[Newspoetry] [FAIR-L@FAIR.ORG: [FAIR-L] ACTIVISM UPDATE: Chinese Embassy Bombing: Media Reply, FAIR responds]

[Bill Wendling]

Not 12 characters, but 2! :)

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From: FAIR <FAIR-L at FAIR.ORG>
Subject:      [FAIR-L] ACTIVISM UPDATE: Chinese Embassy Bombing: Media Reply,
              FAIR responds
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                                 FAIR-L
                    Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting
               Media analysis, critiques and news reports




Chinese Embassy Bombing Update:
Media Reply, FAIR Responds

Nov. 3, 1999

Since FAIR released its October 22 action alert, "U.S. Media Overlook Exposé
on Chinese Embassy Bombing," many readers have written to mainstream media
outlets, asking them why they have devoted so little attention to the
Chinese embassy story. A number of readers have received replies from Andrew
Rosenthal, foreign editor of the New York Times, and from his counterpart at
USA Today, Douglas Stanglin.

Andrew Rosenthal of the Times admitted that, "in a few articles," his paper
erred in referring to last May's embassy attack as an "accidental bombing,"
since, as FAIR pointed out, the intent behind the attack remains disputed.
Rosenthal described the Times' choice of words as "poorly phrased." (It's
worth pointing out that those "few articles" actually amounted to a total of
twenty stories over a five-month period.)

More importantly, Rosenthal responded to FAIR's questions about his paper's
lack of coverage. "The Times is well aware of the reports in the Guardian,
the Observer and Politiken," he wrote in response to several inquiries:

"We have assigned reporters to follow up and when we have the facts, we will
publish an article. That is the responsible journalistic course. We have
been criticized by the organization FAIR, which accuses us of ignoring or,
worse, covering up these articles. That is grossly unfair and simply not
true, as FAIR might have found out if anyone from that organization had
bothered calling someone at the Times."

In a later message, Rosenthal added that "The Observer article was not
terribly well-sourced, by our standards at least. I assure you that if we
can show that the bombing was deliberate, you will read about it on the
front page of our paper."

FAIR never accused the Times, or any other news outlet, of attempting to
"cover up" the Chinese embassy story. That should be clear from the text of
our alert, which can be viewed at
http://www.fair.org/activism/embassy-bombing.html . FAIR simply documented
that since October 17, when the Observer published its report, the paper's
findings have been reported prominently in major news outlets all over the
world -- except in the United States, where there has been virtually no
coverage.

FAIR did not attempt to explain this lack of coverage. Instead, we urged our
readers to contact important media outlets and ask them why they had chosen,
so far, not to cover the story. We also encouraged them to ask media outlets
to follow up on the Observer's reporting. The embassy bombing has
potentially severe ramifications for U.S.-China relations. Yet so far, the
public knows only that NATO has apologized for its "mistake" while China
remains inexplicably furious -- despite the media's repeated assurances that
China's suspicions are groundless.

AP, Reuters and Agence France Presse all chose to send out dispatches about
the Observer's embassy bombing report (all 10/17/99). The editors of those
news agencies clearly believed that the Observer's findings were important
and credible enough for many of their clients around the world to be
interested in publishing them.

Indeed, the foreign editors of some of the most distinguished news outlets
in the world picked up the wire accounts or reported on the Observer
investigation themselves. Those outlets include the Times of London, the
Globe and Mail of Canada, Le Figaro of France, Corriere Della Sera of Italy,
the Sydney Morning Herald of Australia, the Irish Times, the Times of India
and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (all 10/18/99). (The Zeitung, which
ran the story on its front page, has been described by the New York Times as
"Germany's most prestigious newspaper" -- 3/1/98.)

Since Rosenthal has asserted that the Observer article was "not terribly
well-sourced," it's worthwhile to review the sourcing of the embassy expose.
To clarify any ambiguity about who the sources were and what they said, FAIR
contacted journalists at both the Observer and Politiken. According to the
Observer's U.S. correspondent, Ed Vulliamy, its foreign editor, Peter
Beaumont, and Politiken reporter Jens Holsoe, their sources included the
following:

--A European NATO military officer serving in an operational capacity at the
four-star level - a source at the highest possible level within NATO -
confirmed three things: (1) That NATO targeted the Chinese embassy
deliberately; (2) That the embassy was emitting Yugoslav military radio
signals; and (3) That the target was not approved through the normal NATO
channels but through a second, "American-only" track.

--A European NATO staff officer at the two-star level in the Defense
Intelligence office confirmed the same story.

--Two U.S. sources: A very high-ranking former senior American intelligence
official connected to the Balkans - "about as high as you can get,"
according to one reporter - confirmed that the embassy was deliberately
targeted. A mid-ranking current U.S. military official, also connected to
the Balkans, confirmed elements of the story and pointedly refused to deny
that the embassy had been bombed deliberately.

--A NATO flight controller based in Naples and a NATO intelligence officer
monitoring Yugoslav radio broadcasts from Macedonia each confirmed that
NATO's signals intelligence located Yugoslav military radio signals coming
from the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. When they informed their superiors,
they were told that the matter would be handled further up in the chain of
command. Two weeks later, the embassy was bombed.

