60 Minutes - 2/27/2022: The Grid, Wrongful Detainees, Headlines, Deadlines & Bottom Lines

Episode Date: February 28, 2022

On this week's "60 Minutes," as tensions with Russia intensify, Bill Whitaker investigates threats to the U.S. electric grid. Lesley Stahl reports on Americans unjustly imprisoned abroad by foreign governments with whom the U.S. has thorny relations. Jon Wertheim reports on a new threat faced by local newsrooms. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Jane Pauley. Listen up! Every Monday, tune in to our Sunday Morning Podcast, offering extended interviews, in-depth conversation, and inspiring stories on arts, culture, travel, and more, along with features that make you smile, because there's always something new under the sun. Follow and listen to our Sunday Morning podcast on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. On the night of April 16th, 2013, a mysterious incident south of San Jose marked the most serious attack on our power grid in history. If they had succeeded, what would have happened? Could have brought down all Silicon Valley. We're talking Google, Apple, all these guys. Yes, that's correct.

Who do you think this could have been? I don't know. We don't know if they were a nation state. We don't know if they were domestic actors. But it was somebody who did have competent people who could, in fact, plan out this kind of very sophisticated attack and execute it. I'm kind of surprised that there are many more, many more hostages being held by governments than by terrorists. I know that is surprising, isn't it? The majority of our cases are actually what we call wrongful detentions.

It's when a nation state actually is detaining American essentially unjustly. That government wants something in return for our citizens. They want to use that person for political leverage. They want to use them as a bargaining chip. My desk was right about here, and the editor sat up there. America's newspaper industry is in a state of decline, partly due to a loss of advertising revenue, partly due to financial firms that have bought up nearly a third of the daily papers in the U.S. So what's the cost

to American citizens? This is an attack on our democracy. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes.

But first, Holly Williams with the latest from Ukraine this evening. Today, Russian ground forces continued to press Ukraine's two larger cities, Kharkiv and the capital, Kiev. It's the fourth day of war here, but as the sun set, Ukraine's government and the Kremlin agreed to hold talks. Yet in an unnerving sign of how things could escalate, President Vladimir Putin ordered Russia's nuclear forces on higher alert, while the US and Europe have increased their weapon shipments to Ukraine. Resistance here has looked determined, with videos emerging of killed and captured Russian soldiers

and destroyed Russian tanks and vehicles. Ukrainian volunteers have taken up arms and others have prepared Molotov cocktails at the request of their government. Moscow claims it hasn't targeted civilians, but Ukraine says Russian forces have fired indiscriminately. Look at this. We've seen people here taking cover in the subway, where many are sleeping at night. And nearly 400,000 have already fled across Ukraine's borders, according to the United Nations.

Lines to enter Poland and Romania have stretched for miles. In the months leading up to this invasion, many ordinary Ukrainians told us they'd lay down their lives to protect their country. And now it appears they were deadly serious. For 60 Minutes, I'm Holly Williams innytsia, Ukraine. I'm Jane Polly. Listen up every Monday. Tune into our Sunday morning podcast, offering extended interviews, in-depth conversation,

and inspiring stories on arts, culture, travel, and more, along with features that make you smile, because there's always something new under the sun. Follow and listen to our Sunday morning podcast on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Ukrainians are facing the prospect of massive power outages as Russian forces fight for control of areas that house vital parts of Ukraine's electric grid. If Moscow shuts down the grid, millions could be left without light, heat, refrigeration, water, phones, and internet. The White House is monitoring our own critical

infrastructure after two Department of Homeland Security warnings last month about threats to our grid. One noted Russia has proven its ability to use cyberattacks to shut down electric grids and compromised U.S. energy networks. We've been looking at the grid for months, and we're surprised to learn how vulnerable it is and how often it's deliberately targeted. One attack nine years ago was a wake-up call for industry and government. There's been a major transformer leak. This is at a PG&E substation.

