Good Journalism from NPR and Maddow

Their reporting on the National Labor Relations Board whistleblower was well-researched and ethical.

A midweek missive

Just a quick note on two pieces of good journalism I saw yesterday.

The first is this NPR piece by Jenna McLaughlin that details the findings of a whistleblower for the National Labor Relations Board.

In early March, the DOGE team invaded the NLRB, took over the agency’s computer systems for a week, made sure what they did wasn’t logged, and then deleted what they did.

But they left the security systems they had disabled open. So any common hacker could access them.

Later, the whistleblower, looking at a graph of outgoing data, saw a spike in data being extracted from the agency when the DOGE team had been at NLRB’s computers.

Moreover, the whistleblower said that as soon as the DOGE Boys left, it looks like a number of IP addresses from Russia were trying to get into National Labor Relations Board computer systems, using the logins that DOGE had just created. Those Russian computers were rebuffed by protocols denying entry to any IP address outside the country.

McLaughlin wrote:

The labor law experts interviewed by NPR fear that if the data gets out, it could be abused, including by private companies with cases before the agency that might get insights into damaging testimony, union leadership, legal strategies and internal data on competitors — Musk's SpaceX among them. It could also intimidate whistleblowers who might speak up about unfair labor practices, and it could sow distrust in the NLRB's independence, they said.

McLaughlin’s piece was reported with detail. She verified and corroborated what the whistleblower was telling her in a number of ways.

“In total, NPR spoke to over 30 sources across the government, the private sector, the labor movement, cybersecurity and law enforcement,” McLaughlin wrote.

NPR, and McLaughlin’s editor Brett Neely, allowed it’s reporter to write a 7,000-word investigation, AND did a 7-minute radio piece on it. They also had illustration explainers within the written piece.

In other words, NPR didn’t let the media shape the message. They used whatever media they had to tell the story.

Kudos to that.

Also kudos to NPR for just doing this story. Their funding may be cut by the Trump Administration. And yet, they stood up and reported the whistleblower’s assertions.

Journalism as middle finger to fascism.

Last night, Rachel Maddow picked up on this story, scoring an interview with the whistleblower, Daniel Berulis, and his attorney, Andrew Bakaj of Whistleblower Aid.

On the Maddow Show, Bakaj asserted that the Department of Defense had stopped using Starlink last year because they feared that Elon Musk would give sensitive military information to Russia.

“The information that flows through Starlink goes directly to Russia,” Bakaj told Maddow. “Last year the Department of Defense had stopped using Starlink in any way, shape or form.”

This statement was in the A Block in the show. At the end of the show, Maddow said this:

That was an assertion made by our guest, but we should note we have not found any evidence that the defense department has stopped using Starlink over those types of security concerns. When we learn more, we will tell you more.

In other words, the Maddow Show team spent the better part of the 40 minutes after the interview fact checking that assertion and could not verify it.

This is what needs to be done in live journalism.

It is an argument I have made in the two public radio shows I hosted.

“If we are going to be live - and take callers - then we have to have real-time fact checking.”

That never happened. So, I heard my former co-host agree with a right-wing guest who said you had to be a citizen to fill out the census.

Which is NOT TRUE.

And my co-host knew that. Honestly, I don’t think he was listening, because he immediately went on to another question.

In Wisconsin, we had all sorts of callers who would tell us the latest lie pushed by Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh.

But, even though the show was three hours long, we didn’t have producers who did real-time fact-checking, which violated a promise made to me before I even took the job.

MSNBC, of course, has a lot of money to pay people on the Maddow Show to fact-check in real time.

Public radio stations do not have that kind of money.

And that effects the quality of the journalism.

Of course, if you don’t take callers, and don’t book guests who you know will lie, then you have less of a problem.

It’s why the podcast and livestreaming news space is blowing up right now.

The people who do that are not adhering to both-sideism, which, in practical terms, means pitting people who are telling the truth against people who are telling lies.

In this formulation, then, fact-checking is bias.

And yet, this is the formulation legacy media adheres to.

So, kudos to NPR national for doing an intensely fact-checked piece on what Musk and his Muskenjugen are doing with our data. They got statements from the Trump administration. But they didn’t portray those statements as equal to the overwhelming consensus from the experts they talked to.

They didn’t both-sides it.

And kudos to the Maddow team for jumping to verify the assertion their guest made.

We need more of that.

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