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| COVERING WEN HO LEE | |
 September 26, 2000  |
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After a background report, media correspondent Terence Smith talks with two journalists about The New York Times' coverage of the Wen Ho Lee case. The NewsHour Media Unit is funded by a grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts.
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LARS ERIK NELSON: The first story just didn't hold water on its own merits. They were saying that China had stolen the plans for a bomb, W-88 warhead, that the nuclear balance was shifting, this was the worst espionage since the Rosenbergs, that the suspect was a Chinese-American scientist at Los Alamos. None of that turns out to be true. They have some information on the W-88. Whether they got it by espionage or some other way, nobody knows. Whether they got it from Los Alamos or some other way, nobody knows. We know that it's not Wen Ho Lee, who was named two days later. In the course of this, they accused the White House, in fact, on the first day, of dragging its feet and the Justice Department of closing their eyes to this espionage. And all this was done in the context of those accusations that the president had somehow sold out national security in exchange for Chinese campaign contributions. There was no skepticism. TERENCE SMITH: In a political context?
TERENCE SMITH: And yet the Times' coverage tended to drive other media coverage, did it not? LARS ERIK NELSON: Well, the Times has got a great institutional clout. Majesty. People assume the Times is somehow graven on stone in the morning and handed down from the top of the mountain. That's the fault of us who take it so seriously and so literally. In this case, they were just wrong. |
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| A self-correcting institution | ||||||||||||||||||||
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TERENCE SMITH: David Shipler, in your years at the Times, do you recall an explanation, an assessment of coverage, a correction, an editor's note, whatever you want to call it, anything like what was published today?
TERENCE SMITH: Do you think they were driven to it by criticism from Lars and many others? DAVID SHIPLER: I don't know that, but I would assume so, sure. The paper gets criticized all the time for coverage. I got criticized when I was a correspondent in Israel all the time. And normally when you think you're right, when the paper feels it's right and the reporter feels he's right, they don't go to these lengths to defend themselves. So I think it's clear they felt they made some very serious mistakes and that they needed to air those mistakes. TERENCE SMITH: What did you think of this statement today? LARS ERIK NELSON: I thought it was a partial correction. It ignores the role played by the editorial page and their columnist William Safire who said, based upon the Times' news reporting, and then they made the direst conclusions about China and the Chinese nuclear arsenal -- Safire said that because of this action by Wen Ho Lee, our cities are at greater risk of nuclear holocaust than they were at the height of the Cold War. It's utter nonsense. There's no mention of that. They say that others echoed and just oversimplified their charges. Well, the others included their own editorial page. Now, institutionally, as you know, the editorial page and the news pages are separate, but I think in the minds of the public, it's the mighty New York Times and the public doesn't differentiate.
TERENCE SMITH: Central to the story, if it's gratuitous, the rule… you don't do it. |
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| Is ethnic background relevant? | ||||||||||||||||||||
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DAVID SHIPLER: It raised the question that the story didn't answer, the question being, is this relevant? Is this person selling or giving secrets to the Chinese because he's Chinese-American by background? It was a very explosive insinuation I think in this society to do that without them going on to explain why they were doing it. Were the prosecutors convinced that this was the man because he, in fact, was ethnic Chinese, Chinese-American? I don't think that's even clear yet. I mean, they're denying it. We don't know. TERENCE SMITH: Lars, if this is such a departure, as David is suggesting, then what explains it?
TERENCE SMITH: You're assuming a government source? LARS ERIK NELSON: They admitted their sources -- I think Trulock, who they now have doubts about the Department of Energy guy. One of the other things that they haven't addressed, well two other things they haven't addressed, they haven't apologized to the Department of Justice officials who would not authorize the wiretap on the grounds there was no evidence this guy was a spy. That proved to be right. They haven't apologized to the NSC, whom they accused of foot-dragging in this espionage case. That also turned out to be right because there was no espionage case. There's still more to come in this. They owe a little bit more of an explanation and making a clean breast of it. TERENCE SMITH: There was no apology. You wouldn't apply that word today, would you? LARS ERIK NELSON: No. DAVID SHIPLER: Not quite. TERENCE SMITH: You used the word mea culpa. DAVID SHIPLER: If you read this, this is from the Times statement:
"We occasionally use language that adopted the sense of alarm that
was contained in official reports and was being voiced to us by investigators."
