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Watchdog Conferencegrown pretty steadily. For the last two years, the IRS reportsthey have been granting new tax exemptions to 75 organizationsper day. That’s on top of nearly 1.5 million nonprofitorganizations that have federal exemptions from taxes. In1997, the federal tax exemptions alone withdrew $21 billionfrom the national treasury. State and local tax exemptionsadded another 30-plus billion to that….All sorts of aspects of our social and political activity takeplace at the direction of private money through nonprofitorganizations. And the journalistic problem attached to thatis that these are private organizations and private money andjournalistic access to those precincts is not nearly as clear asit is to government organizations.Jim Tharpe, an editor who has led several lengthyinvestigations of nonprofits, echoed Kovach’s admonitionof the need to report on nonprofits but also described theeffort to do so as one that demands enormous tenacity fromreporters.“I’d never done any reporting on nonprofits. I thoughtthey were all good guys. They were mom and pop, bake sale,raise money for the local fire department types. I had no ideahow sophisticated they were, how much money was raised,and how little access you have to them as a reporter….Wehad access to 990’s [mandatory financial records filed to thegovernment by nonprofits] which tell you very little, but theyare a good starting point…. If I had advice for anybodylooking into a nonprofit, it would be this: It’s the mosttenacious story. You have to be more tenacious in yourpursuit than anything else I’ve ever been a part of…. We [atthe Montgomery (AL) Advertiser] were accused of attackingessentially the Mother Theresa of Montgomery, that beingMorris Dees in the Southern Poverty Law Center.”Being a watchdog on national security issues requiresits own set of strategies to get past some of the bureaucratichurdles put up by military and diplomatic organizations.And it requires that journalists find ways to work aroundthe hurdles to avoid being “handled” by sources in waysthat stifle their abilities to monitor the events of their beat.Several reporters recalled times in which their judgmentand/or persistence had to prevail in order for them—orothers—to develop and publish important stories.Susanne M. Schafer: “In order to cover a bureaucracy aslarge as the military, as large as the Pentagon, what you’vegot to fight for is that ability to get out there and interview thesoldier in the trench, the lady in the cockpit. It’s very hard todo, but that’s the only way you’re going to get beyond whatI call death by briefing. You can waste hours and hourslistening to those people, and that’s exactly what they wantto do. They want to entrap us there…. [there is a need to] getbeyond what people in Washington are telling you the storyis to the reality of what it is on the ground.”Murrey Marder: “I got a call one day from Dick Dugginfrom the St. Louis Post Dispatch, who was a first-classreporter during the Vietnam War. It was on a Sunday. Dicksaid he had just gotten a call from the White House. ‘One ofthe presses in the White House is telling me if we print a storyI’m working on, it will jeopardize national security,’ Dicksaid. ‘Has this happened to you?’“I burst out laughing. He said, ‘What’s so funny?’“I said, ‘Dick, you don’t realize the advantage you have inappearing in the St. Louis Post Dispatch: The White Housedoesn’t see your copy. It happens to me all the time.’“He said, ‘What do you tell them?’“I said, ‘I generally tell them if they can prove it willjeopardize national security I will consider it, but until thenI won’t even think about it.’“He said, ‘What happens if they prove it to you?’“‘They never have,’ I replied.”Roy Gutman: “The Balkan conflicts that we’ve seen from1991 to now were an example of an event that the establishment,both in government and the elite of the East Coast,preferred to ignore. NATO itself decided that the war againstSlovenia and Croatia in 1991 was beneath its field of vision.I once went to see the U.S. Ambassador to NATO. I had justreported for Newsday that the Croatians had repelled aninvasion attempt over part of their territory on the Adriatic.I had it down to the last detail of just how it happened, whichofficer changed sides at which moment, and how they savedbasically the middle Adriatic coastline of Croatia.“The Ambassador told me, ‘We really are not followingthis matter. What’s your next question?’“I said, ‘Don’t you want to at least see it? I think this haschanged the entire course of the war.’“‘Well, if you want to leave the article, you can. But this isnot something that NATO is following,’ he told me….“And I think the intention within the U.S. government wasto let it happen and to hope that it would happen quickly.Our editors at Newsday who were aware of this had a difficultdecision to make. I was the reporter for all of Europe: Whyshould we justify covering a war that is not seen by anybodyin the national security establishment as being of nationalsecurity concern? How do you get the interest of your editorsin something that you feel is really central?”Business reporting, when it’s done from the perspectiveof journalists being watchdogs, poses difficulties in terms offinding credible and identifiable sources. These problemsare magnified when a story must be told on television, aspanel moderator Paul Solman, business correspondent for“The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,” described.“[Business reporting is] a unique beat…[with] uniqueproblems with regard to sourcing implicit in what we do….There are two kinds of problems with sources…. One is theNieman Reports / Fall 1999 5