Currents November/December 2000

November/December 2000 | Contents

IN REVIEW

PERIPHERAL VISION AND WEN HO LEE

Investigative reporters need eyes like hawks, but they occasionally fall victim to a kind of tunnel vision that comes from straining to trace a line of logic through a forest of facts. That appears to be what happened, on the Wen Ho Lee story, to The New York Times.

In its extraordinary "From the Editors" note on September 26, the Times addressed all of the paper's coverage of the case, but the main reason for the note was its first article, BREACH AT LOS ALAMOS, a 4,000-word blockbuster on March 6, 1999, by James Risen and Jeff Gerth. Like much good investigative work, the piece made a case for serious wrongdoing and suggested a villain, an unnamed scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Two days later, when he was fired, the world learned that the scientist was an American of Taiwanese descent named Lee.

The backdrop was China's progress in making nuclear weapons smaller and thus easier to deploy, and U.S. suspicions, fortified by intelligence clues, that espionage had helped them make the leap. Leading the government's probe was Notra Trulock, then the director of intelligence at the Energy Department, which oversees Los Alamos. Trulock emerged as a central figure in the Times story, an embattled investigator up against politicians who wanted to minimize problems with China for policy reasons. History could prove him right; Wen Ho Lee still has a lot of explaining to do about why he downloaded sensitive files.

OUR WIRED WORLD

"WORLD EXCLUSIVE -- New Zealand detectives have foiled a possible terrorist plot to target a nuclear reactor in Sydney, venue for next month's Olympic Games." So began a New Zealand Herald article that ran on August 26. The article buried the fact that the police raid of an Islamic command center actually had happened five months earlier. Reuters picked up the story and ran its initial report without any date at all. A producer for NBC Nightly News, who looked into the story after that, was told that the news made it as far as the White House Situation Room. But the CIA soon determined that the supposed crisis was something less than that. Follow-up reports began to arrive over the wires, this time including the date of the operation. Reports also explained what happened: the New Zealand police found a group of Afghani refugees involved in smuggling illegal immigrants into the country. While the police uncovered a map of Sydney that included access routes to the nuclear reactor, there was no real indication of terrorist activity. The threat wasn't really all that threatening.
-- Lauren Janis

Yet it turns out that the assumptions that served as the story's starting point -- that spying was the key to China's nuclear progress, and that this spying took place at Los Alamos -- are wide open to debate. Worse, so is the troubling subtext of BREACH AT LOS ALAMOS. Some may yet argue that the story merely reported on what investigators were pursuing, but it went beyond that. It is hard to read it without thinking that readers were supposed to believe -- from the way the facts were marshaled and supported by inferences and quotes -- that Wen Ho Lee was a probable spy and that those in the government who doubted it were politically motivated.

Risen and Gerth included in their article the CIA's doubts that espionage was the key factor in China's progress, but that debate was subordinated. On September 7, 1999, the Times itself, in a 5,400-word investigation by the science writer William J. Broad, brought such doubts to the forefront. Broad found that nuclear experts "clash violently on how much was stolen and what impact it had on Beijing's advance, if any." More to the point, his reporting, Broad wrote, "bolsters a point of emerging agreement among feuding experts: that the Federal investigation focused too soon on the Los Alamos National Laboratory and one worker there, Wen Ho Lee, who was fired for security violations. The lost secrets, it now appears, were available to hundreds and perhaps thousands of individuals scattered throughout the nation's arms complex."

By the time Broad got to the story, more sources were surely available, more discussion was public. And by now, in other media and via court documents, we've heard from people intimately familiar with the Lee case who strongly disagreed with Trulock, such as Robert Vrooman, the head of counterintelligence at Los Alamos from 1987 until 1998. Vrooman has sworn in court documents that he thinks that Wen Ho Lee made the suspect list largely because he was of Chinese ancestry, while a number of others whose access and travel history are similar, but who were not of Chinese origin, did not. And we've heard from Charles E. Washington, former acting director of counterintelligence at the Department of Energy, who has sworn in a similar declaration that he believes Notra Trulock "improperly targeted Dr. Lee due to Dr. Lee's race and national origin," and that he thought Trulock's investigation was "a fishing expedition." Whether these and other sources with doubts about Trulock's thinking (and, in Washington's case, a history of run-ins with him) were available to Gerth and Risen is not clear.

