Rage Against the Machine: the Restless, Frenetic Journalism of Jason Leopold v. United States

There’s something about journalists. Hacks. The pre-writing part. The balding/unshaved, bloated/emaciated, sweating, greasy, oblivious thing sat at the keyboard, monosyllabic irritation at interruptions, mustering the superhuman work ethic through cigarettes, caffeine, booze, cocaine… Starting work hopefully this side of midnight so they might get to go to bed not too long after sunrise.

Constant, effortless dedication to grabbing a story. Phoning folks cold. Talking to people who are involved enough and stressed enough to be a nightmare to approach and yet getting information out of them with the authority of a wronged hero in a movie. Journalists can be sleazy, morally dubious. But then they can also reel off the most articulate moral indignation over a story or event. It’s like they’re simultaneously fired up by and tired of the disappointments of humanity. When someone does something wrong it’s their job to really understand exactly how wrong, how corrupt or degenerate, it is when they type out the story. They are moral by trade.  

Jason Leopold: 45-year-old reporting for Vice. A Freedom of Information Act terrorist who wears Black Flag t-shirts on the media’s trips to Gitmo (How’s this for humourless, paranoid American muscle: Camp Justice authorities mistook the Henry Rollins outfit for an Al Qaeda reference). He was Truthout, LA Times, Al Jazeera America, freelance…

“I'm an investigative reporter for VICE News where I cover national security, counterterrorism, civil liberties and other issues. My aggressive use of the Freedom of Information Act includes suing the FBI and Department of Defense and forcing those agencies to changes its policies. […] In 2014, I was singled out in a study by Syracuse University as the journalist who filed more Freedom of Information Act lawsuits against the US government that year than all other news organizations combined.”

He’s got an amazing room. One like that rogue teacher or lecturer you knew at school or college had: all posters and mugs and books and photocopies and magazines and stacks of documents and bulging, unopened envelopes of yet more documents. The walls are lined with neatly crammed bookshelves. And you know everything gets used. Hard core metal and punk CDs – just as neatly stored. It’s mind fuel.

And Jason Leopold sits there at his Mac wearing band t-shirts [Clash, Dead Kennedys, Big Black, Youth of Today…], with music blasting at full volume to get the adrenaline up to write with. Fucken A. He lost an LA Times job over it, telling a fellow reporter who didn’t appreciate the dial hitting 11: “[I’ll] rip your fucking head off your shoulders, you little prick.” It’s that thing about writing – or anything you love – being the better high than anything chemical. Back in the existential calamity of his early 20s he’d funded a $300-a-day coke habit by stealing promo CDs from the label he worked for.

But that was then (circa 25 years ago for the cocaine).

10 years ago Jason Leopold was here:

[…] the former Los Angeles Times and Dow Jones reporter has written a book, "Off the Record," that criticizes journalists as lazy. Oh, and by the way, Leopold says he engaged in "lying, cheating and backstabbing," is a former cocaine addict, served time for grand larceny, repeatedly tried to kill himself and has battled mental illness his whole life. 

But the book's publisher, Rowman & Littlefield, has canceled "Off the Record" days before it was to go to press, despite having sent out news releases and listed the book on Amazon.com. The publisher acted after receiving a warning letter from one subject's lawyer.  

"I'm devastated," Leopold said yesterday. "I worked really hard these past two years to restore my credibility after the Salon fiasco. . . . I have a checkered past, and I was hoping that by coming clean about my own past, it would allow me to move forward."

[Washington Post there]

His credibility was always rollercoastering back then. Big scoops that foundered, leading to outraged copy from other news outlets who’d very nearly bought them [bought: paid; bought: believed]. Leopold’s stories got their feet pulled out from under them – there were either too many unnamed sources or else named ones that would claim to have been misquoted or total strangers to Leopold. Salon dropped a 2002 article of his on Enron and [then US Army secretary] Thomas E White when the sources denied having spoken to him.

“Leopold told The Washington Post at the time that Salon was being "wimpy," but a Salon executive said the source cited by Leopold as providing the e-mail insisted he had never spoken with Leopold. (In the book's press release, the author gloats that journalists, including this reporter [Howard Kurtz], "never bothered to check out my past" while covering his mistakes.)”

In 2006, about the same time as he released News Junkie, a tell-all autobiography that covered his past lies, ethical bending, crimes and cocaine habit, another story got discredited – hugely.

Jason Leopold via Truthout [13^th May 2006]: “Speaking on condition of anonymity Friday night, sources confirmed [then White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl] Rove's indictment was imminent. These individuals requested anonymity saying they were not authorized to speak publicly about Rove's situation. A spokesman in the White House press office said they would not comment on "wildly speculative rumors."” 

Washington Post [18^th June 2006]: “As we learned last week, Rove isn't being indicted, and the supposed Truthout scoop by reporter Jason Leopold was wildly off the mark. It was but the latest installment in the tale of a troubled young reporter with a history of drug addiction whose aggressive disregard for the rules ended up embroiling me in a bizarre escapade -- and raised serious questions about journalistic ethics.”

Ouch. And that WP journalist goes on to claim that Leopold impersonated him to research the Rove story.

Leopold was like those musicians who can beautifully articulate the mistakes they’ve made, dissecting their character in lyrics, only to shrug when the next album comes along because they’ve done the exact same things more recently, and probably will again tomorrow.

So, ten years on, he’s trying to dig up dirt without using anonymous quotes or lying to sources – no more fishing with fiction to get people to betray their secrets. He doesn’t want his sources disappearing or denying all knowledge of him [or, taking his detractors’ side, maybe he’s stopped making up sources and stories]. Either way, avoiding sources’ denials means finding documents. Black and white. Evidence that is somehow both damning yet neutral.

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in the UK was signed in 2000 and was in full effect by 2005.

The FOIA in the US was in effect by 1967.

Kudos to America for starting early, but then the extra decades have allowed anyone who produces documents worth worrying about to find ways of phrasing things carefully and covering their tracks – nine times out of ten.

It’s all in the details. If you, say, asked for all documents concerning force feeding at Guantanamo you’d get nothing back. This is because the process is called ‘enteral feeding’ at Gitmo, and that’s not what you asked us to look for, sir. Hunger strikes get Guantanamo bad press – it just sounds so damn bad when they have to say those words in front of the media. This is why the activity has been renamed – it’s actually a ‘long-term non-religious fast.’

Leopold knows all this, though. He knows the euphemistic vocabulary. He appeals every document he gets because, whether it’s been redacted down to a totally black page or not, they’ll always give up more information after an appeal. He notes that the redaction problem has got worse under Obama – everything gets filtered through national security concerns. Still, he’s got 20,000 pages of documents through the FOIA.

“They have included a series of disclosures from Guantánamo Bay; racist emails from the Ferguson, Mo., Police Department released after the shooting death of Michael Brown by a police officer and the subsequent racial unrest in the city; and some details of unreleased Central Intelligence Agency memos on torture”

He’s dishing dirt, and some of the dirt is really important:

The NSA’s difficulty/reluctance [according to taste] in finding Edward Snowden’s pre-whistleblowing communications

The Google Search That Made the CIA Spy on the US Senate

These Are the 6 US Prisons That May Soon House Guantanamo Detainees

Whatever was happening in his career before, what’s consistent with Leopold is his pouncing on information - and his will to always extract a good story out of it. To scour every page knowing that it is important. That these details will show the wrongdoing that everyone’s carefully hiding – because anyone degenerate enough to lie and cheat and do ill in their career for easy fixes and quick bucks and vainglory won’t be dedicated or clever enough to see the significance of the trail they leave behind in their documents.

Not with a bang but with a whimper.