May 01, 2007
Willing to Please
There once was a line of thinking that the sign of a good manager is when one knows his or her weaknesses and compensates those weaknesses with the strengths of a well-rounded staff. Good presidents also go out of their way to find the strongest thinkers of opposing views to help probe policies for their weaknesses and figure out where solutions can be strengthened.
Walter Isaacson explores this phenomenon in discussing former CIA director George Tenent and draws parallels to corporate life in the media:
George Tenet's woes, it seems to me, come from the very natural instinct to please rather than tell uncomfortable truths to those in authority. Watching Bill Moyers's show on how the media failed to question the march to the war in Iraq, I reflected on how I, likewise, when I was at CNN, was too willing to accept what those in authority were telling me. And reading Bob Dallek's new book on Nixon and Kissinger, I was reminded how Kissinger, someone I once wrote about, was too willing to cater to and collaborate with the darker impulses of Nixon.
Here's his blog on Huffington Post.
Posted by davidphinney at 09:40 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 19, 2006
Happy Birthday, CIA
Someone just sent me this link: from Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting:
Extra! November/December 1997
One of the most evenhanded examples of mainstream coverage of the CIA's anniversary was on ABC News' website, where the report opens on a note of caution: "No doubt the nation's leading band of spies prefers to forget about the disastrous Bay of Pigs, bumbling plots to knock off political leaders and an abject failure to predict the fall of the Berlin Wall," writes ABC's David Phinney. "During the 1960s, the CIA experimented with LSD on unsuspecting subjects and spied on citizens protesting the Vietnam War. In the 1980s, it associated with groups found to be involved in torture and executions, and became mixed up in trading drugs for arms during the Iran/Contra era." Unlike most features on the CIA's anniversary, Phinney's story includes a quote from a CIA critic, a representative of Human Rights Watch.
Posted by davidphinney at 05:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack