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.

Dumbfounding Violence: Photojournalists in War

Photojournalists: those images, man…

Girl post-Napalm, bullet to brain, grinning atrocities and abominations. Corpses that teach you anatomy and living people posing with shit that’s so wrong you can see how you’d have to be flip around it. And these guys and gals with cameras walk round everything with (damaged) rock star ease. Doing their job and putting their minds and souls through the wringer.

But it’s not just dispassionate (the photographer that link takes you to was killed in Afghanistan in April).

The love or the need or the drive or the duty to do it. You have to photograph, to report. Stick the camera in people’s faces. And these people know why they need to look into the lens and be the subject, too. Everyone feels it. This stuff won’t fit words; images and footage need to come out of the mess and stick well-spaced pins in people’s moral maps.

Video doesn’t always work in war. We know what frame-by-frame explosions look like – they’re things actors run out of with a bit of dirt make up on.

But the stills camera‘ll show you the percentage of body that’s GONE in an explosion. The dead body hurled into a tangle somewhere with a very alive expression on the face. Just how monochrome a person covered in the dust of a pulverized building looks.

So why kill them, photojournalists? (Still and moving pictures). They are neutral. Those fucking images are neutral – neutralizing. They annihilate war. They speak for themselves and they speak for neither side.

A child full of shrapnel, eyes going everywhere as the arms cling around mother, cradled in an Aleppo hospital.

That was October 21^st 2012. The photographer, Fabio Bucciarelli, won the photo category of the Bayeux-Calvados Award for war correspondents the following year:

“I haven’t been back to Syria since then,” […] “The situation has been by far too dangerous in the last few months. The Syria war is a huge massacre against civilian populations. I know people who have been kidnapped there, like James Foley. I hope this award will help to make the people remember them, and remember all the innocent victims of this terrible war in Syria.”

View image | gettyimages.com

This was one of many mentions James Foley got while he was still alive and a hostage (he was kidnapped on Thanksgiving 2012). Grisly, much-exploited murder done, he is now the first American journalist to have been killed in the conflict.

“We ask our audience to consider refraining from watching or sharing the video of Jim's killing or its associated images. The video is a graphic work of propaganda, intending to terrorize the public at the expense of an impartial, credentialed journalist whose objective was to chronicle the suffering in Syria, where more than 170,000 people have been killed.”

The Committee to Protect Journalists counts 67 journalists killed in Syria since the civil war began. They’ve named the country the most dangerous place in the world for journalists on the job.

But what a job, though. Foley’s last report for the GlobalPost has that potent, civilian-centric angle where he stands back, editing and punctuating devastatingly:

‘As Sayed recounted his near-death experience, he smoked a cigarette and tears welled in his eyes. Patches of gauze were still taped to his neck.

“You know one of the FSA leaders from Maraa?” he asked. “They go into the free area when there’s fighting in Salahhadin. I see them taking screens, computers, telephones, everything they can lay their hands on.”

He said he's seen civilians executed after rebels recklessly accuse them of being mercenaries for the regime.

“I saw one beaten to death,” he said. “The FSA didn’t check their facts, and now he’s dead. I know the man. He was 46. He has five children.”

“We have lost the civilians now,” he said, exhaling smoke.’

Less than two years before his Syrian kidnapping Foley’d been kidnapped in Libya – all sand dunes, Gaddafi forces and rifle butt beatings. South African photographer Anton Hammerl had been shot in front of Foley just before and was left to die from his wounds in in the desert: "I'll regret that day for the rest of my life. I'll regret what happened to Anton, […] I will constantly analyze that."

Foley was released, went back to the States to raise money for Hammerl’s widow and family, and returned to Libya to catch the successful hunt for Gaddafi. Not just closure but being useful: he helped source footage that showed that Gaddafi’s death was something more calculated than the firefight rebels initially claimed it was, prompting a UN investigation.

The night after Gaddafi was killed Foley polished off a bottle of Johnny Walker with Human Rights Watch’s Peter Bouckaert.