In other words, in place of a tone of journalistic detachment... that's
a pretty severe self-criticism because that goes right to the heart
of what good journalism is all about. |
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| A scientific point of view | ||||||||||||||||||||
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TERENCE SMITH: Well, we should point out that William Broad is a science writer. He approached it from the scientific point of view and suggested that much of the information was readily available in other sources and may not have been all that crucial.
DAVID SHIPLER: What set off alarm bells for me about the first story, and I'm a layman in this area, I know nothing about the subject, was the tone of certainty about it. That is that this espionage happened, that there's no question about it, and all of these government agencies were incompetent in their prosecution of the situation. You know, ambiguity, skepticism, these are the hallmarks of good journalism. And I think that's where the story fell down. I'm surprised actually that editors didn't catch that, because you would have thought they would have. TERENCE SMITH: Let me ask you both briefly, if The New York Times has stubbed its toe on this story, does that have a ripple effect on investigative reporting and the vigor with which people go after stories like this? LARS ERIK NELSON: I would hope it does. I mean, investigative reporting can be agenda-driven. The reporting team gets an idea in its head or they find a source, and they cease being skeptical because they're so delighted to have this insider source. Whitewater was a similar case where the Times believed the version told by Jim McDougal. I think you'll agree he was not a particularly good source. But Jim McDougal's version of Whitewater drove that case. Oddly enough, this is the same reporter in that case who did the Wen Ho Lee. TERENCE SMITH: Ripple effect, David? DAVID SHIPLER: I would hope it doesn't make the paper or other journalists timid about going after stories that aren't right on the surface. You just have to be very careful, double, triple, quadruple check everything. You have to be skeptical. All of those ingredients were missing from the initial stories, but they did come into some of the later coverage. TERENCE SMITH: All right, David Shipler, Lars Erik Nelson, thanks very much both of you. |
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TERENCE
SMITH: For more on The New York Times' coverage of Wen Ho Lee's
case, we turn to author David Shipler, who was a New York Times
correspondent from 1966-1988; and to New York Daily News columnist
Lars Erik Nelson, who was one of the Times' earliest critics. We invited
editors at the Times to join us for this discussion today. They declined.
Gentlemen, welcome to you both. Lars, you have been a critic for a long
time of the Times' coverage, which dates back over 18 months. Why? Why
do you fault them? Where do you fault them?
LARS
ERIK NELSON: Right. There was no skepticism. They seemed to be captive
of their sources. There are a lot of people around town who could have
told them, wait, it's not that bad. China has always been a nuclear
power. A smaller warhead doesn't make their nuclear arsenal any more
dangerous than the big city busters they have now. So it was clear that
the two reporters involved didn't know the science involved, didn't
know the arms questions involved and appeared to be being led by the
nose by the source. 
DAVID
SHIPLER: Not at this length. This is more space than I used to get for
a lot of good stories. But the editor's note idea did emerge during
my time at the paper, as a way of explaining lapses in coverage that
were... went beyond factual error, where there was unfairness or bias
or a bad headline that distorted the truth -- that kind of thing. So
I don't think this is completely outside the normal framework of what
the Times tries to do. You know, I always regarded the Times when I
worked there, and I still do as a reader, as a self-correcting institution,
or one that attempts to be self-correcting, that is that when, you know,
they have very high standards. They're serious people, and they try
very hard to be balanced and fair and to get it right. And they don't
always do it. And, you know, all of us have made mistakes. When I was
at the paper, I made mistakes, nothing quite this colossal, thank goodness,
but when those standards are not met, the paper tends, I think, to try
to get back on the track. I mean, this is not always true at other institutions.
So I think that that's what was going on here today - that they went
back and they looked at that coverage. They found things to defend.
They found flaws. And they laid it out as they saw it for the public.
DAVID
SHIPLER: One problem that they did not address in the mea culpa today,
which I thought was a serious one, and I noticed it when I read the
first story in March of 1999, was their identification of this as yet
unnamed scientist as Chinese-American. The Times has always had a pretty
strict rule about not identifying the ethnic or racial background of
people unless they feel it's relevant. 
LARS
ERIK NELSON: I think they were captive of their sources. The problem
with investigative reporters is they get the scent like bloodhounds.
And they just sort of go where the scent leads them and they don't stop
and think whether they're chasing the right spore or whatever. Editors
tend to go along with them if they've invested a lot of time in the
case. Here they had a source, the cachet of this is secret stuff, nobody
else has this.