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Wen
Ho Lee: (contd.)
A Bomb of
Misconstrued "Facts"
(contd.)
The second speaker was Prof. Christine Harrington, a Law and Politics
professor at the NYU School of Law. She wanted to contextualize the
Wen Ho Lee case involving the Cold War but decided to limit her lecture
to contemporary events leading to the profiling of Dr. Lee in Los Alamos.
Further explaining Dr. Lee’s case was the next speaker, Ms. Chisun Lee,
a journalist from the Village Voice. She spoke extensively about the
media coverage of the Wen Ho Lee case, specifically citing the journalistic
faux pas of The New York Times March 6, 1999 article, a 4,000-word cover
story that purported that Dr. Lee was a Chinese spy. The article stated
that a reliable source from the Dept. of Energy “leaked” the scoop to
the Times. From this coverage, a series of articles around the country
further indicted the Taiwanese-born scientist and caused a mini mass
hysteria of fear of Chinese espionage, the nuclear arms capability of
China as well as the appropriation of Orientalist traits (inscrutable,
double-faced, etc.). The Times and other dailies that covered the story
never referred to the animosity and strain between Chinese and Taiwanese
relations which, logically, would have ruled Dr. Lee as a suspect in
leaking sensitive information to the Mainland Chinese government. Ms.
Chisun Lee (not related) asked rhetorical questions such as, who is
the press? What is considered news and who are reliable sources of such
news? She further stated that, “journalists are culpable to (appropriating)
stereotypes (to their subjects).”
The
final speaker of the night was Peter Kwong, the Director of the Asian
American Studies Program at Hunter College, who, along with his wife,
wrote a Village Voice
...the
Wen Ho Lee case is a culmination of events from over a century
of American policies and the influence of media in these policies.
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article
about a heroin bust based on racial profiling. The Voice nominated the
article for the Pulitzer Prize. He contextualized the whole notion of
racial profiling in Wen Ho Lee’s
case as a form of racism and sexism, becoming a vehicle for white male
chauvinism that has been an integral part in American policy, both foreign
and domestic, since the beginning of the 20th Century. His asserts that
the Wen Ho Lee case is a culmination of events from over a century of
American policies and the influence of media in these policies. He further
stated that, “discrimination (embodied by racial profiling) became sophisticated,
elevated in class since the (Nixon years) in the 60’s.”
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