Syrians pay tribute to James Foley http://t.co/174KjjXJyq pic.twitter.com/lZz4f2q0G3
— i100 (@thei100) August 20, 2014

“I don’t have any pictures of Dana, but there’s not much chance I’ll forget what he looked like, that front-line face, he never got anything on film that he didn’t get on himself, after three years he turned into the thing he came to photograph.”

Michael Herr’s Dispatches is a devastating hoard of written combat photos itself. And he talks about the photojournalists around him. I think this was why James Foley resonated – something reared up from Sean [son of Errol] Flynn and Dana Stone’s capture/disappearance in April 1970 (Flynn was declared dead some 14 years later):

“I have pictures of Flynn but none by him, he was in so deep he hardly bothered to take them after a while. Definitely off of media, Flynn; a war behind him already where he’d confronted and cleaned the wasting movie-star karma that had burned down his father. In so far as Sean had been acting out, he was a great actor. He said that the movies just swallowed you up, so he did it on the ground, and the ground swallowed him up (no one I ever knew could have dug it like you, Sean), he and Dana had gone off somewhere together since April 1970, biking into Cambodia, ‘presumed captured’, rumours and long silence, MIA to say the least.”

(Michael Herr, Dispatches (London: Picador, 1979) p. 256-7)

Off the English-Speaking World’s Radar

The 21-year-old companion of a Portuguese celebrity journalist who was choked and beaten to death in his Times Square hotel room on Friday has been charged with one count of second-degree murder in his death, the police said on Monday. The body of the journalist, Carlos Castro, 65, was found on the 34th floor of the InterContinental Hotel, at 44th Street and Eighth Avenue. He had been sexually mutilated, an official said.

Karen Zraick and Liz Robbins ‘Companion Is Charged in Killing of Journalist in a Times Square Hotel’, New York Times, 10^th January 2011

Carlos Antonio De Castro was a Portuguese journalist, writing mostly about fashion and socialite/celebrity gossip. Over the New Year he was staying at the Intercontinental Hotel in Manhattan with 21-year-old Renato Seabra, a model from Portugal. Seabra had come to fame in “À Procura do Sonho” (roughly: Pursuit of the Dream), a reality TV show where male contestants compete to become the face of the year. The men were apparently a couple (that’s apparently: allegedly and apparently: ostensibly, as it seems that at least one of them was playing along with that outward image for other reasons). Media reports have Castro and Seabra dating since October, though this seems to be based on their Facebook messages. Seabra’s mother maintains that he is heterosexual, and that he has never hidden that. Friends of Seabra have also stated this - one acquaintance said that Seabra used Castro as a ‘trampoline to rise in the fashion and social worlds.’

Castro had paid for Seabra to join him in Manhattan over New Years. They went to the theatre and the cinema, and met friends for dinner during their stay. There had been some friction between the two, though nothing that alarmed their friends [1]. By the 7^th of January Seabra had been arrested, hours after Castro’s body was discovered in their hotel room. Castro had been bludgeoned and castrated, and Seabra confessed to the killing.

The men are supposed to have quarrelled after Seabra said that he was only in the relationship for money, while Castro seems to have grown jealous of Seabra’s flirting with women in New York [2]. Seabra claims to have shouted: ‘I’m not gay anymore!’ before he attacked Castro. In this retrospective testimony, Seabra appears to have said that he cut off Castro’s testicles to rid the journalist of his homosexual demons – ‘to get rid of the virus.’ Seabra then showered, put on a suit, slit his wrists, and left the hotel, admitting himself to St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Centre to get his wounds treated some hours later [3].

