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CNN Newsnight Aaron Brown

Iraqi Government Pushes Ahead With Elections; U.S. Supreme Court Takes Up Issue of Medical Marijuana

Aired November 29, 2004 - 22:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.


AARON BROWN, HOST: Good evening, again, everyone.
So you believe in freedom. How much freedom do you believe in? Do you believe, for example, that people in the state of Montana should be able to decide that some sick people in that state should smoke pot if they want? Not sell pot to kids, not take it to Wyoming and smoke it. Just sit there in Helena, Montana, and smoke pot.

Eleven states have decided by vote, democracy, that certain ill people should be allowed to use marijuana. They don't make anyone smoke it. They just say if you have certain illnesses, and your doctor agrees, you may smoke it.

The federal government went before the U.S. Supreme Court today to argue that the people in those states, people who voted on this, those people don't have that right, that freedom.

This isn't really about pot. It isn't, really. It's about freedom. How much do we have, or should we have in a free society, and whether we believe it when we say that the era of big government is over.

We'll spend some time on that question tonight.

But the whip begins, as it often does these days, in Iraq, where freedom still seems a long way off for many.

CNN's Jane Arraf starts us off with a headline.

JANE ARRAF, CNN BAGHDAD BUREAU CHIEF: Aaron, the Iraqi government is pushing ahead with elections in January. But security in the country's raising questions about whether people will be safe to vote, and who they'll vote for.

And here in Falluja, this city, it is a deserted of locked doors, continues to give up its secrets, Aaron.

BROWN: Jane, thank you. We'll get to you at the top tonight.

As we said, the U.S. Supreme Court took up the issue of medical marijuana today.

Bob Franken covered the hearings. So Bob, a headline.

BOB FRANKEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Aaron, the arguments before the Supreme Court were not about the merits of legalizing marijuana for medical use, but about the states' rights to do so.

BROWN: Bob, thank you.

Beyond the legal issue of who should control access to marijuana, there is another debate, one that is strictly medical. Does pot actually help sick people feel better?

CNN's Elizabeth Cohen in Atlanta tonight. Elizabeth, a headline.

ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Aaron, some sick people say that marijuana really does make them healthier. We'll look at the science behind that claim.

BROWN: Elizabeth, thank you. We'll get back to you and the rest shortly.

Also coming up on this Monday night, in the deep South, a vote on segregation reopens old wounds and raises new questions about progress made.

Also, they say beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Where others saw trash, one Seattle photographer saw art.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CHRIS JORDAN, PHOTOGRAPHER: To me, this cacophony of color reminded me of a Monet pointing when I saw it from a ways back. And the more I looked at it, the more I realized I made this kind of macabre portrait of America.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROWN: What our garbage says about us. The pictures tell a terrific story.

And at the end of the hour, not garbage, not at all, morning papers wraps it up, as it always does.

All that and more in the hour ahead.

We begin where we have so often for more than a year and a half now, in Iraq. There is, of course, no pause button in this story. It doesn't stop unfolding on the weekends when we're off.

And so we pick up tonight in many respects where we left off on Friday, the last several days bringing more reasons to wonder where things are heading, how far there is to go.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN (voice-over): Today's death came from another suicide attack on an Iraqi police station, similar to an attack yesterday, where a car surged into a crowd of police in Ramadi waiting outside their police station. A dozen died in that incident, 10 others hurt.

Both incidents beg a difficult question about the reliance on Iraqi security.

JOHN HENDREN, PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT, "LOS ANGELES TIMES": In Ramadi, where I just was, I was told by military commanders there that the national guard is basically ineffective because they're under so much threat to their families in a very tightly knit tribal area. So they're going to have to import national guard troops, Iraqi national guard troops, from elsewhere.

BROWN: Elections are now just two months away. IN Iraq itself, especially among the Sunni minority, there are growing calls for a delay until security is better and Sunnis can freely vote.

But preparations continue where they can, and Washington is not giving up, at least not yet.

COLIN POWELL, SECRETARY OF STATE: We're working hard on it. The U.N. has increased its presence. There are thousands of Iraqis who are working on registration and getting ready for the elections.

BROWN: And insurgents are doing what they can to disrupt those legislations. A small example, voter registration cards delivered to this bakery -- or what was this bakery.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through translator): When we got the registration cards, our problems began. They kidnapped one storekeeper, and one or two more shops were burned. They're saboteurs and want no stability for the country.

BROWN: In Mosul, American soldiers continue to find Iraqi bodies, 40 in the past week or so, most shot execution-style. And to the south, in Falluja, more and more weapons are being discovered. Officials at the Pentagon saying troops have found at least 650 homemade bombs in the past three weeks.

This, as the U.S. military says, it will extend the stay of about 6,500 American soldiers in order to increase the American presence for the January elections.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: And two more Americans died in Iraq today. A hundred and thirty have died this month, a month not quite over, the second- deadliest month of the war.

The hundreds of bombs found in Iraq in the past few weeks are one measure of how much work and how much danger lies ahead. They're also a measure of what, until now, was the unseen threat that U.S. troops factored into the battle plan.

Now, the extent and the shape of the threat is emerging, house by house, search by search.

From Falluja, CNN's Jane Arraf.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) ARRAF (voice-over): Like most of the hidden horrors in this city, this one was contained in what looks like an ordinary home. But the rocket and other weapons were an indication something valuable was beneath this roof.

COL. CRAIG TUCKER, 7TH RCT COMMANDER, 1ST MARINE DIVISION: Based on what the evidence we saw in this block of houses, handcuffs, flex cuffs, medical supplies, chains, and small rooms with dirty bedding in them. I'm making an assessment that somebody was kept there. Who that was, we don't know. It was definitely a house that was used to keep people against their will.

ARRAF: This had been a shower room with a lock and chain secured to the tiny window. Marine officials believe it might have had a much more sinister purpose.

An Iraqi detainee, captured by Iraqi security forces, brought the military to this house in Falluja. On the stairs were shackles. In the stairwell...

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: See, this is an area underneath here (UNINTELLIGIBLE) the torture area or the beating area as we described it.

ARRAF: About a mile away, what appeared to be a former school. Intelligence experts are trying to determine if this might be the cage that held British hostage Ken Bigley, later killed.

MAJ. GENERAL. RICHARD NATONSKY, 1ST MARINE DIVISION COMMANDER: We did find a intravenous bag next to it when we first came in the house. Certainly the structure would be used to contain somebody (UNINTELLIGIBLE), you know. There was some evidence of -- you know, it was -- had been occupied by humans. Scraps of food, and the IV bag.

ARRAF: The intravenous dextrose bag was found here. Although the cage had been described as identical to one shown in a video of Bigley, Tucker cautioned that the similarity wasn't conclusive.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We spent a lot of time studying it. It's hard to tell.

ARRAF: As Marines search every building in this city, they're making chilling discoveries. The 1st Division commanding general tells us they've uncovered more than 500 weapons finds, some of them suspected of being the makings of chemical weapons.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We found -- and I've been in one of them. But I know we found at least two or three chemical caches. In terms of a take, I know cyanide was part of it. Glycerin was a part of some of the chemicals there.

ARRAF: This house in the southeast of Falluja contained a chemical laboratory. Most of the chemicals have been removed. But when these officials first came here, it was well stocked. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hydrolic acid, sulfur acid. And then in the table here, you can find (UNINTELLIGIBLE) and different kinds of acids.

ARRAF: In between the clothing on the floor, gas masks. There are still documents lying here.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There are more artillery firing tables. So it's telling you range and deflections for different distances.

ARRAF: There are entire neighborhoods in Falluja still unsearched. As the Marines continue to go house to house, they'll piece together more of what may have happened here those many months behind these locked doors.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ARRAF: And the city is awash in conventional weapons as well. As Marines go through, officials tell us that they have found what they consider more than 500 major weapons finds in this city of 200,000 people, which means, until they clear those up, they're not encouraging civilians to come back anytime soon, Aaron.

BROWN: Want to go back to the chemicals. Are we talking about a lot? And sometimes when you're talking about chemical weapons, a very little can be a lot. And are we talking about the kinds of things that can be weaponized?

ARRAF: As you know, Aaron, and as Saddam Hussein found out, it is extremely difficult to weaponize chemical weapons. But what they believe, their best guess, based on the information they have now, and they are still going through reams and reams of documents and other evidence, is that an attempt was likely made to make weapons out of these chemicals.

