notices and advertisements on the authorized web site. The New Mexico broadcasters association shall be responsible for establishing and maintaining the authorized web site, www.nmlegalnotices.com, which shall be promoted by members of the New Mexico broadcasters association." 

… (2) by posting on the authorized web site, which electronic posting shall be archived and accessible for a period of not less than five years.

The action was postponed indefinitely in the Senate Judiciary Committee. It is a proposition likely to reappear in the legislature.

The problem of access can be boiled down to the mistaken Constitutional interpretation that government somehow gets to define who is media. Government officials take a further step by excluding those who may tell the truth on them or are perceived as being less than always favorable towards them. Journalists are sometimes demonized for accurately reporting information that a candidate views as damaging to their tightly controlled image and message.

I wrote about how alternative media emerged when forced to do so, in the fall of 2003 for a Media History class:

Existing media outlets do not always represent the diverse interests of peoples. Often existing media outlets are diametrically opposed to the position taken by particular groups. They will include events (marches, strikes and demonstrations) in which groups participate, but present a slanted stereotypical view of groups' positions and ridicule and stereotype the dissenting groups.

Historically, prime examples were abolition, woman's' suffrage and civil rights. The position of existing media in the slave states was to perpetuate the ownership of slave as an intricate part of the South's economic system along moral, patriotic, and religious grounds. Woman's' suffrage was opposed by existing media because they represented the status quo of the time, which was dominated by men with their belief that women were incapable of being responsible with the rights held exclusively by men. The political and economic interests of people, who were and maybe still are, against recognizing equality, based on race, opposed to civil rights.

Existing media outlets exclude the group(s), their ideas and goals from the popular marketplace.

Alternative media are confronted by challenges through:

A lack of money,

A lack of patrons,

A lack of sales and advertising,

Small or a one-person staff,

Early alternative media were political and later focused on abolitionist, voter, and other civil rights.

Violence against the groups was directed towards those represented by the alternative media.

Existing media and those in power marginalized ideas propounded by the alternative media.

There is a bias amongst some government actors against the word blogger. It is largely based on the fact that many people who blog do so with no intention of resembling the academic model of journalism, as purportedly practiced by commercial news media, like daily newspapers, news radio stations and network affiliated television newsrooms.

Before computers, a person who wanted to get a message out usually started with a blank sheet of paper. The end result might have been a scribble, or a coloring by a child, to a personal note, letter, or into published documents that were, and still are reproduced on any number of technologies.

Now the starting point is, as often as not, a blank computer monitor. The output is often an image on the same computer monitor.

Computers are just a new technology equal to the printing press known by the first United States Congress when they penned the word “press” in the First Amendment. There is no question today that the word applies to technological advances that the scientific minds of the likes of Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson could never have imagined.

However, the use of the term blogger is often used to marginalize those who use the internet for journalistic purposes, as was done against the alternative media. Such online journalists are engaging as an internet based media. 

Bloggers are now particularly vulnerable targets for government actors who wish to suppress this new breed of a free press for several familiar reasons:

internet based media usually work alone, often unpaid,

they are unattached to commercial news organizations,

they don’t know what legal rulings have been made that might help them,

they don’t have the resources to take on government in court.

Government actors believe they can suppress internet based media for the same reasons used to suppress the alternative media, because of their own ignorance of internet based media’s Constitutional rights found in the First Amendment’s freedom of the press;

they believe it is within their power to select who in the media should or should not be granted access to their events;

they don’t know what legal rulings have been made that prohibit or limit their ability to restrict access to any journalist;

The two recent gubernatorial candidates and most incumbents, disregarded the fact that they were already elected state officials, who were paid through taxes, a large amount of money to serve the public and they were not able to distance themselves from their official duties and though they were candidates, they retained their public titles and duties;

as pubic officials, and those candidates are still running for governmental office are duty bound to be open with the public;

they think it is more important to control their campaign message rather than uphold the Constitution;

they fear bloggers have their own political agenda which might be contrary to their campaign;

campaigns fear “the question” that forces their candidate off the scripted message, possibly breaking open the election by answering, botching the answer, or refusing to answer the question.

Political campaigns don’t limit their refusal to deal with journalists only to bloggers. In Nevada, the Republican Party nominee for U.S. Senate Sharron Angle, banned a Las Vegas television station, 8 NEWS NOW, the CBS affiliate from election night coverage. Angle refused to answer directly or through phone calls or e-mails, so the station and the NBC affiliate KSNV News 3 staked her out at the airport.