Tales for an accelerated culture. You can imagine the lenses this story has been viewed through: this is the trouble with homosexuals, this is the trouble with dirty old men, this is the trouble with relationships based on money, this is the trouble with Latin people. Really it’s: ‘this is the trouble with a juicy news story.’ Of course it’s juicy. The added newsworthy-ness of these men being famous in Portugal is irrelevant; we didn’t know that, and we don’t care as we read the ghoulish news pieces. What they give us, and what we want, is a freak show news story with OMG examples of human behaviour. The story appeared (briefly) in the American, British and Australian media because its grisly facts made it stand out from many other events. On the 14^th, when further details about the state of Castro’s body came out, a new flurry of articles appeared to fill us all in:

Gruesome new details of the castration murder of a Portuguese journalist were divulged yesterday, including the revelation that he had shoe prints on his face. Carlos Castro was choked and stomped and had his head slammed into a TV monitor before his testicles were cut off with a corkscrew, according to court papers.

Melissa Grace, ‘Carlos Castro choked, stomped by murder suspect Renato Seabra before corkscrew castration: papers’ NYDailyNews.com, 14^th January 2011

Just try Googling Carlos Castro’s name and see if you can find a single result there that predates his killing. This man was off the English-speaking world’s radar until he had his scrotum hacked off in a New York hotel room. He was prominent in Portugal as a journalist and a gay rights campaigner, and in Portugal - with the dual shock of a famous murder victim and a famous murderer – the events may well be tragic. To us, the johnny-come-latelys, all we can do is bitch in the abstract. Both men are stripped of their fame in our world. We bitch from the self-righteous response of ‘dirty old man who pushed his luck and his depravity too far – ‘urgh,’’ or that of ‘money grabbing, sick, depraved little kid - ‘urgh.’’

The use of ‘kid’ is interesting too. Comments from America and Britain, as well as Seabra’s family and supporters in Portugal, have referred to the 21-year-old man as a ‘boy.’ Obviously his mother is going to call him her ‘golden boy,’ but then a comment on an American news site dubbed Castro a ‘child molester’ for having had a relationship with Seabra, adding that he got what he deserved. Without knowing the details or the people, we resort to the types we can imagine more easily. Old men, old foreign men, gay, vain, rich; or young Latin hustlers, grasping, desperate for money, extreme networking for fame, and capricious to the extent of murdering a redundant sugar daddy.

That is the problem with the juicy news story (all gore and no character development, like a particular brand of horror movie). In the absence of knowing who the people are/were, or what they might have been doing prior to the event we’ve taken an interest in, imaginations and opinions run wild: same sex relationships are abnormal - look at the age gaps, look at the violence; gay sex is so disgusting that a confused ‘boy’ pushed into it can end up killing a homosexual. Sadly Seabra seems to be using that last line of thought in his ‘homosexual demons’ testimony. In short, everyone gets to take what they want from this news story. It’s a mirror for every opinion to see itself in.

Castro’s ashes (his funeral was on the 15^th of January) were poured down a subway grate in Times Square. ‘Dumped’ as some articles sensitively worded it, by his friends and family, as Castro had requested them to do. He was dumped at the Crossroads of the World, and he and Seabra, famous and infamous in their own right and in their own nation, have been picked up, highlighted to us in our world - where they can only ever be ‘allegedly famous’ - then manhandled and vilified by commentators and readers. Now, with no more grisly depravations left to reveal, they’ve been dumped. Next! =============================================================================
[1] David B. Caruso, ‘Portuguese TV star slain, castrated at NYC hotel’, Associated Press, 9^th January 2011 <http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2011/01/09/general-us-hotel-castration-slaying_8246968.html>

[2] Jen Chung, ‘Murdered Foreign Journalist's Model Companion In Custody’ gothamist.com, 9^th January 2011, <http://gothamist.com/2011/01/09/murdered_foreign_journalists_model.php>

[3] Laura Italiano, ‘Gay boyfriend of journalist strangled, stomped on victim's face in NY hotel murder’, The Australian, 15^th January 2011 <http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/breaking-news/gay-boyfriend-of-journalist-strangled-stomped-on-victims-face-in-ny-hotel-murder/story-fn3dxity-1225988280339>