What is clear is that if reporters are focused narrowly, like hawks on a target, in an investigative piece, then editors must supply the peripheral vision. As the Times concedes in its note, it should not have taken six months to get a science reporter into the mix in a story about the arcane science of nuclear weaponry. The paper should have taken "a closer look" at Trulock, as well as at "the political context of the Chinese weapons debate, in which Republicans were eager to score points against the White House on China." It should have investigated hints early on that the legal case against Lee was not all that impressive. These things need not have killed the story, but they would have made it a different kind of story. Less certain, perhaps, but better.

The Times has steadily reached new heights in recent years, and part of the reason is that it has freed up its writers and reporters from the platoons of editors who once used to work them over and, not infrequently, stomp out any sign of originality or risk. That's healthy.

But there is a tension in investigative reporting, in particular, between the urge to marshal an argument and the need to question a story's hypothesis. Good editors help with both, and particularly the latter. Nobody wants an on-the-one-hand, on-the-other kind of story. Nobody wants a bowl of thin oatmeal. But then nobody wants to write the kind of painful "From the Editors" note that the Times, to its considerable credit, published on September 26.

-- Michael Hoyt

THEIR OWN PRIVATE IDAHO

When national public television stations aired the documentary "It's Elementary: Talking About Gay Issues in School" back in September 1999, the program ran without incident. Except in Idaho. In that state, public TV is facing a searing political assault as a result of the show that could doom the network or force it to raise millions to survive.

The Christian Right found the documentary offensive. "Idaho Public Television was trying to promote an agenda -- the acceptance of the homosexual lifestyle," says Henry Kulczyk, a lobbyist for the Idaho Christian Coalition.

Republican lawmakers agreed. In March, they passed an appropriation that called for monthly reviews of Idaho Public Television's programming decisions by the Idaho Board of Education. The board -- the FCC licensee for the Idaho network -- would decide whether to censor potentially controversial programs.

National public television advocates fired back. "Government control of public programming is antithetical to the purpose of public broadcasting," says Marilyn Mohrman-Gillis, a vice president for the Association of America's Public Television Stations, an advocacy group for PBS-affiliate stations. The 1934 Federal Communications Act, she points out, decrees that, "It is in the public interest to encourage the development of programming that involves creative risks and that addresses the needs of unserved and underserved audiences, particularly children and minorities."

Robert Corn-Revere, a Washington, D.C., attorney representing PBS, says Idaho's program review policy violates the First Amendment. "As long as guidelines are in place that have a chilling effect on free speech, you already have a situation of prior restraint," he says.

In June, Idaho Public Television was slapped on the other cheek when the controversial documentary sparked the question: Should the state continue providing more than a quarter of Idaho Public Television's budget even though some programs offend people? The Christian Right said no. "Part of my tax dollars go to public television, whether I like the programs or not. That's absurd," says Kulczyk.

The Idaho Republican party then passed a resolution calling on the state legislature to "privatize" Idaho Public Television. According to Mel Richardson, the Republican state senator and conservative radio talk-show host who is leading the charge, that could mean an end to all state financial support for the network. Idaho Public Television would be forced to reorganize as a non-profit corporation and replace the state's $1.6 million annual support with funds from the private sector. (In Idaho, both chambers of the legislature and Governor Dirk Kempthorne are Republican. If that Republican super-majority wants to end state support for public television, Democrats don't have enough votes to stop them.)

"I'm not trying to kill public television," says Richardson. "I just don't think the state should be involved in the television business."

Idaho Public Television is trying to stay alive. Peter Morrill, the network's general manager, quickly requested and expects to receive an $80,000 grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to study what happens when networks lose their state funding. In the few states that have made a similar transition -- including Vermont, Hawaii, and Florida -- it has led to a loss of staff or programming, or both. Hawaii Public Television, for example, can no longer produce local shows.

Nearly 100 public-television station managers nationwide have contacted Morrill to discuss the situation. He says they fear that the Christian Coalition or other groups could target other PBS affiliates in the future over a similar issue.

In an August 14 letter, Corn-Revere urged the Idaho Board of Education to reconsider its program review policy or face a "legal confrontation." In the meantime, the board continues to preview programming schedules for Idaho Public Television. It has not censored any programs . . . yet.

-- Stephen Stuebner

Stuebner is a free-lance writer who lives in Boise.