Angle would later claim that the presence of two reporters and three cameras made a scene and caused a security concern.
There is another aspect to be considered: mainstream media, newsprint, radio, and television offer advertising space to campaigns. Though campaigns and the media would deny it, the amount of money to be made by publishing and airing political advertising may weigh on the decisions of how deeply the media delves into the positions candidates hold beyond the limited talking point issues designed for 30-second advertising.

The journalist of traditional media may well attempt to cover candidates accurately. However, those decisions are being made, when editors and news directors decided not to cover certain issues and refuse to cover down ballot races at all.

During the early televised debates for the 2012 Republican Presidential Primary nomination, we saw major media in the form of joint newspaper and (cable) television networks fail to invite candidates who have met the legal requirements for their names to appear on various state primary ballots.

 

Johnson is on the cusp of announcing that he is leaving the Republican Party to run as an Independent.

Few bloggers, who are independent of party partisanship, have a direct economic or political interest to pull their questions. So those bloggers may well ask questions burrowing into issues that candidates regard as toxic.

Contrary to any rhetoric, candidates and their campaign staffs offer about answering to the press, they do not do so at open events where a truly free press has access.
So what’s wrong with this picture?

I hadn’t officially seen my neighbor Lt. Gov. Denish since the last day of the legislative session on February 18, 2010.

The last time I talked with her, left was over two years ago at the mayoral polling site in October 2009.

I saw her with a group of people in a local coffee shop, shortly after US Sen. Jeff Bingaman’s retirement announcement. She shifted her position at the table so a corner of the wall blocked my view; it was an acknowledgement without ever even making eye contact.

She and her husband, Herb, (seen to the right of the two photos above) were in the audience at the New Mexico First’s First Forum Lecture Series, the Spirit of Bipartisanship Awards.

Denish was at an Albuquerque Public Schools District Goals Community Meeting at Jefferson Middle School, at right.

Now more than a year after the gubernatorial election, things have changed slightly in Governor Susana Martinez’s camp.

With the hiring of Communications Director Scott Darnell, right, after he graduated with a Master in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, access to the Governor’s office vastly improved; from locked out, to some degree of openness. I get press releases and have been able to cover all the events that I have chosen based on those releases.

When I asked for a one on one interview, it was granted. Darnell wanted to know what the topic was, almost all public information officers will at least ask, I told him I was going to give him an opportunity to not allow the interview based on the subject of the question.

Darnell was the former Director of Communications for the Republican Party of New Mexico before going to Boston. He was able to spin the party line at the GOP, but was also able to relate details when pressed.

Now, two years after the mayoral election, Mayor Richard Berry’s first Communications Director Chris Huffman Ramirez, initially welcomed bloggers and alternative news outlets. He then removed their names from media advisories, placing them on after the fact press releases, and with me, even eliminated those notifications when I appealed directly to the Mayor to again be placed on the media advisory list.

Huffman Ramirez, above left, with City Clerk Amy Baily, refused to fulfill inspection of public records requests, though he acknowledged the specific document sought existed. He cited no legal exception, they just wouldn't produce it. I had been provided a partial memo from a source in the city administration.

With Huffman Ramirez’s recent departure from the Mayor’s office, returning to TV news, his replacement as Berry's new Communications Director Dayna Gardner adopted the same attitude: that she could unilaterally determine what and who the press were and deny access to city events, even though Berry acknowledges and speak with me as a member of the press.

When Mayor Berry travels without his executive protection detail of Albuquerque Police Officers, he is open and accessible to me for photographs and questions. However, in the presence of the APD officers, I am subjected to efforts, by them, to control my movements in photographing him where other, “recognized media” have free roam.

In a recent period of just over two weeks I covered four events of Mayor Berry. At three of them he had staff, but no police officer. He greeted me by name and shook my hand. At the fourth event, the state of the city report, attended by about 250 people, the vast majority being city employees, mostly mayoral appointees showing their personal loyalty; including more than 20 command level or above police officers, and at least two officers from the executive protection detail, access was greatly restricted.

