This morning's New York Times, at page A2, contains an unusual and lengthy mea culpa by the Times with respect to its coverage of the Wen Ho Lee nuclear secrets case. The article, unsigned but slugged "From the Editors," is subtle and nuanced. We had to read it over several times before we could tell whether it was an apology or a defense. In fact, it's a little of both. The article says, "On the whole, we remain proud of work that brought into the open a major national security problem of which officials had been aware for months, even years." But the article also says, "looking back, we also found some things we wish we has done differently in the course of the coverage to give Dr. Lee the full benefit of the doubt."
Well, of course, looking back, there are things the Times wishes it had done differently. That is the nature of daily newspapering, which, as the Times correctly points out, "is performed under deadline pressure, with the best assessment of information available at the time." The best way to deal with these sorts of regrets and second thoughts is by printing follow-up stories, as the Times has done, rather than by engaging in the sort of painstaking public self-examination that the Times engages in today. What's interesting is why the Times caved in in this case, and engaged in this unusually detailed self-criticism. Why did it devote so much space and attention to its supposed errors in the Wen Ho Lee case and not to confessing its bias against George W. Bush, or its errors in reporting the supposed melting of the North Pole, or its manufacturing of a backlash against the Boy Scouts for their rules against gays?
The Times has duly corrected some of these other errors, but with nothing like the public self-flagellation that characterizes today's "From the Editors" note about Wen Ho Lee. It's hard to assess the newspaper's motivations, but it's probably not merely a coincidence that in the Wen Ho Lee case the newspaper's coverage was being attacked by critics on the political left motivated by anti-anti-Communism and by an Asian-American identity politics that feeds on the notion of victimhood and false persecution. The Times is naturally more sympathetic to such criticism, because on the whole, it shares the ideological suppositions of those critics with respect to Communism and racism. It's a credit to the Times that the original Lee reporting was able to make its way into the paper despite those ideological barriers. What the editor's note represents is the Times reverting to its standard ideological assumptions, which is too bad.
It's Not a Cut: In an article in its national section today, the Times lets Al Gore get away with the false charge that "Mr. Bush commended" a 1995 "House Republican plan to cut $270 billion over seven years from Medicare, the federal health insurance program for the elderly." We don't know how many times we are going to have to explain this, but here it goes again: A reduction in the rate of growth is not a "cut." If it is, then Mr. Gore himself, and President Clinton, wanted to "cut" Medicare by $124 billion over seven years, according to a September 27, 1996 Times article. Medicare spending skyrocketed to $177 billion in 1996 from $53 billion in 1983, according to a 1996 article in Reason magazine. The Republican proposed "cuts" actually were a 40% increase over current levels of Medicare spending. The Democratic willingness to attack the Republicans for "cuts," when what the Republicans wanted to do was take Medicare spending from $4,800 per recipient in 1995 to $6,700 per recipient in 2002, was so breathtaking that CNN's Wolf Blitzer even asked President Clinton about it at a 1996 press conference: "Mr. President, your most recent Clinton-Gore campaign commercials still speak about Republican cuts in Medicare and Medicaid. Speaker Gingrich points out repeatedly that these aren't 'cuts' in Medicare and Medicaid; they are simply cuts in the projected growth of Medicare and Medicaid, which you in your own seven-year balanced budget proposal similarly propose. Are you prepared to stop calling the Republican savings in Medicare and Medicaid 'cuts'?" The Times' answer is apparently, "No."
It's almost comical to watch the Times try to grasp this point. A story in the metro section today about the race for U.S. Senate in New Jersey paraphrases a spokesman for Rep Bob Franks, a Republican, complaining about commercials running in support of the Democratic candidate: "For example, he said, they have given the impression that he voted to cut Medicare spending, when in fact he voted on reductions in future Medicare and Medicaid spending." This is an attempt to get the difference straight, but it still doesn't accurately portray what happened on the Medicare issue. Mr. Franks didn't vote to reduce future Medicare spending; he voted to increase Medicare spending in absolute terms while reducing the rate of growth.