On the night of April 16, 2013, a mysterious incident south of San Jose marked the most serious attack on our power grid in history. PG&E tells us someone may have fired some shots into that transformer. For 20 minutes, gunmen methodically fired at high-voltage transformers at the Metcalf Power substation. Security cameras captured bullets hitting the chain-link fence. They knew what they were doing. They had a specific

objective. They wanted to knock out the substation. At the time, John Wellinghoff was chairman of FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, a small government agency with jurisdiction over the U.S. high-voltage transmission system. You were concerned enough that you flew out there? That's correct. And I took two other individuals who trained special forces, U.S. special forces. They trained people to actually attack infrastructure. And what the former commandos found looked familiar. They discovered the attackers had reconnoitered the site and marked firing positions with piles of rocks. That night, they broke into two underground vaults and cut off communications coming from the substation.

But then they went from these vaults across this road over into a pasture area here. There were at least four or five different firing positions. No real security. There was no security at all, really. They aimed at the narrow cooling fins, causing 17 of 21 large transformers to overheat and stop working. They hit them 90 times, so they were very accurate. And they were doing this at night with muzzle flash in their face. Someone outside the plant heard gunfire and called 911.

The gunman disappeared without a trace about a minute before a patrol car arrived. The substation was down for weeks, but fortunately PG&E had enough time to reroute power and avoid disaster. If they had succeeded, what would have happened? Could have brought down all Silicon Valley. We're talking Google, Apple, all these guys. Yes, that's correct. Who do you think this could have been? I don't know.

We don't know if they were a nation state. We don't know if they were domestic actors. But it was somebody who did have competent people who could, in fact, plan out this kind of very sophisticated attack. The grid is a sprawling target. There are actually three in the U.S. The eastern, western, and Texas has its own. Most of us rarely notice substations. There are 55,000 across the country, each housing transformers, the workhorses of the grid. Inside these massive metal boxes, raw electricity is converted to higher or lower voltages. Should a transformer explode, like this one in Manhattan during Superstorm Sandy, the system is designed to trigger a localized grid-preserving blackout. But if several sections

of the grid go down at the same time, the shutdowns can cascade like dominoes. That's what set off the Great Northeast Blackout in 2003, leaving 45 million Americans without power. A few months before the assault on Metcalf, John Wellinghoff of FERC commissioned a study to see if a physical attack on critical transformers could trigger cascading blackouts. It was actually a very shocking result to us that there's very few number of substations you need to take out in the entire United States to knock out the entire grid. Knock out the entire grid? That's correct. How many would it take to knock out, putting the entire country in a blackout?

Less than 20. The report was leaked to the Wall Street Journal. It found the U.S. could suffer a coast-to-coast blackout if saboteurs knocked out just nine substations. You are relaying this in a very measured way. I would think this would be quite alarming. It was alarming. There's no question. It is alarming. After the Metcalfe attack, FERC pressed the utilities to harden defenses

at their most critical substations, erect walls and sensors to prevent similar attacks. There's now a wall around Metcalf. But many substations remain vulnerable targets, like this one we found in Southern California that serves more than 300,000 customers, huge transformers protected by a chain-link fence. Anybody who knows about power systems

knows that the grid is physically spread all over the countryside. There are a lot of places that are vulnerable. Dr. Granger Morgan is a Carnegie Mellon University professor of engineering who chaired three National Academy of Sciences reports on the power grid for the U.S. government, the most recent in 2021. An earlier report on terrorism was classified for five years. We simply made a strong case that the grid was physically very vulnerable. Why was there a specific report on terrorism and the grid? There were concerns about the possibility that a terrorist organization could attack the grid. And around the world, there have been a fair number of attacks on grids. They have attacked with bombs, planes, and drones.