When we asked about it, we were told there was seemingly no other purpose that you would have a room full of those chemicals with beakers, and instructions. We saw one book that had in it instructions for making poisons. There was another one that talked about how to fire various weapons.

It does seem to have been a base, the one we saw, that was held by the insurgents. And although it is impossible to say that they were trying to make chemical weapons or impossible at this stage to say how far they might have got, officials believe it was an attempt, Aaron.

BROWN: Jane, thank you. Jane Arraf in Falluja tonight.

As we mentioned at the top of the program, the U.S. Supreme Court took up the question of medical marijuana today, hearing arguments that could leave intact or invalidate the votes of people in 11 mostly Western states. The court has already ruled against so-called growing clubs. But this case centered more on the individual. What right does the individual have to grow and use marijuana when ill?

Covering the court, CNN's Bob Franken.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

FRANKEN: For Angel Raich, it's not about the sweeping issues her case places before the justices. For her, it's her brain tumor, and what she says is her need for help from marijuana.

ANGEL RAICH, MEDICAL MARIJUANA USER: I need to use cannabis every two hours. If I don't medicate every two hours, I become debilitated.

ARRAF: Her home state of California is one of 11 that permit private use of marijuana for medical purposes. But federal law prohibits virtually any use.

So the Supreme Court was again hearing arguments over the constitutional power of the federal government to override state laws. Was the medical, individual use of home-grown marijuana interstate commerce?

Yes, said Paul Clement, the administration's acting solicitor general, because the garden patch weed would affect overall production.

Randy Barnett, who argued the other side, called any connection hypothetical, since it's privately grown, not bought or sold. Many argue there's little evidence that marijuana has medical value.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It's a handful of people who want to see not just marijuana, but all drugs legalized.

ARRAF: Inside, the justices peppered both sides. Ginsburg, Nobody is buying anything, nobody is selling anything. But Justice Breyer argued a preference for medicine by regulation as opposed to medicine by referendum.

The referendum in these cases involves the nine Supreme Court justices, including, we're told, Chief Justice Rehnquist, who was not present again today, as he fights his own medical afflictions.

Bob Franken, CNN, Washington.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Later in the program, we return to the question of medical marijuana, several facets of the debate, starting with the purely medical. Does pot actually help people feel better? How solid is the research?

And beyond medical debate, the culture war. Why has the issue become such a big deal in the country? We'll talk with Dr. Andrew Weil about that.

And also, what role, if any, should the FDA play in all of that?

All that coming up later in the hour. One other note from the Supreme Court before we go to break. The justices today rejected a challenge to the country's only law allowing gay marriage. They'd been asked by conservative groups to overturn the decision by the supreme court in Massachusetts which legalized same-sex marriages. The justices declined without comment.

Ahead on the program tonight, in the deep South, a vote concerning segregation results in a recount and raises difficult questions.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CHARLES STEELE, SOUTHERN CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE: I love Alabama. There are a lot of good people in Alabama. But it seems as though we still have some work to do.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROWN: Half a century after segregation was ruled unconstitutional, how much past is in the present?

Also ahead, the anatomy of a bruised reputation. How "The New York Times" was duped by one of its youngest reporters, but it's more than just that. We'll talk to the author who went five behind the scenes to reconstruct the mess.

We'll take a break first from New York.

This is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Here are a few headlines from the day.

Officials in Colorado say the body of Teddy Ebersol has been found. He's the 14-year-old son of NBC Sports chairman, one of the great TV innovators, Dick Ebersol. Mr. Ebersol and his two sons were in a chartered plane that crashed on takeoff from an airport in Montrose, in Colorado. Ebersol and his son Charles, survived, Teddy did not. Two crew members also died. A flight attendant remains in critical condition. Officials are not saying how badly Dick Ebersol and his sons were hurt.

The NTSB, of course, is investigating.

A Black Hawk helicopter went down in heavy fog about 30 miles northeast of Fort Hood, Texas, today. Seven soldiers were killed. Officials say the chopper was headed to a maintenance facility in Texarkana when it hit a TV transmission wire. Station officials say the warning lights on the TV tower had been out since a storm last week.

And the Laotian immigrant who allegedly shot and killed six deer hunters in Wisconsin has now been charged with six counts of first- degree murder. Police say Chai Vang went on a shooting rampage last Sunday. He claims the victims provoked him, fired first, shouted racial slurs.

There are some things you would think are pretty simple, and here's one of them. There's a clause in the Alabama state constitution that says there should be "separate schools for white children and colored children." That's their language, not ours.

Removing that language was on the ballot earlier this month, and it may surprise you to learn that Alabama decided, though just barely, to leave the language in the constitution. There's a recount under way tonight.

In any case, the people who argue in favor of keeping the language say it isn't about race at all. It's about taxes.

Here's CNN's Bruce Morton.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BRUCE MORTON, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Nineteen sixty- three, Alabama Governor George Wallace stands in a schoolhouse door and says his state schools will stay segregated. Just pretend, of course. Federalized troops were there. Black students enrolled in the University of Alabama as everyone knew they would.

And yet, on November 2 this year, 50 years after the Supreme Court said separate was unequal, Alabama voters voted against repealing that part of their state's constitution, which requires separate schools for whites and colored children.

If you're old enough, you remember all the marches, all the demonstrations, Alabama police beating marchers at the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, Alabama, the church bombing that killed four little black girls in Birmingham, Alabama, all the rest of it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And we'll keep marching and marching and marching until one day, you'll look around, and we'll all be marching together.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MORTON: Well, not all together, not yet. Congress passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Segregated schools are illegal. Federal law overrides the Alabama constitution.

But they did vote against repeal. Some who did say they were objecting to repealing a section that says Alabama does not guarantee anyone the right to a public education, arguing that could mean higher taxes.

JOHN GILES, PRESIDENT, CHRISTIAN COALITION OF ALABAMA: This is very dangerous, lethal, fuzzy-code legal language that can open up the door, anything from raising of taxes all the way to penetrating the veil of the quality of education for private, parochial, Christian, and home schoolers. MORTON: Roy Moore, the former chief justice who lost his job for refusing to remove a Ten Commandments monument from the rotunda of the state supreme court, campaigned against the amendment. So did Tom Parker, elected to the court, who campaigned with little Confederate flags.

Still, it was a close vote.

CHARLES STEELE, SOUTHERN CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE: We feel like we've come a long ways. And I love Alabama. There are a lot of good people in Alabama. But it seems as though we still have some work to do.

MORTON: The late Mississippi novelist William Faulkner said of his region, "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past."

Maybe.

Bruce Morton, CNN, Washington.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Coming up on NEWSNIGHT tonight, medicine and marijuana, the medical part of the debate. Does pot actually help sick people? What the science shows.

And after that, beyond the medicine to the cultural, the beliefs that shape our views on marijuana and the debate over its use.

A break first around the world.

This is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Back now to the debate on medical marijuana. The court argument today centered less on medicine than on economics. A court ruling back in the '40s said that wheat grown for personal use could be regulated by the federal government because it impacted the overall price of wheat at the market, that one person growing wheat in his back yard bought less.

If that principle holds, the court will likely strike down state laws that deal with medical marijuana.

But what of the science, the claims that it helps some people eat better or feel better in ways that other legal prescription drugs cannot?

From Atlanta tonight, CNN medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

COHEN (voice-over): Does marijuana really help sick people feel better? Or is it just that they feel better because they're high? Medical researchers have been asking that question for years, and here's what they've come up with. Marijuana has an effect on several centers of the brain. For example, there are receptors to a chemical in marijuana in the hypothalamus, which controls appetite, important for AIDS and cancer patients who are wasting away.

DR. GLEN HANSON, UNIVERSITY OF UTAH: Oftentimes, it's hard to get these people to eat. If you stimulate the cannabinoid receptors, then you can bring the appetite back, and they will eat. And obviously that's a good thing.

COHEN: There are also cannabinoid receptors in the brainstem, which deals with pain.

HANSON: For some types of pain it may reduce that pain.

COHEN: But Dr. Hanson, a pharmacologist and senior adviser to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, says there aren't enough good studies to determine whether marijuana is better than other drugs for pain or loss of appetite, other drugs that wouldn't have bad side effects such as decreased blood flow to the brain, memory problems, and infertility. He believes that only rarely is pot the only option.

HANSON: Under those cases, almost humanitarian cases, I would say it's better to use the marijuana than to make or allow a patient to suffer.

