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Chinese take-out
Accusing the New York Times of a hit piece, Brill's Content does one of its own.

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By Sean Elder

Nov. 1, 1999 | Taking potshots at the New York Times is a favored sport among journalists. For a magazine like Brill's Content, which fancies itself the conscience of contemporary journalism (even as most contemporary journalists demur), the "paper of record" is an obvious target. But an article in the November issue criticizing the Times' handling of a major spy story hasn't made a ripple. Yet.

Robert Schmidt's story, "Crash Landing," alleges that the paper has flip-flopped on its coverage of Chinese nuclear-missile espionage, contradicting itself within a six-month period. In a March 6 story headlined "Breach at Los Alamos: China Stole Nuclear Secrets for Bombs, U.S. Aides Say" and a number of follow-up reports, Times investigative reporters Jeff Gerth and James Risen reported that "China has made a leap in the development of nuclear weapons: the miniaturization of its bombs" and that it made that leap with information supplied by a scientist working at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, Wen Ho Lee. One source even invoked Julius and Ethel Rosenberg -- executed in 1953 for sending secrets to the Soviets.

In the wake of the Times report, the Clinton administration was accused of turning a deaf ear on complaints against the Chinese, congressional committees considered the fallibility of national security and Lee lost his job. Such, it seems, is the power of the Times.

But on Sept. 7, the Times ran a front-page story by science writer William Broad that seemed to call Gerth and Risen's assertions into doubt. After months of going over some of the same ground the investigative reporters had covered (as well as material not previously available), Broad wrote of "an 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."

According to Brill's, the front-page play and significant length (5,400 words) of Broad's story added up to a retraction of mind-boggling dimensions. The magazine also contended that Gerth and Risen's reporting encompassed a number of journalistic sins, including a rush to judgment in pursuit of a scoop and favoring the point of view of one source over another.

But the Times stands by its story -- or stories, rather. The paper says Brill's Content has made the same mistakes and, in trying to nail the paper of record, has done its own take-out job. The Times' Stephen Engelberg, editor of all the stories in question, read me the following statement Tuesday: "We will be responding in detail to the story in Brill's Content. In brief, we find [Schmidt's] article guilty of every journalistic crime he has accused us of committing. It is one-sided and full of omissions and inaccuracies that we intend to specifically identify."

When I first contacted Engelberg he was wary of speaking about the matter on the record, and clearly smarting from his dealings with Schmidt and Brill's Content -- to say nothing of the story itself. For though the tale as told in the magazine is one of two egos (Gerth and Risen), two cities (Washington and New York) and even two disciplines (science and political reporting), there is really only one fall guy. As editor in chief Steven Brill himself told me, "The job of the editor is to say [to his reporters], 'Are you really sure you have that? How do you know that?' And it struck me that if you call someone the Rosenbergs on the front page of the New York Times you really ought to know that."

Indeed, the Rosenbergs reference was one of the flash points of Schmidt's article. In the Times' defense, the paper itself did not make the comparison, but rather used it in a quote. In addition, it was not on the front page, but deep within a 4,000-word story -- and the source was not an anonymous sniper but rather Paul Redmond, the CIA's foremost spy catcher and the man in charge of the agency's handling of the Lee case.

Setting the quote up that way certainly seems defensible, much less of a smear than the way Brill's portrays it. The Times' Engelberg claims that the issue is symptomatic of how Schmidt and Brill's were selective in their reporting. "There's an awful lot of stuff we told him that, had he used it, would have made his story much more nuanced and less entertaining," says the Times veteran.

In fact, the real story behind the stories is one of journalism of the old-fashioned sand-sifting sort -- interesting perhaps to members of the press and fans of insider baseball, but not the stuff that sells magazines.

Next page | The leak: Plans for a miniature nuclear warhead