On October 30, 2011, Berry attended a Republican event of a group called Club 66. A single staff member, then Director of Constituent Services Tito Madrid, accompanied him. Berry was open and accommodating to my photographing and videoing him.

On November 14, Berry was the guest speaker at the Albuquerque Press Women’s luncheon. A staff member to run his computer and projector and a senior staff member accompanied him.

He was again accommodating in letting me capture still and video images and audio record his presentation.

On November 15, Berry was the guest speaker at an Albuquerque TEA Party meeting where he presented part of his power point slide show to try to explain why the proposed bond for reconstructing the intersection of Interstate Highway 25 and Paseo del Norte, coupled with a sports complex was defeated by city voters.

He arrived alone, passed several people, walked up to me, and I was the first person with whom he shook hands.

His computer and projector staff member arrived on his own earlier to set up his equipment.

On November 25, Berry presented his state of the city report.

I moved to a spot more than 20 feet from the edge of the stage and at least 35 feet from Berry to get a wide-angle picture of the mayor and his audience.

Albuquerque Police Officer Chris Lucero, below right, assigned to his protective detail, called me by name and told me I had to move. Thinking he might have considered me to be blocking his line of travel to the mayor, I got my shot and backed away to the wall.

Immediately, a member of the city’s GOV TV – Government Television cable access station, above left, moved from Lucero's right, setting up his tripod and video camera in the exact spot I was forced to move from.

Apparently it was not about the media being in that specific location, it was about me being there.

Berry expounded on a theme of being transparent at these four events, yet this is actually how he shows his transparency; you can see through him as he moved during this slow exposure after giving the 2011 state of the city address. What you see beyond him is the impenetrable wall of an executive protection detail officer, Lucero, and his new Communications Director Dayna Gardner. Both, when present or able to control access, are anything but transparent. As gatekeepers, they deny the independent, internet photojournalist from focusing on press conferences and photo opportunities that commercial media are invited to attend.

The Albuquerque Public Schools Communications Department, headed by Executive Director Monica Armenta, Communications Director Rigo Chavez, and their staff are recalcitrant in dealing with requests for information.

Armenta, right, in particular, attempts to thwart any coverage of her, by stating she wishes not to be recorded at public events and states that she does not grant permission to have photographs of her used in any way.

Armenta fails to recall that she is a public person, and when in a public place, doing public work, is subject to strict scrutiny; capturing her public utterances, and being recorded, on audio, video, and through still photographs.

APS has withheld documents requested under the inspection of public records act. From other sources, I obtained partial records I had specifically sought from APS, but even their existence was not acknowledged.

As custodian of public records, Chavez, left with APS School Police Lieutenant Karl Overmyer, skirts the requirements of the public records law to provide records that are instantly available by ignoring the provision and slow rolling compliance to the excepted limits of the law. He does so to those not recognized by APS as press, probably in the hopes that any information might become stale news in the two-week delay.

Some APS police officers are not always welcoming to coverage of their presence at public functions. Others have no problem physically throwing members of the "free press" from meetings for covering them and banning them from future public meetings.

With this backdrop of a shrinking well established mainstream media and a growing number of citizens practicing their own media roles to varying degrees of the art of journalism or reporting and covering events, government actors are trying to take advantage of these realities to take control over the free flow of public information except to those commercial institutions of the press of their choosing.

I will present these issues, the limiting or denial of access to government activities that some media get invitations, while others don't, in a series of posts as personalized case studies.

The next installment will be: Part One: Republican Party gubernatorial candidate Susana Martinez’ June 10, 2010 visit to Conspiracy Brews, Martinez’ August 11, 2010, Education Reform Press conference.

More Life at the Monroe Gallery: John Loengard UPDATED

What’s Wrong With this Picture?

 

The bright lights of the Monroe Gallery spilled onto Don Gaspar in Santa Fe the evening of November 11, 2011. It being after dusk, it had to signify another opening of another photographic exhibit.

The gallery’s owners, Michelle and Sidney Monroe are renowned for knowing many famous photographers and seem too have an affinity for those photographers who worked for the Time-Life company.

The Monroes hosted the first one-man show of the dean of Life, Alfred Eisenstaedt in New York. He was one of the first four photographers hired full-time at Life. Eisenstaedt led the Monroes to specialize in presenting photojournalists' work.