COHEN: The American Medical Association has called for more studies. And in the meantime, many scientists want drug companies to make a medicine with the effects of THC, the chemical that's medically useful in marijuana, without the bad side effects.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

COHEN: Now, there is a prescription drug called marinol, which is made to have the good affects of marijuana without having any of those bad side effects. But some scientists will tell you that it doesn't get into the body as effectively because it's a pill and not inhaled, Aaron.

BROWN: And is that -- the why not -- this will be stupid, I suppose, but why not make marinol in a form that you could inhale it, make it as a mist or something?

COHEN: Well, that's exactly what scientists are trying to do. They're trying to make a drug that would mimic the good effects of marijuana and could be inhaled, that wouldn't be a pill. But, you know, that's not easy to do. That's something that they're working on.

BROWN: Elizabeth, thank you very much. Elizabeth Cohen in Atlanta tonight.

Even though it's illegal, to some doctors medical marijuana falls under the category of alternative medicine. While some people say alternative medicine is the best way to go in looking for a cure, others say it's more in the realm of witch doctors. So are the two ends of this argument.

We're joined from Houston -- from Tucson, Arizona, rather, by bestselling author Dr. Andrew Weil.

It's nice to see you, sir.

You'd agree, I think, that smoking marijuana, for sick people, isn't a perfect way to go. There are downsides to it. Is the argument that it's just better in some respects than anything else that's out there?

DR. ANDREW WEIL, AUTHOR: Well, first of all, marijuana is probably the least toxic drug known to medicine. So that alone recommends it for trying to find ways to use it.

And for many of these conditions, like stimulating appetite, for example, we really don't have drugs and medicine that work for that condition. And the drugs that we have for many of the other uses that people like marijuana are much more toxic.

So that's certainly in favor of marijuana. Obviously, it's not ideal to have patients taking any medication by smoking. There is, by the way, a preparation of whole marijuana being developed in England called Sativex (ph) that's a spray that you spray under the tongue. I think that would make it much more medically respectable and more usable by physicians.

BROWN: In a sense, is that what you think needs to happen, that some pharmaceutical company has to come up with some way to make marijuana respectable?

WEIL: Yes. Now, I don't think that means, by the way, making the high go away, because the high -- the effect on mood may be a desirable effect, especially for people with terminal illness. I do, however, think that there needs to be some better way of cleanly distinguishing between medical use and recreational use.

And at the moment, I think that boundary is very blurred.

BROWN: In and of itself, do you believe marijuana is an especially harmful drug?

WEIL: No.

In purely medical terms, physical terms, I think it's one of the least harmful drugs that we know of, and much less harmful than most drugs used in medicine, and much, much less harmful than the recreational drugs that we have made legal in this country, especially alcohol and tobacco.

(CROSSTALK)

WEIL: I think the opposition -- go on.

BROWN: Yes. I was going to say, why do we -- it's interesting to watch other countries, other cultures deal with this, and often deal with it differently from the way we do. Why do we seem to struggle with it so?

WEIL: I think it's because people react to marijuana as a symbol, rather than as a thing in itself.

And marijuana in this society has always been associated with deviant subcultures, originally with black jazz musicians in the South, with Mexican migrant labors. Later, with Bohemians, beatniks, then, in the '60s, hippies, radicals, the counterculture. It's always had associations with deviant subcultures. And I think that's what people react to.

When you listen to what I call fanatical extremist groups, like the Partnership For a Drug-Free America, that reaction is to that aspect of marijuana, the symbolic aspect of it.

BROWN: I think that the Partnership For the Drug-Free America would make an argument -- and it's not a wholly unsupportable argument -- that the last thing the culture needs is one more drug for people to use and abuse.

WEIL: And I would also say that the idea of creating a drug-free America is laughable. We have never been a drug-free America. We never will be. We are awash in drugs, both legal and illegal. It's always going to be that way.

Of the drugs that people use, marijuana I think is one of the least worrisome in medical terms. And I think it's one that has significant medical potential. It would be absolutely silly for us to reject that medical potential. And I really think it's up to the medical profession to decide whether to use this substance and how to use it.

BROWN: Just one more area here. I'm sure you've thought about this. If you go back to the beginning of time, I suspect you would find that in every culture, where they could figure it out, there was some drug, a mushroom, a drink, a plant, whatever, that altered people's feelings. Have you wondered what it is about humans that want that?

WEIL: I have.

In fact, I wrote a book about that in 1972 called "The Natural Mind" which argues that the desire to alter consciousness is something that is basically human. And I think it's connected with our creativity, our desire to know ourselves. I think there's lots of ways you can do that, by the way, not just with drugs. But drugs are very convenient.

BROWN: Nice to talk to you. Thanks for your time tonight.

WEIL: Good to talk to you.

BROWN: Thank you, Dr. Weil.

Still to come on the program, we'll take a look back at the scandal that rocked the gray lady, "The New York Times," and the media, under the microscope.

And speaking of papers, morning papers, not under the microscope, but under the unblinking eye of the NEWSNIGHT rooster.

A break first.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: President Bush today nominated Carlos Gutierrez to be the new secretary of commerce. He's a great story, Mr. Gutierrez, a Cuban-born American, currently the CEO at Kellogg. He started driving a truck for the company back in 1975, selling cereal from a van in Mexico City. At a news conference, the president said Mr. Gutierrez is a perfect example of the American dream.

In other business news tonight, one of the largest makers of jams and jellies says it needs to restructure its business. The JM Smucker Company -- and, you know, with a name like Smucker, you got to be good -- plans to close one of its plants in California, cut other jobs around the country. No word on how many employees will be fired.

Merck, the company that made the arthritis drug Vioxx appears to be getting ready for a takeover, or at least defending against one. It announced plans to give its top executives big bonuses if the company is bought. Merck's stock has been way down since it pulled Vioxx, one of the biggest moneymakers it had in its inventory.

And look for a possible dip in the price of oil. Saudi Arabia reportedly plans to increase production over the next few years from 11 million barrels a day to 12.5 million a day.

And speaking of the day, it was a mixed day on the street. The Dow fell just over 45 points. It was down more than 100 at one point, Nasdaq up under five points. S&P took a slight dip. Dow just over four. It's been so long since I read those.

Ahead on NEWSNIGHT, how one of the most respected newspapers took faith over facts, the behind-the-scenes account of the Jayson Blair scandal, which is much more than Jayson Blair.

That after a break. This is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: It's true that this program loves stories about this business, the business of journalism. Whether it's the influence of bloggers or the importance of retiring network anchors or a good scandal, we report them all. So, how could we resist a book looking at a scandal -- and it was that -- at the country's best and surely most important newspaper, "The New York Times"? The scandal was Jayson Blair. But it turns out the story was much more and, in many respects, much more important than that.

Seth Mnookin, who used to write about the media for "Newsweek", has now written "Hard Times: The Scandals at 'The New York Times' and Their Meaning for American Media." And he joins us tonight. It's nice to meet you. Congratulations on the book.

SETH MNOOKIN, AUTHOR, "HARD TIMES": Thank you very much.

BROWN: Which has been well received.

It's always the Jayson Blair scandal, the Janet Cooke scandal at "The Post," the Jack Kelley at "USA Today."

MNOOKIN: Right.

BROWN: But these stories, all of them, and this story in particular, has other, in some respects, more important characters.

MNOOKIN: Yes.

I thought definitely, in this story, the most important character was Howell Raines, the man who was the executive editor of "The Times" from the period right before September 11 to about a month after the Jayson Blair scandal broke. And the changes that he effected at the paper was what I examined and what I wanted to look at. Some of those changes were very positive.

And, obviously, the paper got a lot of congratulatory plaudits after its September 11 coverage. But, ultimately, I thought that he took the paper in a really dangerous direction. And you saw what happened with Jayson.

BROWN: I want to talk about that. But just, he is a reminder, be careful how you are on the way up, because the road down can be very tough.

MNOOKIN: Right.

BROWN: Well, when he was named the executive editor, he was coming off a stint as the editorial page editor. So he had not been in the newsroom for a good long period of time.

And once he got to the newsroom, he never spent any time getting to know his troops, building a constituency. And, in fact, he spent a fair amount of time alienating people, making it clear that he didn't appreciate dissent in any form. And so when there was this opening, when the Jayson Blair scandal hit, instead of people rallying around him as a leader, the entire staff really took it as a chance to attack him and ultimately force him out.

BROWN: One of the criticisms of Howell that I think is fair is that, when he fell in love with a story, he really fell, whether it was Wen Ho Lee and Los Alamos or Augusta National.

