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Murray Waas

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Murray S. Waas (born circa 1961) is an American freelance investigative journalist known most recently for his coverage of the White House planning for the 2003 invasion of Iraq and ensuing controversies and American political scandals such as the Plame affair (also known as the "CIA leak scandal" and "Plamegate"). His articles about such matters have appeared in The American Prospect, The National Journal, Salon, and The Village Voice. Waas also comments on contemporary American political controversies in his personal blogs Whatever Already! and at The Huffington Post. An "instant book" on United States v. I. Lewis Libby which he edited, with research assistance by Jeff Lomonaco, was published by Union Square Press (an imprint of Sterling Publishing) in June 2007.

Personal history

Waas was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and originally hoped to have a career in law and city politics ("To be the district attorney and mayor of the City of Philadelphia"), but he dropped out of George Washington University before graduating.

In 1987, when Waas was only twenty-six years old, he learned that he had a life-threatening "advanced form" of cancer. On June 26, 2006, Washington Post media writer Howard Kurtz disclosed that Waas had been told that he had an "incurable Stage C" cancer and faced a "terminal diagnosis."

Subsequently, Waas successfully sued the George Washington University Medical Center, which had negligently "failed to diagnose his cancer, winning a $650,000 judgment ... in a 1992 verdict ... upheld by the D.C. Court of Appeals." Although, according to a pathologist hired by Waas to testify in the case, "90% of patients die within two years," Waas survived and was later declared "cancer-free."

As result of his activism on behalf of other cancer patients and his public revelations about the prejudices that he says cancer survivors like him face professionally and about other personal matters, Waas has received considerable moral support from others in the blogosphere.

Waas currently resides in Washington, D.C.

Professional career

While still attending college, Waas began working for American newspaper columnist Jack Anderson. His journalistic work has been published in such publications as The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The Village Voice, and The Boston Globe. In his twenties he was a staff writer and investigative correspondent for the Village Voice. According to his tribute to Anderson that Waas published in the Village Voice, after the columnist's death at the age of 83:

The series of columns we produced regarding the role of U.S. companies doing business with Idi Amin were instrumental in leading to the imposition of U.S. economic sanctions against the Amin regime, according to the congressman who originally sponsored legislation seeking the sanctions, and other key congressional staffers who worked on the issue. Some historians in turn say the sanctions may have played an instrumental role in Amin’s subsequent overthrow.

During the Reagan administration, Waas was among a small group of reporters involved in breaking the story of the Iran-Contra affair. Later, he also reported on Whitewater and the Clinton impeachment for Salon.com.

Most recently, he has worked as a national correspondent and contributing editor of The National Journal.

In 1992, Waas was a fellow with the Alicia Patterson Foundation, investigating substandard conditions and questionable deaths at institutions for the mentally retarded, mental hospitals, nursing homes, jails, prisons, juvenile detention centers, and other publicly run facilities.

During the presidency of George Herbert Walker Bush, in 1993, while a reporter for the The Los Angeles Times, Waas was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in the category of national reporting for his stories detailing that administration's prewar foreign policy towards the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein, and that year, along with his Los Angeles Times colleague Douglas Frantz, Wass was also a recipient of the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, awarded by the Joan Shorenstein Barone Center on The Press, of the John F. Kennedy School of Government of Harvard University, for "a series that detailed United States policy toward Iraq before the Persian Gulf war."

In a May 15, 2006 interview with Elizabeth Halloran, of U.S. News and World Report, when she asked whether he was "working on stories other than those involving the Fitzgerald investigation," Waas indicated that he has "been working on a long, explanatory piece about healthcare issues, the cervical cancer vaccine." Among the questions that he raised with Halloran are: "Why isn't that vaccine going to get to the people it should get to? Is it going to be locked away?"

Main article: Cervarix

When Halloran went on to ask the subject of his "next story," Waas identified it as "another story about the level of knowledge among high-level administration officials about attempts to discredit Wilson and when they knew about it." Waas had already expressed that viewpoint regarding the CIA leak grand jury investigation of the public outing of Mrs. Wilson's then-classified covert CIA identity and the alleged involvement of officials in The White House in it in his article concerning Wilson published in The Village Voice in October/November 2003, in which he concludes: "Of course, nobody would have been looking into Plame's background had White House officials not leaked her status as a clandestine CIA officer, and if Novak hadn't agreed to out her for the Bush administration in an attempt to discredit her husband."

Several of Waas's later published accounts of that aspect of the Plame affair inform his Union Square Press book on the Libby trial published in June 2007, which he discusses in some detail in his interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!.