Russia's cyber attack on Ukraine's grid in 2015 knocked about 60 substations offline, leaving 230,000 people in the dark. The U.S. Secretary of Energy has said Russia could do the same thing here. In the report we did on the resilience of the power system, we did argue that we needed an organization, probably DOE and Department of Homeland Security, to systematically look at all the kinds of vulnerabilities we have and then begin to figure out who could address each. In terms of resilience issues, there's nobody in charge. I mean, there's no single entity that has responsibility for everything. The U.S. electric grid is the largest machine in the history of mankind. It is a marvel of modern engineering. No one person owns or controls it. It's actually

3,000 different companies, both public and private sector, that own or operate little pieces of the electric grid. Mike Mabee is an Iraq war vet, a former cop, and a self-taught grid security expert. By day, he works for the government. In his spare time, he uncovers public information electric utilities would rather not see the light of day and publishes them on a website called Grid Security Now. He is both fascinated and horrified by the grid. I think everybody needs to be as alarmed as I am. We've had disasters in the past, but they've generally always been regional in scale. What we've never had is a national scale blackout, which is completely possible under some known threats such as the cyber threat, the physical security threat, or even extreme weather, and the U.S. public is completely unprepared to survive without the electric grid for any period of time whatsoever.

So you have wind power, too. So when he moved to Texas two years ago, he prepared for the worst, installing solar, wind and battery power. Whole system's 48 volts. Mabee's family survived last winter's deadly storm. Hundreds of Texans perished. And the deaths were largely due to hypothermia, carbon monoxide poisoning, because when people got cold, they would do things like, you know,

go into their car in the garage to try to stay warm. Mabee has become a thorn in the side of the federal government and utility companies. I filed a complaint about supply chain cybersecurity. I filed a complaint about physical security. I filed a complaint about the Texas blackout. The government and the industry, they think you're an annoyance. I've been termed a grid security gadfly, which I wear that as a badge of honor. One frequent target, the Department of

Energy. Mabey told us the grid information the DOE puts out is confusing and dispersed. He said he spends hours trying to make sense of it all. There is a requirement that they report electric disturbance events, but the data from the Department of Energy is so bad. So, you know, I took it upon myself to do some data crunching. And what I found is that 38% of the electric disturbance events in the United States are due to physical attacks. 38%? That's a lot. So in the past decade, there have been over 700 physical attacks against the U.S. electric grid. Many are copycats of the Metcalfe assault. In 2016, an eco-terrorist in Utah shot up a large

transformer, triggering a blackout. He said he'd planned to hit five substations in one day to shut down the West Coast. In 2020, the FBI uncovered a white supremacist plot called Lights Out to simultaneously attack substations around the country. We're seeing planning to disable the delivery of power to the American people. Dr. Liz Sherwood-Randall is President Biden's Homeland Security Advisor. We met with her and Ann Neuberger, Deputy National Security Advisor for Cyber. They told us the administration's infrastructure plans should help secure the grid, but acknowledge the threats are real.

We have physical threats to the grid. We have natural threats to the grid. We have cyber threats to the grid. Neuberger threats to the grid. We have cyber threats to the grid. Neuberger came to the White House from the secretive National Security Agency, where she battled Russian hackers in cyberspace. You said that you've been talking to private utility companies around the country about the potential for a cyber attack. What are you telling them? We're sharing with them some of the context regarding how Russia and other countries use cyber in crisis or conflict. We've actively downgraded intelligence.

We've taken any information we have about malicious software or tactics that the Russian government has used, shared that with the private sector with very practical advice of how to protect against it. Isn't the problem that when it comes to the grid, there's nothing like the FAA or the Food and Drug Administration or the Securities and Exchange Commission? There's no one overall agency overseeing these, what you said, 3,000 different utilities across the country?

We don't have one system. We have several grids. We also have individual energy ecosystems in regions and states. And that's part of our strength because the resources for energy are different in different regions. And we have to acknowledge that we're not going to have a one-size-fits-all system. You call it one of our strengths, but it also seems to be one of our vulnerabilities. Well, in my view, we can't impose the regulations that you would be suggesting as a federal government. We can set standards, and we are setting standards in a variety of arenas.

