HERE’S HOW NEWS is often put together. Reporters hear things from people. Some of these people, in return for their disclosures, demand and receive a measure of anonymity — so in the reporter’s finished story, their identities are disguised. Not entirely disguised. Newspapers generally demand a generic but accurate description of the people the reporter has talked to — a “senior White House official,” a “congressional leadership aide” — so that readers can judge the credibility of the information they’re consuming.
Of course, if it turns out the “senior White House official” isn’t actually a senior White House official at all, this entire enterprise of credibility comes crashing down. But that kind of witting inaccuracy would never be perpetrated by a reputable newspaper like the New York Times. Or would it?
Consider a New York Times story of January 31, 1999, by Don Van Natta Jr., a reporter in the paper’s Washington bureau. That story is central to a current federal contempt of court proceeding against Charles Bakaly, former spokesman for Kenneth Starr’s independent counsel operation.
Van Natta’s front-pager revealed that Starr was considering a near-term indictment of President Clinton. The story was sourced, over and over, to “associates of Mr. Starr,” which made it appear that the independent counsel’s office had leaked like a sieve. And the story was published right in the middle of Clinton’s Senate trial, so it was widely noticed.
Clinton’s lawyers noticed it, anyway. They immediately claimed that Van Natta’s scoop represented a prima facie violation of grand jury secrecy rules by Starr and his men, and demanded an investigation. In response, Starr filed with U.S. district judge Norma Holloway Johnson a signed declaration by Bakaly that he had not discussed privileged information with Van Natta. But Starr subsequently came to doubt Bakaly’s explanations of his contacts with the Times, accepted his spokesman’s resignation, and withdrew the declaration. For alleged false statements in that document, Bakaly is now being prosecuted.
As a legal matter, the Bakaly case is odd. The man is charged with lying to Johnson about whether he illegally disclosed grand jury secrets to the New York Times. But a federal circuit court has already ruled, some time ago, that there were no such secrets in Van Natta’s story. In other words, Charles Bakaly now stands accused of falsely denying participation in a crime that the law has already concluded didn’t occur. Chances are that Bakaly will eventually be exonerated.
But Don Van Natta’s story may not deserve such a happy verdict. And it can only raise suspicions about how the nation’s paper of record handles its anonymous sources. Does the New York Times, at least occasionally, deliberately and flagrantly mislead its readers about those sources?
In the trial briefs he’s submitted, Charles Bakaly has acknowledged that he was indeed the unspecified “associate” of Kenneth Starr to whom Don Van Natta’s story attributed a couple of innocuous quotations. Bakaly has further acknowledged having provided Van Natta with a redacted copy of an internal independent counsel’s office memorandum: a piece of historical research that summarized arguments considered by Watergate prosecutors in 1974 — about whether to indict President Nixon. Bakaly has no apparent reason to lie about either deed; neither admission is particularly helpful to his case.
Both admissions cast a cloud over the Times, however. Bakaly swears, on penalty of perjury, that he consented to talk about a theoretical indictment of the president with Van Natta in January 1999 — provided the reporter make it seem Starr’s spokesman had actually stayed mum. As it happens, Van Natta’s story did include such a disclaimer: “Charles G. Bakaly 3d, the spokesman for Mr. Starr, declined to discuss the matter.” If Bakaly is now telling the truth, Van Natta reported something he knew to be false.
And what about the memorandum Bakaly delivered to Van Natta? It’s relevant to conversations the Times story claimed the reporter had had with “associates of Mr. Starr.” The following sentence in Van Natta’s piece, for example: “Another argument in favor [of indicting Clinton] is that ‘prosecutors should pay no heed to considerations of national interest,’ an associate of Mr. Starr said.”
Trouble is, no “associate of Mr. Starr” ever said that to the New York Times. Those words, and several other sets of words quite like them, which Van Natta made sound as though they had recently been uttered to him over the phone, were in fact lifted verbatim from the memorandum Bakaly had given him. In each such case, the quoted words described ideas advanced by lawyers working for Leon Jaworski a quarter century ago. None came from the mouth of a Starr “associate.”
Is Don Van Natta’s scoop a piece of journalism consistent with New York Times standards? In a July 20 interview with the Internet edition of Brill’s Content, Michael Oreskes, Washington bureau chief of the Times, insisted that it is “absolutely” against his paper’s policy to “say anything untrue or misleading” in a news article. But Oreskes — and Van Natta — declined to answer questions from Brill’s about the sourcing of any specific story. Last week, Oreskes was unavailable for comment.
David Tell is opinion editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