They also feature the last remaining Life staff photographer, Joe McNally. He teaches in Santa Fe at the Workshop from time to time and brings his students to view the exhibits. McNally also has spoken at the gallery.

This night was no different from previous openings.

 

It had all the trappings of a Santa Fe gallery show opening.

 

John Loengard is the current featured photographer. Much of his work being hung on the walls can be previewed here. He came late to Life; about the time the magazine changed from a weekly to a monthly offering.

So, What’s Wrong With this Picture?

Loengard, right, is as much a historian of photographers, as he is a photographer himself of history. His latest book, Age of Silver: Encounters With Great Photographers, takes an intimate look at those artists who mastered photography; at a time when it was a reaction of silver to light, chemically processed into print or transparent images; not as much of photography is today; which is electronics reacting to light, and processed into digital imagery.

Loengard, where he had the opportunity to photograph the photographers in his book, presents his portraits of them. Where he hadn’t photographed them, he presented the work of those masters, mostly looking at negatives of signature pieces.

He exposed one of my few heroes in my life, W. Eugene Smith, for manipulating a photograph.

While attending the New York Institute of Photography, in 1969, I was invited to participate in a two-month long photojournalism workshop, a couple of nights a week where Smith instructed for a small group of students, above.

Smith was a Magnum photographer, arguably the best, and the firdt master of the photo essay.

He parted ways with Life in a dispute he claimed was over his insistence that his photo essay on Dr. Albert Schweitzer should run in three consecutive issues.

Smith, right, was known for his darkroom magic, having negatives that he claimed were nearly impossible to print, yet through processing techniques, including the use of potassium ferrocyanide as a bleach to lighten areas of his dark prints. He described the process as, almost painting the highlights back into the print.

In his book, Loengard recites a story related to the 1954 Schweitzer photos that Smith took five days and nights to properly get a satisfactory print for the opening photograph. Smith’s claim was there was a “sheet of fog” on the bottom of the negative. After Smith’s death Loengard located the negative and found there was no fog, neither was there a handsaw at the bottom of the image; Smith had added it from another negative.

It is ironic that the book, Let Truth Be the Prejudice: W. Eugene Smith, His Life and Photographs, uses this manipulated, hence untrue, photograph on its cover.

Loengard chats with: Santa Fe New Mexican photographer Jane Phillips, above left, and Michelle Monroe, visitors, and he signed copies of his books for his admirers, including my brother, Guy, below.

This post is presented in black and white in homage to the age of silver, but I didn't get my finger in developer or spend hours in a darkroom. I just chased electrons to and fro in the digital age.

The Loengard exhibit runs through January 29, 2011, at the Monroe Gallery of Photography, 112 Don Gaspar, Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Monroe Gallery celebrates its tenth year in Santa Fe, having moved from lower Manhattan after 9/11 and infrastructure problems caused in the terrorists' aftermath. This was after 20-years of gallery experience, including five years with a gallery they opened in1996.

A tenth anniversary celebration will be held Friday, December 23, from 4 - 6 PM.

UPDATE

I did not talk with John Loengard during his book signing at the opening of an exhibition of his work at Santa Fe’s Monroe Gallery of Photography a couple of weeks ago, except to ask him to sign a copy of his book, LIFE Classic Photographs: A Personal Interpretation.

In an email exchange advising Sidney Monroe that my post was up I wrote:

Again, another wonderful exhibit. 

Monroe responded:

Thank you very much for the post - we are flattered!

I wrote:

I post about you and your wonderful gallery because I believe you provide an invaluable service, not replicated anywhere else.

I suspect from some of the visitors to the opening, that I am not alone in appreciating not only what you hang on the wall but bringing in the photographers/artists.

With the exception of Neal Leifer, you may have noticed I don't engage them. I savor their work and listen to what they respond to from others who have questions. I derive answers by what's on the walls; your walls.

Maybe I should have asked for an interview with Loengard, right with Sidney Monroe, after the show, but didn’t.

He wrote me and Monroe Gallery of Photography this email.

Dec 16, 2011

Dear M. G. Bralley

I appreciate your comments on Age of Silver. I may even be even a greater admirer of Gene Smith that you are.

Gene tore up his contract with LIFE in 1954 because his story on Dr. Albert Schweitzer was changed at the last minute to fit the available space in an issue. He subsequently associated himself with Magnum for a brief period. His ties with LIFE, however, remained strong for the rest of his life (it is where his essay on Minamata was published).