MNOOKIN: Right.

BROWN: Which somehow he turned into a front-page story again and again.

And in doing so, do you think, or do they think, because this is really a reporting story, damage the paper?

MNOOKIN: Absolutely, although I think I want to temper that a little and say that I think the paper is doing great now and has recovered.

But if you look just at the example of Augusta, there was a mini- furor over whether that golf club was going to admit women. And Howell Raines' "New York Times" seemed to decide that that was the most pressing national issue of the day. And they put it on the front page again and again and again. Now, that in itself doesn't seem like that big of a deal.

But "The New York Times"' value and "The New York Times"' place in society has been built on this long legacy of serving as an objective interpreter of the news. And once it appears that they're crusading, as opposed to just reporting on what's going on, it changes the entire tenor, their relationship with their readers.

BROWN: Why is it OK for "The New York Post" to crusade, but "The New York Times" not to crusade?

MNOOKIN: Well, "The New York Post" fills a very different role in our country. It's a tabloid. It's an avowedly right-wing tabloid. It's one that is serving a market that Rupert Murdoch and the News Corporation felt was underserved.

"The New York Times" has become the most important paper in the country by, over a century, presenting itself as objective arbiter of what's going on in the country and the world. So, its identity, its corporate identity, is tied up in something very different than "The New York Post." If "The New York Post" tried to be sober-minded and temperate, people would pick it up and say, what is this? I want my "Page Six." I want Steve Dunleavy.

BROWN: Yes.

But let me throw you one hanging curve here.

MNOOKIN: Please.

(LAUGHTER)

BROWN: Well, of course please. Who wouldn't want a hanging curve?

Let's just assume that someone has a marginal interest in journalism, like they read the paper every day. Why should they read the book?

MNOOKIN: Well, I tried to make the book more like a detective story than like an inside account of what's going on in journalism. And I looked back to books like "All the President's Men," where, obviously, you knew what was going to happen at the end. But I think that the picture of the inner workings of "The Washington Post" and that newsroom were so interesting that the rest of the country, civilians, as us journalists like to call them, got interested. BROWN: Yes.

MNOOKIN: Or you look at the movie "Shattered Glass," which also is able to sustain that kind of excitement. And I think -- I hope that this book does that same thing.

There is today an enormous interest in the workings of the media, but not a lot of comprehension about what's actually going on. And what I tried to do was set up an exciting story that would show people what happened and pull back the page.

BROWN: You did a good job.

MNOOKIN: Thank you very much.

BROWN: Congratulations.

MNOOKIN: Thank you. Thank you.

BROWN: Yes. It's fun. It's a fun read in and out of the -- well, I wouldn't know. I'm in the business.

MNOOKIN: Right.

BROWN: I assume.

(CROSSTALK)

MNOOKIN: So I hear.

BROWN: Well, one aspect of it. Thank you.

Ahead on NEWSNIGHT, the old yard sale motto in pictures. One man's trash is another man's art.

A break first. This is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: When Ansel Adams photographed Yosemite, he caught not only the majesty and the beauty of America's West; he captured a time of innocence, of simplicity. That was then.

Now America is still beautiful, but turn the lens around and it wouldn't be hard to find acres of waste, consumer waste. To one photographer, Chris Jordan, there's a certain majesty in our trash. His current project, shot in Seattle, is called "Intolerable Beauty: Portraits of American Mass Consumption."

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

CHRIS JORDAN, PHOTOGRAPHER: Day to day, we make consumer decisions that feel right to us as individuals. But we never get to see the aggregate.

And so I'm trying to find places where you can see the cumulative result of all of our consumption. And these places are actually the infrastructure of our consumption, in a port where you can see hundreds and thousands of shipping containers.

Mount Rainier is usually photographed Ansel Adams-style, with beautiful blue skies and rivers and meadows and that kind of thing. And, in this case, the lower half of the image is now industrialized. And this is almost like a new horizon.

I use an 8-by-10 view camera, which is considered by most people to be sort of an antique way of photographing. It's made to be used in a studio. And I lug it around out in the field. I'm fascinated by pattern. And one of the things that pattern conveys is scale. Like, 1,000 shipping containers in a row is not only visually interesting and beautiful, but that conveys a scale of our consumption.

To me, evidence of our mass consumption means vast piles of garbage, crushed cars, shredded scrap steel, container ports, rail yards, places where the scale of our consumption is readily visible.

These look like apartment buildings to me. And where I took this image was in a wine distributor. So all of these pallets are used to distribute wine that comes from overseas on containers and gets sent out all over the country.

This is just an impossibly huge mountain of sawdust outside a lumber mill down in Tacoma. It's so huge that it actually has the features of a mountain, has strata. See these strata in here and these sort of erosional features? And this is just sawdust. Think how many trees just went into this sawdust pile.

Consumption is -- it's not something we can see every day. It's not an easy thing to find visible evidence of how much stuff we use. This is the first image I made in my consumerism series. To me, this cacophony of color reminded me of a Monet painting when I saw it from a ways back. And the more I looked at it, the more I realized I had made this kind of macabre portrait of America, because you can read the labels on the cans. And there are products in there that I use.

There's a facility down in Tacoma where they collect cars from five states around and shred them. And I saw this barge moving up the waterway. And the weight of the cars is so much that it actually crushes them into sort of a strata that makes them look like layers of the Grand Canyon.

It isn't the kind of beauty that people generally think of. But, to me, there's a beauty in honesty. And what I'm trying to do is to look honestly at our world.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Chris Jordan.

Morning papers after the break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(ROOSTER CROWING)

BROWN: Okeydoke, time to check morning papers from around the country, around the world.

We will start with "The Stars and Stripes," because we have been. "Flu Vaccine to be Available to Europe Clinics in a Week." So, you might want to get on a flight for Rome if you feel like you're getting the flu. Otherwise, "Should Medical Marijuana Be Legal? Supreme Court Hears California Woman's Case." That's the way "Stars and Stripes" led.

"International Herald Tribune," published by "The New York Times." "Kuchma Proposes New Ukraine Vote. Awaiting Court, Opposition Ignores Call." This is such -- it's a remarkable story that it -- and, well, it's remarkable to see how it plays out, though I have a feeling I know.

"Washington Times." "Bush Names Gutierrez For Commerce." This is a great American story. You have got to set politics aside. This is a pretty good story, too. "Jordan's Brother" -- as in Michael Jordan -- "a Real Role Model, Soldier, a Leader on Iraq Mission." Michael Jordan's older brother, James R. -- I believe it's his older brother -- headed for Iraq.

Look at this picture, OK? This is "The Philadelphia Inquirer." This is an oil spill in Philadelphia, the Philadelphia area. "Deck Heads Goes Here and Here and Here." That's a journalist term. They haven't written a headline. But that's a great picture.

"Cincinnati Enquirer," as opposed to "The Inquirer." "Baby's Parents Face Deportation; 5-Week-Old is a Citizen, But Only If He Could Stay Here." I haven't read this story, but I guarantee you it's one of those stories that will break your heart, no matter what you think of the politics. "School Violence Falling, Incidents Halved in a 10-Year Period Across the Country." That's pretty good news.

Here's pretty bad news thank you.

How we doing? Thank you.

"The Rocky Mountain News." "Grim Aftermath" is the headline. "Investigators Find Body of Ebersol's Son. Crash Witnesses Report Ice on Jet Wing." The plane was not deiced. And all in all, a pretty horrible story.

Let's end it with "The Chicago Sun-Times" for a change. Here's what I like about "The Sun-Times." Give me a host. They got a big super-secret story. They didn't want to blow the headline on us tonight. So you will just have to buy the paper tomorrow and figure it out.

But we can tell you the weather in Chicago tomorrow...

(CHIMES)

BROWN: Thank you -- is "character-building." So is this job sometimes.

We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: A look ahead to tomorrow's "AMERICAN MORNING." Here's Soledad O'Brien.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SOLEDAD O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Thanks, Aaron.

Tomorrow on "AMERICAN MORNING," the jury returns to make the ultimate decision for Scott Peterson. Will it be life in prison or death for murdering his wife and unborn son? The most emotional part of the trial is set to begin, but can any decision stand up to the legal maneuvering still to come? The next chapter in the Peterson case, CNN tomorrow, 7:00 a.m. Eastern -- back to you, Aaron.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROWN: "LOU DOBBS TONIGHT" next for most of you.

