Saturday, January 22, 2005

21 Fleet Street

Jason Leopold, the former Dow Jones Newswires reporter and recent contributor to alternative news sites (including Press Action), tells the New York Post there’s talk about Johnny Depp possibly starring in a film based on his soon-to-be-released book, “Off The Record: An Investigative Journalist’s Inside View Of Dirty Politics, High Finance, And Corporate Scandal.”

Richard Johnson, the Murdoch paper’s Page Six reporter, writes:

”He says his reps at Creative Artists Agency are trying to turn his book into a movie or TV series. ‘The talk is that Johnny Depp is pursuing it as a producer or maybe starring in the film, but some people are saying it might be better as a TV series,’ he told us. ‘Sort of like Michael Chicklis in ‘The Shield.’ Sort of like an anti-hero.’”

In 2002, Leopold gained some acclaim and notoriety, before the Jayson Blair fiasco at the New York Times, when Salon.com issued a correction noting, according to its research, seven paragraphs in a Leopold story about former Enron executive and then-Army Secretary Thomas White were taken from a Financial Times article.

Salon then pulled Leopold’s article from its site, saying that, “we have been unable to independently confirm the authenticity of an e-mail from former Enron executive and current Army Secretary Thomas White that was quoted in the article.”

In his article, Leopold reported that several emails were sent to White in 2000 and early 2001 by former executives of Enron Energy Services, a subsidiary of Enron Corp. for which White served as co-chairman, warning him that EES was losing cash on many of the division’s energy contracts. “Close a bigger deal. Hide the loss before the 1Q,” one email response from White to an Enron underling read, according to Leopold.

Leopold, I assume, covers this life event as well as felony convictions and cocaine addictions in Off the Record. In a blurb for the book, best-selling author Greg Palast writes:

"I love this book. I love Jason Leopold. When other US reporters were licking Ken Lay’s loafers, Leopold went for Enron’s thieving throat. But Leopold is a fool, and a fascinating readable one at that: a journalist who insists on real investigative reporting—inside documents, inside sources, hard knife-in-the-gut evidence—detective-style reporting that is just about illegal in the USA. In “Off The Record,” you’ll get a hard-core story of a true investigative journalist hunted down and professionally exterminated, a hero cut down by the lazy fat pricks we call ‘mainstream reporters.’ The book is worth the price just for exposing the craven toadies of the New York Times who open their pages to White House hatchet jobs against offending reporters. Bravo and my personal Pulitzer to Jason Leopold. Every journalist in America should read this, then quit or riot."

In a note, Leopold reminds me that in the story he wrote when the Salon fiasco hit, he explained how he had credited the FT three times in his piece on White. “So there was attribution. However, I did not credit them enough,” Leopold says. “I should have credited them two more times. If you look at the original piece you will see the attribution. Then I said that only an idiot would credit a story and try to pass off the same story as his own work. I was stupid but not that stupid. Why Salon chose to brand me a plagiarist is still mystifying to me.”

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