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On the Bias

I have read Nicholas Lemann’s books, The Big Test and The Promised Land, which were written with a liberal bias, and which I found informative and worth the read. The discipline of objectivity, which he rightly respects, is what made this seemingly contradictory achievement possible. Like the rest of us he has a bias, but in submitting that bias to this discipline he was able to achieve an informative result. I applaud his commitment to teaching Columbia journalism students the importance of this discipline.

Our concern in publishing the study “Representation of Political Perspectives in Law and Journalism Faculties” was not that Columbia lacks an artificially imposed balance. Our concern was that because conservatives are effectively excluded from the Columbia faculty the standard of curricular objectivity the school is able to achieve is unnecessarily (and regrettably) low.

Lemann’s article bears this out. It is pointedly titled “On Balance,” which misrepresents its subject. In doing so, it reflects a bias so institutionally entrenched at Columbia that even an honest reporter like Lemann is unable to correct for it.

The thrust of “On Balance” is that to achieve ideological balance through affirmative action hiring quotas for conservatives would be harmful to the very cause of objective journalism. I agree. Contrary to the article’s main point, I have never called for “balance” on academic faculties, nor does the word “balance” appear in our study. To demonstrate, as we have, that there is an absurd scarcity of conservatives on faculties like Columbia’s is not the same as saying you ought to have an equal number of conservatives and leftists, let alone that there should be a political litmus in hiring so that the politics of a candidate would be checked before, or in place of, any other factor. This is a pretty big error, since it is the substance of Lemann’s case.

The slogan of my academic-freedom campaign encapsulates the problem: “You can’t get a good education if they’re only telling you half the story.” The absence of conservatives on Columbia’s faculty denies its members the intellectual challenge that is necessary to maintain a quality standard.

Lemann has already conceded this in describing his invitation to Tunku Varadarajan to co-teach a course with him, explaining: “Our mission should be to rid our students of automatic or blinkered thinking; . . . to make them push themselves to find alternative perspectives.”

I applaud him for this. The point of the study we have published and of my academic-freedom campaign is that this laudable gesture is simply not enough.

David Horowitz
Publisher, frontpagemag.com
Los Angeles, California

I had a wise old J-school prof named Gil Cranberg who taught a senior editing class at the University of Iowa. Among the things he taught us is to be very suspicious when a writer turns in work with words like “everything,” “entirely,” or “every.”

They are very strong words and, more often than not, they’re simply wrong. Most Republicans may believe in tax cuts, but not every Republican does. Those words are also favored tools of demagogues like Rush Limbaugh. Listen to his show and you’ll hear things such as “Democrats always . . .” or “These protesters disagree with everything America stands for.”

So it was with some disappointment that I read Nicholas Lemann’s defense of J-schools from charges that they lean too far left. Each time he confronts the arguments of David Horowitz, he distorts Horowitz’s arguments exactly as Limbaugh would:

What’s more important is that Horowitz assumes that everything we teach has a political view embedded within it. Journalism is not physics, but most of what we teach does not have any obvious ideological content.

What the Horowitz approach may gain in refreshing honesty is outweighed by what it loses by just giving up on the informational mission entirely.

For us to build in liberal-conservative balance in every hire and every class would be to take us away from our core assumption, which is that reporting can get you meaningfully closer to the truth.

Plenty of things J-schools teach have some ideological content. The Horowitz approach may make the “informational mission” secondary, but he does not abandon it entirely. Nobody’s asking for liberal-conservative balance in every class or every hire. With Republicans outnumbered 15 to 1 at Columbia’s j-school, why not start thinking about ideological diversity in some hires?

David Mastio
Editor, InOpinion
Chesapeake, Virginia

Nicholas Lemann responds: I appreciate the cordial tone of Horowitz’s letter, but I still don’t understand how he thinks the voter registration preferences of our faculty affect classroom teaching in the school, especially in skills courses, and what mechanism he thinks we should use to get more conservatives on our faculty, given that we don’t ask people we hire about their political views. Mastio is right to call me on the use of “every,” but, again, exactly what policy are he and Horowitz proposing for our hiring and our curriculum? I don’t think I’m the only reader of Horowitz’s writing on the subject who would infer that he wants to impose some kind of ideological balance requirement on universities.

Missteps in Miami

Tom Austin’s excellent piece about The Miami Herald and its firing of controversial columnist Jim DeFede (CJR, January/February) omitted one important factor. That was DeFede’s defiance of the Herald’s relentless kowtowing to a diminishing but still powerful right-wing and hardcore element in Miami’s Cuban-American community.

The Herald has consistently supported the Cuban embargo, a failed policy since its inception forty-five years ago. The Herald has consistently endorsed the three Cuban-American members of Congress who steer these failed policies and continue to battle family visitation rights and even the right of Cuban-Americans to send their relatives soap and toilet paper. Any candidate taking exception to these policies has no chance of winning a Herald endorsement.

In the December 31 “King Mango” satirical parade in Miami’s Coconut Grove, Grand Marshal Jim DeFede rode with a sign identifying him as the “King Kong of Controversy,” picking up sections of the Herald every minute or two and tearing them in half, to the cheers of the crowd.

