Did Newsweek Drop Its Own Scoop?   

It was a blockbuster: a respected war hero/national politician accused of ordering the killing of more than a dozen unarmed civilians during the most controversial war in U.S. history, and a cover-up that had stood for more than 30 years. The main source was one of the Navy SEALs who'd wielded a gun that night, an American who said his actions still haunted him.

When the story was finally published in the New York Times Magazine on April 29, reporter Gregory L. Vistica's account of the February 1969 raid on the Vietnamese village of Thanh Phong led by former U.S. Sen. Bob Kerrey that left women and children dead prompted national debate. But what triggered even more discussion in the journalism world was the fact that the investigation into the raid had begun more than two years earlier when Vistica was employed by Newsweek, and the magazine had chosen not to run its version of the controversy in 1998.

Days after the Times' story ran on its Web site, the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz reported that editors at the newsmagazine had decided to hold the story because Kerrey had withdrawn from the 2000 presidential race. He quoted Editor Mark Whitaker as saying there was a "higher level of scrutiny that goes on for presidential candidates.... At that point, in my mind, the relevance of this story changed a little bit."

That explanation surprised many in the news field, including National Journal Editorial Director and Atlantic Monthly Editor Michael Kelly. "From a journalistic point of view, I thought it was an odd decision. I argue it's obviously newsworthy if Bob Kerrey is a politician or not at all," Kelly says. "It seems to me that any American in the Vietnam War who allegedly ordered the murder of more than a dozen women and children, when you add on that this particular American is a U.S. senator, a nationally famous war hero and a leader of one of the two major political parties...it seems pretty clear-cut that it's newsworthy."

But Whitaker says the Post story did not fully describe the thought process behind Newsweek's decision not to run the piece in 1998. "That was secondary, as far as I was concerned," Whitaker says of the presidential bid. "The fact was, if he was in the race or out of the race, we didn't have enough to go with the story based on the standards we have at Newsweek."

The story that was published in April 2001 was not the same one the magazine had years earlier, he says. In 1998, Kerrey acknowledged that civilians had died at Thanh Phong but said that the killings came after he and his men were fired upon. Kerrey said he expected to find Viet Cong dead. Instead, he found a cluster of women and children. With the exception of Gerhard Klann, the SEAL who told his story, no other member of "Kerrey's raiders" would comment on what had happened. And the Vietnamese citizen who told the Times she'd witnessed the murders hadn't surfaced in 1998, Whitaker says.

In his most recent interviews with Vistica, Kerrey gave a step-by-step account of the taking of the tiny village for the first time. This version of events is in contrast to the one given by Klann, who says Kerrey's squad rounded up the women and children and questioned them as to the whereabouts of a Viet Cong leader. After the interrogation, Kerrey gave his men the order to kill the group so as not to compromise the SEALs' escape or actions, Klann said.

"We only had one source, and that was the fundamental reason we didn't run the story at the time. We had war-crimes accusations coming from only one source," Whitaker says. "We felt it was too libelous."

Poynter Institute ethics faculty member Aly Colón says withholding the story for such reasons is good journalism.

"It's more important to be right than to be first. If Newsweek felt it was unsure that it had the story down right, then their reluctance to go forward would make sense," Colón says. "But if they felt they had the story correctly and with enough information to follow up on it and chose not to [publish it], that's another matter entirely. This is a pretty newsworthy event to have not been made public after all this time."

Whitaker says the newsmagazine made it clear to Kerrey in 1998 that it wanted to tell his story, but the then-Nebraska senator held back. And when Kerrey did step forward years later, with his political career behind him, he spoke again with Vistica, who had left the magazine. If Kerrey, now president of the New School University in New York, had come to Newsweek, Whitaker says, the story of Thanh Phong would have broken on its pages.

Whitaker believes Newsweek was right to hold back on publication, but the decision has left some to wonder if the magazine has weakened its position as a breaking-news leader.

"They were slower to pull the trigger than the other news organizations, and it puts them among the pack of news reports that comes out subsequent to the revelation," Colón says.

Whitaker says he's not worried about the magazine's standing in the journalism community. "We break lots of stories. I think we have a pretty good record, and the fact that we're in the midst of whether we have to decide 'to break or not to break' is a testament to the fabulous reporters we have," he says.

"It's not worth it to us to get something wrong, to [gratuitously] destroy people's reputations, to harm our own journalistic reputation, just to be first. Other people might not have this standard, but we do."