Friday, May 19, 2006

BellSouth's Warning Shot At USA Today

BellSouth issued a statement calling for a retraction of the USA Today story:
"BellSouth is now insisting that USA Today retract the false and unsubstantiated statements that it made in regards to our company," said BellSouth spokesman Jeff Battcher, noting that his company on Monday said its preliminary review found that it had no contract with the NSA and that it had not provided customer data en masse to the intelligence agency.

Since the USA Today report appeared, the White House has neither confirmed nor denied that it sought calling records on a mass scale to track suspected terrorists.

Privacy advocates believe statements from the companies leave open the possibility that they may have provided calling data to the government, even if they did not do so under a contract with the NSA as the USA Today story said.

"The story came out in USA Today . . . and then all this dancing starting, which doesn't give people reason to believe it wasn't true," said Mary J. Culnan, a professor at Bentley College and a privacy expert. "These kind of carefully worded press releases where people just don't flat out say 'We didn't do it' -- I think that's why people continue to be suspicious."

In its denial on Monday, BellSouth did not address whether it might have provided such records outside of a contract or to an agency other than the NSA, but the BellSouth spokesman said it had not. "To the best of our review, we have not provided any bulk or wholesale customer calling records to any governmental agency," Battcher said. "People are thinking we are trying to be cute and trying to mince words here and we're really not."

In a statement issued by Verizon on Tuesday, the company denied that its local and mobile phone businesses had turned over customer calling records to the NSA but did not address whether MCI Corp., the long-distance company it bought in January, may have done so.
Considering the billions of dollars at stake in lawsuits against the phone companies by groups and individuals basing their suits on the USA Today story, the paper has to respond to this story quickly or else face lawsuits of its own by deep pocketed phone companies.

Don Surber notes that it was real bad form for the paper to run with the story without getting comments from the phone companies to confirm the facts:
I agree with BellSouth officials: USA Today should retract its last spy story. USA Today made errors of fact that greatly harmed Bell South and Verizon.

At the time, I said: "Journalism 101 required USA Today to get the telephone companies' side. USA Today did not."

No comment does not cut it. Give the company time to check its records. The newspaper's obliogation is to make sure a story this important is as clean as a whistle.

The press has repeatedly failed to take the war on terrorism seriously ever since it moved into the Iraq theater. Yes, the president's premise was wrong. Hold him accountable for that. But that is no excuse for the press to spit out every hare-brained or half-baked conspiracy without going through the basics. It is unprofessional and is why the media's credibility remains below the president.
UPDATE:
Wizbang also notes that the USA Today story is crumbling.

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