Richard Rosichan
Miami Beach, Florida

Tom Austin makes a mistake in his “Miami Noir” that if not corrected might give credibility to those who argue against laws requiring the disclosure of public documents.

Austin suggests that publication of the documents that led to Art Teele’s suicide was the “mixed blessing” of the “noble precept” of Florida’s long tradition of government in the sunshine. That is untrue. The raw police reports that so distressed Teele were in a prosecution court filing as part of the state’s corruption case against Teele — they were not released because of any requirement of Florida’s open records act.

Miami legal circles are still debating whether the prosecution should have included unproven allegations against Teele in a public court filing, just as journalists are still discussing whether Miami New Times should have published them. But Florida’s commendable open records laws bear no responsibility here; in fact, had a reporter sought the documents from police or prosecutors, the law probably would have exempted them from release because they were part of an ongoing criminal investigation.

Mark Seibel
Managing editor/International
Knight Ridder Washington bureau
Washington, D.C.
(The writer is a former managing editor of The Miami Herald)

In his article, “Miami Noir,” Tom Austin states matter-of-factly that my conversation with former Miami City Commissioner Art Teele — the one I secretly recorded — was “off the record” and that by attempting to write about that conversation I had violated a fundamental journalistic principle. This accusation was initially promoted by Herald executives to buttress their hasty decision to fire me. The accusation, however, is false.

Common sense dictates that Teele wanted me to write about our final conversation.

Teele and I had not spoken in four months, and then, less than an hour before killing himself he called me. Think about that. The last person Teele contacted before shooting himself in the lobby of The Miami Herald wasn’t his wife or his son or his minister, the last person he called was me, whom he repeatedly described as the only reporter in Miami he could trust to tell his story fairly.

But if common sense doesn’t dictate that Teele wanted me to write about our final conversation, Teele himself made it clear after his death. As we would learn weeks later, Teele made a separate tape, addressed to me, which he brought to the Herald when he committed suicide. I’ve yet to hear the tape, but according to prosecutors Teele’s comments on that tape are virtually the same as the phone conversation we had. He was explaining why he had lost hope.

The fact that Teele made his own tape to be delivered to me after his death, is perhaps the most compelling evidence of all that Teele wanted me to write about his thoughts in the final moments of his life and any argument to the contrary is ludicrous.

Jim DeFede
Miami, Florida
(In January, DeFede was hired as a full-time reporter and commentator for WFOR-TV, the CBS affiliate in Miami.)

The Plame Game

Timothy M. Phelps incorrectly describes my agreement to testify in the Plame investigation (CJR, January/February). The scope of the questioning during my deposition was quite limited. I did not discuss two conversations I had had with I. Lewis Libby in July 2003, but merely affirmed that the subjects of Valerie Plame, Joseph Wilson, and Wilson’s trip to Niger were not raised in those conversations. The actual subjects of those conversations remain off the record, per my agreement with my source.

Glenn Kessler
Diplomatic correspondent
The Washington Post
Washington, D.C.

Phelps’s article bemoaning the effect that Judy Miller’s case has had on reporters and the First Amendment ignores the two key points:

1. Even if a well-developed reporter-source privilege existed, it wouldn’t apply to Judy Miller in this case anyway. The exposure of Valerie Plame’s identity as a CIA employee to Miller was the crime; and as such Miller was an eyewitness to that crime. An attorney who watched his client shoot someone would not be able to claim attorney-client privilege to not testify about what he saw. The way to have minimized the damage done to the First Amendment would have been not to go to the mat on such a weak case in the first place. Read Judge Tatel’s argument in the appeals court decision for a limited reporter-source privilege, based on Department of Justice rules of evidence. With a more clear-cut case, perhaps Tatel might have convinced one of his colleagues to go along with his argument.

2. The standard for protecting sources should be simple: whistleblowers get protected; smear mongers get outed. And the argument that reporters wouldn’t be able to tell the difference is beyond weak; it’s ludicrous.

Bill Rudman
Castro Valley, California

Timothy M. Phelps replies: I agree with Rudman’s point that the Miller case was a dangerous one to make law with. But such is often the case. It is true that a federal reporter’s privilege might not have applied to Miller, as I tried to suggest, for example, in the last paragraph by saying, “Of course, [reporters] never did have the right to offer complete confidentiality in every circumstance.” And, of course, I clearly disagree when Rudman suggests that “smear mongers get outed.” One person’s smear monger is another person’s, well, source.

Editor’s note: Phelps’s article incorrectly stated that Wen Ho Lee “is suing government agencies for allegedly leaking fake information about him.” In fact, the basis of his contention is that the reporters’ sources violated his privacy.

‘Drug Test’ Tested

I am disturbed by the article, “Drug Test,” by Daniel Schulman (CJR, November/December), which purports to be a balanced look at issues surrounding thimerosal (a mercury-based vaccine preservative) and autism, a development condition first seen in childhood. While tilting away from science and toward the believers’ side, he ends up with an article that qualifies as faith-based journalism.