Book publication

The United States v. I. Lewis Libby, edited and with reporting by Waas, was published by Sterling Publishing's Union Square Press imprint on June 5, 2007. According to the press release, Waas has "drawn from the transcript of the trial of Scooter Libby" in editing and assembling this "instant book," which combines "pivotal testimony by key witnesses from the trial, along with original reporting and an introductory essay by Waas," who "receiv research assistance" from Jeff Lomonaco, a professor of political science at the University of Minnesota.

In "FDL Book Salon", Lomonaco, Waas's collaborator in preparing the book, observes:

The bulk of the book is an edited version of the trial transcript, carefully cut down from its original size of nearly one million words to a more manageable and readable length, along with the most important and illuminating of the extraordinary documentary evidence presented at the trial. Murray has simply owned this story since the beginning with his ability to get sources and documents no one else can. The book has an excellent introduction entitled 'The Last Compartment' which emphasizes what I think is at the heart of the case: the compartmentalized effort of Vice President Dick Cheney and Libby, his most important adviser, to respond to Joe Wilson’s criticisms of the OVP over its role in publicly justifying the Iraq war in part by disclosing to reporters that Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA. We also offer a variety of editorial aids to making your way through the transcript.

Critique

On October 27, 1992, the late David Shaw, then a staff writer for The Los Angeles Times who won a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism the previous year, assessed the reporting by his colleagues Murray Waas and Douglas Frantz on the first Bush administration's prewar policy towards Iraq leading up to the first Gulf War, which included "more than 100 stories, totaling more than 90,000 words": "The Times's stories--many based on previously secret papers prepared by the Bush administration--alleged that the Bush administration tried to cover up what it had done by altering documents it supplied to Congress and by attempting to obstruct official investigations of aid to Iraq," quoting the observation of Leonard Downie, executive editor of The Washington Post, that his own newspaper was "slow in getting up to speed on that story, in part because it's the kind of story involving careful work with documents... Once you're behind, it takes a while to catch up." Downie credits the Los Angeles Times with "pav the way," saying that that is "why we began pursuing it after really not noticing it from the outset."

In June 1998, J.D. Lasica published "The Web: A New Channel for Investigative Journalism", a "sidebar" to his article entitled "Salon: The Best Pure-Play Web Publication?", published in American Journalism Review, assessing reporting on the Impeachment of Bill Clinton in Salon.com by Waas and his colleagues, observing that "Salon's coverage of the Clinton-Lewinsky matter--its first sustained foray into classic investigative journalism--has served as a counterweight to the mainstream media's wolfpack mindset" and citing the view of Andrew Ross (then-managing editor of Salon); according to Lasica, "Salon's investigative journalism ... has raised old media's hackles because, Ross says, it was done the old-fashioned way: shoe leather, cultivating sources, working the phones — no new-media tricks here. Indeed," Lasica continues the 1998 account, by pointing out that Waas, who has written a dozen stories for Salon, is a bit of a technophobe; he never signs onto the Web and has never seen his stories online. He writes for Salon, he says, because 'I like the daily rhythm and the immediacy.'"

His reporting on the administration of George W. Bush, especially with regard to the Plame affair, has been called "groundbreaking" by New York University journalism Professor Jay Rosen, who considers Waas the "new Bob Woodward": "By Woodward Now," Rosen writes of Waas, "I mean the reporter who is actually doing what Woodward has a reputation for doing: finding, tracking, breaking into reportable parts—and then publishing—the biggest story in town."

In the Summer of 2006, Jim Boyd prepared an "exclusive list" of newspaper reporters whom he considered "courageous," including among them Murray Waas: "People I consider courageous are Murray Waas at the National Journal; Dan Froomkin at washingtonpost.com and niemanwatchdog.org; Warren Strobel and several of his colleagues at the Knight Ridder Washington bureau (soon to be the McClatchy Washington bureau); Walter Pincus and Dana Priest of the Post. And, of course, Helen Thomas."

In May 2007, Erik Wemple, Jason Cherkis, and Chris Peterson published an eleven-page online article in the Washington City Paper entitled "Murray Waas Against the World" and captioned "A National Journal reporter has fashioned a reputation among his peers: He's a tough act to follow", in which they examine Waas's body of journalistic work culminating in publication of the book on the Libby case. As they acknowledge, Waas disputes personal factors in their account of him and his work, which he considers biased, and he responds to them in his personal blog at The Huffington Post.

