She exposed a welfare fraud scandal, now she risks going to jail | The Excerpt

On a special episode (first released on September 12, 2024) of The Excerpt podcast: In 2023, Mississippi Today reporter Anna Wolfe was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for reporting that exposed how former Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant used his office to steer millions of dollars from a welfare fund to his family and friends, including former NFL quarterback Brett Favre. In response, the former governor sued her for defamation. Wolfe now risks jail time for refusing to reveal her sources for the story. Could this lawsuit be a warning to other reporters who might not be able to afford a good lawyer? Kelly McBride, Senior Vice President and Chair of Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership at the Poynter Institute, a global non-profit focused on strengthening democracy through journalism, joins The Excerpt to discuss the impact of the case on local journalism.

Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

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Dana Taylor:

Hello and welcome to The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Thursday, September 12th, 2024, and this is a special episode of The Excerpt. In 2023, Mississippi Today reporter, Anna Wolfe was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for reporting that exposed how a former Mississippi governor used his office to steer millions of dollars from a welfare fund to his family and friends, including former NFL quarterback, Brett Favre. Pulitzer is the most prestigious award in American journalism. She now risks jail time for refusing to reveal her sources for the story. Being able to protect the confidentiality of sources can be critical to a reporter's ability to provide the public with information they both need and deserve to know. Here to discuss the impact of this case on local journalism is Kelly McBride, senior vice president and chair of Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership at the Poynter Institute. Thanks for being on The Excerpt, Kelly.

Kelly McBride:

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Dana Taylor:

Let's begin with the series of stories written by Anna Wolfe. She discovered that the state of Mississippi was rejecting more than 90% of welfare applicants. That discovery led to her award-winning reporting on Mississippi's welfare fraud scandal. What were some of the key components of that story and Anna's ability to tell it?

Kelly McBride:

She was able to show that the people who needed help were really not able to access it. They were being rejected, and then she was able to follow the money and she found a series of documents and other information that demonstrated that that money was going to projects and to people who were not necessarily doing what the money was intended for it to do. The key to her reporting was, one, she really cared about the people that deserved the help and weren't getting it. And then she also was deeply sourced. She was able to find people who could point her in the direction of different documents.

She was able to learn the names of certain documents that she could request, that she could [inaudible 00:02:27]. Ultimately, that story was so successful because she connected the dots. She was able to, in a narrative fashion, describe the need and then the actual names of people who had taken this money away from the people who deserved it. And so it was a really great series of accountability journalism, and it's the kind of journalism that is becoming more and more rare in the United States because local journalism is just becoming so economically thin and not really viable that it's really exceptional to see great reporting on a local and state level.

Dana Taylor:

She's now facing a defamation suit by former governor Phil Bryant. His attorney told NBC News that lawsuit is not about punishing good reporting. What are your thoughts there and how is it that libel is the law being used here when the former governor is clearly a public figure?

Kelly McBride:

In our country anybody can sue anybody and people sue journalists often, and it's going to cost Mississippi Today a fair amount of money to hire the lawyers to defend this lawsuit. And in this particular case, when someone says that they're not trying to punish good journalism, but they're suing a reporter and they are a public official, unless they're alleging that the reporter got the facts wrong, that's libel. Defamation just means you made me look bad. And so when somebody is simply alleging that you made me look bad, it's hard to see if that person is a public official, how that's not punitive. He says it's not punitive, but for a public official to claim that it's inappropriate for a journalist to hold that person accountable for their actions if it makes them look bad, that seems antithetical to public service in a democracy.

Dana Taylor:

Both Anna and her editor, Adam Ganucheau, have refused to reveal their confidential sources despite a court order requiring them to do so. They've appealed that decision. How does this case compare to other well-known cases where journalists refuse to reveal their sources?

Kelly McBride:

When you are a journalist and you agree to protect your source, you have to stand by that. And there are many, many cases where journalists have refused to reveal their sources, and the courts have upheld that they absolutely have that right. And normally a court will only try and compel a journalist to reveal their source when there is some sort of immediate danger, like a national security danger or some sort of ongoing corruption that threatens public safety. And so this case doesn't seem like it meets that threshold. Many of us in the journalism community are watching it and really hoping that that ruling is overturned by a higher court.

Dana Taylor:

The total theft here was $77 million. Neither the governor nor anyone else in the state payroll involved in the scandal has been sentenced to jail time. What's the message here when only journalists telling the story face jail time?