The story he wanted to run in three consecutive issues of LIFE was, I suspect, the one he did on Pittsburgh while at Magnum. Smith’s friend Gjon Mili quoted Gene saying he wanted 35 pages in order to top the unheard of 22 pages of color photographs of New York City that ran in two issues of LIFE a few years earlier, taken by his Magnum colleague Ernst Haas. LIFE tried to make shorter layouts that would satisfy Smith. So did Look. Popular Photography finally offered Gene the space he wanted, but the layout Smith made for himself there was not effective.

The Pittsburgh story may be Smith’s finest work, but it was never published properly as an essay.

There are myths surrounding Gene. It takes only a few minutes (as you know) to expose a print and a few minutes more to develop it. Smith’s prints, of course, were in a class by themselves, but even allowing for a number of tries to get a perfect print, his claim that he spent 5 days and nights making one of them was over the top. Apparently he could not admit the print was a composite of two or three different negatives, a tricky thing to accomplish seamlessly before Photoshop. His misleading suggestion of enormous effort being routinely required to make a good print, discouraged many young photojournalists from even trying to print their own photos. That led me to believe that you can be a genius and do harm, which I fear he did, if you lead your acolytes astray. Of course, all this is a tiny footnote of no importance, compared to Gene’s pictures.

I was the only LIFE photographer allowed to print in the LIFE darkroom. I started working for LIFE as a photographer in 1956 and joined the staff in 1961, so I worked at the weekly LIFE for the last 16 of its 36 years. I was the picture editor of the monthly LIFE for another 8.

All best wishes,

John Loengard

20 West 86th Street #9B

New York, NY 10024

Loengard’s comments add to my recollection of Smith’s statements of over 40 years ago.

The nuances of Smith’s character now have a dimension, unknown to me at the time, added by a perspective of someone who interacted with him as a peer.

I appreciate that Loengard expounds on the Smith story; taking it further from a myth to its reality,

But to stay with the myth for a few moments:

Smith apparently was known to drink scotch. He complained to the class that he drank milk and drank a lot more of it than he did scotch; but was dismayed that in an article the writer only wrote about the whiskey. My unasked question was, did he drink the scotch in milk?

The other myth he told my group was why he had such underexposed negatives. It was because: he did not have a steady enough hand, and he had to use a higher shutter speed to compensate for his shaking, and that he had to close the lens’ aperture to gain depth of field (the distance over which a subject appears to be in focus) because through his stupor he couldn’t accurately focus.

Great story, better if true, as attributed to an unknown editor allegedly from the City News Bureau of Chicago, I didn’t then and don’t now buy Smith’s self-deprecating hyperbole.

As Loengard’s picture in Age of Silver, of Smith’s negatives and accompanying contact sheet show, they look at most slightly underexposed.

Personal Note

I wish my negatives were only that slightly underexposed and I didn’t drink.

Though I state my disappointment in Smith’s manipulation, I agree with Loengard’s assessment, “all this is a tiny footnote of no importance, compared to Gene’s pictures.”

Remember Pearl Harbor 70 Years Ago

USS Arizona Memorial, Pearl Harbor and Ford Island, Oahu, Hawaii.

Almost Live Television, all smoke and mirrors?

What’s Wrong With this Picture?

Some events are more ironic than others.

I was invited to attend the taping of a segment of KNME’s “In Focus” program, to be aired April 22, 2011.

They needed bodies to help fill out a studio audience. The actual audience was made up of students from UNM Journalism Professor Ilia Rodriguez’ Media History class.

The segment was a conversation via satellite from San Francisco, with Dr. Daniel Ellsberg, of his release in 1971 of a classified history of the Vietnam War known as the Pentagon Papers, the release on PBS of a movie, “The Most Dangerous Man in America,” and the relevance of events of the day with WikiLeaks, and its founder Julian Assange.

The New York Times published three segments starting Sunday, June 13, 1971, before Richard Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell’s Justice Department filed for and was granted an injunction keeping the Times from continuing publishing. At the same time the Washington Post began publishing details of the papers. The Post was asked to voluntary refrain from continuing publishing. The Post refused and Justice sought an injunction in Federal District Court, which refused to order the paper to stop. Two days later, the Boston Globe began publishing aspects of the leaked documents.

