Why aren’t mainstream news outlets giving a Salon writer credit for his groundbreaking reporting?
Both the Wall Street Journal and New York Times published shocking stories this morning about a new Army report that found “remains in more than 200 graves at Arlington National Cemetery may be incorrectly identified,” and that the “U.S. Army forced out the top two officials at Arlington National Cemetery … after a seven-month investigation uncovered widespread mismanagement of the military’s most hallowed burial ground.” The report came out after hundreds of discrepancies had been found between the graves within the cemetery and the records that purported to detail what bodies lay within them.
What neither the Journal nor the Times pointed out, however, is that Mark Benjamin, the national correspondent for Salon.com, not only broke the story a year ago but is also likely the sole reason the Army launched the investigation in the first place.
In a phone conversation with Benjamin, the journalist told me he first got tipped off to the story in April 2009 by people knowledgeable with burial operations within the cemetery. “They approached me with very, very serious problems with the cemetery,” he said. “At first it seemed like their concerns were over the top. But the more I looked into them I realized they looked increasingly credible and I thought, ‘Oh my gosh this is possibly the worst case scenario,’ and it was actually true.”
Editors like to lament that the loss of newspaper jobs means that publishers will no longer invest in long-form investigative journalism given the low profitability of such investigations. But Benjamin’s methods meet every definition of classic gumshoe reporting. He first developed several prime sources who were able to provide the documents that were crucial for him to complete his work, including the burial records that turned out to be so inaccurate.
“I also spent a lot of time walking the grounds of the cemetery,” he said. “That cemetery is 684 acres, I know it like the back of my hand. To give you an example, one of the recent articles that I wrote was about the Civil War section of the cemetery, I needed to figure out how many headstones were missing. So I took all the records and counted them. There were 5,800 and something records, and I walked the cemetery and literally counted every headstone, and there were 500 missing. I’ve been out there in the freezing cold, I’ve been out there in the burning hot summer, and I’ve been out there when it’s raining. I was out there two days after a car accident while my back was hurting. So it’s taken a lot of sort of classic investigative reporting. I have to say I feel like I need to give [Salon editor] Joan Walsh a plug here, because let’s face it, she let me do this for a year, and she let me take a long long time with the pieces.”
His first piece hit the web in July 2009, and if judged solely by the response from other media outlets, it wasn’t exactly “explosive.” In fact, a more appropriate term to describe the response would be “cricket chirping silence.” Almost all the major news outlets ignored the story, except one. “I got only one TV person that showed any interest in the story, and that was Joe Scarborough. Joe Scarborough had me on a number of times months ago. I don’t know him but I’d be on the show and he’d be saying, ‘this is a big deal, what are they going to do, dig up the whole cemetery?’ And god bless him, he’s the only one.”
But despite the lack of media response, his reporting must have turned heads, otherwise the Army wouldn’t have launched the investigation that would lead to today’s Journal and Times reporting. In some ways, this makes Benjamin almost an integral part of the story, which leads me to wonder why the newspapers left him out.
“I have a couple thoughts on that,” he said when I brought it up. “In some ways it makes me sort of angry because I feel like, frankly, most of the media over the past couple days has given me pretty grudging or no credit. I also feel happy that this very, very important issue is finally seeing the light of day after I’ve been working on it for over a year. Thirdly, I think as the media fragments more and more, one of the problems is that large institutions, or government institutions, strengthen their hands because it’s easy to ignore. I’ve been reporting since last July on burial screw ups in Arlington National Cemetery. Basically everybody ignored me for a year until the Army decided to finally admit that they have a massive problem there. I think they were able to do that because I work at Salon.com, and Salon.com is wonderful, I love Salon, and the work is some of the best I’ve ever done in my life, but because it’s a website and they can ignore it, they did ignore it.”
He added that he thought part of the problem is that “the media, and this is not so much TV but definitely in print –let’s face it — there’s a very, very strong incentive to ignore other people’s work.”
Despite the lack of traction last year, Salon submitted Benjamin’s work for the “public service” category for the Pulitzer prize, which it obviously didn’t win. He sounded skeptical that the news outlet could submit it again this year, though with the revelations that came out today, I’m not so sure Salon couldn’t argue that this was an “ongoing” piece and that the Army report and subsequent firings would provide a sound argument for why the Pulitzer committee should reconsider it.
Either way, despite the media blackout over the last year, the report and today’s coverage are certainly evidence that even a smaller, web-only publication like Salon can fight through the noise, and Benjamin had to agree with me.
“Yes, there’s no question that the Army launched the investigation specifically because of my reporting and in the investigation it says everything in my reporting was absolutely right.”
At the end of the day, isn’t that the only accomplishment that reporters need? If our goal is to expose corruption and neglect, then today’s acknowledgment from the Army is the vindication that Benjamin is the kind of reporter that newspaper editors everywhere claim is a dying breed. The fact that he doesn’t work for a newspaper is just an inconvenient detail to their narrative.
