On May 22, The New York Times reported that on June 3, the day of the Democratic primary debate in New Hampshire, it will excerpt a new biography of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY), co-authored by former Times reporter Jeff Gerth and current Times reporter Don Van Natta Jr. in The New York Times Magazine. The on-sale dates of the Gerth-Van Natta book, titled Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton (Little, Brown), and that of a second Clinton biography, A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton by Carl Bernstein (Knopf), have been moved up twice by their rival publishers. According to the May 22 Times report, the Bernstein book will go on sale June 5, the Gerth-Van Natta book on June 8.

The May/June 2001 edition of the Columbia Journalism Review included a lengthy profile of Gerth by Ted Gup, a former Washington Post and Time reporter, author and professor of journalism. In the interview, Gerth stated both that “I have assiduously avoided writing about people's private lives in my career,” and that “I don't go out and write books about stories I wrote. I don't go on TV to discuss my stories. If I really were heavily invested in my stories I would do all those things. ... That's not the kind of person I am.”

According to the book description of Her Way, “although dozens of books have been written about her [Clinton], none of them have come close to uncovering the real Hillary -- personal, political, in all her complications.” The description continues:

Drawing upon myriad new sources and previously undisclosed documents, HER WAY shows us how, like many women of her generation, Hillary Rodham Clinton tempered a youthful idealism with the realities of corporate America and big-league politics. It takes readers from the dorm rooms at Wellesley to the courthouses of Arkansas and Washington; to the White House and role as First Lady like none other; inside the back rooms of the Senate, where she expertly navigates the political and legislative shoals; to her $4 million mansion in Washington, where she presides over an unparalleled fundraising machine; and to her war room, from which she orchestrates ferocious attacks against her critics. Throughout her career, she has been alternately helped and hindered by her marriage to Bill Clinton. HER WAY unravels the mysteries of their political partnership -- one of the most powerful and enigmatic in American history. It also explains why Hillary is such a polarizing figure. And more than any other book, it reveals what her ultimate hopes and ambitions are--for herself and for America.

Gerth and Von Natta were reportedly offered a $1 million advance to write the book. It remains to be seen whether the media will challenge Gerth to reconcile his writing of Her Way with his reported statement to Gup that he has “assiduously avoided writing about people's private lives” and is “not the kind of person” who would “go out and write books about stories I wrote.”

On March 27, the New York Daily News' George Rush and Joanna Rush Malloy wrote that according to a “publishing source,” Her Way “is filled with 'explosive stuff' and 'may force her [Clinton] to answer ethics charges in the Senate' in a partisan game of Hacky Sack to throw her off course.” However, unlike the May 22 Times report, the Daily News identified co-author Jeff Gerth as “the New York Times reporter who first wrote about Whitewater,” and touched on criticisms of his reporting regarding both Whitewater and scientist Wen Ho Lee. From the Daily News:

Gerth's writings about the Whitewater land deal in Arkansas spawned a highly politicized, $73 million federal investigation, which, as Joe Conason wrote on Salon.com, “found that Bill and Hillary Clinton had done nothing that could be prosecuted as a crime.”

Writer Gene Lyons made a detailed criticism of Gerth's work in his book “Fools for Scandal,” and Alexander Cockburn said reading his writings “is like bicycling through wet sand.”

Gerth later wrote about Wen Ho Lee, a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory who was accused of stealing nuclear secrets and spent nine months in solitary confinement. Lee settled his lawsuit with the government for leaking damaging information about him to the press.

Indeed, Gerth's investigative reporting on a number of subjects -- including the Clintons -- has been the subject of harsh criticism. If Gerth's new book is as flawed as his previous reporting on the Clintons and others, Media Matters will no doubt analyze the book and his previous work in greater detail. Until then, journalists covering Gerth's book should keep in mind the following examples of his flawed reporting.

Whitewater

The publication of Her Way will likely necessitate a more thorough review of Gerth's Whitewater reporting in the Times and in his forthcoming book. For now, we offer only a brief overview.

As Jeffrey Toobin wrote in his book, A Vast Conspiracy: The Real Story of the Sex Scandal that Nearly Brought Down a President (Random House, 2000), Gerth's original Whitewater article “was as notable for what it didn't say as for what it did: there was no allegation of illegal conduct on the part of the then governor.” This is particularly noteworthy given that the initial Gerth article would be described years later as containing the bulk of what was known about Whitewater.