Good to have you with us starting a new week. We'll see you tomorrow at 10:00 Eastern time. Until then, good night for all of us at NEWSNIGHT.

TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com


Aired November 29, 2004 - 22:00   ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
AARON BROWN, HOST: Good evening, again, everyone.
So you believe in freedom. How much freedom do you believe in? Do you believe, for example, that people in the state of Montana should be able to decide that some sick people in that state should smoke pot if they want? Not sell pot to kids, not take it to Wyoming and smoke it. Just sit there in Helena, Montana, and smoke pot.

Eleven states have decided by vote, democracy, that certain ill people should be allowed to use marijuana. They don't make anyone smoke it. They just say if you have certain illnesses, and your doctor agrees, you may smoke it.

The federal government went before the U.S. Supreme Court today to argue that the people in those states, people who voted on this, those people don't have that right, that freedom.

This isn't really about pot. It isn't, really. It's about freedom. How much do we have, or should we have in a free society, and whether we believe it when we say that the era of big government is over.

We'll spend some time on that question tonight.

But the whip begins, as it often does these days, in Iraq, where freedom still seems a long way off for many.

CNN's Jane Arraf starts us off with a headline.

JANE ARRAF, CNN BAGHDAD BUREAU CHIEF: Aaron, the Iraqi government is pushing ahead with elections in January. But security in the country's raising questions about whether people will be safe to vote, and who they'll vote for.

And here in Falluja, this city, it is a deserted of locked doors, continues to give up its secrets, Aaron.

BROWN: Jane, thank you. We'll get to you at the top tonight.

As we said, the U.S. Supreme Court took up the issue of medical marijuana today.

Bob Franken covered the hearings. So Bob, a headline.

BOB FRANKEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Aaron, the arguments before the Supreme Court were not about the merits of legalizing marijuana for medical use, but about the states' rights to do so.

BROWN: Bob, thank you.

Beyond the legal issue of who should control access to marijuana, there is another debate, one that is strictly medical. Does pot actually help sick people feel better?

CNN's Elizabeth Cohen in Atlanta tonight. Elizabeth, a headline.

ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Aaron, some sick people say that marijuana really does make them healthier. We'll look at the science behind that claim.

BROWN: Elizabeth, thank you. We'll get back to you and the rest shortly.

Also coming up on this Monday night, in the deep South, a vote on segregation reopens old wounds and raises new questions about progress made.

Also, they say beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Where others saw trash, one Seattle photographer saw art.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CHRIS JORDAN, PHOTOGRAPHER: To me, this cacophony of color reminded me of a Monet pointing when I saw it from a ways back. And the more I looked at it, the more I realized I made this kind of macabre portrait of America.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROWN: What our garbage says about us. The pictures tell a terrific story.

And at the end of the hour, not garbage, not at all, morning papers wraps it up, as it always does.

All that and more in the hour ahead.

We begin where we have so often for more than a year and a half now, in Iraq. There is, of course, no pause button in this story. It doesn't stop unfolding on the weekends when we're off.

And so we pick up tonight in many respects where we left off on Friday, the last several days bringing more reasons to wonder where things are heading, how far there is to go.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN (voice-over): Today's death came from another suicide attack on an Iraqi police station, similar to an attack yesterday, where a car surged into a crowd of police in Ramadi waiting outside their police station. A dozen died in that incident, 10 others hurt.

Both incidents beg a difficult question about the reliance on Iraqi security.

JOHN HENDREN, PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT, "LOS ANGELES TIMES": In Ramadi, where I just was, I was told by military commanders there that the national guard is basically ineffective because they're under so much threat to their families in a very tightly knit tribal area. So they're going to have to import national guard troops, Iraqi national guard troops, from elsewhere.

BROWN: Elections are now just two months away. IN Iraq itself, especially among the Sunni minority, there are growing calls for a delay until security is better and Sunnis can freely vote.

But preparations continue where they can, and Washington is not giving up, at least not yet.

COLIN POWELL, SECRETARY OF STATE: We're working hard on it. The U.N. has increased its presence. There are thousands of Iraqis who are working on registration and getting ready for the elections.

BROWN: And insurgents are doing what they can to disrupt those legislations. A small example, voter registration cards delivered to this bakery -- or what was this bakery.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through translator): When we got the registration cards, our problems began. They kidnapped one storekeeper, and one or two more shops were burned. They're saboteurs and want no stability for the country.

BROWN: In Mosul, American soldiers continue to find Iraqi bodies, 40 in the past week or so, most shot execution-style. And to the south, in Falluja, more and more weapons are being discovered. Officials at the Pentagon saying troops have found at least 650 homemade bombs in the past three weeks.

This, as the U.S. military says, it will extend the stay of about 6,500 American soldiers in order to increase the American presence for the January elections.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: And two more Americans died in Iraq today. A hundred and thirty have died this month, a month not quite over, the second- deadliest month of the war.

The hundreds of bombs found in Iraq in the past few weeks are one measure of how much work and how much danger lies ahead. They're also a measure of what, until now, was the unseen threat that U.S. troops factored into the battle plan.

Now, the extent and the shape of the threat is emerging, house by house, search by search.

From Falluja, CNN's Jane Arraf.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) ARRAF (voice-over): Like most of the hidden horrors in this city, this one was contained in what looks like an ordinary home. But the rocket and other weapons were an indication something valuable was beneath this roof.

COL. CRAIG TUCKER, 7TH RCT COMMANDER, 1ST MARINE DIVISION: Based on what the evidence we saw in this block of houses, handcuffs, flex cuffs, medical supplies, chains, and small rooms with dirty bedding in them. I'm making an assessment that somebody was kept there. Who that was, we don't know. It was definitely a house that was used to keep people against their will.

ARRAF: This had been a shower room with a lock and chain secured to the tiny window. Marine officials believe it might have had a much more sinister purpose.

An Iraqi detainee, captured by Iraqi security forces, brought the military to this house in Falluja. On the stairs were shackles. In the stairwell...

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: See, this is an area underneath here (UNINTELLIGIBLE) the torture area or the beating area as we described it.

ARRAF: About a mile away, what appeared to be a former school. Intelligence experts are trying to determine if this might be the cage that held British hostage Ken Bigley, later killed.

MAJ. GENERAL. RICHARD NATONSKY, 1ST MARINE DIVISION COMMANDER: We did find a intravenous bag next to it when we first came in the house. Certainly the structure would be used to contain somebody (UNINTELLIGIBLE), you know. There was some evidence of -- you know, it was -- had been occupied by humans. Scraps of food, and the IV bag.

ARRAF: The intravenous dextrose bag was found here. Although the cage had been described as identical to one shown in a video of Bigley, Tucker cautioned that the similarity wasn't conclusive.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We spent a lot of time studying it. It's hard to tell.

ARRAF: As Marines search every building in this city, they're making chilling discoveries. The 1st Division commanding general tells us they've uncovered more than 500 weapons finds, some of them suspected of being the makings of chemical weapons.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We found -- and I've been in one of them. But I know we found at least two or three chemical caches. In terms of a take, I know cyanide was part of it. Glycerin was a part of some of the chemicals there.

ARRAF: This house in the southeast of Falluja contained a chemical laboratory. Most of the chemicals have been removed. But when these officials first came here, it was well stocked. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hydrolic acid, sulfur acid. And then in the table here, you can find (UNINTELLIGIBLE) and different kinds of acids.

ARRAF: In between the clothing on the floor, gas masks. There are still documents lying here.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There are more artillery firing tables. So it's telling you range and deflections for different distances.

ARRAF: There are entire neighborhoods in Falluja still unsearched. As the Marines continue to go house to house, they'll piece together more of what may have happened here those many months behind these locked doors.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ARRAF: And the city is awash in conventional weapons as well. As Marines go through, officials tell us that they have found what they consider more than 500 major weapons finds in this city of 200,000 people, which means, until they clear those up, they're not encouraging civilians to come back anytime soon, Aaron.

BROWN: Want to go back to the chemicals. Are we talking about a lot? And sometimes when you're talking about chemical weapons, a very little can be a lot. And are we talking about the kinds of things that can be weaponized?

ARRAF: As you know, Aaron, and as Saddam Hussein found out, it is extremely difficult to weaponize chemical weapons. But what they believe, their best guess, based on the information they have now, and they are still going through reams and reams of documents and other evidence, is that an attempt was likely made to make weapons out of these chemicals.

When we asked about it, we were told there was seemingly no other purpose that you would have a room full of those chemicals with beakers, and instructions. We saw one book that had in it instructions for making poisons. There was another one that talked about how to fire various weapons.

