Norman Pearlstine, the former Time Inc. editor-in-chief who agreed to turn over a reporter’s notes to prosecutors in the “Plame Affair,” has just published a book titled Off the Record: The Press, the Government, and the War over Anonymous Sources. In it, he tells how confidentiality has become “a weapon in the White House’s war on the press, a war fought with the unwitting complicity of the press itself.” On Wednesday at 2pm in the Watson Institute’s Joukowsky Forum, Pearlstine will give a talk based on his book.
Biography
Pearlstine joined The Carlyle Group in September, 2006. He is a Senior Advisor to the private equity firm's telecommunications and media group, based in New York. Prior to joining Carlyle, Pearlstine was a Senior Advisor to Time Warner Inc. Before that, he served for 11 years as editor-in-chief of the company's Time Inc. subsidiary. As editor-in-chief, Pearlstine oversaw the editorial content of Time Inc.'s 154 magazines, including Entertainment Weekly, Fortune, In Style, Money, People, Real Simple, Sports Illustrated, and Time. Prior to joining Time Inc., Pearlstine worked for The Wall Street Journal from 1968 to 1992, except for a two-year period, 1978-1980, when he was an executive editor of Forbes magazine. At the Journal, he served in several key positions including managing editor of The Asian Wall Street Journal; editor and publisher of The Wall Street Journal/Europe; managing editor; and executive editor. After resigning from the Journal in June 1992, Pearlstine spent a year launching Smart Money magazine for the Journal's parent, Dow Jones & Company, and for Hearst. He then became general partner of Friday Holdings L.P., a multimedia investment company, in April 1993 and held that position until joining Time Inc. in October 1994.
In January 2005, the American Society of Magazine Editors named Pearlstine the recipient of its Lifetime Achievement Award and inducted him into the Magazine Editors' Hall of Fame. He received the Loeb Lifetime Achievement Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism in 2000 and the National Press Foundation's Editor of the Year Award in 1989. Pearlstine is President and CEO of The American Academy in Berlin and is President of the Atsuko Chiba Foundation. He also serves on the boards of the Carnegie Corporation, the Committee to Protect Journalists, the International Center for Journalists, the Arthur F. Burns Fellowship Program, the Berlin School of Creative Leadership at Steinbeis University and the Tribeca Film Institute. He serves on the advisory boards of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University, the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Southern California and the City University of New York's Graduate School of Journalism. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Pearlstine received his B.A. from Haverford College, his L.L.B. from the University of Pennsylvania, and he did postgraduate work at the law school of Southern Methodist University. He is a member of the Bar Association of the District of Columbia.
Location: Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute, 111 Thayer Street.
Event Summary
When the name Valerie Plame first popped up in news reports four years ago, Norman Pearlstine, then editor-in-chief of Time Inc., didn’t think much of it. But the subsequent investigation and the damage done to journalism as a result changed everything the veteran newsman knew about the business, Pearlstine told a crowd Wednesday in the Watson Institute’s Joukowsky Forum.Pearlstine, now a senior advisor to the Carlyle Group and a member of the Institute’s board of overseers, spoke about the Plame affair, his decision to turn over a reporter’s notes to Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, and his new book on the subject, titled Off the Record: The Press, the Government and the War over Anonymous Sources. The talk was part of the Directors Lectures Series on Contemporary International Affairs.
“It was a great learning experience that taught me everything I thought I knew about journalism,” Pearlstine said.
The first mention of CIA agent Valerie Plame appeared in a syndicated column by Robert Novak in July 2003. Plame’s husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson had gone to Niger to investigate claims that Saddam Hussein was attempting to buy uranium, but when that turned out to be false, and when Wilson wrote an op-ed in the New York Times, administration officials leaked her identity to journalists, including Time reporter Matthew Cooper, in an apparent attempt to penalize Wilson for disagreeing with the White House.
When Cooper, whose source was Karl Rove, wrote a small piece on the outing of Plame for Time.com, Pearlstine said the item didn’t warrant inclusion in the magazine and he scarcely noticed it.
While it seemed an innocuous detail, the CIA asked for an investigation into the leak, which Pearlstine said was expected. What did catch him off guard was a New York Times editorial calling for a special investigation into leaks to the press.
“I thought that’s what we did,” Pearlstine said of publishing information from anonymous sources.
After a subpoena was issued for Cooper’s notes in late 2004 and when a federal judge later held Time Inc. in contempt for resisting the court order, Pearlstine said the question then became what type of source gave the information to the reporter – confidential or anonymous? The distinction proved to be the reason Pearlstine eventually turned Cooper’s notes over.
It was determined during internal deliberations at Time that Rove was an anonymous source, not a confidential one – the difference being that everything possible is done to protect a confidential source, including going to jail, while an anonymous source is only guaranteed that his name will not appear in print. In his story Cooper attributed the Plame information to “an administration official” but the veil of confidentiality was lifted when Cooper used Rove’s name in e-mails, effectively revealing the source to a number of Time employees.
“One of the things I’ve learned along the way is the “e” in e-mail might as well stand for evidence,” Pearlstine said.
In making his decision to turn the notes over, Pearlstine said he studied two famous journalism court cases, the Pentagon Papers and Watergate. Neither, it turned out, had much in common with what he was dealing with.
The Pentagon Papers case was not, as Pearlstine said he originally thought, about protecting confidential sources; it was about prior restraint. The Watergate investigation, which could not have been written without confidential sources, was actually a civil case against the reporters and the Washington Post.
“It was not a good precedent for me,” Pearlstine said.
One valuable lesson taken from those two cases though, was a statement by New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger that if the Supreme Court ruled against the publication of the Pentagon Papers then the paper would cease running the documents. Pearlstine pointed out that statement said to him that a newspaper cannot and should not violate a Supreme Court order.
When the high court decided not to hear the Time case, effectively enforcing the lower court order demanding Cooper’s notes, Pearlstine turned them over. The whole affair led to the deterioration in the public’s trust of the media, he said. Pearlstine said he was still unsure if it was all worth it.
An advocate for a federal shield law that would protect journalists from revealing sources, Pearlstine said that while the public sees anonymous and confidential sources as having something to hide, reporters, especially in Washington, see them as the best way to get accurate information rather than the spin and PR that typically accompanies on-the-record statements.
Prior to becoming editor-in-chief at Time Inc., Pearlstine served in a number of executive level positions at the Wall Street Journal. He was the recipient of the American Society of Magazine Editors Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005 and was inducted into the society’s Magazine Editors’ Hall of Fame. Pearlstine received his BA from Haverford College and his law degree from the University of Pennsylvania.
By Watson Institute Student Rapporteur Scott Spitler
Find out more about Off the Record here.
Read the book's guidelines for sourcing here.