The 'Post' Withholds Credit Where It's Due
It's intellectual dishonesty time again! Chatterbox's Indis citation
goes this time to the Washington Post , which today reports on Page 1 the firing of Wen Ho Lee, a Taiwanese-born
American scientist at Los Alamos who's suspected of turning over nuclear
secrets to the Chinese. According to the Post , Lee got fired after
failing a polygraph test last month and after complaints from Sens. Trent Lott
and Richard Shelby. (Shelby is chairman of the Senate Intelligence committee.)
That's true. But readers will be forgiven for wondering whether the firing has
anything to do with a splashy New York Times front-page story that
appeared two days before and identified (but did not name) a Los Alamos
scientist who was believed to have passed along nuclear secrets to the Chinese.
The Times story's impact was mentioned in yesterday's accounts of Lee's
firing by the AP and UPI, but it wasn't mentioned in today's Post story
by Walter Pincus.
Newspapers hate to credit other newspapers. They will do it when they have
to, which is why, in its initial follow-up story to the Times scoop two
days ago, the Post did cite the Times . Because that piece was
also by Pincus, Chatterbox won't bother to set the Indis Hall of Fame
timer a-ticking this time out. But the fact remains that the appearance of the
Times piece was surely a precipitating event, perhaps the
precipitating event, in the firing of Wen Ho Lee. It had a big impact. It was
hyped by Matt Drudge on his Web site. It landed Richard Shelby on NBC's Meet
the Press one day later, giving Shelby a highly visible platform from which
to scream and yell about the alleged security breach. ( Meet the Press
credited the Times generously, too.)
Whether the disproportionate attention given to the front page of the New
York Times ought to be a major factor in government decisions is, of
course, another question. One can argue, as the Post has more or less
been doing in its coverage of the ongoing China technology-transfer story, that
questions about what the U.S. should be selling to the Chinese are very murky,
and that the Pulitzer-hungy Times has been hyping this scandal's
importance in the series of pieces that Jeff Gerth has been grinding out.
(That's the subliminal message of an accompanying story in today's Post ). But if the
Times ' take, even if it's wrong, really is driving events, shouldn't the
Post acknowledge that?
On a less lofty plane, it does seem a bit unfair that the Times gets
to cover itself with glory over exposing Wen Ho Lee when the Wall Street
Journal ran a piece on page A3 (for breaking news, its version of "page 1")
by Carla Anne Robbins conveying essentially the same information on Jan. 7.
This fact seems to have eluded the media, as do many facts that appear in the
Journal , for the simple reason that the Journal is not available
on Nexis. (This used to drive Chatterbox crazy when he worked in the
Journal 's Washington bureau.) Assuming no one else had it before
Robbins, shouldn't Gerth have credited her?
--Timothy Noah