It does seem to have been a base, the one we saw, that was held by the insurgents. And although it is impossible to say that they were trying to make chemical weapons or impossible at this stage to say how far they might have got, officials believe it was an attempt, Aaron.

BROWN: Jane, thank you. Jane Arraf in Falluja tonight.

As we mentioned at the top of the program, the U.S. Supreme Court took up the question of medical marijuana today, hearing arguments that could leave intact or invalidate the votes of people in 11 mostly Western states. The court has already ruled against so-called growing clubs. But this case centered more on the individual. What right does the individual have to grow and use marijuana when ill?

Covering the court, CNN's Bob Franken.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

FRANKEN: For Angel Raich, it's not about the sweeping issues her case places before the justices. For her, it's her brain tumor, and what she says is her need for help from marijuana.

ANGEL RAICH, MEDICAL MARIJUANA USER: I need to use cannabis every two hours. If I don't medicate every two hours, I become debilitated.

ARRAF: Her home state of California is one of 11 that permit private use of marijuana for medical purposes. But federal law prohibits virtually any use.

So the Supreme Court was again hearing arguments over the constitutional power of the federal government to override state laws. Was the medical, individual use of home-grown marijuana interstate commerce?

Yes, said Paul Clement, the administration's acting solicitor general, because the garden patch weed would affect overall production.

Randy Barnett, who argued the other side, called any connection hypothetical, since it's privately grown, not bought or sold. Many argue there's little evidence that marijuana has medical value.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It's a handful of people who want to see not just marijuana, but all drugs legalized.

ARRAF: Inside, the justices peppered both sides. Ginsburg, Nobody is buying anything, nobody is selling anything. But Justice Breyer argued a preference for medicine by regulation as opposed to medicine by referendum.

The referendum in these cases involves the nine Supreme Court justices, including, we're told, Chief Justice Rehnquist, who was not present again today, as he fights his own medical afflictions.

Bob Franken, CNN, Washington.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Later in the program, we return to the question of medical marijuana, several facets of the debate, starting with the purely medical. Does pot actually help people feel better? How solid is the research?

And beyond medical debate, the culture war. Why has the issue become such a big deal in the country? We'll talk with Dr. Andrew Weil about that.

And also, what role, if any, should the FDA play in all of that?

All that coming up later in the hour. One other note from the Supreme Court before we go to break. The justices today rejected a challenge to the country's only law allowing gay marriage. They'd been asked by conservative groups to overturn the decision by the supreme court in Massachusetts which legalized same-sex marriages. The justices declined without comment.

Ahead on the program tonight, in the deep South, a vote concerning segregation results in a recount and raises difficult questions.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CHARLES STEELE, SOUTHERN CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE: I love Alabama. There are a lot of good people in Alabama. But it seems as though we still have some work to do.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROWN: Half a century after segregation was ruled unconstitutional, how much past is in the present?

Also ahead, the anatomy of a bruised reputation. How "The New York Times" was duped by one of its youngest reporters, but it's more than just that. We'll talk to the author who went five behind the scenes to reconstruct the mess.

We'll take a break first from New York.

This is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Here are a few headlines from the day.

Officials in Colorado say the body of Teddy Ebersol has been found. He's the 14-year-old son of NBC Sports chairman, one of the great TV innovators, Dick Ebersol. Mr. Ebersol and his two sons were in a chartered plane that crashed on takeoff from an airport in Montrose, in Colorado. Ebersol and his son Charles, survived, Teddy did not. Two crew members also died. A flight attendant remains in critical condition. Officials are not saying how badly Dick Ebersol and his sons were hurt.

The NTSB, of course, is investigating.

A Black Hawk helicopter went down in heavy fog about 30 miles northeast of Fort Hood, Texas, today. Seven soldiers were killed. Officials say the chopper was headed to a maintenance facility in Texarkana when it hit a TV transmission wire. Station officials say the warning lights on the TV tower had been out since a storm last week.

And the Laotian immigrant who allegedly shot and killed six deer hunters in Wisconsin has now been charged with six counts of first- degree murder. Police say Chai Vang went on a shooting rampage last Sunday. He claims the victims provoked him, fired first, shouted racial slurs.

There are some things you would think are pretty simple, and here's one of them. There's a clause in the Alabama state constitution that says there should be "separate schools for white children and colored children." That's their language, not ours.

Removing that language was on the ballot earlier this month, and it may surprise you to learn that Alabama decided, though just barely, to leave the language in the constitution. There's a recount under way tonight.

In any case, the people who argue in favor of keeping the language say it isn't about race at all. It's about taxes.

Here's CNN's Bruce Morton.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BRUCE MORTON, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Nineteen sixty- three, Alabama Governor George Wallace stands in a schoolhouse door and says his state schools will stay segregated. Just pretend, of course. Federalized troops were there. Black students enrolled in the University of Alabama as everyone knew they would.

And yet, on November 2 this year, 50 years after the Supreme Court said separate was unequal, Alabama voters voted against repealing that part of their state's constitution, which requires separate schools for whites and colored children.

If you're old enough, you remember all the marches, all the demonstrations, Alabama police beating marchers at the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, Alabama, the church bombing that killed four little black girls in Birmingham, Alabama, all the rest of it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And we'll keep marching and marching and marching until one day, you'll look around, and we'll all be marching together.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MORTON: Well, not all together, not yet. Congress passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Segregated schools are illegal. Federal law overrides the Alabama constitution.

But they did vote against repeal. Some who did say they were objecting to repealing a section that says Alabama does not guarantee anyone the right to a public education, arguing that could mean higher taxes.

JOHN GILES, PRESIDENT, CHRISTIAN COALITION OF ALABAMA: This is very dangerous, lethal, fuzzy-code legal language that can open up the door, anything from raising of taxes all the way to penetrating the veil of the quality of education for private, parochial, Christian, and home schoolers. MORTON: Roy Moore, the former chief justice who lost his job for refusing to remove a Ten Commandments monument from the rotunda of the state supreme court, campaigned against the amendment. So did Tom Parker, elected to the court, who campaigned with little Confederate flags.

Still, it was a close vote.

CHARLES STEELE, SOUTHERN CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE: We feel like we've come a long ways. And I love Alabama. There are a lot of good people in Alabama. But it seems as though we still have some work to do.

MORTON: The late Mississippi novelist William Faulkner said of his region, "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past."

Maybe.

Bruce Morton, CNN, Washington.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Coming up on NEWSNIGHT tonight, medicine and marijuana, the medical part of the debate. Does pot actually help sick people? What the science shows.

And after that, beyond the medicine to the cultural, the beliefs that shape our views on marijuana and the debate over its use.

A break first around the world.

This is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Back now to the debate on medical marijuana. The court argument today centered less on medicine than on economics. A court ruling back in the '40s said that wheat grown for personal use could be regulated by the federal government because it impacted the overall price of wheat at the market, that one person growing wheat in his back yard bought less.

If that principle holds, the court will likely strike down state laws that deal with medical marijuana.

But what of the science, the claims that it helps some people eat better or feel better in ways that other legal prescription drugs cannot?

From Atlanta tonight, CNN medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

COHEN (voice-over): Does marijuana really help sick people feel better? Or is it just that they feel better because they're high? Medical researchers have been asking that question for years, and here's what they've come up with. Marijuana has an effect on several centers of the brain. For example, there are receptors to a chemical in marijuana in the hypothalamus, which controls appetite, important for AIDS and cancer patients who are wasting away.

DR. GLEN HANSON, UNIVERSITY OF UTAH: Oftentimes, it's hard to get these people to eat. If you stimulate the cannabinoid receptors, then you can bring the appetite back, and they will eat. And obviously that's a good thing.

COHEN: There are also cannabinoid receptors in the brainstem, which deals with pain.

HANSON: For some types of pain it may reduce that pain.

COHEN: But Dr. Hanson, a pharmacologist and senior adviser to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, says there aren't enough good studies to determine whether marijuana is better than other drugs for pain or loss of appetite, other drugs that wouldn't have bad side effects such as decreased blood flow to the brain, memory problems, and infertility. He believes that only rarely is pot the only option.

HANSON: Under those cases, almost humanitarian cases, I would say it's better to use the marijuana than to make or allow a patient to suffer.