The article mentions eight reports from nine meetings the independent Institute of Medicine held from 2001 to 2004 as if they were the equivalent of the anguished cries of parents seeking an answer. The final IOM study was conducted by thirteen senior scientists and health officials who collectively hold seventeen advanced degrees and serve at twelve universities and medical centers around the country. It was not a frivolous exercise. Those studies are both acknowledged, then dismissed, usually in favor of beliefs expressed by reporters, or advocates.

The article throws out theories of a conspiracy between scientists, the federal government, and drug companies to suppress or deny the alleged connections, but remarkably never pursues them. The article blends in the unrelated hardball lobbying tactics of the pharmaceutical industry as if they were proof of the thimerosal theory (rather than the industry’s standard aggressive business practice). The article devotes four lengthy paragraphs to the fringe notion of “chelation therapy,” which is best described on a Web site called quackwatch.org.

The article identifies the university affiliations of researchers who anecdotally support some aspect of the thimerosal-did-it view or who think that more research into this specific issue is needed. But it never identifies the university affiliations of those who worked on the three-year IOM study and unanimously concluded that there was no causal link and that funds could best be spent elsewhere.

Go to the last paragraph of the story to see the tilt away from an understanding of the scientific method and toward a romantic view of journalism, with reporters as the lonely Davids ready to take down the behemoth Goliaths: “Whether the thimerosal theory is proved right or wrong, there will be consequences — for the public health apparatus and vaccine manufacturers, for parents and their children, even for journalists.” Excuse me, but the thimerosal theory has been proven to be wrong. We are talking about scientific inquiry here, not gumshoe political reporting. A real opportunity was lost here, and a remarkably vaporous smokescreen has been thrown up in the name of “balance.”

Bob Meyers
President, National Press Foundation
Washington, D.C.

Daniel Schulman responds: The major assumption in Meyers’s letter is that “the thimerosal theory has been proven wrong.” That is simply untrue. But don’t take my word for it. Take the word of the Centers for Disease Control. The agency is currently conducting a study on precisely whether there is any connection between mercury-containing vaccines and autism, a line of inquiry it would hardly waste time or money on if the thimerosal theory had been authoritatively debunked.

Contrary to what Meyers suggests, nowhere in the story do I assert a definitive link between thimerosal and autism, or anything even approaching that. What I do state is that “there is science left to be done and scientists eager to do it,” which seems to be in accord with the CDC’s official position.

Although I never intimate, as Meyers suggests, that the IOM is anything less than a highly respected institution that undertook a serious review, I do cover some legitimate concerns that have surfaced about the methodology of some of the primary studies the IOM relied on. In addition, my failure to list the university affiliations of the IOM’s panel was in no way an attempt to undercut the credibility of its work; I repeatedly make it clear that the “bulk” of the scientific establishment believes no association exists between thimerosal and autism. Since reputable researchers on the other side of this debate have often been portrayed by their peers and others as charlatans, I thought it important that readers be aware of just who these “charlatans” are.

Meyers also claims that I push conspiracy theories, though I clearly state my views on the “evidence” of conspiracy that advocates of the thimerosal theory have amassed. Referring to the minutes of a hush-hush meeting of public health officials, researchers, and reps from leading vaccine manufacturers, and other similar documents that advocates point to as proof of an autism connection or a cover-up of same, I write: “Simpsonwood is not a smoking gun. Nor are other documents that purport to be.” I also note that there is no proof that the IOM manipulated data to whitewash a link between thimerosal and autism, as some allege.

Far from writing about chelation as an advocate, I note it solely in the context of a five-year-old boy who died as a result of this therapy. My aim was to point out that the consequences of lending any measure of credibility to the thimerosal theory are not purely theoretical and that journalists who choose to write about this subject must grapple with that reality.

Ultimately, perhaps Meyers and I disagree on what the “scientific method” really is. In my view, debate and controversy are integral to the process. But we are in agreement that when it comes to the thimerosal question, “a vaporous smokescreen” has indeed obscured the issue.

Nuclear Clarity

In a letter to the editor published in the January/February issue, Rick Lehner, communications director for the U.S. Missile Defense Agency, claimed that I had “injected an important error” into my November/December Voices piece (“Hair-Trigger Nukes”) by suggesting “that the U.S. strategic nuclear deterrent force is part of the National Missile Defense System.” He offered no evidence that my article made such a link between missile defense and strategic nuclear forces, however, because he had none. And, even if I had made such a link, it would not have amounted to “an important error.” The missile defense agency and strategic nuclear forces are separate organizationally and for the most part operationally, but as Bruce Blair, a recognized authority in the field, told me, “they are now closely linked in terms of doctrine, roles, and missions, according to Bush’s Nuclear Posture Review submitted to Congress in 2001, in which it is stated that offensive nuclear forces and active defense are integrally related. In addition, the operational overlap between strategic offensive and missile defense forces on alert is the common global early warning network on which both rely.”

Morton Mintz
Washington, D.C.

To read the articles in the March/April 2006 issue, click here.

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