Carnegie Mellon's Granger Morgan says what government, industry, and law enforcement are doing doesn't meet the magnitude of the threat. What we need at this point is to get the White House to put all the key players together in a room to identify the biggest vulnerabilities and then take steps to reduce them. I'm surprised that's not being done. It has not been done. And it needs to happen now. What's better than a well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue? A well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper and delivered to your door. A well-marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool. Whatever groceries your summer calls for,

Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. Sometimes historic events suck. But what shouldn't suck is learning about history. I do

that through storytelling. History That Doesn't Suck is a chart-topping history-telling podcast chronicling the epic story of America, decade by decade. Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s, including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck, available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. When most of us hear the word hostage, we think of someone held captive by a terrorist group or criminal gang seeking ransom, attention, or worse. But the vast majority of Americans imprisoned abroad today are held not by terrorist

groups, but by foreign governments with whom the U.S. has thorny or in some cases no relations. Our government calls them wrongful detainees, and there are currently more than 40 of them. This fall saw a rare moment of success, the release of a 37-year-old journalist named Danny Fenster, a Detroit native who'd been locked away for nearly six months in a small, always-lit cell in a prison in Myanmar, formerly called Burma. Danny Fenster's reunion with his family in November is the moment every hostage and detainee family dreams of. Danny Fenster had moved to Myanmar in 2019 and worked as an editor for several publications. He and his wife, a Brazilian diplomat named Juliana, watched in dismay as a year ago this month, a military junta ousted the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi, which brought throngs of peaceful protesters into the streets.

Within weeks, though, the military regime ordered a violent crackdown that drew worldwide condemnation. Late last spring, Danny had a flight home to visit his parents. But as he was about to board the plane, a group of policemen showed up and called out his name. And I just looked up like, what? And I said, yeah, that's me. And they said, we have questions for a criminal investigation. Did they allow you to make any phone calls? No. No, I got a couple text messages off to Juliana saying, call the American Embassy.

I hadn't been detained. Were you handcuffed? Handcuffed and blindfolded. I had a very long text message from his wife, Juliana. Brian Fenster, Danny's older brother back home in Detroit, was the first in the family to learn that Danny was in prison, and the family immediately mobilized. Please, I beg you, we beg you, bring Danny home. They launched a Bring Danny Home campaign, including supporters worldwide sketching his picture. Danny was eventually charged with incitement and wrongful association

based on his work for a banned publication that had been critical of the military, even though he hadn't worked there for 10 months. He says he desperately wanted to let his family know he wasn't being tortured, but for weeks he wasn't allowed any communication at all outside the prison. I remember just staring at the wall, thinking sort of figuratively, you know, I just thought, when is that tank going to bust through the wall, you know, and get me out of here? You really thought at one point you were going to be rescued? No, but I was really hoping. Release Danny immediately. The State Department made repeated appeals.

We remain deeply concerned over the continued detention of Danny Fenster. But the U.S. government hasn't recognized the legitimacy of the junta, so even getting information about Danny was difficult. After a month, he was finally allowed periodic phone calls with his family. It was hard. I mean, there were many calls we had with him where he was in tears. You're trying to find the words for him. You know, after one month, two months, three months, four months. Back in Washington, Danny's case had fallen under the mandate of Roger Carstens,

one of the few State Department officials held over from the Trump administration. He's a man with a tough job and an odd-sounding title. You're called SPIHA. What does that mean, SPIHA? It's Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs. So everyone truncates it into SPIHA. The SPIHA office was created in 2015 after an internal review of U.S. hostage policy following the tragic deaths of American journalists and aid workers held captive by ISIS and complaints from hostage families that the government hadn't been proactive enough. But in the years since, the makeup of Roger Carsten's cases has changed.