COHEN: The American Medical Association has called for more studies. And in the meantime, many scientists want drug companies to make a medicine with the effects of THC, the chemical that's medically useful in marijuana, without the bad side effects.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

COHEN: Now, there is a prescription drug called marinol, which is made to have the good affects of marijuana without having any of those bad side effects. But some scientists will tell you that it doesn't get into the body as effectively because it's a pill and not inhaled, Aaron.

BROWN: And is that -- the why not -- this will be stupid, I suppose, but why not make marinol in a form that you could inhale it, make it as a mist or something?

COHEN: Well, that's exactly what scientists are trying to do. They're trying to make a drug that would mimic the good effects of marijuana and could be inhaled, that wouldn't be a pill. But, you know, that's not easy to do. That's something that they're working on.

BROWN: Elizabeth, thank you very much. Elizabeth Cohen in Atlanta tonight.

Even though it's illegal, to some doctors medical marijuana falls under the category of alternative medicine. While some people say alternative medicine is the best way to go in looking for a cure, others say it's more in the realm of witch doctors. So are the two ends of this argument.

We're joined from Houston -- from Tucson, Arizona, rather, by bestselling author Dr. Andrew Weil.

It's nice to see you, sir.

You'd agree, I think, that smoking marijuana, for sick people, isn't a perfect way to go. There are downsides to it. Is the argument that it's just better in some respects than anything else that's out there?

DR. ANDREW WEIL, AUTHOR: Well, first of all, marijuana is probably the least toxic drug known to medicine. So that alone recommends it for trying to find ways to use it.

And for many of these conditions, like stimulating appetite, for example, we really don't have drugs and medicine that work for that condition. And the drugs that we have for many of the other uses that people like marijuana are much more toxic.

So that's certainly in favor of marijuana. Obviously, it's not ideal to have patients taking any medication by smoking. There is, by the way, a preparation of whole marijuana being developed in England called Sativex (ph) that's a spray that you spray under the tongue. I think that would make it much more medically respectable and more usable by physicians.

BROWN: In a sense, is that what you think needs to happen, that some pharmaceutical company has to come up with some way to make marijuana respectable?

WEIL: Yes. Now, I don't think that means, by the way, making the high go away, because the high -- the effect on mood may be a desirable effect, especially for people with terminal illness. I do, however, think that there needs to be some better way of cleanly distinguishing between medical use and recreational use.

And at the moment, I think that boundary is very blurred.

BROWN: In and of itself, do you believe marijuana is an especially harmful drug?

WEIL: No.

In purely medical terms, physical terms, I think it's one of the least harmful drugs that we know of, and much less harmful than most drugs used in medicine, and much, much less harmful than the recreational drugs that we have made legal in this country, especially alcohol and tobacco.

(CROSSTALK)

WEIL: I think the opposition -- go on.

BROWN: Yes. I was going to say, why do we -- it's interesting to watch other countries, other cultures deal with this, and often deal with it differently from the way we do. Why do we seem to struggle with it so?

WEIL: I think it's because people react to marijuana as a symbol, rather than as a thing in itself.

And marijuana in this society has always been associated with deviant subcultures, originally with black jazz musicians in the South, with Mexican migrant labors. Later, with Bohemians, beatniks, then, in the '60s, hippies, radicals, the counterculture. It's always had associations with deviant subcultures. And I think that's what people react to.

When you listen to what I call fanatical extremist groups, like the Partnership For a Drug-Free America, that reaction is to that aspect of marijuana, the symbolic aspect of it.

BROWN: I think that the Partnership For the Drug-Free America would make an argument -- and it's not a wholly unsupportable argument -- that the last thing the culture needs is one more drug for people to use and abuse.

WEIL: And I would also say that the idea of creating a drug-free America is laughable. We have never been a drug-free America. We never will be. We are awash in drugs, both legal and illegal. It's always going to be that way.

Of the drugs that people use, marijuana I think is one of the least worrisome in medical terms. And I think it's one that has significant medical potential. It would be absolutely silly for us to reject that medical potential. And I really think it's up to the medical profession to decide whether to use this substance and how to use it.

BROWN: Just one more area here. I'm sure you've thought about this. If you go back to the beginning of time, I suspect you would find that in every culture, where they could figure it out, there was some drug, a mushroom, a drink, a plant, whatever, that altered people's feelings. Have you wondered what it is about humans that want that?

WEIL: I have.

In fact, I wrote a book about that in 1972 called "The Natural Mind" which argues that the desire to alter consciousness is something that is basically human. And I think it's connected with our creativity, our desire to know ourselves. I think there's lots of ways you can do that, by the way, not just with drugs. But drugs are very convenient.

BROWN: Nice to talk to you. Thanks for your time tonight.

WEIL: Good to talk to you.

BROWN: Thank you, Dr. Weil.

Still to come on the program, we'll take a look back at the scandal that rocked the gray lady, "The New York Times," and the media, under the microscope.

And speaking of papers, morning papers, not under the microscope, but under the unblinking eye of the NEWSNIGHT rooster.

A break first.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: President Bush today nominated Carlos Gutierrez to be the new secretary of commerce. He's a great story, Mr. Gutierrez, a Cuban-born American, currently the CEO at Kellogg. He started driving a truck for the company back in 1975, selling cereal from a van in Mexico City. At a news conference, the president said Mr. Gutierrez is a perfect example of the American dream.

In other business news tonight, one of the largest makers of jams and jellies says it needs to restructure its business. The JM Smucker Company -- and, you know, with a name like Smucker, you got to be good -- plans to close one of its plants in California, cut other jobs around the country. No word on how many employees will be fired.

Merck, the company that made the arthritis drug Vioxx appears to be getting ready for a takeover, or at least defending against one. It announced plans to give its top executives big bonuses if the company is bought. Merck's stock has been way down since it pulled Vioxx, one of the biggest moneymakers it had in its inventory.

And look for a possible dip in the price of oil. Saudi Arabia reportedly plans to increase production over the next few years from 11 million barrels a day to 12.5 million a day.

And speaking of the day, it was a mixed day on the street. The Dow fell just over 45 points. It was down more than 100 at one point, Nasdaq up under five points. S&P took a slight dip. Dow just over four. It's been so long since I read those.

Ahead on NEWSNIGHT, how one of the most respected newspapers took faith over facts, the behind-the-scenes account of the Jayson Blair scandal, which is much more than Jayson Blair.

That after a break. This is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: It's true that this program loves stories about this business, the business of journalism. Whether it's the influence of bloggers or the importance of retiring network anchors or a good scandal, we report them all. So, how could we resist a book looking at a scandal -- and it was that -- at the country's best and surely most important newspaper, "The New York Times"? The scandal was Jayson Blair. But it turns out the story was much more and, in many respects, much more important than that.

Seth Mnookin, who used to write about the media for "Newsweek", has now written "Hard Times: The Scandals at 'The New York Times' and Their Meaning for American Media." And he joins us tonight. It's nice to meet you. Congratulations on the book.

SETH MNOOKIN, AUTHOR, "HARD TIMES": Thank you very much.

BROWN: Which has been well received.

It's always the Jayson Blair scandal, the Janet Cooke scandal at "The Post," the Jack Kelley at "USA Today."

MNOOKIN: Right.

BROWN: But these stories, all of them, and this story in particular, has other, in some respects, more important characters.

MNOOKIN: Yes.

I thought definitely, in this story, the most important character was Howell Raines, the man who was the executive editor of "The Times" from the period right before September 11 to about a month after the Jayson Blair scandal broke. And the changes that he effected at the paper was what I examined and what I wanted to look at. Some of those changes were very positive.

And, obviously, the paper got a lot of congratulatory plaudits after its September 11 coverage. But, ultimately, I thought that he took the paper in a really dangerous direction. And you saw what happened with Jayson.

BROWN: I want to talk about that. But just, he is a reminder, be careful how you are on the way up, because the road down can be very tough.

MNOOKIN: Right.

BROWN: Well, when he was named the executive editor, he was coming off a stint as the editorial page editor. So he had not been in the newsroom for a good long period of time.

And once he got to the newsroom, he never spent any time getting to know his troops, building a constituency. And, in fact, he spent a fair amount of time alienating people, making it clear that he didn't appreciate dissent in any form. And so when there was this opening, when the Jayson Blair scandal hit, instead of people rallying around him as a leader, the entire staff really took it as a chance to attack him and ultimately force him out.

BROWN: One of the criticisms of Howell that I think is fair is that, when he fell in love with a story, he really fell, whether it was Wen Ho Lee and Los Alamos or Augusta National.

MNOOKIN: Right.

