The New York Times waddles in this morning with an article about low-power FM radio licenses for religious broadcasters. It apparently thinks the story is important enough to place in the upper right-hand corner of the front page, the most prominent display spot in the paper. But this policy feud has been going on for months, and has already been covered thoroughly in other newspapers. The Wall Street Journal editorial page has been covering the issue, for example. So has the Jewish weekly newspaper the Forward, which on the front page of its April 28 issue carried a story under the headline, "Chabad Radio Gets Tangled in Policy Spat; FCC, Congress Duel Over FM Bandwith; Feds Raid Crown Heights." It is an interesting story, but the Times is playing catch-up.
Did Bakaly Talk? The Justice Department is trying to nail a former spokesman for independent counsel Kenneth Starr on criminal charges of contempt of court. The case stems from the spokesman's allegedly obscuring the role the spokesman played in talking to reporters for the Times. The spokesman's name is Charles Bakaly. A dispatch about the case in the national section of this morning's Times sheds a few rays of additional light on whether Mr. Bakaly spoke to the Times about the story that sparked the dispute. In fact, today's article suggests the original dispatch in the Times may have misled readers. Here's the conflicting information:
Today's story reports, "In their brief, defense lawyers conceded that Mr. Bakaly had discussed the subject with a reporter for The Times, but had not discussed anything that was not already public knowledge."
But the original January 1999 story in the Times that sparked the dispute said Mr. Bakaly had "declined to discuss the matter."
Was the original January 1999 story incorrect when it said that Mr. Bakaly had declined to discuss the matter? And if so, why hasn't the Times run a correction? Probably what happened is a case of reporters stretching the truth a bit in an effort to protect their sources. The standard formulation in the case of someone like Mr. Bakaly, who helps a reporter on a background basis yet doesn't want to be quoted by name, but is too obvious and central a player to be left out of the story entirely, is something like: "Mr. Bakaly declined to discuss the matter for the record." That at least has the virtue of being true, though it does make it somewhat transparent that Mr. Bakaly was willing to discuss the matter on a background basis. Another possible formulation would have been: "Mr. Bakaly declined to discuss the matter beyond what is already public knowledge."
But if the Times told its readers in January 1999 that Mr. Bakaly "declined to discuss the matter," period, when in fact he did discuss the matter but didn't want to be quoted or to dispense any new information to them, it was being a little too coy for the taste of most editors we know.