I'm kind of surprised that there are many more, many more hostages being held by governments than by terrorists. I know that is surprising, isn't it? The majority of our cases are actually what we call wrongful detentions. It's when a nation state actually is detaining an American essentially unjustly. That government wants something in return for our citizens. They want to use that person for political leverage. They want to use them as a bargaining chip. It's something that people don't know about, they don't think about very much. Washington Post reporter and Iranian-American Jason Rezaian was a wrongful detainee himself,

imprisoned for a year and a half in Iran, where he'd been living as the paper's bureau chief. He was freed as part of a prisoner swap in 2016 and has been pushing ever since for the U.S. government to prioritize the cases of the more than 40 current wrongful detainees. We're not doing enough for these people, and we're not doing it quickly enough. What countries around the world are holding Americans right now? Iran, which is sort of the perennial hostage taker. China, who has more than anybody else. Russia, Venezuela.

Does our government have a stern policy against quid pro quos? That's a hard question to answer, and here's why. There are things that to give in would actually either provide an incentive or a benefit to the hostage taker. And so my job is to start becoming creative. What else can we possibly do to solve this problem without giving a direct concession? Prisoner swaps. Taking the innocent American and swapping him for a guilty criminal. We've done that. There's a way I can get someone out that doesn't involve a swap much better. But in Danny Fenster's case, the Myanmar government wasn't asking for any policy concessions or prisoner swaps. It didn't look like he was going to get out. Enter former congressman, U.N. ambassador, and New Mexico governor Bill Richardson,

who established a foundation that facilitates the delivery of humanitarian aid and engages in hostage negotiating, his longtime, sometimes controversial, specialty. How are you feeling? He had a long history with Myanmar and was concerned about a local former employee of his foundation who had also been arrested. He secured an invitation from the military regime to come to discuss humanitarian assistance and COVID vaccines and told the State Department he wanted to work on the Fenster case too, but he got pushback. They asked me not to raise Danny Fenster. Did you say, why shouldn't

I raise him? Yeah, I said, look, this is what I do. So I said, all right, look, I'm going to go. There was some tension between Governor Richardson and the State Department. The bottom line is that I had discussions on a few occasions where I said, we have a current line of effort, I'm feeling pretty good about this, can we hold off a little bit? Richardson held off briefly, but then flew to Myanmar this past November and participated in two days of humanitarian aid meetings at the presidential palace with the isolated military regime, including the commander-in-chief, a man considered responsible at the time for more than 1,200 civilian deaths.

It was a PR coup for the junta, which splashed photos of the meeting far and wide. When I think we convinced them of our sincerity, then I said, by the way, you've got, I want two things. You have an activist Burmese woman that worked for me. I want you to release her. The next day, she'd been released. Just like that? Just like that.

Then I decided, I'm on a roll. By the way, there's an American journalist named Danny Fenster, and you should release it. It'd be the right thing. The American people are going to like this. Your record with the U.S. government right now is not very good. So it'd make you look good. Humanitarian gesture. But you were def. Humanitarian gesture.

But you were defying the State Department. I wasn't defying. I just saw an opportunity, and I took it. Richardson says the commander privately told him he'd release Fenster, but not yet. So he left Myanmar empty-handed, slammed for having given a pariah regime legitimacy, and looking like he might have made things worse for Danny Fenster, who was sentenced a week later. You've been convicted on every count and sentenced to 11 years. 11 years? Yeah. It was like despair, you know? Helpless. Yeah, helpless. There was criticism. The feeling that you had botched this meeting and it led to Danny Fenster getting this 11-year sentence.

You know, families get so emotional. They go through ups and downs. But I knew if the commander kept his word, and I thought he would, that this would be forgotten. Go away, yeah. And I got him out. He's out. And we did it. Sure enough, just days after the sentencing, Richardson was quietly summoned back to Myanmar. And Danny was unexpectedly taken out of his cell, put in a van, and without knowing where he was going, driven to the airport.