--An official at the U.S. National Imagery and Mapping Agency told the
reporters that NATO's official explanation, which involves a faulty map of
Belgrade, is a "damned lie." The Alliance claims it was targeting the
Yugoslav Federal Directorate for Supply and Procurement which had once been
located at that site. But Holsoe discovered through simple open-source
inquiries that no building was ever on that site before the embassy. The
Yugoslav office for supplies is in fact 500 meters down the street and was
struck later by NATO. According to Helsoe, "nearly everyone involved in NATO
air operations or signals command knows that the embassy bombing was
deliberate." (Pacific News Service, 10/20/99)

The Observer's findings appear to corroborate other information that was
previously known about the attack. For example, the CIA admitted that out of
more than 900 sites targeted by NATO during the Kosovo campaign, it
developed only one target: the site of the Chinese embassy (AP, 7/22/99).
The London Daily Telegraph (6/27/99) disclosed that NATO's precision-guided
missiles struck only the embassy's intelligence-gathering section. And
German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder took the unusual step of publicly
questioning NATO's explanation of the attack (AFP, 5/12/99). Together with
these additional pieces of information, the Observer investigation appears
to stand on remarkably firm ground.

Since the quality and quantity of the Observer's sources do not seem to be
the issue here--six NATO-country officials from both Europe and the United
States, up and down the chain of command--FAIR can only speculate that the
Times' real objection to the Observer's sourcing is that the paper does not
cite by name any of the NATO officers who confirmed the story. If this
standard -- a named official source -- is the one the Times is applying, it
has condemned the story never to see the light of day, since a military
officer could quite possibly face a court martial for disclosing such
information. The New York Times regularly grants anonymity to sources who
have far less justification for concealing their identities.

Finally, Rosenthal wrote to one correspondent: "There is nothing in the
distinguished history of the Times - where reporters have risked their
lives, been threatened with jail and indeed gone to jail to protect the
public's right to know things the government does not want to get out - to
suggest that we would withhold such a story."

Certainly, the history of the New York Times contains some very admirable
and courageous moments--for example, publishing the Pentagon Papers in the
face of government threats. But the Times also has a long record of
silencing reporters and stories which might cause the government discomfort.
The Times pulled a reporter out of Guatemala on the eve of the 1954 coup at
the request of the CIA. In 1961, the Times sanitized and downplayed a story
about the upcoming Bay of Pigs invasion at the request of President Kennedy.
After the 1982 El Mozote massacre, the Times reassigned its El Salvador
correspondent to New York under pressure from the Reagan administration.
More recently at least one reporter for the Times withheld information about
the CIA's use of U.N. weapons inspectors to spy on Iraq.

-------------------------

USA Today foreign editor Douglas Stanglin wrote to a correspondent:

"We have checked into the report and do not find it credible. We will
continue to monitor the situation. If we find credible evidence, we will
print. I should point out, in case the observer didn't, that the relaying of
radio information (whether by the Chinese embassy or not) is frequently done
and is not all that unusual. There are plenty of embassies and other sources
that do the same thing all the time. So this is not a situation where the
Chinese, if in fact they did that, are somehow the only lone operator here
doing something of vital military significance. It makes a nice story that
way, but does not reflect the reality of wartime situations. That, among
other things, is what our Pentagon reporter has found which makes us not
want to rush into some judgment that looks less compelling in the bright
light of day."

Unlike Rosenthal, Stanglin says explicitly that he chose not to print the
Chinese embassy story because his paper had looked into it and did not find
the reporting credible. It is impressive that USA Today managed to see
through a story that fooled the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the London
Times and the Globe and Mail. It is equally impressive that USA Today took
less than five days to disprove a story the London Observer and Politiken
spent four months reporting.

But what is most striking about Stanglin's message is the new information he
says his paper has uncovered. Apparently, USA Today's Pentagon correspondent
has found that it is not unusual for embassies to relay radio military
signals for their host country. "There are plenty of embassies and other
sources that do the same thing all the time," Stanglin writes.

Stanglin seems to imply that during the Kosovo war, other embassies in
Belgrade were providing the same assistance to the Yugoslav military that
the Observer and Politiken's sources say prompted NATO to bomb the Chinese
embassy. Of course, this does not disprove the Observer/Politiken story;
there could be differences in the quality of the help provided by China, or
political reasons why the U.S. would choose to strike at the Chinese embassy
-- or not strike at other embassies.

But if Stanglin's assertion is true -- if his paper has evidence that other
countries were militarily helping Yugoslavia in this way during NATO's
bombing -- that is important news, and USA Today should publish it rather
than simply relate the information to a reader in an e-mail communication.

-------------------------------

Editors are frequently forced to make difficult decisions about which
stories to publish and which to leave out. It is not uncommon for an
important story to be overlooked by a newspaper or news broadcast. But FAIR
does find it significant that U.S. media, broadcast and print,
overwhelmingly ignored a story that put the U.S. government in a negative
light, even while respected international media outlets afforded the story
significant attention.



                               ----------


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-- 
|| Bill Wendling			wendling at ganymede.isdn.uiuc.edu