Because this is a story about the national media, none of the standards reporters use to judge other institutions can be applied. The following must be stipulated: There are no hidden personal agendas. There are no hidden corporate agendas. There are no conflicts of interest. There are no conspiracies. There is not even much coordinated activity. There are simply hard-working publishers, editors, and reporters determined to push the news out as soon as it is reliable, and as space and time constraints permit.
How, then, to account for the peculiar way in which the nation’s Big Three newspapers — the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post — reported on many China-related issues in the weeks surrounding the House of Representatives’ vote last May on U.S.-China trade?
A few days after the House voted to grant China permanent normal trade relations, the Journal, the Post, and to a lesser extent the Times each featured stories containing plenty of bad and previously unreported or neglected news about China, about U.S. policies toward the People’s Republic, and about the multinational companies leading the multi-million dollar lobbying campaign for normal trade. Three of these articles, moreover, were being researched well before the China vote.
Not surprisingly, most who noticed this pattern were, like the author, strong opponents of unconditionally normalizing trade with China. But even some of the presumably neutral journalists involved noticed how much negative China news came out right after the House vote that could have done something about it. And those reporters and editors willing and able to discuss the issue tended to provide the kinds of answers they themselves would never consider adequate from other newsmakers.
For example, the day after the House vote, the Wall Street Journal ran a front page lead article revealing that much of the corporate lobbying for the China trade bill was based on misleading claims. Individually and collectively, multinational companies had bombarded Congress, the media, and the public with the message that normal trade with China would benefit not just Big Business, but the entire U.S. economy — including the workers who would be hired in greater numbers and paid higher wages to meet new Chinese demand for American-made goods and services.
Yet Journal correspondents Helene Cooper and Ian Johnson reported that, although “business lobbyists emphasized the beneficial effect the agreement would have on U.S. exports to China” and “played down its likely effect on investment, leery of sounding supportive of labor-union arguments that the deal would prompt companies to move U.S. production to China, . . . many businessmen concede that investment in China is the prize.” In other words, these companies had decided to serve China’s markets (and in many cases, America’s markets) from factories located in China, and many U.S. workers were right to fear the consequences.
On May 27, the Post published a business section article echoing the Journal piece. International trade reporter John Burgess presented his own evidence showing that, as the headline stated, “For Many, China Trade Bill Isn’t About Exports; U.S. Firms Eager To Offer Services, Open Subsidiaries.” Noteworthy in Burgess’s article was an admission from a spokesperson for the Business Roundtable that “it’s hard” to convey to the public or congressional staffers in short ads or brief meetings the point that trade is not only about “a product being sold to another consumer outside the U.S.” Yet Burgess’s piece made clear this problem didn’t stop corporate lobby groups from pushing exactly this point in their ads.
The day before, the Post featured bad non-economic China news in a front-page lead. According to Pentagon correspondent Thomas E. Ricks, the Defense Department was making a major shift in our military strategy. U.S. force structures and deployments would be focused less on Europe and more on Asia — largely because of growing concerns about China’s power and even unfriendly intentions. In other words, even as President Clinton was insisting on treating China as a normal country commercially, his security advisers had decided China was anything but a normal country politically and militarily.
Nothing so dramatic appeared in the New York Times. But the day after the China vote, White House correspondent David E. Sanger published a news analysis contending “the economic benefits” of the China deal “were undoubtedly oversold,” and “history suggests that as soon as China’s tariffs come down, new bureaucratic barriers will magically appear.”
The Journal and Post articles, at least, could clearly have been published before the House vote. Yet few of the reporters and editors involved even acknowledged anything out of the ordinary about their China news decisions.
The Wall Street Journal would not permit staff members involved in the Cooper-Johnson story to be interviewed. But Richard J. Tofel, the paper’s vice president for corporate communications, insisted the piece simply “wasn’t finished being written” until the day the House voted. He bristled when asked whether the Journal had deliberately held the story until after lawmakers could act on its implications, and contended that — especially in its coverage of Chinese human rights activists — “no paper has been tougher on China.”
Yet Cooper received much of the raw material for the investment article two weeks before the China vote. I know this because I spoke with her on the subject on May 10 and dropped off at her office a brand new study detailing how many multinational companies were planning to ramp up production in China and how few were planning to ramp up exports from the United States. When asked whether the reporters could have been directed to finish the article in time for publication before the China vote, Tofel replied, “I don’t know and I won’t ask. I don’t want to be commenting on our internal editorial processes.”
Two sources at the Journal’s Washington bureau, however, have confirmed that Cooper’s story was ready to be published early the week of May 22, before the House vote. Tofel responded to this claim by saying, “I don’t know who you’ve been talking with out on the street corner.”