I just see a bunch of white guys in suits. I didn't know who was who. And there was Danny walking towards me. And he said, I'm here to take you home. I just couldn't stop smiling. I was smiling so much. I was so happy. The sun was on my face. I could feel the sun. Yeah, it was amazing. I'd like to start with saying thank you to Governor Richardson for securing the release of Danny Fenster. If there was any lingering anger over Governor Richardson's trip, it was not on display at the press conference when Danny landed on U.S. soil. I just can't get upset when the governor actually brings him home. We have no pride of authorship. Whoever can come up with a plan and get someone out, we're down for the win. Karsten

says he's hopeful about some of the other detainee cases. Recently, he traveled to Venezuela to meet nine Americans in prison there. And in ongoing negotiations to revive the Iran nuclear deal, the U.S. envoy has said it would be very hard for us to imagine getting back into the nuclear deal while four innocent Americans are being held hostage. Yet Jason Rezaian says it's still not enough. When you say we should prioritize getting these people out, the implication is that you're saying let's make a deal, let's do a swap, and then you're right back to the issue of incentivizing this thing. Look, ultimately when Americans come home, when Brits come home, when French people come home, there

are some concessions. The issue is not whether or not to give a concession. The issue is how do we make it difficult on the back end? So you're saying, make the deal here, and then punish them later. Bring them home, however you need to do it. Money, swaps, whatever. You know what? Cut through all the BS and just bring people home. Critics say that even though you work very hard, and you keep the families apprised of what's going on, that you're not doing a good job. There are still 40 people being held. When I go to bed every night, I feel the weight of not having brought home between 40 and 50 Americans. So I don't go to bed usually feeling good. I usually wake up with energy. Can't wait

to get to the office and get back after it. But this is a business of ones and zeros in computer language. Someone comes home, steps on a tarmac in America, falls into the arms of their loved ones, you've got a victory there. But unless that's happening, you're losing. Hello? We want to leave you. Ah! Ah! Ah, my beautiful Scrimson! with a pretty special falling into the arms of a loved one.

Oh, my God. Danny's reunion with his 95-year-old grandmother, a survivor of the Holocaust. But I met you in America. Yeah. God bless you. Newspaper industry in state of decline. Not exactly as stopped the press's headline. For two decades now, owing largely to the loss of advertising revenue to Facebook and Google, fewer and fewer Americans get their news, comics, and sports from all those gazettes and tribunes

and journals. But that doesn't tell the whole story. There is an additional threat. Hedge funds and other financial firms that now own nearly a third of the daily papers in America. And these new owners are often committed not to headlines and deadlines, but to bottom lines. One fund in particular has been called by some in the industry a vulture, bleeding newspapers dry. It all prompts the question, as local newsrooms and local news coverage shrivel up, to what extent does democracy shrink with it? Behind the marching band and baton twirlers at the annual Fourth of July parade in Pockstown, Pennsylvania,

you'll find a one-man band. Reporter Evan Brandt, snapping photos, taking notes, and gathering quotes. The paper comes out tomorrow. Tomorrow. Every day. Tell me all about what you're doing here. We're just looking forward to a great Fourth of July.

For the last 24 years, he's chronicled this community of 23,000 for the local newspaper, The Mercury. J-A-S. Which at one time had dozens of reporters. Now, Brandt is literally the last reporter standing in Pottstown. When a community like this loses their local reporters, what else are they losing? It reminds us all about shared experiences. You know who died.

You know who graduated from high school. You know whose kid had a great game. You know, those are all important elements about holding people together. Describing the soul of a community. Sure. Brandt took us to the old headquarters of the Mercury. Punching above its weight, the Mercury won a Pulitzer Prize in 1979 and another in 1990. Now it looks like this.

My desk was right about here, and the editor sat up there. The sports guys were along here. The photographers were in the back. Anyone could walk in the front door and say, I need to talk to a reporter. My sewer's backing up and the township isn't doing anything about it. Can you do something? Behold, the new Mercury headquarters. We're going up to the Mercury newsroom. Brant's turned his attic into a command center.

