Lynx, Lies and Media Hype

McInnis. He won favor with greens by securing federal money for an Audubon nature center in Colorado, but then used our national tragedy of September 11 to attack defenders of the ESA, sending mainstream environmental groups open letters demanding that they "publicly disavow" acts of "eco-terrorism." He used last summer's "Thirty-mile" forest fire in the Cascades to attack the ESA, suggesting, incorrectly, that the deaths of four firefighters were the result of water restrictions brought on by the listing of Pacific salmon.

Pombo. He serves on the national advisory board of a radical, anti-ESA property-rights group called the National Wilderness Institute. A week after the Forest Service's investigation report vindicating the biologists had been made public, he falsely charged in an op-ed piece for The Washington Times that they had "intentionally planted hair from the threatened Canadian lynx in our nation-al forests in order to impose sweeping land-management regulations."

Cubin. She has a long history of bizarre, irrational, and disruptive behavior. Colleagues have complained about her distributing penis-shaped cookies and photographing the pants crotches of male legislators, then asking them to guess who belongs to which. As the former ranking minority member of the House energy subcommittee, she bullied and harassed a little watchdog group called the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), dragging it to endless hearings, trying to get it cited for contempt of Congress, and costing it $500,000 in legal fees from an annual budget of $600,000. POGO had exposed royalty cheating by oil companies, thereby fetching $438 million for the U.S. Treasury in 15 out-of-court settlements. It had then given part of its reward money to two federal whistleblowers. Armed with no evidence, Cubin "investigated" POGO to see if it had paid off the whistleblowers for possibly illegally leaking information to help with its lawsuit.

Craig. He serves with Pombo on the advisory board of the National Wilderness Institute. He has a long history of bullying federal employees for doing their jobs. In 1996 he was cited by the Interior Department's solicitor for unlawfully demanding the termination of a BLM employee. What makes the behavior of The Washington Times astonishing is not its willingness to shatter innocent lives in an effort to sell newspapers. This is expected of the Times. What's astonishing is its effort to use the mess it made to sell an ad. Two weeks after the Times ran its original story and three iterations, the FSEEE got a call from the paper's advertising department. The guy said that the biologists were getting the bejesus kicked out of them by the editorial department and that the really smart thing to do would be to purchase a full-page ad for $9,450. That way the FSEEE and the biologists could tell their side of the story. Overcoming speechlessness, Stahl feigned interest. "This wasn't just some ad rep operating on his own," he said. "I made sure he went to his department and that the Times sent me a mock-up of the ad. It's their brand of ethics: 'For a small price you can fix some of the damage we've done.'"

I am unable to determine how the Times could not have known the "bio-fraud" tale was false before it published at least six of its "news" stories and two of its editorials. Audrey Hudson, who wrote all but one of the 12 stories, told me she got the investigation report that vindicated the biologist of "biofraud," a word the Times invented, from PEER's web site. PEER says it posted the report during the last week of December. This raises three disturbing questions: How was Hudson able to reference the report and selectively pull information from it in the paper's first story, on December 17? Why, on January 18, was she still repeating the untruth about the biologists planting fur in the forests? And why was the Times still accusing the biologists of "fraud" on March 2? This was my conversation with Hudson.

TW: "Are you going to issue a retraction and apology?"

AH: "No. We stand by our story."

TW: "But you've known it was false at least since December. . . ."

AH: "I reported what the Forest Service told me. We stand by our story."

TW: "But the Forest Service told you in its investigation report that your story isn't true. . . ."