Much of the criticism of Gerth's (and the Times') Whitewater reporting focused on a pattern of over-hyping innocuous facts. It is important to note that this criticism has come not only from those close to the Clintons, but from working journalists as well.

CNN reporter John Camp, for example, was quoted in an October 29, 1994, Washington Post article as saying that “the documentary evidence did not support the premise of [Gerth's] initial story.”

Miami Herald executive editor Tom Fiedler (best known for revealing the affair between Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart and Donna Rice in 1987) harshly criticized Gerth's Whitewater reporting in an August 4, 1996, column:

Reporting on Whitewater and all its aspects is beginning to become a textbook example of ready-fire-aim journalism run amok. Ironically, about the only place in America that wasn't sucked in on all the alleged misdeeds has been Little Rock, where the local news media -- even the newspaper long dedicated to trashing the Clintons -- has pooh-poohed Whitewater as a non-story concocted by Arkansas Republicans that only the most gullible outsiders would swallow.

And we almost did.

The first reporter to fall for the tale was The New York Times' Jeff Gerth, an investigative reporter. He produced an almost incomprehensible report on the Clintons' Whitewater land investments in early 1992. But incomprehensible or not, the fact that it appeared in so prestigious a paper as The New York Times insinuated that something must have been wrong. And that meant that every other baying hound in the pack had to give chase.

The tale of the resulting journalistic feeding frenzy is artfully told in a new book titled Fools for Scandal, by Gene Lyons and the editors of Harper's Magazine. Lyons is a columnist for The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, a paper that, despite its title, has historically been anti-Clinton. He is also a former editor at Harper's and Newsweek, and has been widely published as a literary critic.

Lyons begins by showing how Gerth was duped by Clinton's GOP enemies and how Gerth's original stories were so error-filled, intentionally or otherwise, that one of the key figures, former Arkansas state securities director Lee Thalheimer, called them “unmitigated horseshit.”

Beverly Bassett Shaffer, Thalheimer's successor in that department and another figure upon whom Gerth heavily relied for his reporting, was so upset by the story -- although she was treated favorably -- that she considered filing a libel suit.

Nonetheless, with The Times' imprimatur, the parade of reporters from Washington, D.C., to Little Rock began, and most, like Gerth, ended up dining on the table scraps served up by Clinton's GOP enemies.

[...]

I know neither Gerth nor Lyons. But I have reason to worry about the former's work. The New York Times reporter ventured to Florida before the 1994 governor's race to report a story alleging dark dealings by Republican-candidate Jeb Bush with a Broward savings and loan.

Those same dealings had previously been examined by The Herald and found quite legitimate, thus producing no story. Yet when Gerth's again-incomprehensible version appeared in The Times, it became the basis for a long-running attack on Bush's integrity and furnished material for political ads insinuating near criminality.

In addition to criticism that Gerth's Whitewater reporting over-hyped innocuous details (and downplayed exculpatory information like the Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC) report), Gerth's Whitewater articles also drew fire for factual errors. In The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton (Thomas Dunne Books, 2000), co-authors Joe Conason and Gene Lyons explained one memorable example in which Gerth incorrectly reported that a client of Hillary Clinton's friend and investment adviser James Blair, benefited “from a variety of state actions, including $9 million in government loans.” Conason and Lyons noted no such loans took place. From The Hunting of the President:

His [Blair's] client Tyson Foods, Gerth wrote, had benefited “from a variety of state actions, including $9 million in government loans.”

In fact, those alleged loans were imaginary. Arkansas had no state loan program for Fortune 500 companies, and more that a month late the Times conceded in a published correction that there were no such loans to Tyson. Rather, it said, Tyson had enjoyed $7 million in state income tax credits -- investment incentives available to every corporation, as the correction failed to mention. By then the fictive $9-million loan had been featured in scores of accusatory editorials and columns. [Page 150]

Wen Ho Lee

In a feature article in the November 2000 edition of American Journalism Review, Lucinda Fleeson criticized Gerth's coverage of Wen Ho Lee, a Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist accused of stealing U.S. nuclear secrets and passing them to China. From Fleeson's article, titled “Rush to Judgment”:

Investigative reporters Jeff Gerth and James Risen reported from the Times' Washington bureau that nuclear weapons secrets had been stolen from the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Federal authorities were focusing on an unidentified Chinese American who worked in the division that helped design the W88 nuclear warhead and had failed a polygraph test. The massive espionage, the story said, had allowed the Chinese to make a “leap in the development of nuclear weapons: the miniaturization of its bombs.”

[...]