That's where the magic happens. It's here that he scrambles to cover Pottstown, 20 surrounding towns, and nine different school districts. Overworked and overwhelmed, Grant has seen his industry battered by all sorts of forces. Disappearing classified ads, people getting news for free online. But he says the worst culprit is the hedge fund, Alden Global Capital, which bought the Mercury in 2011 and has since sold the paper's building and slashed newsroom staff by about 70 percent. Severe even by the standards of the newspaper sector that has seen an astounding 57 percent job loss since 2008. In 2017, after another round of layoffs, Brandt says he felt angry and wanted answers and accountability. So he paid a visit to the Hampton summer home of Heath Freeman,

the 41-year-old president of Alden Global Capital, and knocked on the door. What did you want to say to him? What I settled on is, what value do you place on local news? And I'm not talking about money. What value do you place on it? Brant recalls that a woman let him in. Behind her, he caught a glimpse of Freeman, who walked away. You never got to ask him that question. I did not. This secretive hedge fund, their website shows this single photo,

started building its print empire over the last decade and now owns more than 200 newspapers, making it the country's second largest newspaper owner behind Gannett. Alden's rapid takeover and cuts have alarmed U.S. lawmakers. In 2019, 21 senators wrote to Heath Freeman asking him to abandon his newspaper-killing business model. Freeman, though, has doubled down. Last year, Alden made a play for Tribune Publishing, home to historic papers like The Baltimore Sun and The Chicago Tribune. This is an attack on our democracy. Gary Marks and David Jackson spent 30 years as investigative reporters at The Chicago Tribune, a paper that has won 27 Pulitzer Prizes. Local and regional newspapers are so important to our communities, to holding our leaders accountable.

They're not just going after some business that is trying to make money. They admit the Tribune had been crippled for years by bad management. But after seeing Alden buy the Denver Post and then gut staff by 70 percent, the journalists were worried the hedge fund would do irreversible damage. So what did you do? We fought back. That's what we did. Dave and I just decided that we are going to throw everything we possibly can, use all our investigative and repertorial skills to save this organization that is so important, we felt, to the future of this city we love, Chicago. So this investigative team, accustomed to exposing corruption and injustice, acting as watchdogs on local government, they turn their attention to their potential new owners.

You've said when Alden Capital arrived, it was an existential threat. Why is this firm particularly nefarious? Well, Alden has sort of a playbook of going into a distressed newsroom and selling off the real estate and property equipment, things like that. And second of all, diminishing the resources that the reporters have. Leak company financials show in 2017, Alden built in profit margins as high as 30% at certain papers, more than double industry standard. In recent filings, the New York Times company reported 10% profit margins.

These are executives from a hedge fund who live in a very wealthy lifestyle. They're not taking the profits and using them to build the Tribune. What's your response to someone who'd say, look, this is capitalism? Well, we've always been aware that we're doing journalism in a capitalist democracy, and we've always embraced that.

But we felt that Alden didn't recognize the civic trust that's embedded in this profit-making machine. Jackson and Mark say what they learned about Alden only fueled their sense of urgency. So in 2020, putting their jobs at risk, they wrote an op-ed in the New York Times pleading for a philanthropist, foundation, anyone to step forward to save their paper. One man tried. Maryland hotel magnate Stuart Bainham, a lifelong subscriber to the Baltimore Sun. Bainham committed $200 million and we followed him last year scrambling to put together a deal to buy Tribune Publishing.

We've done the due diligence. We just need a buyer. Bainham couldn't find a partner. Last May, Alden bought Tribune Publishing for more than $600 million and two days later started offering buyouts to Tribune employees. More than 40 have since left the Chicago Tribune, including one-fourth of the newsroom. Freeman declined our repeated request to sit down with 60 Minutes, but his public relations team sent us letters he wrote to other newspaper owners that state Alden is committed to providing robust, independently minded local journalism, and that it's time for tech giants to start paying for the billions of

dollars they're making off of news publishers' content. The newspaper crisis didn't begin with Alden, and this is not the only financial firm in this sector. But Alden is often held up as the worst actor. One study conducted by the University of North Carolina in 2018 found that some Alden-owned newspapers had cut staff at twice the rate of their competitors. Stephen Waldman is a former journalist. In 2011, he studied the decline of the local news industry for the Federal Communications Commission. He says that in the absence of local reporting, there's evidence of increased corruption by local officials.