BROWN: Which somehow he turned into a front-page story again and again.

And in doing so, do you think, or do they think, because this is really a reporting story, damage the paper?

MNOOKIN: Absolutely, although I think I want to temper that a little and say that I think the paper is doing great now and has recovered.

But if you look just at the example of Augusta, there was a mini- furor over whether that golf club was going to admit women. And Howell Raines' "New York Times" seemed to decide that that was the most pressing national issue of the day. And they put it on the front page again and again and again. Now, that in itself doesn't seem like that big of a deal.

But "The New York Times"' value and "The New York Times"' place in society has been built on this long legacy of serving as an objective interpreter of the news. And once it appears that they're crusading, as opposed to just reporting on what's going on, it changes the entire tenor, their relationship with their readers.

BROWN: Why is it OK for "The New York Post" to crusade, but "The New York Times" not to crusade?

MNOOKIN: Well, "The New York Post" fills a very different role in our country. It's a tabloid. It's an avowedly right-wing tabloid. It's one that is serving a market that Rupert Murdoch and the News Corporation felt was underserved.

"The New York Times" has become the most important paper in the country by, over a century, presenting itself as objective arbiter of what's going on in the country and the world. So, its identity, its corporate identity, is tied up in something very different than "The New York Post." If "The New York Post" tried to be sober-minded and temperate, people would pick it up and say, what is this? I want my "Page Six." I want Steve Dunleavy.

BROWN: Yes.

But let me throw you one hanging curve here.

MNOOKIN: Please.

(LAUGHTER)

BROWN: Well, of course please. Who wouldn't want a hanging curve?

Let's just assume that someone has a marginal interest in journalism, like they read the paper every day. Why should they read the book?

MNOOKIN: Well, I tried to make the book more like a detective story than like an inside account of what's going on in journalism. And I looked back to books like "All the President's Men," where, obviously, you knew what was going to happen at the end. But I think that the picture of the inner workings of "The Washington Post" and that newsroom were so interesting that the rest of the country, civilians, as us journalists like to call them, got interested. BROWN: Yes.

MNOOKIN: Or you look at the movie "Shattered Glass," which also is able to sustain that kind of excitement. And I think -- I hope that this book does that same thing.

There is today an enormous interest in the workings of the media, but not a lot of comprehension about what's actually going on. And what I tried to do was set up an exciting story that would show people what happened and pull back the page.

BROWN: You did a good job.

MNOOKIN: Thank you very much.

BROWN: Congratulations.

MNOOKIN: Thank you. Thank you.

BROWN: Yes. It's fun. It's a fun read in and out of the -- well, I wouldn't know. I'm in the business.

MNOOKIN: Right.

BROWN: I assume.

(CROSSTALK)

MNOOKIN: So I hear.

BROWN: Well, one aspect of it. Thank you.

Ahead on NEWSNIGHT, the old yard sale motto in pictures. One man's trash is another man's art.

A break first. This is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: When Ansel Adams photographed Yosemite, he caught not only the majesty and the beauty of America's West; he captured a time of innocence, of simplicity. That was then.

Now America is still beautiful, but turn the lens around and it wouldn't be hard to find acres of waste, consumer waste. To one photographer, Chris Jordan, there's a certain majesty in our trash. His current project, shot in Seattle, is called "Intolerable Beauty: Portraits of American Mass Consumption."

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

CHRIS JORDAN, PHOTOGRAPHER: Day to day, we make consumer decisions that feel right to us as individuals. But we never get to see the aggregate.

And so I'm trying to find places where you can see the cumulative result of all of our consumption. And these places are actually the infrastructure of our consumption, in a port where you can see hundreds and thousands of shipping containers.

Mount Rainier is usually photographed Ansel Adams-style, with beautiful blue skies and rivers and meadows and that kind of thing. And, in this case, the lower half of the image is now industrialized. And this is almost like a new horizon.

I use an 8-by-10 view camera, which is considered by most people to be sort of an antique way of photographing. It's made to be used in a studio. And I lug it around out in the field. I'm fascinated by pattern. And one of the things that pattern conveys is scale. Like, 1,000 shipping containers in a row is not only visually interesting and beautiful, but that conveys a scale of our consumption.

To me, evidence of our mass consumption means vast piles of garbage, crushed cars, shredded scrap steel, container ports, rail yards, places where the scale of our consumption is readily visible.

These look like apartment buildings to me. And where I took this image was in a wine distributor. So all of these pallets are used to distribute wine that comes from overseas on containers and gets sent out all over the country.

This is just an impossibly huge mountain of sawdust outside a lumber mill down in Tacoma. It's so huge that it actually has the features of a mountain, has strata. See these strata in here and these sort of erosional features? And this is just sawdust. Think how many trees just went into this sawdust pile.

Consumption is -- it's not something we can see every day. It's not an easy thing to find visible evidence of how much stuff we use. This is the first image I made in my consumerism series. To me, this cacophony of color reminded me of a Monet painting when I saw it from a ways back. And the more I looked at it, the more I realized I had made this kind of macabre portrait of America, because you can read the labels on the cans. And there are products in there that I use.

There's a facility down in Tacoma where they collect cars from five states around and shred them. And I saw this barge moving up the waterway. And the weight of the cars is so much that it actually crushes them into sort of a strata that makes them look like layers of the Grand Canyon.

It isn't the kind of beauty that people generally think of. But, to me, there's a beauty in honesty. And what I'm trying to do is to look honestly at our world.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Chris Jordan.

Morning papers after the break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(ROOSTER CROWING)

BROWN: Okeydoke, time to check morning papers from around the country, around the world.

We will start with "The Stars and Stripes," because we have been. "Flu Vaccine to be Available to Europe Clinics in a Week." So, you might want to get on a flight for Rome if you feel like you're getting the flu. Otherwise, "Should Medical Marijuana Be Legal? Supreme Court Hears California Woman's Case." That's the way "Stars and Stripes" led.

"International Herald Tribune," published by "The New York Times." "Kuchma Proposes New Ukraine Vote. Awaiting Court, Opposition Ignores Call." This is such -- it's a remarkable story that it -- and, well, it's remarkable to see how it plays out, though I have a feeling I know.

"Washington Times." "Bush Names Gutierrez For Commerce." This is a great American story. You have got to set politics aside. This is a pretty good story, too. "Jordan's Brother" -- as in Michael Jordan -- "a Real Role Model, Soldier, a Leader on Iraq Mission." Michael Jordan's older brother, James R. -- I believe it's his older brother -- headed for Iraq.

Look at this picture, OK? This is "The Philadelphia Inquirer." This is an oil spill in Philadelphia, the Philadelphia area. "Deck Heads Goes Here and Here and Here." That's a journalist term. They haven't written a headline. But that's a great picture.

"Cincinnati Enquirer," as opposed to "The Inquirer." "Baby's Parents Face Deportation; 5-Week-Old is a Citizen, But Only If He Could Stay Here." I haven't read this story, but I guarantee you it's one of those stories that will break your heart, no matter what you think of the politics. "School Violence Falling, Incidents Halved in a 10-Year Period Across the Country." That's pretty good news.

Here's pretty bad news thank you.

How we doing? Thank you.

"The Rocky Mountain News." "Grim Aftermath" is the headline. "Investigators Find Body of Ebersol's Son. Crash Witnesses Report Ice on Jet Wing." The plane was not deiced. And all in all, a pretty horrible story.

Let's end it with "The Chicago Sun-Times" for a change. Here's what I like about "The Sun-Times." Give me a host. They got a big super-secret story. They didn't want to blow the headline on us tonight. So you will just have to buy the paper tomorrow and figure it out.

But we can tell you the weather in Chicago tomorrow...

(CHIMES)

BROWN: Thank you -- is "character-building." So is this job sometimes.

We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: A look ahead to tomorrow's "AMERICAN MORNING." Here's Soledad O'Brien.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SOLEDAD O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Thanks, Aaron.

Tomorrow on "AMERICAN MORNING," the jury returns to make the ultimate decision for Scott Peterson. Will it be life in prison or death for murdering his wife and unborn son? The most emotional part of the trial is set to begin, but can any decision stand up to the legal maneuvering still to come? The next chapter in the Peterson case, CNN tomorrow, 7:00 a.m. Eastern -- back to you, Aaron.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROWN: "LOU DOBBS TONIGHT" next for most of you.

Good to have you with us starting a new week. We'll see you tomorrow at 10:00 Eastern time. Until then, good night for all of us at NEWSNIGHT.

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