Kelly McBride:

Part of the message is is that it's very, very hard to hold public officials accountable whether they are elected or appointed. When you work for the government, there should be a higher standard of accountability, and yet it seems like it's very hard to hold the bureaucracy accountable. And what journalism does is try and bring that level of accountability at least by telling the truth. It's up to prosecutors and other law enforcement people to figure out if crimes have been committed and if someone should be prosecuted. And if all of those systems are either corrupt or bankrupt or incompetent, then that doesn't happen. And as journalists you can't do anything about that except keep telling the story.

Dana Taylor:

The number of local news outlets that are still in business continues to decline. According to researchers at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University of the 3,143 counties in the US, more than half have either no local news source or only one remaining outlet, which is typically a weekly newspaper. How does reporting, particularly with stories like Anna Wolfe's, speak to the importance of local news?

Kelly McBride:

Investigative reporting is really important for holding officials accountable and holding powerful people accountable. But local reporting goes beyond just investigative reporting. If you want to know what your school board is doing or what your hospital board is doing, you need journalists explaining how changes are being implemented and how that affects everybody in a community. And without that, we become less democratic as a nation. So all of that, what you said about journalism is true. It's become smaller and thinner, but there are places like Mississippi Today, which is a startup, a nonprofit organization recently founded to fill in the gaps. There are many, many others across the country that are doing really fine work, and there's also a cadre of other kinds of journalism that is expanding. So public radio journalism is expanding.

Many local public radio stations have hired more reporters, and that's a form of nonprofit journalism too. And so you want to figure out, as a news consumer, how you're going to support the good local journalism, and it might mean contributing to your public media station or donating to the local nonprofit in your state that covers the state government. Or it might mean helping your community start its own nonprofit news organization. So it is really important for citizens to understand that good local news doesn't come free, that somebody's going to pay for it, and actually, I mean, somebody's going to pay for it if it's bad local news too, it's probably you. So just understanding that whole ecosystem is critical.

Dana Taylor:

Anna Wolfe reporting also centered on Brett Favre. He recently asked an appeals court to reinstate a defamation lawsuit against Shannon Sharpe, a Fox Sports host for comments Sharpe made about the steering of welfare funds. Without speaking to the merit or lack of merit of Favre's case what are the implications here in terms of the ability of others to publicly discuss their opinions about stories like the Mississippi fraud case?

Kelly McBride:

When you see very powerful people suing journalists for defamation, for simply stating their opinion or describing their interpretation of a set of facts, those defamation suits are meant to chill criticism. They're meant to intimidate other people into silence. And so in addition to the person named in the lawsuit, what those types of lawsuits are really meant to do is to keep people with less power from critiquing or analyzing people with more power. I personally find that frightening.

Dana Taylor:

Do you expect that the threat of jail time hanging over Anna and her editor Adam, will have a chilling effect on journalism overall? How does a case like this impact a reporter's ability to go after a story?

Kelly McBride:

So most journalists know when they publish information attributed to an anonymous source that they're taking a risk. A lot of times that risk comes when somebody sues you, and the judge tries to compel you to reveal what your sources are. Most journalists, when they work with their sources, try and balance the risk to the source in revealing the information versus the gain that the public stands to achieve by knowing the information, and a lot of journalists understand that that risk is part of the job. It's rare that a judge would go this far and compel you. Most of the time, judges will recognize that the case law that has evolved in response to libel and defamation in the United States, which all comes under the First Amendment, that that case law protects journalists.

But in a case like this where it's simply defamation, you hurt my reputation and so now I want to know where you got your information. A lot of journalists recognize that that may be the price of doing business. It's a really high price, but it's a six-month sentence in most cases because it becomes a contempt of court and contempt of court usually lasts for six months. It's a game of nerves. Who's going to back down first? But journalists are pretty passionate about the work that they do, and so I think most of them recognize that this comes with the territory.

Dana Taylor:

It's been more than two years now since Anna Wolfe's last piece in the Mississippi fraud series was published. What lessons can we learn about safeguarding journalists and the public's right to information?

Kelly McBride:

There has been a concerted effort to try and undermine the protections that journalists have, and it's come from many, many levels. More conservative judicial districts are definitely where you see many of these lawsuits happening. So one of the lessons is, if you are a journalist and you live in one of the more conservative judicial districts, you probably want to make sure you've got really good legal representation because you're more likely to face this type of attack. If you're a citizen and you're interested in making sure that local journalism can continue to hold your government officials accountable, then you probably want to make sure that you are supporting local journalism that does that work, and that you're doing it both publicly by stating that you support it, and by figuring out a way to support the economic engine that drives that kind of journalism.

Dana Taylor:

Kelly, thank you so much for joining me on The Excerpt.

Kelly McBride:

Thanks for having me.

Dana Taylor:

Thanks to our senior producer Shannon Rae Green for production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to [email protected]. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.