Reporter on Retracted Newsweek Article Put Monica on the Map

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Reporter on Retracted Newsweek Article Put Monica on the Map

By CHARLES McGRATH

Investigative reporters come in a couple of varieties. There are the quiet, scholarly types who troll the archives and pore over documents. And there are the gumshoes, obsessive and indefatigable, who tend to dress like Columbo, never let go of a story and seldom see eye to eye with their editors.

Michael Isikoff, the Newsweek reporter who together with John Barry, a national security correspondent for the magazine, wrote a brief article referring to desecration of the Koran by American guards at Guantánamo Bay, is a charter member of this second club. He is rumpled, relentless and even abrasive at times.

His article, which was blamed for rioting in Pakistan and Afghanistan in which at least 17 people were killed, has been denounced by the Pentagon for relying on what it says is incorrect information supplied by an anonymous source.

In discussing the article yesterday, Mr. Isikoff, who supplied the source for the article, said: "Whenever something like this happens, you've got to take stock and review what you did - how the story was handled. The big point that leaps out is the cultural one. Neither Newsweek nor the Pentagon foresaw that a reference to the desecration of the Koran was going to create the kind of response that it did. The Pentagon saw the item before it ran, and then they didn't move us off it for 11 days afterward. They were as caught off guard by the furor as we were. We obviously blame ourselves for not understanding the potential ramifications."

Mark Whitaker, the editor of Newsweek, said in an interview yesterday, "Everybody behaved professionally and by the book in this case." Mr. Whitaker said no disciplinary action was being taken against the reporters because they did everything they should have done. "Grounds for discipline would be unethical behavior, fabrication, sloppy reporting or unwillingness to acknowledge the s*****ty of the problem, and none of those things happened in this case."

Mr. Isikoff is, famously, the journalist who discovered the liaison between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, and it was his reporting that led to impeachment proceedings against the president.

Lucianne Goldberg, the literary agent for Linda R. Tripp, the Pentagon employee who tape-recorded Ms. Lewinsky's descriptions of her meetings with Mr. Clinton, recalled Mr. Isikoff yesterday: "He just showed up one day at Linda's office. We don't know how he got in there." She added: "I found him infuriatingly professional. He crossed all the t's, dotted all the i's, double-sourced everything and drove us all crazy. He's like an old beat reporter - kind of a throwback, for someone his age."

Glenn Simpson, an investigative reporter for The Wall Street Journal who is friendly with Mr. Isikoff but has also competed with him for stories, described him succinctly: "Mike will pull your fingernails out over coffee discussing lawn care. He is just a born interrogator."

Seymour M. Hersh, a reporter cut from the same cloth as Mr. Isikoff, said of him: "He's very smart and very tough. He does that magic thing that's so obvious but that nobody does: he reads before he writes."

Mr. Isikoff, 53, broke into newspapering with The Washington Star, now defunct, and joined The Washington Post in 1981. While at The Post, he began pursuing the story of Paula Jones and her sexual harassment suit against President Clinton. When The Post was reluctant to print his findings, he became involved in a now legendary newsroom brouhaha with Fred Barbash, then the deputy national editor. Robert Kaiser, the paper's managing editor, suspended Mr. Isikoff for two weeks.

Mr. Barbash did not return a telephone call yesterday. Mr. Kaiser, whom Mr. Isikoff once called a "pompous snob," said: "Mike Isikoff is a very tough, relentless reporter. There was never any doubt about how he did his work but about what should be done with his work, which is characteristic of investigative reporters - they want to see their stories instantly in print. That's why there are editors and why they get paid, and there's nothing wrong with that arrangement."

Mr. Isikoff left The Post and joined Newsweek in 1994. After the Lewinsky story broke, he was a sought-after guest on late-night talk shows, and in 1999 he published a book, "Uncovering Clinton," about his experiences on the sex-scandal beat. Then, as his friend Howard Kurtz, the media reporter at The Post, said yesterday, "He went back to the trenches."

Last month, Mr. Isikoff won an award from the Society of Professional Journalists for reporting on the interrogation scandals at Abu Ghraib prison.

"It's hardly surprising that Mike would write a controversial story based on an anonymous source," Mr. Kurtz added. "Sometimes that is the only way to get at sensitive or classified information. But when you live by unnamed sources, you can also get burned badly when the source is wrong."

Bill Kovach, the founding director of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, said: "Here is a reporter who can shake stuff out of deaf and dumb people, but you can't let it go at that. The material has to be edited and verified and lawyered if necessary." Mr. Kovach added, "As the course of events in this particular event has shown, you can't play fast and loose with even a one-paragraph item."

Mr. Isikoff, when asked whether he was used to being in the journalistic hot seat, laughed and said: "Well, you don't get used to being denounced by the White House. You may have experienced it before; that's not the same thing."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/17/politics/17isikoff.html?hp&ex=1116388800&en=ab7e42ab12d03735&ei=5094&partner=homepage