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| COVERING WEN HO LEE | |
 September 26, 2000  | |
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TERENCE SMITH: The "New York Times" today printed an extraordinary note from its editors about its controversial coverage of the Wen Ho Lee story. It was both a defense of its reporting and an admission of "things we wish we had done differently... to give Dr. Lee the full benefit of the doubt." The newspaper said it felt compelled to review its own work because critics had "contended that our reporting had stimulated a political frenzy, amounting to a witch hunt." On March 6, 1999, the "Times" first reported that government investigators believed that China had accelerated its nuclear weapons program with the aid of stolen American secrets. Two days later, the government announced that it had fired Wen Ho Lee for what it called "serious security violations" at the Los Alamos Lab. Almost immediately some in the media began questioning whether the "Times" aggressive coverage had gone too far. And when Dr. Lee was freed on a plea agreement earlier this month, "Slate," the online magazine, asked "why won't the 'Times' apologize to Wen Ho Lee?" "Salon," another online magazine, headlined its piece, "how the 'New York Times' helped railroad Wen Ho Lee." Today the "Times" said it remains "proud of work that brought into the open a major national security problem of which officials had been aware for months, even years." But it conceded that its coverage "fell short of our standards," and concluded, "we have dispatched a team of reporters... to go back to the beginning of these controversies and do more reporting.... Our coverage of this case is not over." |