One example he points to, Bell, California. When the local newspaper there shut down, scandal ensued. Thank you! Thank you very much! The elected officials just kept voting themselves pay raises to the point where the city manager was making $800,000 just because there was no one there. I'm guessing there's nothing specifically corrupt about Bell, California that wouldn't replicate in any of a thousand other towns.

Pretty much through all of human history and throughout the world, when you have power that isn't watched, it tends to get abused. Waldman says it's not just that local news has been hollowed out, it's what has replaced it. The vacuum was filled by national cable news and social media and very opinionated, polarizing material. Waldman believes in flooding communities with local reporters. In 2017, he co-founded Report for America, a program that sends print, radio, and television journalists to newsrooms

in underserved communities across the country. We brought together five reporters. I'm Kristana Mink. I'm a pediatrician and also a health reporter. I'm Camelot Todd. I report on mental health for Buffalo. I'm Amelia Farrell-Nicely. I'm an investigative reporter that covers poverty in West Virginia. Chris Jones, a Marine Corps veteran, covers domestic extremism in Appalachia.

Grayson Docter covers race and equity in Charlotte. These studies that show that people trust local media more than national media, it doesn't sound like that surprised you, those results. No. And these are our neighbors, you know? I mean, we're not writing about someone I'm never going to talk to again. They're people before they're interview subjects. This is Jones on January 6th.

He had cultivated such a level of trust from his sources that he was one of the few reporters covering the insurrectionists as they stormed the U.S. Capitol. I got a lot of calls immediately after the 6th from a lot of different news organizations, people who wouldn't answer an email from me a week prior. You were the local journalist. You had the sources. You you have relationships. A lot of national media is coastal, and it stays coastal unless there's a big news event, and then they fly the reporters in, write the story, and fly them out. Grayson Docter experienced this firsthand. Her mother was one of nine African Americans killed by a white supremacist in the 2015 Mother Emanuel church shooting in Charleston.

Docter felt that when the national media parachuted in, they were looking for sound bites instead of examining the deeper questions. Especially in a place like Charleston, South Carolina, where the history of racism runs very, very deep. That was the opportunity to really dive into some of that history. Why did this happen in this community? While newspapers like the Washington Post and LA Times have been bought by billionaires, Waltman says addressing this crisis falls to all of us.

We need a dramatic increase in the commitment of foundations and philanthropists and donors like you and me to actually supporting local news. Remember Stuart Bainham, who lost out to Alden Global Capital? He's launching the Baltimore Banner, a nonprofit digital news outlet to go head-to-head with the Baltimore Sun for subscribers. It will cover only local news, with plans over the next three years to hire more than 100 reporters. All digital. The web, newsletters, podcasts, apps. Wherever people receive their news, we're going to go there.

After sounding the alarm about Alden Global Capital, Gary Marks and David Jackson left the Chicago Tribune. Jackson is still working as a reporter at a nonprofit newsroom in Chicago. Full speed, full speed. Marks is now living what he calls his second dream job as a high school football coach. Come on, Teddy! They're more convinced than ever that local news cannot become yesterday's news.

You're faster than that! Journalism is one of the most noble professions there is. You can have tremendous impact on society. I work with a lot of young people, and I tell them that we're leaving them a smashed and broken system, but that they're going to have to reinvent it because it's necessary. Journalism is necessary for the survival of American democracy. As for Heath Freeman, this past summer he bought a Miami mansion for $19 million, a transaction discovered and reported by a local news outlet.

I'm Leslie Stahl. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes. I'm Jane Pauley. Listen up every Monday. Tune into our Sunday morning podcast, offering extended interviews, in-depth conversation, and inspiring stories on arts, culture, travel, and more, along with features that make you smile, because there's always something new under the sun. Follow and listen to our Sunday morning podcast on the free Odyssey app, or wherever you get your podcasts.