WHITE HOUSE BLASTS SALON

Drug policy spokesman responds to Daniel Forbes' report on the
government's anti-drug messages in American media, and Forbes replies.

Editor's note: This letter was recently sent by the White House to
Salon in response to Daniel Forbes' March 31 article on U.S. drug
policy, "The drug war gravy train." Following the letter, which was
written by White House aide Robert Housman, investigative reporter
Daniel Forbes offers his rebuttal.

Dear Editor:

The purpose of this letter is twofold. First, I write to once again
ask Salon.com to set the record straight with respect to the errors in
Salon's earlier reporting, which were set out in my last letter.
Second, I write to raise factual errors with respect to the latest
article in Salon, "The Drug War Gravy Train."

Salon has an obligation to correct the record about
openness

In my prior letter, ONDCP [Office of National Drug Control Policy]
provided you with extensive documentation that proves that, contrary
to the reporting of Mr. Forbes and Salon, the Youth Campaign was in no
way secret. In fact, well before Salon's focus on the Youth Campaign,
as we documented for you, the use of content within the match element
of the Youth Campaign had appeared on the front page of the Los
Angeles Times and on the pages of USA Today. It was also the subject
of opinion editorials by Director McCaffrey in papers across the
nation. We had also testified extensively about this element of the
Youth Campaign before the Congress. And, it was the Congress that
actively voted to require the match requirement of the Youth Campaign
and to allow for the use content.

As my earlier letter underscored, based on these facts the New York
Times Sunday Magazine, which relied on Salon's reporting in calling
the Youth Campaign secret, has had to subsequently correct the record.
Moreover, the New York Times' inaccurate comments about the Youth
Campaign were far more restrained than those that appeared in Salon.

We must, once again, formally call upon Salon to retract its reporting
that the Campaign was secret. As Salon seeks to establish a niche as
legitimate journalism on the Internet, it is imperative that your
readers have full confidence in the factual basis of your reporting.
Allowing such a clear error as this to go unanswered is not only
wrong, it will undermine Salon's long-term credibility. Certainly, if
the New York Times, one of the nation's most respected newspapers,
felt the obligation to correct the record, Salon, which actually
started this false allegation, should do so as well.

Salon has a particular obligation to correct errors of fact in Salon's
prior reporting because in his recent column Mr. Forbes writes that
ONDCP's relationship with television networks "was revealed in Salon
earlier this year." This repeated error of fact, after we have made
this error clear to Salon, is completely unacceptable. As we stated in
our last letter Salon "no more broke this story or uncovered some
trumped up secret than did any reader of the August 20, 1998 Los
Angeles Times or the November 2, 1998 USA Today."

Salon's continuing pattern of factual errors

In addition to the errors in Salon's prior reporting, your latest
article about the Youth Campaign continues to completely ignore the
facts. Each of the following factual errors are so clear that they too
require Salon to correct the record.

In your latest article, Mr. Forbes writes that the Office of National
Drug Control Policy requested the Sporting News to assign a specific
reporter to write stories about drugs. This is completely false.
Through hearsay, Mr. Forbes attributes this statement to the editor of
the Sporting News, Mr. John Rawlings. However, Mr. Forbes never spoke
with Mr. Rawlings to confirm this allegation. Had he taken this most
basic reporting step he would have found out that ONDCP did no such
thing. I have attached an email from Mr. Rawlings that provides for
the record that Mr. Forbes' reporting is false.

Mr. Forbes directly quotes Mr. Rich Vietri, an employee of an ONDCP
contractor, in his article. His article gives the false impression
that Mr. Forbes interviewed Mr. Vietri in preparing the article (e.g.:
"Vietri noted"; "according to Vietri"; "Vietri stated last year";
"Vietri confirms"). In fact, Mr. Vietri has never knowingly spoken
with Mr. Forbes or any other reporter about the program. Unless Mr.
Forbes interviewed Mr. Vietri under false pretenses, his technique is
a deliberate effort to mislead Salon's readers in order to give his
reporting credibility.

Mr. Forbes further argues "that the U.S. government is using taxpayer
money to, in effect, reward publications whose editorial content
matches the government's views on drugs." This is also false. A
particular magazine's editorial bent on any given issue has no role in
the Campaign's decision as to whether to advertise in that magazine.
Such decisions are based upon the ability of any given magazine to
effectively reach our target audiences (youth and adult youth
mentors). The specific criteria for the purchase of ad space are
guided by the professional standards and practices of the advertising
business. Additionally, such advertising decisions are not made by the
government. They are made by advertising agencies that are experts in
the field, without government interference.

Mr. Forbes refers to ONDCP as a "law enforcement agency." This is
inaccurate. As a matter of fact, ONDCP is a policy coordinating
office. ONDCP has no operational law enforcement statutory authority.

Mr. Forbes reports that the magazine Seventeen has been credited
$70,000 by the Youth Campaign for published content. Here again, Mr.
Forbes is wrong. Seventeen has submitted content for credit. However,
as of this date, no decision has been made on these
submissions.

Salon reports that " ... Family Circle snared the drug control
office's second-highest magazine buy: $1,425,000 last year." In fact,
between June 1998 and July 1999, the Campaign has bought only $526,138
in advertising from Family Circle. Salon's reporting is off by roughly
three-fold or approximately $1 million.