In contrast, Post reporters and editors felt free to discuss the articles in question. Burgess received my China investment report even before Cooper. He “thought of doing it [as a story] about a week before the vote,” but “there were a lot of different stories in the pipeline.” Eventually, he decided to “do it as a summing up.” Burgess said that before the vote, “we did say investment was key” to many companies’ support for the China trade bill. But a search of the Post’s China articles for the critical month before the vote — when most congressmen actually began to focus on the issue — turned up nothing on this topic.
Michael Abramowitz, who helped oversee the Post’s coverage of Congress’s consideration of the China trade issue, conceded, “in an ideal world,” Burgess’s article “would have run before the vote.” Abramowitz added, however, that the Post had thoroughly covered both sides of the China debate before the vote, and “anyone who read the Post would have gotten that argument” from the China critics, who were repeatedly quoted. Yet it is one thing to present a point in a news story as the opinion of one side or another in a policy dispute. It is something else entirely to present this point as a significant trend identified or confirmed by a reporter, as in Burgess’s article.
Ricks, a Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent while at the Journal, initially tried to laugh off the charge that China stories were deliberately delayed, calling it “goofy.” Ricks did acknowledge that his article about the defense strategy shift involved “several weeks” worth of work,” that “I could have done it” before the China vote, and editors “had put heat on me” to finish the piece — though “no one said it needed to run before the vote.” In Ricks’s view, “It’s in the nature of journalism. Before the vote, you write about the vote — afterwards, about the implications.”
Jackson Diehl, the Post’s assistant managing editor for national news, supervised Ricks’s work on the strategy article, which he said originated in a March trip to East Asia Ricks had made with defense secretary William Cohen. Diehl maintained the Post “did not deliberately not publish” the article before the China vote; nor did the paper attempt to “speed up” its completion to permit pre-vote publication. Arguing that the article’s main thrust was America’s emerging Asia strategy, not China specifically, Diehl said “we did not connect it in our minds” with the House vote. When reminded that, shortly before the vote, Clinton had begun emphasizing the national security reasons for granting China permanent normal trade status, Diehl replied, “I didn’t see [the Ricks article] as something that could influence the vote, but I was interested in it as a follow-up.”
According to Thom Shanker, foreign editor at the New York Times Washington bureau, David Sanger’s post-vote revelations about hyping the China deal and about China’s determination to maintain trade protection represented no sudden change in China reporting priorities. Instead, Sanger was simply drawing his own conclusions, as permitted in an article clearly labeled as analysis, not reporting. Shanker called “interesting” the contention that these points had not appeared recently in previous Times coverage, but added that he “would be surprised if you polled members [of Congress] and found that their votes would have been changed” by reading Sanger’s conclusions beforehand.
There is one possible conflict of interest: Karen Elliot House, who heads the international division of the Journal’s parent, Dow Jones & Co., is a member of the board of the U.S.-China Business Council. This organization, comprising more than 250 American and foreign business interests, was among the leaders of the China lobbying effort. Dow Jones’s membership on the council is understandable. It is a corporation with corporate interests, and it is entitled to represent those interests before the government and the court of public opinion. On the other hand, service on the board that oversees the council’s lobbying and other operations appears to entail a different order of involvement — and should be disclosed regularly. Disney, GE, Microsoft, and Time Warner are other council members with major media holdings, but Microsoft is the only other in this group currently represented on the board.
But according to the rules, because this story is about the national media, and the usual standards don’t apply, the Journal must be given the benefit of the doubt. There is no serious choice but to accept the emphatic denial by Tofel, the Dow Jones official, of any impropriety, or even the appearance of a conflict. For publishers’ commercial interests do not influence news coverage. And the Journal’s news product is widely admired and relied on.
The other explanations of unusual China coverage patterns by the Journal’s two peers apparently deserve the same credence. “This or that point was indeed mentioned” (even when it can’t be found). “You didn’t look at enough of our coverage.” “There wasn’t enough space or enough time to include these points.” The occasional, “We hadn’t thought about that.”
Still, for anyone less concerned with obeying the rules about covering the media and more concerned with understanding how news and information influence American politics, it’s harder to dismiss these observations: Before the vote, the Big Three published nothing remotely resembling a scoop casting aspersions on China, on U.S. policy toward China, or on the corporate China lobby. Before the vote, downbeat assessments of China’s economy and U.S. business and labor prospects were never portrayed as indisputable realities or as conventional wisdom.
This record, and the accompanying explanations, add up to a strange picture of how these crown jewels of the national media view their role in American politics and policy. What comes through especially is the stated belief of the nation’s leading newspapers that they have little or no influence on policy decisions or on Washington’s working agenda, and that delivering important news before major votes is not an especially high priority. It almost makes you wonder why they’re involved in journalism in the first place.
Alan Tonelson is a research fellow at the U.S. Business and Industry Council Educational Foundation.
