Watching the Feds

#### "Where are the Watchdogs?" by Lucinda Fleeson, in American Journalism Review (July/Aug. 2001), Univ. of Md., 1117 Journalism Bldg., College Park, Md., 20742–7111.

Are federal agencies too boring to cover on a regular basis? Editors at most major newspapers seem to think so. According to a recent American Journalism Review survey, a number of government bureaucracies are not covered by any full-time newspaper reporters, including the $46 billion Department of Veterans Affairs, which is the third-largest federal employer after the Pentagon and the Postal Service.

Critics warn that the change leaves government agencies less accountable to the public. Consumer advocate (and erstwhile presidential candidate) Ralph Nader argues that to cover government, reporters must "get inside, you’ve got to get the leaks, and the whistle-blowing, and you can’t do that once in a while."

Editors are generally unapologetic, notes Fleeson, a former Philadelphia Inquirer reporter. "We don’t cover buildings," says Sandy Johnson of the Associated Press. At the Washington Post, national editor Liz Spayd says that her staff of 50 isn’t big enough to do the job, even if she wanted it to. Editors also insist that the old approach often lost sight of larger issues in a sea of trivia, or yielded stories of marginal interest. Besides, Reuters and the Associated Press (as well as trade publications) still cover the old beats. Today’s editors prefer to assign reporters to cover several agencies at once, or to produce thematic or issue-oriented "enterprise" stories.

Out of the changes has emerged what Fleeson calls "the New Washington Reporter," who gives "only part-time scrutiny to the business of the federal government." One of them is Lisa Hoffman, a Scripps Howard reporter charged with covering the Pentagon, the State Department, and the Internet. She still stalks the halls of the Pentagon on occasion, and she’s a good reporter, Fleeson says. But Hoffman is stretched thin and there’s a limited payoff to covering the Pentagon: The chain’s papers don’t always run her defense stories. Readers aren’t interested, editors say.

Another member of the new breed is the Los Angeles Times’s David Willman, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1998 stories revealing that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had given fast-track approval to seven drugs over the objections of its own experts and other warnings. Willman reported that one drug, Rezulin, a diabetes treatment, was linked to 33 deaths. After Willman’s story broke, the drug was recalled by the FDA. But it was a triumph of enterprise rather than beat reporting: it took almost two years to complete the story, and Willman had to be freed from covering campaign finance reform and other matters.

Willman’s Times colleague, Alan C. Miller, scored a coup in 1994 by uncovering ethical misdeeds by then Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy. He went back to Agriculture two years later and wrote about the theft of timber in national forests. "Every time I dug into something at the Ag Department, we hit paydirt," Miller told Fleeson. But the Times, based in the nation’s biggest agricultural state, doesn’t have anybody "covering the building." The department "is largely uncovered except by the AP, Reuters, and reaches an "uncomfortable" conclusion: the Des Moines Register." Despite all the talk, "fewer and fewer main-Fleeson is not unsympathetic to the editors’ stream news organizations bother any anymore dilemma: hard news or enterprise. But she with dailies or enterprise stories."