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Amerithrax backlash: cooler heads prevail?

By Mark Obbie

The more that reporters dig into the Bruce Ivins anthrax case, the less certain we are of key facts asserted in the first- and second-day reports. David Willman of the LA Times led his big scoop last Friday with the news that Ivins killed himself "just as the Justice Department was about to file criminal charges against him for the attacks." On Sunday, NPR's Dina Temple-Raston and today The New York Times' Scott Shane portrayed any indictment as weeks away -- according to Temple-Raston because of a series of procedural steps that had yet to occur, and according to Shane because the case was still too shaky to be considered ready. Is Willman's wording still true, given that Ivins reportedly was told he would be charged? It appears Willman overstated the timing. But we still don't know the facts, and Shane's report is pegged to a single anonymous source said to have been briefed on the status of the case (later, and perhaps tellingly, he writes that Ivins' attorney Paul Kemp "declined to comment for the record," which leads me to speculate that the doubt cast on a possible indictment might merely be defense spin). Other elements of the story that have gone wobbly are the Washington Post's report on Saturday of active plea bargain talks (now portrayed elsewhere as pressure by law enforcement to bring Ivins to the plea-bargaining table, but not active plea-bargaining); Willman's focus on a possible greed motive (several others challenge the notion that the patent Ivins held on a vaccine was financially promising); and everyone's excitement over testimony by a social worker who claimed that Ivins was a homicidal loose cannon (with little or no skepticism about how the social worker could state so categorically that Ivins had indeed conducted the anthrax attacks). The core of Willman's original report, of course, still holds up: The investigation indeed had turned its focus on Ivins and was accelerating. But loose threads are now exposed.Some of the reasonable doubts are raised today in Glenn Greenwald's report at Salon, which includes a serious challenge to the social worker's credibility. Greenwald also has looked back to 2001 to pose tough questions for ABC News' Brian Ross, whose reports linking the anthrax attacks to Iraq Greenwald has a long history of attacking (Greenwald wrote that ABC and Ross were guilty of "the single greatest, unresolved media scandal of this decade"). That report and a folo yesterday have been picked up by Jay Rosen and Dan Gillmor, who are joining Greenwald's campaign to pressure ABC to reveal its sources for the discredited reports. It all adds up to yet another illustration of the dangers of relying on anonymous sources and the rush to judgment when only part of the story comes out via shadowy channels. As I said on Day One, let's see how well journalists maintain their sense of skepticism. I'll include myself now in that admonition, given how ready I was to gush about the LAT and WaPo reports in the first two days.

Full post as published by Lawbeat on August 04, 2008 (boomark / email).