Richard Ness : Blog : Perlez Blog Series-1: Verdict on Buyat Is a Verdict on Jane Perlez

Perlez Blog Series-1: Verdict on Buyat Is a Verdict on Jane Perlez - 02 May 2007
by Eric

Over the last two months I’ve been asked a number of times what I was going to do with the blog once the case was over. Essentially I’ve said that I intend to maintain the blog for two reasons. First, if the case goes into appeal then I will continue the blog in support of my Dad. And second, I’ve explained that I want to help try to restore my Dad’s good name, which has suffered over the last thirty months. Over the next year, it is likely that academic papers, videos, and even books will continue to shed light on this hoax.

Starting with this blog I want to re-focus on the person whom I consider to be instrumental in instigating this hoax. And this person is Jane Perlez of the New York Times. In fact I believe that Jane Perlez has set a new standard in yellow journalism. First it was her false reporting! And then unlike the fish that never disappeared from Buyat Bay, Jane Perlez disappeared from the scene when my Dad’s defense started to present their witnesses in early 2006.

It is clear that Perlez first devised a story and then conjured up the facts to support it. No one expected a New York Times reporter to indulge in this kind of pop-journalism. But she did and my future blogs on this topic will show that the urge to embellish the Buyat story for mass appeal can be traced back to the encouragement that the newsroom managers in New York provided to Jane Perlez (the forthcoming blog on the Overseas Press Club’s award ceremony would show that Jane Perlez and her managers collectively camouflaged the scientific facts).

I am outraged by Perlez’s skewed coverage of the Buyat case. But Jane Perlez has incensed a lot of her peers too because her slanted stories have adversely affected the reputation of the whole community of reporters. Therefore, it is not a surprise that many reporters have now openly questioned Perlez’s journalistic integrity. And I expect their drubbing to continue till it is fully established that Jane Perlez belongs to the same hall of shame as the journalist Jason Blair does.

Doubts about Perlez’s story started to surface about a year ago. First it was on 16-March-2006 when a report by Jonathan Burns and Stephen Moore of the Wall Street Journal raised some piercing questions about Jane Perlez’s story [link]. When Burns and Moore tried to call Jane Perlez during their investigation, she declined to return their calls. During her career Perlez must have definitely subjected others to unexpected phone calls but this time she was at the receiving end. And interestingly her evasive behavior was no different from that of the sleazy politicians who come under the glaring attention of the media.

It is never easy for one reporter to investigate another reporter but Jane Perlez has herself become a story now because of her dodgy reporting on Buyat. Vincent Carroll for the Rocky Mountain News wrote a very interesting piece the other day entitled “The Newmont Verdict.” [link]

Mr. Carroll begins his article by calling attention to Jane Perlez’s initial reporting:

The 2,200-word article on Sept. 8, 2004, was replete with one damning claim after another. Perhaps the most shocking involved medical examinations in Buyat Bay, near the mine: “Thirty of the villagers had tumorlike growths, said one of the doctors, Jane Pangemanan. ‘I was shocked by what I saw,’ she said in an interview. Of the 60 people she examined, about 80 percent showed symptoms of poisoning by mercury and arsenic, she said.”

Mr. Carroll, then, follows this up with the observation: “The only problem with those lurid accusations is that they amounted to a hoax” and that the, “charges had been crumbling on their own for two years.”

Mr. Carroll also points out some of the discrepancies in Jane Perlez’s reporting on Dr. Jane Pangemanan. He notes Dr. Jane’s “retracting her claims just five months after the Times article…. [but] could find no timely mention of this in the Times”. But, when Jane Perlez finally did address Dr. Jane’s retraction she did it “by way of informing Times readers that the doctor had come to regret reversing course”.

But, as Mr. Carroll notes:

If Pangemanan regretted her retraction, she could have rectified the error when she testified at Newmont’s trial. Instead, she confirmed she had not identified mercury or arsenic poisoning.

So how can Jane Perlez redeem herself now? The answer is she cannot. She is responsible for stealing more than two years of precious time from my Dad and my family. She encouraged the rogue elements in certain NGOs, the government and the Police to abuse their regulatory authority so that her false story would appear to be authentic.

Instead of exposing and disciplining the public officials who were abusing their authority, Perlez herself got immersed in this corrupt process so that she could repaint the truth about Buyat. The last trip she made to Manado, she was seen flying with Masnellyarti Hilman of the Ministry of Environment— the regulator who cited a non-existent ASEAN standard in Integrated Team’s Report and who also concocted the numbers on arsenic intake using a consumption rate of 5kg of fish per capita per day—an empirical impossibility [link].

Stories published in newspapers can have huge impacts on people and organizations. For instance, in February 2007, when the Washington Post broke the story on the pitiful conditions at the outpatient care of Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the commander in charge of the center was fired and an immediate review was initiated. The question now is would the New York Times management have the courage to impose similar consequences on its own reporter. Would they initiate a publicly transparent review to scrutinize the performance of their newsroom management that allowed the persistence of Perlez’s biased reports on Buyat Bay?

My opinion on Jane Perlez’s stories also reflects the sentiments of a wider community of people. But most important of all Jane Perlez should be answerable to the people of Buyat village who suffered from the fear of Minamata disease that never existed, and the fishermen who unnecessarily worried about their livelihood because Jane Perlez incorrectly reported that fish were vanishing.

Only time will tell what happens to Jane Perlez and her OPC award. But in my forthcoming blogs, I will continue to expose Perlez and cover two new aspects related to her stories.