'This Is Kind of Old News’
Hillary Clinton’s editorial judgment.
The first public editor, Dan Okrent, ended his tenure in 2004 with an affirmatively forthright answer: “Of course it is.” Clark Hoyt, who had the job some five years later, raised the question frequently, and always (as we recall) reached a conclusion like this one: “I do not think liberal bias had anything to do with it.”
Liz Spayd, the newest public editor, raised the question without answering it in her first column last month:
Why is it that conservatives, and even many moderates, see in The Times a blue-state worldview? Let’s set aside for now the core of their criticism—that the coverage is in fact biased. I’ll be turning to that as I settle into the job.Turn to it she did on Tuesday, in a blog post titled “The Clinton Story You Didn’t Read Here.”
If you’re getting all your political news from The New York Times, this may be the first time you’re hearing this. [Mrs.] Clinton’s remarks were covered by several major news organizations, several of which pointedly challenged the Democratic nominee’s candor. But nothing on the interview ever appeared in The Times, either online or in print.Spayd doesn’t take a clear position on whether the paper erred in ignoring the story, about which she writes both that “it was clearly news” and that it “may have felt like more of the same, especially coming as it did on the same day [Donald] Trump made a flip remark about a Muslim couple who lost their son in Iraq and appeared at the Democratic convention.”
We tend to agree with the former observation. As for the latter, surely a news organization with the Times’s resources could cover both stories, as this columnist did; we weighed in on the Trump-Khizr Khan kerfuffle on Tuesday.
Which brings us to The Wall Street Journal’s report, in yesterday’s paper, by Jay Solomon and Carol Lee:
The Obama administration secretly organized an airlift of $400 million worth of cash to Iran that coincided with the January release of four Americans detained in Tehran, according to U.S. and European officials and congressional staff briefed on the operation afterward.
Wooden pallets stacked with euros, Swiss francs and other currencies were flown into Iran on an unmarked cargo plane, according to these officials. The U.S. procured the money from the central banks of the Netherlands and Switzerland, they said.
The money represented the first installment of a $1.7 billion settlement the Obama administration reached with Iran to resolve a decades-old dispute over a failed arms deal signed just before the 1979 fall of Iran’s last monarch, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.On Twitter, Jonathan Weisman, the Times’s deputy Washington editor, scoffed: “New York Times’ @SangerNYT in January vs. @WSJ ‘scoop’ today. Hmmm. Is that really a secret ransom payment?” He provided this excerpt from that Times report, on which David Sanger shared a byline with Rick Gladstone and Thomas Erdbrink:
[President] Obama also announced the resolution of another argument between Tehran and Washington that dates to the Iranian revolution, this one over $400 million in payments for military equipment that the United States sold to the shah of Iran and never delivered when he was overthrown. The Iranians got their money back, with $1.3 billion in interest that had accumulated over 37 years.It’s true, as Commentary’s Jonathan Tobin notes, that the fact of the payment “wasn’t exactly a secret up until now.” But he adds:
The Journal story not only connects the dots to prove that Secretary of State John Kerry’s claim the U.S. didn’t pay ransom was a lie; it also illustrates how President Obama’s eagerness for a deal at any price prolonged the captivity of the hostages and wound up facilitating the West’s commitment to subsidizing the regime Kerry’s own State Department has certified as the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.The image of piles of money being delivered to Tehran on wooden pallets also made the story a lot more vivid than the abstraction of a nine- or 10-figure money transfer.
The Weekly Standard’s Jeryl Bier, a contributor to this column, notes that in September 2015 an anonymous “senior administration official,” in a State Department background briefing, “pooh-poohed” what the official called the “common misperception” about the administration’s deal with Iran “that on implementation day a big suitcase full of cash shows up in Tehran and all of a sudden they have all this money.”
All of that denial turned out to be false, except for the bit about the suitcase. That would have been one hell of an oversize bag.
There’s more. The Journal’s Devlin Barrett reports in today’s paper:
Senior Justice Department officials objected to sending a plane loaded with cash to Tehran at the same time that Iran released four imprisoned Americans, but their objections were overruled by the State Department, according to people familiar with the discussions. . . .
The timing and manner of the payment raised alarms at the Justice Department, according to those familiar with the discussions. “People knew what it was going to look like, and there was concern the Iranians probably did consider it a ransom payment,’’ said one of the people.Even Vox describes the cash delivery as “a debt payment dressed up as a ransom.”
The Times treated the story as a political one, reporting on page A5 of today’s paper that the payment “became part of the presidential campaign on Wednesday, as Donald J. Trump seized on the money transfer as a sign of what he called the administration’s failed foreign policy—prompting a forceful White House rejection”:
The existence of the payment was disclosed in January, and [White House press secretary Josh] Earnest dismissed a Wall Street Journal report on Wednesday about the details of the cash payment as a “six-month-old news story” that is being pushed by opponents of the president’s nuclear deal with Iran.The Washington Examiner reports that Mrs. Clinton took a similar tack in an interview with Denver’s KUSA-TV:
“The White House has addressed this,” she said. . . . “This is kind of old news.”
“So far as I know, it had nothing to do with any kind of hostage swap or any other tit-for-tat. It was something that was intended to—as I am told—pay back Iran for contracts that were cancelled when the shah fell,” she added.So Mrs. Clinton’s news judgment is in line with the Times’s. Some readers will take that as an indication of bias.
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