Mr. Forbes' description of USA Weekend's efforts confuses a paid
insert or advertorial (which will clearly indicate ONDCP's
sponsorship) with editorial content submitted for match purposes.

In what he describes as "an unusual example," Mr. Forbes writes that USA
Weekend "submitted paragraphs culled from four different articles in an
attempt to cobble together enough government-endorsed column inches to
physically add up to one full page." This is false. In fact, USA Weekend
has only submitted two full stories for possible match credit: "Tackling
Tough Topics with Kids," December 3, 1999, and "Mackenzie Phillips: One Day
at a Time," August 13, 1999.

Mr. Forbes also writes that: "When Congress appropriated nearly $1
billion for the anti-drug program in late 1997, it added the
stipulation that the drug-control office get all of its advertising at
a 50 percent discount." Again, he is wrong. The statutory requirement
is not a 50 percent discount on ads. The requirement is that for every
public dollar spent, we must get an equal dollar's value of public
service, which may or may not be ads. In fact, we often buy ads at
full market price and receive other forms of public service, such as
content, as the public service match. Further, the use of content and
other outreach tools by the Campaign was specifically authorized by
the Congress. Moreover, the statutory "match" requirement was
established in 1998 as part of ONDCP's reauthorization not the
Campaign's 1997 appropriation.

That Salon would twice publish error-laced articles by Mr. Forbes
calls into question Salon's journalistic standards. In this latest
article Mr. Forbes describes arrangements with six magazines; his
description of each contains substantial factual errors.

While no one is above imperfection, it is troubling that so many
important factual errors slipped unnoticed through Salon's editorial
process. Let me underscore, I have not raised for you judgement calls,
but only obvious errors -- calling something reported on the front
page of the L.A. Times secret, misrepresenting public laws,
attributing a statement to a person without ever checking with the
purported source, and the like. Since these clear errors have now made
it into your publication, we must ask that you now without delay
correct each of these errors for your readership.

Thank you for your review of this situation. I look forward to your
reply.

Sincerely,
Robert Housman
Assistant Director, Strategic Planning
The White House

Daniel Forbes responds:

While I thank Robert Housman for taking the time to write, I wish he
and other officials of the public agency that pays his salary had made
themselves available for interviews before my most recent story was
published. In any case, I'm happy to address the points in his letter.

1. For the record, the word "secretly" appears in a headline to
Salon's original story of Jan. 13, which detailed the drug office's
involvement with the TV networks. The body of that story uses the word
"hidden." The March 31 story, about the drug office and a half-dozen
publications, does not use either word. Neither the House nor the
Senate Appropriations Subcommittee chairmen knew of the financial quid
pro quos operating in television. I spoke to some 20 senior Hollywood
creative executives. Of that number, only one said she had any
awareness of the drug office's financial incentives applying to the
shows they were creating. It was also news to the editors of the New
York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post and the Chicago
Tribune, all of whom placed news of the arrangement on their front
pages the day after our original story appeared.

2. As for the drug office's having requested a specific reporter for
the Sporting News, my source, identified by name in the story, was the
reporter in question.

3. I called Ogilvy & Mather's Rich Vietri in June, 1999 and identified
myself as Daniel Forbes, a reporter doing a story on the drug office's
paid-media campaign under formal assignment for MediaWeek magazine.
(The story was ultimately published in Salon.) I had just interviewed
a colleague of Vietri's, and told him I had done so. The colleague
referred me to Vietri as the individual with the most expertise on the
magazine component of the campaign. We had a 10-minute, on-the-record
interview for which I have the notes.

4. In regard to the drug office's rewarding certain publications that
adhered to the government's viewpoint, here again my reporting was
well-sourced. I quote a senior participant saying, "Anyone without the
right editorial environment wouldn't even have gotten approached." And
I quote a second participant describing how magazines competing for
ONDCP ad dollars would boast of their anti-drug editorial content to
the ad agency making the selections.

5. According to the agency's own budget summary, well over half of the
drug office's financial disbursements go for law enforcement and
interdiction efforts and have done so throughout the 1990s.

6. I reported that Seventeen received more than $140,000 in
drug-office ad money in 1999. I quote the Seventeen sales executive,
Jackie O'Hare, and her understanding at the time of the interview that
the Web site content was to be valued at $70,000. If the drug office
had agreed to speak with me before the article's publication, I could
have confirmed whether the valuation had been completed.

7. The Family Circle point is a crude sleight of hand. Housman's
figure is, as he notes, from June 1998 to July 1999. My figure,
supplied by Competitive Media Reporting, referred to the calendar year
of 1999, as the story made clear. CMR confirms the 1999 total as $1,425,000.

8. In regard to USA Weekend culling paragraphs, my source was sales
executive Lisa Helbraun in an on-the-record interview, as the story
stated.

9. Housman disputes my characterization of the office's paid media
buys with the phrase "50 percent discount." In both stories, I
explained clearly and at length the circumstances of the office's
arrangements with the networks and periodicals. Indeed, the
arrangement is further described in the sentence following the one he
quoted. Finally, while the statutory language Hausman refers to may
have been added in 1998, Congress in passing the initial legislation
in 1997 always intended to require the media discount. Salon quoted
Congressional staffers to that effect in January.

I will look forward talking with Robert Housman about this non-secret,
non-hidden government program in the future.

- -- Daniel Forbes