When Journalists Join Forces

If the current wave of negative publicity about Facebook yields substantial change at the world's largest social network, it will be due to the work of people like me.

Not *me* currently, but people like the journalist I used to be.

According to the the Washington Post, this week's multiple headlines, recent 60 Minutes report,  Congressional testimony, UK Parliamentary testimony and more to come  are all due to what is being hailed as a "new" model of investigative reporting. 

The successful model involves a whistleblower, Frances Haugen, who leaked thousands of pages of internal documents she had access to as a product manager for Facebook to a coalition of reporters from multiple news outlets, including the Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, CNN and AP that agreed to embargo the release of their stories until this past Monday, October 23.

This unusual coalition was put together by a PR firm led by a former political operative for Barack Obama.

This development is hardly unique. In point of historical fact, some of us have been building coalitions of reporters inside competing news organizations for more than four decades.

Ours tended to be smaller efforts, it's true, involving only three or four organizations at a time, but sometimes a larger group would convene too, such as the investigation into the murder of Arizona journalist Dan Bolles in 1977, that led to the creation of Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE).

Or the organization I co-founded with Lowell Bergman and Dan Noyes, also in 1977, called the Center for Investigative Reporting. At CIR we frequently coordinated projects between multiple partners, including 60 Minutes, 20/20, ABC, NBC, CBS, the Washington Post, the San Francisco Examiner, Mother Jones, New Times, New York, PBS, NPR, KQED, NHK and many others.

In more recent years, California news outlets led by KQED and others have built huge coalitions to expose widespread cases of police misconduct all over the state.

None of this is to take away from the "Facebook Papers," which is a laudable and significant development for the current generation of journalists. But some of its predecessors have been building this model for a long, long time.

***

The Washington Post has another, less-hyped but critically important story today about the role an American may have played in the origin of the Covid-19 pandemic:

"Peter Daszak, the president of EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit based in New York, organized a five-year research program funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health to study bat coronaviruses and potential spillover risk to people, with significant participation by the Wuhan Institute of Virology and its scientist, Shi Zhengli. The government of China, Ms. Shi and Mr. Daszak all insist the laboratory could not be the source of the pandemic strain...Last week, it was disclosed that the EcoHealth Alliance in August filed a report on its research in 2018-2019 — the report was two years late. This just happens to be the two-year period of the pandemic and intense debate about the virus origins. No reason has been given...The tardy report describes experiments, approved in advance by the NIH, to test the infectivity of the genetically-manipulated viruses on mice with cells resembling those of the human respiratory system. The manipulations made the viruses more lethal to the mice."

While this does not constitute proof of the lab-leak theory of the origin of the coronavirus, it certainly suggests that more inquiry is justified.

What did Mr. Daszak know and when did he know it?

THE HEADLINES:

* One person who might know what really happened in Wuhan (WP)

* Three California teens recently developed psychiatric symptoms while recovering from COVID-19. Scientists at UCSF say it’s a clue to what coronavirus does to developing brains. (SFC)

* FDA Panel Reviews Pfizer’s Covid Shot in Young Children (WSJ)

* VIDEO: Facebook ‘Unquestionably’ Makes Hate Worse, Whistle-Blower Says -- During testimony before the British Parliament, Frances Haugen, the former Facebook product manager-turned-whistle-blower, said that the tech company was aware of its harmful effects on society but was unwilling to act. (AP)

* The indisputable harm caused by Facebook (WP)

* Amid fallout from the Facebook Papers documents supporting claims that the social network has valued financial success over user safety, Facebook reported a 17% increase in quarterly profit, exceeding analyst expectations. CEO Mark Zuckerberg made only a brief mention of what he called the “recent debate around our company.” [AP]

* Facebook Wrestles With the Features It Used to Define Social Networking -- Likes and shares made the social media site what it is. Now, company documents show, it’s struggling to deal with their effects. (NYT)

* Facebook froze as anti-vaccine comments swarmed users (AP)

* Facebook said it will start publishing the financial results of its augmented and virtual reality labs as a separate unit, where it is investing billions in its ambitions to build the "metaverse" and as it reported that its main advertising business faces "significant uncertainty." (Reuters)

* The massive Facebook leak shows how investigative journalism is changing (WP)

* Afghanistan faces unprecedented hunger crisis as children starve to death in Kabul -- Over five million children are now just a step away from facing the effects of famine in the country (The Independent)

* Where Have All the Insects Gone? -- Scientists who once documented new species of insects are now charting their perilous decline—and warning about what it will mean for the rest of us. (New Yorker)

* The U.N. chief’s relentless, frustrating pursuit to bring the world together on climate change (WP)

* Yes, There Has Been Progress on Climate. No, It’s Not Nearly Enough. -- Nations have started making progress on climate change. But we’re still on track for dangerous warming unless those efforts accelerate drastically. (NYT)

* The leaders of most of the world's biggest greenhouse gas emitters gather in Glasgow from Sunday, aiming to thrash out plans and funds to tilt the planet towards clean energy. But the man running the biggest of them all (China's Xi) likely won't be there. (Reuters)

* In advance of climate summit, tension among Biden aides on China policy -- John Kerry, the climate envoy, sees an improved U.S.-China relationship as key to progress on climate. National security adviser Jake Sullivan is skeptical. (WP)

* The weekend’s storms destroyed local rainfall records and prompted high surf warnings across much of the top half of the state. So why isn’t California out of drought conditions yet? One sudden drenching is not enough to save the state’s desiccated landscape. This summer was the driest for the state since historians started tracking the climate, making conditions ideal for one of the most destructive wildfire seasons on record. While downpours forced North Bay residents to evacuate their homes on Sunday, long-term forecasts indicate a dry autumn ahead. California needs several more rounds of rain to replenish its water supply. Major reservoirs in the Sierra, which provide water to a large part of the state, need an above average amount of rainfall to make up for what’s missing. (SFC)

* VIDEO: Protesters Defy Military Coup in Sudan -- Pro-democracy protesters filled the streets of the capital, Khartoum, after the military detained the prime minister, suspended the government and declared a state of emergency in an apparent coup. At least three protesters were killed. (AP, Reuters)

* Sudan’s Military Seizes Power, Casting Democratic Transition Into Chaos (NYT)

* U.S. President Joe Biden will join Southeast Asian leaders for a virtual summit today, the first time in four years that Washington will engage at the top level with a bloc seen as key to countering an increasingly assertive China. (Reuters)

* President Joe Biden has rejected another request from his predecessor Donald Trump to cover up Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol that aimed to keep him in power despite losing the 2020 election. Biden already rejected a request by Trump earlier this month to assert “executive privilege” over 47 documents that the House committee investigating the Capitol attack had requested from the National Archives. [HuffPost]

* College enrollment plummeted during the pandemic. This fall, it's even worse (NPR)

* Tesla surpassed $1 trillion in market value after landing its biggest-ever order from rental car company Hertz, a deal that reinforced the electric car leader's ambitions to top the entire auto industry in sales over the next decade. (Reuters)

* About $24 billion in goods are floating outside California’s biggest ports. (CNN)

* People Are Using Marijuana to Treat Anxiety and Depression, but the Science Is Murky (WSJ)

* If NASA greenlights this interstellar mission, it could last 100 years -- Scientists who want to understand what's beyond our solar system have designed an interstellar spacecraft that could go out farther and faster than the famous Voyager probes. (NPR)

* Construction Finally Complete On Canal Connecting Chemical Runoff With Mississippi River (The Onion)