After that first New York Times story appeared on March 6, 1999, more explosive stories would appear, including one with accusations that Lee had placed the nation's entire nuclear arsenal at risk by downloading top-secret files for his own personal library. [...] The Times itself would become part of the story, as media critics, scientists and an outraged Chinese American community assailed its reporting as a one-sided parroting of the theory developed by a source who would later be denounced for constructing a case out of “thin air.”

In the end, the government's case collapsed. The major points outlined in the Times' first blockbuster story were found to have little resemblance to what eventually became clear was the truth. And the distinguished newspaper, while defending the accuracy of much of its reporting, conceded significant editing errors in an unprecedented 1,600-word “From the Editors” note. It acknowledged problems with the tone of some articles [the specific article cited in the editor's note as an example of problematic “tone” was not written by Gerth] and said it had failed to assign stories that it should have, including a profile that might have humanized Lee. And it said the paper should have been more skeptical about the information it was receiving and should have explored other possible scenarios.

The Wen Ho Lee saga will be remembered as a case study of what can go wrong when politics infect criminal investigations, when even highly regarded reporters rely on unnamed, inside-the-Beltway sources and leaks about law enforcement investigations, and when cutthroat competition and pressure to match stories encourage news organizations to repeat instead of challenge reporting by others.

[...]

TWO DAYS AFTER the first New York Times story ran, Lee was fired. He was indicted December 10 on 59 counts of mishandling nuclear secrets, and held in solitary confinement, at times shackled, for nine months. By the end, the government's case was shown to be so weak that Lee was allowed to plead guilty to a single count of mishandling secret information. The presiding federal judge excoriated “top decision makers in the executive branch,” apologized to Lee from the bench and said officials had embarrassed the entire nation.

[...]

Yet despite the rampant pack journalism displayed on this story, several reporters including some working for the New York Times eventually clarified and corrected many aspects of the original article by Gerth and Risen. By late summer 1999, many of its key points had been knocked down. But by then too much erroneous and speculative information was in play, and the story of the country's secrets stolen from Los Alamos had become fuel for another assault on President Clinton by Capitol Hill Republicans.

The power of the New York Times -- the preeminent newspaper in the country, if not the world -- propelled this story onto the national agenda and kept it there like no other news organization could. By the time Lee was freed from jail, the Times' coverage had been thoroughly castigated by Asian American groups, scientists and media critics as hyped, sensational, irresponsible and just plain wrong.

[...]

After 19 months of sensational reporting and demagogic politicking, none of the major points made in Gerth and Risen's original March 6, 1999, story hold up.

In April 1999, Bob Somerby of The Daily Howler wrote a four-piece series critical of Gerth's coverage of Lee (here, here, here and here).

Loral Communications

In her American Journalism Review article, Fleeson also criticized Gerth's reporting in his Pulitzer Prize-winning series on allegations that two satellite companies shared sensitive information with China:

In 1998, Gerth, already well-known for his Whitewater coverage, wrote a series of stories reporting that federal investigators were looking into whether two commercial satellite companies -- Loral and Hughes -- had shared too much sensitive information about rocket crashes that had “significantly advanced Beijing's ballistic missile program.” At the time, U.S. companies needed a presidential waiver to launch in China.

Gerth focused on Bernard Schwartz, the chairman of Loral and the Democratic Party's largest individual contributor in 1996. The Gerth stories strongly suggested -- but never proved -- that Schwartz made campaign contributions to continue getting waivers to work with Chinese companies. The implication was that Clinton had sold out national security for campaign cash.

The stories were ultimately undercut two years later when the head of a campaign contributions investigation, Charles G. LaBella, cleared Schwartz and Loral of trying to buy influence, and said that Schwartz was “a victim of Justice Department overreaching,” based on a “wisp of information.”

[...]

The Gerth-Risen piece was essentially a longer version of what had been reported by [Carla Anne] Robbins in the Wall Street Journal, but with two main differences: it quoted Redmond comparing the extent of the spying to the Rosenberg case, and it added the possibility of a Clinton cover-up.

“The impression of the story was that all our secrets were gone,” says Dan Stober of the San Jose Mercury News. Stober wrote extensively about an alleged espionage case in the late 1970s at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California involving a Taiwan-born scientist who supposedly passed classified information to Beijing about the U.S. neutron bomb. “The tone [of the Times story] was clearly that this espionage had happened and this unnamed guy had done it, and that every weapon in the nuclear arsenal had been compromised,” Stober says. “It was way over-the-top.”