See also

Notes

  1. For a perspective on Waas's work as a "net journalist" in Salon, see, for example, Matt Welch, "Salon's Coverage Commands Respect for Net Journalists", Online Journalism Review, March 30, 1998, accessed June 20, 2007.
  2. ^ Press release, Sterling Publishing, March 6, 2007, "Press Room": US_v_ILewisLibby_Release.doc (Downloadable document file); cf. catalogue description; both accessed June 21, 2007. Cite error: The named reference "Sterling" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
  3. For related information, see Murray Waas, "A Book", Whatever Already! (blog), March 6, 2007 and "Book Party", Whatever Already! (blog), June 20, 2007; both accessed June 21, 2007.
  4. ^ Liz Halloran, "A Muckraker's Day in the Sun", interview with Murray Waas, U.S. News and World Report 15 May, 2006, accessed 29 April, 2007.
  5. ^ Howard Kurtz, "Writer Sat on His Own Life-and-Death Story", The Washington Post, June 25, 2006, C-01, accessed June 21, 2007.
  6. ^ Murray Waas, "The Wag Time Pet Spa Conspiracy ... And a Cancer Survivor's Right to Respect", The Huffington Post (personal blog), December 21, 2006, accessed June 21, 2007; contains hyperlink to Kurtz's article and his own related blog entries.
  7. Murray Waas, "Jack Anderson: An Appreciation: The Muckraking Outsider Never Gave a Damn about Entree", The Village Voice, December 19, 2005, accessed August 16, 2007.
  8. ^ Erik Wemple, and Jason Cherkis, with additional reporting by Chris Peterson, "Murray Waas Against the World": A National Journal Reporter Has Fashioned a Reputation Among His Peers: He's a Tough Act to Follow", Washington City Paper, May 16, 2007, accessed June 21, 2007 (11 pages).
  9. "Investigative Reporters Win Goldsmith Prize", The New York Times, April 5, 1993, accessed August 16, 2007 (TimesSelect subscription required): Frantz and Waas shared the $25,000 prize, which "is named for Berda Marks Goldsmith," with four other reporters from The Seattle Times.
  10. Elissa L. Gootman, "Goldsmith Prizes Awarded: Top Investigative Reporting Teams Rewarded by $25,000", The Harvard Crimson, March 26, 1993, accessed August 21, 2007.
  11. Murray Waas, "The Elephant in Wilson's Living Room: Feds Broaden Leak Probe, Start Grilling Republican Party Officials", The Village Voice, October 29 - November 4, 2003, accessed August 18, 2007.
  12. Amy Goodman, "Ex-Cheney Chief of Staff Lewis 'Scooter' Libby Convicted of Perjury, Obstruction in CIA Leak Trial", interview with Murray Waas and Marcy Wheeler, Democracy Now!, March 7, 2007, accessed June 20, 2007.
  13. "FDL Book Salon Welcomes Murray Waas and Jeff Lomonaco", online posting by "Jeff", Firedoglake (blog), June 10, 2007, accessed June 20, 2007. (Online interview with Waas and Lomonaco, who answer questions about the book in the format of an online chat with FDL Book Salon participants after an introduction by Lomonaco.)
  14. David Shaw, "Iraqgate--A Case Study of a Big Story With Little Impact: Despite Hundreds of News Reports, No Public Outrage Has Erupted Over Secret U.S. Aid to Iraq", The Los Angeles Times, October 27, 1992, accessed August 17, 2007.
  15. J.D. Lasica, "The Web: A New Channel for Investigative Journalism: Salon's Groundbreaking Stories on the Ken Starr Investigation Challenge the Conventional Wisdom Laid Down by the Mainstream Media's Wolfpack Mindset", American Journalism Review, June 1998, sidebar to "Salon: The Best Pure-Play Web Publication? Salon's Savvy Blend of New and Old Media Has Made It a Pacesetter for Online Journalism. It May Also Be a Harbinger of Journalism's Future on the Internet", American Journalism Review, June 1998, accessed August 17, 2007.
  16. Jay Rosen, "Murray Waas Is Our Woodward Now", PressThink (blog), April 9, 2006, accessed June 21, 2007
  17. Jim Boyd, "Editorial Pages: Why Courage Is Hard to Find", Niemann Reports (Nieman Foundation for Journalism of Harvard University), Summer 2006 ("Reflections on Courage: United States"), accessed August 19, 2007.

References

Murray Waas's personal blogs
Other pertinent selected articles and books by Murray Waas
Pertinent articles about and interviews of Waas

External links

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