VERBATIM

SCOOPED

"This is the one time I wasn't so upset to be beaten by Bloomberg on a story."

-- Rick Stein, managing editor of Dow Jones News Service, in The Washington Post, on Bloomberg's reporting of the bogus press release that sent Emulex Corp.'s stock plummeting by 62 percent within minutes.

THE BIG TIME

Bush: "There's Adam Clymer, major-league asshole from The New York Times."
Cheney: "Oh, yeah. He is, big time."

-- The candidates as overheard through an open microphone after a rally in Naperville, Illinois.

"One smart-aleck answer occurred to me. Since we were not too far from Wrigley Field, I thought of saying something like, 'At least I didn't trade Sammy Sosa.'"

-- From Adam Clymer's article about the Bush/Cheney slam in The New York Times Week in Review.

LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON

". . . Now we've found that others appear to be spending the afternoon hours on the Internet, for the purposes of sexual recreation . . . . So, due to this latest problem, we'll be randomly auditing computer usage in the future . . . . I hate like heck to do this. It seems kind of creepy. It seems like a waste of my time. But the repeated problems have forced our hand . . ."

-- From a staff newsletter distributed by George Rodrigue, executive editor at The Press-Enterprise in Riverside, California.

COLOMBIA: OPTING OUT

With the U.S. ready to pump more than $1 billion in aid to Colombia to fight the drug trade and the leftist rebels who benefit from it, the civil war there has become one of the hottest stories in the hemisphere. So why don't more journalists want to go?

Partly because the situation there continues to deteriorate. Clifford Krauss, a New York Times reporter who spent ten years covering Central America and who was shot in El Salvador, opted not to take a position as Times correspondent in Colombia this summer, largely for security reasons. "One has to evaluate everything that's going on in your life, your professional life and your personal life, and whether the risk is worth it," Krauss says. "I decided: I don't need this; I don't need the glory." The Times has yet to name a Colombia correspondent.

Between April and July of this year, five Western journalists left Colombia with their families, including four bureau chiefs. Their replacements have been slow to arrive. One reason is that the forty-year-old civil war has evolved into a battle of attrition, with ransom money from kidnappings providing much of the financial backing. According to an official (and conservative) estimate, there were about 3,000 kidnappings in the country last year alone.

Almost half of the kidnappings are committed by ordinary criminals, not the leftist rebels or rightist militias. In large measure because of the war, Colombia has entered a period of lawlessness. The country has one of the highest murder rates in the world; 97 percent of all its crimes go unpunished.

Threats to foreign reporters pale next to the threats to Colombian journalists. Five of them were murdered in the line of duty in 1999, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, which is investigating three more deaths so far this year. At least thirteen others have fled the country under death threats. No U.S. journalist has been kidnapped or killed.

Still, the atmosphere is nerve-racking, particularly for those with families. "How tightly do I hold my three-year-old daughter's hand in the street? Trust me. Almost tight enough to hurt," wrote Tim Johnson, a Miami Herald correspondent, in a farewell-to-Colombia article published in August. "Many mornings, I walk her a half block from the Herald's bureau to a day care. It's not a relaxing stroll. Bodyguards of other parents hover at the gates. Their jackets bulge with hidden guns. No one smiles except the children."

Last year, an assailant slipped up behind Johnson's wife in a supermarket and drugged her with what doctors later determined to be a narcotic spray. The motive is unclear, and she escaped unharmed.

Johnson's replacement, Juan Tamayo, opted to leave his family in Miami. The Washington Post's new correspondent in the region, Scott Wilson, will have his family and home in Caracas. Tod Robberson, Latin America bureau chief for The Dallas Morning News, left Bogota in 1998 with his wife and young daughter for Panama after just eighteen months. "We thought taxi drivers were scoping us out," Robberson explained. "There was one that knew all about our daughter."

Robberson covered the Iran-Iraq war as well as the conflict in Lebanon and the gulf war. The veteran journalist was even kidnapped and held at gunpoint in Beirut before escaping. Still, Colombia unnerved him. Just before his departure someone shined a laser pen into his kitchen window, sending him to the floor and his wife and daughter scrambling behind the refrigerator, until they realized it was a child playing a trick.

