Richard Ness : Blog : Perlez Blog Series-2: Revisiting the Overseas Press Club Award

Perlez Blog Series-2: Revisiting the Overseas Press Club Award - 08 May 2007
by Eric

On 24 April 2007, the Manado court handed down a decisive, unambiguous verdict clearing my Dad of all charges and declared that Buyat Bay was never polluted, the fish are safe for human consumption and the people are fine.

Now let’s rewind almost two years back to 27 April 2005. This day the Overseas Press Club (OPC) awarded New York Times reporter Jane Perlez the prestigious Whitman Bassow Award, which recognizes “Best reporting in any medium on international environmental issues”. The OPC panel of judges awarded Jane Perlez this honor because her reporting “detailed evidence in the village of Buyat Bay of skin tumors, rashes, breathing difficulties, and headaches.” But most noticeably, it is the claim that it wasn’t “until the Times series appeared [that] the Indonesian government and the mining company had turned a deaf ear to the problem” and that it was Jane Perlez’s series of articles that “forced the government to take legal action against Newmont”.

Here is the video from the evening:

[Source: Overseas Press Club New York]


From the OPC award video, it becomes clear that the New York Times unabashedly took the credit for the government action against my Dad. In effect the verbose recipient of the award confirmed to the world that the New York Times indeed has the power to force a transitional government to take action—to send five innocent people to jail for 32 days and put undue stress on my Dad for the past 20 months fighting a court case with the potential of carrying a 10 year jail sentence. And as proclaimed in the video of the OPC award, the credit goes to Jane Perlez who helped create this pollution mirage through the pages of the New York Times.

What is most unacceptable is that by the time OPC award was announced, the source of the key evidence of pollution and illnesses cited by Jane Perlez—Dr. Jane Pangemanan had already retracted her claims and apologized for her wrong diagnosis. And yet you see the attendees from the New York Times basking and congratulating each other in the false glory of their OPC award even though deep inside they probably were aware that Jane Perlez was on the wrong side of truth or at the very least should have seen a number of the inconsistencies in the case already revealing themselves.

Jane Perlez’s stories undoubtedly had profound impact on the lives of people connected with the Buyat case. But her 8-Sep-04 story was factually so out of tune that it quickly attracted the attention of other senior journalists from the Wall Street Journal [link] [link], Rocky Mountain New [link] and now from John McBeth of the Straits Times.

On 5-May-07, John McBeth expounds on the issue of Jane Perlez’s slanted coverage of the Buyat case. He writes:

Much of the impetus for the trial came from a September 2004 story in the New York Times detailing skin tumors, rashes, breathing difficulties and headaches among local residents - ailments that the court heard are commonly found in any Indonesian coastal community.

The article won Jakarta-based correspondent Jane Perlez the Overseas Press Club's 2005 Whitman Bassow Award in the US for 'best reporting in any medium on international environmental issues' for exposing what was termed 'an environmental hell' at Buyat Bay.

'She documented how harsh anti-environmental mining operations by Newmont damaged fishing waters vital to natives,' the citation went on, using a term that evoked visions of grass skirts and bows and arrows. 'Until the Times series appeared, the Indonesian Government and the company had turned a deaf ear to the problem. This series forced the Government to take legal action against Newmont.'

One of Ms Perlez's main sources was the original complainant, family planner Dr Jane Pangemanan. Five months after the story appeared - and long before the Overseas Press Club's awards night - she publicly retracted all her claims. Dr Pangemanan repeated her recantation during the trial, saying she had not identified mercury or arsenic poisoning among any of the Buyat villagers.

In fact, the medical claims never made sense. Mercury causes neurological problems, not the sort of dermatological disorders suffered by many of the residents and which led to the death of a baby originally said to be suffering from Minamata disease - a deadly affliction caused only by the ingestion of non-organic methyl mercury.

Now contrast this reality to the endearments showered on Jane Perlez’s stories on the night of the OPC ceremony on the 27th of April, 2005. The announcer for the award described the Buyat Bay case and Jane Perlez’s coverage as follows:

“Ms. Perlez investigated and exposed an environmental hell in Buyat Bay in Indonesia created by Newmont – an international gold mining company. Her story had legs as they say because it forced the Indonesian government to take action against the company.”

New York Times editor Kirk Kritler, who accepted the award on Perlez’s behalf, as she was not able to attend the ceremony, had the following to say about Jane and his work with her:

“I worked closely with Jane on these stories and one thing we learnt immediately was that when you go up against the world’s largest gold mining company, they push back very hard and Jane never wavered and most importantly she dug. And she never took at face value anything they had to say about their science or their environmental practices or what they had to say in their public statements and I think that digging paid off.”

Not only did Perlez reject what Newmont had to say about their data but it is also fair to say that she did not believe the WHO or CSIRO’s data either. What is interesting is that while Perlez diminished and rejected the scientific analysis of reputable organizations, she readily accepted at face value all that Dr. Jane Pangemanan had to say about the illnesses in Buyat even if she never applied proper medical analysis – this is an investigative double standard that should not be expected from a New York Times reporter.

All the News that’s not Fit to Print

Finally at the OPC Awards ceremony, New York Times editor Kirk Kritler congratulated Perlez for her reporting, saying that the “most important thing is that it says a lot about her devotion to this thing that she does, called newspaper reporting”.

Oddly enough “her devotion”, only lasted until around February 4, 2006 when she covered deputy environment minister Masnellyarti Hilman’s testimony for the prosecution, as is seen in the following graph.



For the remaining 14 months of the trial, Perlez and her reporting disappeared. In fact, since February of last year, Perlez has not authored any articles on the case. Essentially, Perlez did not cover any of my Dad’s testimony or his witnesses that would have in effect help correct the record that remains buried in the New York Times archives.

I would also say the lack of coverage on Perlez’s part is at best irresponsible – especially after the initial reporting and subsequent award. I think one can only conclude that her absence was because either the defense’s arguments were either “not fit to print” or perhaps she wanted to distance herself from the case as she realized that her reporting had been based on lies. Ultimately, it appears that Perlez was not interested in correcting the record left by her previous articles, perhaps because of her award, perhaps because of other reason.

The End Result

So what does it say about Perlez and the newsroom managers who concede that they helped put five innocent men in jail for 32 days and another man through 20-some months of a trial for a crime that never happened. At some point through this whole trial Perlez must have realized that her initial reporting was wrong and she never took steps to acknowledge and correct it.