Fifteen other papers printed stories about the Pentagon Papers.

The U.S. Supreme Court took up the two injunctions on direct appeal under the caption, New York Times Co. v. United States.

The court, with each justice writing separate opinions, ruled 6-3 that the government had not satisfied the high burden necessary in proving the compelling national security interest, outweighing the public’s right to know what their country was doing in their name, before allowing the government to exercise prior restraint against publishing the Pentagon Papers.

The revelation of the papers’ content, though marked Top Secret “Sensitive”, never threatened national security, but proved embarrassing to the former administrations of Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, who had lied to the American public and Congress.

Ellsberg, admitted he had leaked the Pentagon Papers, turning himself in to federal authorities in Boston. A federal grand jury in Los Angeles, indicted Ellsberg for a violation of the espionage act of 1917.

Daniel Ellsberg was viewed as the critic of the Vietnam War. Nixon, Mitchell, and US National Security Advisor Henry Kissenger were recorded on Nixon’s secret tapes plotting to “get Ellsberg.”

“The most dangerous man in America,” Kissinger called Ellsberg, In an effort to “get” Ellsberg the “White House Plumbers,” were formed and their first assignment was to break into the office of Dr. Lewis J. Fielding, Ellsberg’s Los Angeles based, psychiatrist, looking for incriminating evidence to help stop leaks of classified documents to news media.

The Plumbers reported to their White House superiors, that their mission was a failure; Dr. Fielding said Ellsberg’s rifled records were on the floor of his office.

(Personal conjecture – the plumbers succeeded in photographing the records and left the file as a message that they had been there.)

The Plumbers would be later used to break into the office of the Chairman of the Democratic National Committee Lawrence O'Brien, at Democratic national headquarters in the Watergate complex a couple of times. On their second sortie they were caught by plain clothed Washington Metropolitan Police officers.

During the Watergate investigation information about the Plumbers burglary of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office was made public. The federal district judge in California dismissed the case against Ellsberg for the governmental misconduct.

So, What’s Wrong With this Picture?

Stand By We are experiencing technical difficulties.

The KNME studio was set up so host Gene Grant could look at a large monitor in front of him with Ellsberg shown via satellite.

Ellsberg could be seen and heard in Albuquerque, but he could not hear Grant.

Grant using a mobile phone, to talk to Ellsberg, overcame this technical difficulty. However that was not going to work because Ellsberg couldn’t be seen on camera, talking or listening to a phone.

Solution, Grant talked to the studio floor manager in San Francisco who repeated the question Ellsberg would then answer.

KNME videotaped a specific student question from Aubrey Hovey of how Ellsberg felt about the demise of newspaper print journalism, and a consensus class question asked by Professor Rodriguez, of how to deal with the tension of how to protect national security interests with the public’s right to know?  The questions were passed on to Ellsberg in the same telephoning way.

The rented satellite time expired and Ellsberg disappeared from the screen.

Grant thanked Ellsberg by phone and signed off.

Producer Kevin McDonald, entered the studio from the control booth, announcing to the students from the ethics class that the session would air:

Friday night seven o’clock, “New Mexico in Focus” you’ll see this, we’ll make it look like all that technical stuff never happened; that was really cool that you came up and asked those questions.

The studio audience left and Grant remained to ask his question into the camera without the cellular phone.

Then in the editing process the jigsaw puzzle of video parts were arranged in an appropriate sequence.

The process was more like movie making, one shot at a time, even though there were three cameras acquiring video that could be selected by the director.

McDonald was correct, watching the end result, you couldn’t tell that there had been any technical issues or that it hadn’t been live or the some of Ellsberg’s longwinded comments had been edited down.

The irony I mentioned came in several forms: the piercing of the veil of television magic through accepted editing techniques, and that on the fortieth anniversary of Ellsberg’s leaking the Pentagon Papers, the National Archives released the entire declassified non-redacted documents, including one chapter that Ellsberg seemed to have missed.

Their release reinforced the earlier findings that they never contained any national security secrets, only repeated proof of presidents lying to the people and Congress of the United States.

Ellsberg is still a name that raises passions, some call him a hero, others call him a traitor, even though he had served as a Marine officer, a top level analysts, and could not allow his country to be continually lied to. He was willing to serve the rest of his life in prison to let his fellow citizens know a hidden truth.