A number of journalists, foreign and domestic, do stay and work in Colombia. About ten stringers regularly file to U.S. news outlets alone, and several news organizations have bureaus in Bogota, including The Associated Press, Reuters, Dow Jones, BridgeNews, and Bloomberg. Because of the massive flow of U.S. aid and firepower, some of those bureaus are bracing themselves for an escalation of the conflict. One recently reinforced its offices with new surveillance cameras, two-inch-thick glass at the reception area to withstand gunfire, and special film around the windows to absorb a blast.

-- Steven Dudley

Dudley lives in Bogota, where he reports for The Washington Post and National Public Radio, among others.

A WHISTLE IS HEARD

What happens when a television investigative reporter threatens to send the Federal Communications Commission after her employer and then loses her job? If you're Jane Akre, late of Fox-owned WTVT in Tampa, Florida, you win a $425,000 jury award in what many believe to be the first whistleblower case ever brought by a reporter against a media company over news content.

In late 1996 and early 1997, Akre and her journalist-husband Steve Wilson were working on a series about a bovine growth hormone manufactured by Monsanto that increases cows' milk production. In the midst of their reporting, Monsanto sent two letters to Fox calling for a review of the couple's project.

That set off a contentious evaluation of Akre and Wilson's research. They declared they were being pressured to distort their piece. WTVT accused them of insubordination. They threatened to report the station to the FCC. WTVT later opted not to renew their contracts, and ran its own piece on the hormone.

In April 1998, the couple sued WTVT under Florida's whistleblower law. Their claim: WTVT had fired them because they'd threatened to go to the FCC. In August, the jury found for Akre, but rejected Wilson's claim. Both Fox and Wilson are contesting the outcome of the trial. Akre and Wilson say they still intend to lodge a complaint with the FCC.

An FCC staff attorney points out to cjr that the commission does have leverage on licensees found by the agency to have deliberately distorted the news. He cited a 1998 United States Court of Appeals decision, Serafyn v. FCC, stating that the FCC is required to analyze the evidence when someone files a petition complaining of deliberate news distortion. The disciplinary options in the FCC's arsenal, says the lawyer, include everything from "writing a letter admonishing the licensee, to initiating a proceeding to determine whether a license should be revoked, to calling for early renewal of a license, which the FCC could then decide to reject."

Fox has maintained throughout the dispute that it did not pressure the couple to distort their report. Monsanto insists that its product is safe.

-- Geanne Rosenberg

Rosenberg teaches journalism at Baruch College.

IN REVIEW

CONSOLIDATION I

Students of big-media consolidation might want to keep an eye on a new media/old media merger in a subset of journalism, the gay press. In March, five-year-old PlanetOut.com, the largest online service targeting gay men and lesbians, announced that it planned to merge with the largest print-based gay publisher, Liberation Publications, Inc. Los Angeles-based Liberation prints the nationally circulated Advocate and Out, among other magazines, and owns Alyson Books, the largest publisher of gay books.

Some people in the gay community worry that the diversity of voices in the gay press is already limited, and may be further constricted by a monopoly owner's corporate culture. Despite a smattering of brown-skinned faces, women, an occasional individual older than fifty, and perhaps a cowboy or two to signify gay life outside the big city, the national gay media already tend to portray an overwhelmingly white, male, urban, upper middle class vision of gay life. "I think PlanetOut runs the risk of representing a very narrow -- and wealthy -- segment of the community," says Ginny Apuzzo, a veteran lesbian activist.

Even in local communities, smaller media properties are being bought up by large companies. Alexandra Chasin, author of Selling Out, a recent book about the transformation of the gay movement into a "niche market," calls gay media consolidations "frightening" because of the possibility of further reducing diversity in the gay media.

PlanetOut says the merger is a wise economic move that will strengthen both its magazines and the Web site. The individual parts of the new company, says PlanetOut's c.o.o., Susan Schuman, "will still have their own staff, their own mission, and voice." The new company's editorial director, Judy Wieder, also editor-in-chief of The Advocate, says there is "no monolithic point of view" and "people shouldn't worry about this."

But people should probably keep an eye on it.

-- John-Manuel Andriote

CONSOLIDATION II

Expect more consolidations and public outcry in Canada as its media moguls strive to forge new strategic alliances and reduce competition. Since mid-summer, a spate of sudden convergence plays has marginalized many media companies that didn't get in on the game.

When several announced mergers get government approval, look for the media moguls to demand relaxation of laws that limit foreign -- read U.S. -- ownership of Canadian media firms. Then you'll see some really big deals.

-- Don Townson