THURSDAY'S LETTERS: Two at 'Miami Herald' Charge Errors in Wolper's DeFede Columns -- And He Responds

By: E&P Staff Allan Wolper, longtime 'Ethics Corner' columnist for E&P, recently wrote about reporter Jim DeFede's exit at the Miami Herald (after taping a phone conversation without permission) in an October print column and a somewhat expanded Web column that ran here on Oct. 7.

This week E&P received letters from two Herald staffers, a top editor and a key reporter, charging inaccuracies and other failings surrounding those two pieces. Here are the two letters -- first from Judy Miller and then Scott Hiaasen -- and Wolper's replies.

***

The suggestion that The Miami Herald purposely published off-the-record quotes from Jim DeFede's tape of the late Art Teele -- and then fired DeFede for obtaining them -- is simply preposterous.

As I told E&P, I assigned a reporter to interview Jim by phone within minutes of the suicide, after learning Jim was the last person to talk to the ex-commissioner. During that conversation, I assigned Jim to write a column for Page 1. Jim never told me then that he'd taped Teele without consent or spoken with him off-the-record, a fact relayed to Mr. Wolper but omitted from his timeline.

Several hours later, close to the final edition deadline, Jim and I spoke briefly when I went to his desk to give him pizza. As I began to walk away, he told me -- for the first time -- that he'd taped his conversation with Teele (he did not say illegally, but said Teele didn't consent). He said that the publisher and our attorney "were dealing with it." I assumed they would contact me after they'd researched the law and spoken with Executive Editor Tom Fiedler. And they did, advising that the taping potentially violated the law, that the column should be killed and that Jim would be fired.

Subsequently, the reporter who interviewed Jim by phone, along with main story anchor Scott Hiaasen, worked carefully close to midnight to ensure their story did not use material that had to do with the tape. Though aware of this, the E&P story does not mention it. Reviewing the transcript and our interview notes, we cannot find any quotes in our story that came from the tape, only a parenthetical reference inadvertently missed during the deletions.

Other than the chaotic nature of the evening, I don't know why Jim went first to our attorney and publisher, rather than me, to disclose circumstances surrounding the tape. That surely caused confusion on this tragic night, but E&P is wrong to imply that the paper intentionally and hypocritically used material its managers had condemned as illegally gathered.

Judy Miller
Managing Editor/News-Features

***

Wolper responds:

My story was accurate. And true. The Miami Herald fired Jim DeFede for taping a conversation with a source without informing him -- a possible violation of Florida's taping law -- and then published some of that material in its newspaper.

Especially disturbing was the fact that the material made it into the paper after the Herald executives determined that DeFede's interview with Teele was also off-the-record, a theme they impressed on me every time I spoke to them. It was that behavior that prompted me to interview more than a dozen people for my column -- several of them at risk to their jobs -- to find out how that could have happened.

My proof is in the papers distributed to Miami Herald readers. The Herald off-the-record material appeared in all their July 28 editions the day after Teele killed himself in the Herald lobby and was still available on line as of this past Monday night when I last checked.

In my online column, Jim DeFede said: "Here I was fired because I gathered this information and was told how unethical I was and they went ahead and used it anyway to make their story better."

In her letter, Ms. Miller said The Herald did not use any of the quotes from the Teele-DeFede conversation -- except for "a parenthetical reference" in the final edition that somehow was missed. Miller told me in recent days in a telephone interview that she was referring to the fact that Teele told DeFede the state attorney's office was trying to smear him by alleging he had sex with a transvestite prostitute.

However, it was more than a taping issue. The former city commissioner did not want to go on the record with that material and DeFede marked that part of his conversation with Teele "off-the-record" in the notes he handed to Scott Hiaasen. And that material made its way into the The Broward County Edition and The Final Edition, before it was changed in the very last edition of the paper.

What made that use of the "transvestite" material even more questionable was the fact that Herald publisher Jesus Diaz Jr. believed that DeFede was guilty of a felony and unethical behavior because he tried to use that material in a column Miller assigned him to write that night.

In her letter to E&P and in a conversation with me afterwards, Miller said she did not learn that DeFede taped his talk with Teele "without his consent" until late that night. But a reporter who witnessed their conversation told me it occurred shortly after 8 p.m.

Miller says DeFede never told her recording a phone
conversation without someone's consent was illegal. It is hard to imagine that the managing editor of The Herald would not know that secretly taping a telephone interview might break a Florida taping statute.

She asked rhetorically in her letter above why DeFede spoke to the Herald's lawyer and publisher before informing her. Here's why: Miller heard Diaz ask to talk to DeFede.

One last note. Everything I knew about Judy Miller before this case was positive. She spearheaded some of the paper's best investigative stories -- one of which won a Pulitzer Prize. And it seemed that on the night of the suicide she was doing everything she could to get the Teele story right. The way she went at it was wrong.

*****

II.

Allan Wolper's online column, "The Final Twists in the DeFede Saga," posted last month on E&P's Web site, relies on a colossal factual error to support his thesis that the Miami Herald hypocritically used DeFede's tape of Arthur Teele in its coverage of Teele's suicide.

Wolper reports that on the night of Teele's shooting I gave my editors a copy of DeFede's transcribed notes from his conversation with Teele. This never happened. Jim did indeed give me a copy of his notes that night, but I didn't give them to an editor until the following day, after Jim had already been fired.

While drafting the main story on the shooting, I used a couple of quotes from Jim's notes, along with notes from several other reporters working on the story. (At the time, Jim sat two desks away, writing his own column on his conversation with Teele.) After Jim was fired, and his column spiked, our managing editor, Judy Miller, said we could not rely on those quotes or anything else from the tape in the final story. With deadline approaching -- it was almost midnight -- another reporter and I then ran to the copy desk to excise the quotes taken from Jim's transcript. An oblique reference to that segment of the story inadvertently made it into the final edition.

I believe Wolper knew about our efforts to change the story after Jim was fired, yet he chose not to publish this.

The information that was finally published describing Jim's impressions of Teele's state of mind -- and Teele's quote, "Who did I piss off in this town?" -- were taken not from the tape transcript, but from a reporter's separate interview with Jim just a few minutes after the shooting.

I would have been happy to describe all this to Mr. Wolper had he bothered to call me. But he didn't -- a transgression all the more galling from someone masquerading as an arbiter of journalism ethics.

In the end, Wolper's online column, and the version printed in Editor & Publisher, revealed far more about the content of DeFede's final conversation with Teele than the Miami Herald ever did.

I write this in the interest of airing the full, complete story of what happened that night, not to defend or justify management's decision to fire Jim that night. It should be noted that I was among the hundreds of journalists who signed the petition urging the Herald to rehire DeFede.

Scott Hiaasen
The Miami Herald

***

Wolper responds:

Hiaasen is right. I should have called him. What I did do was ask one of his colleagues to relay the only question I had for him: whether he used any of DeFede's taped material with Teele after learning how it had been acquired. He insisted then that he did not -- as he now says in his letter.

Rather than answer him point for point as I did with Miller, I will revisit the chronology of that evening through my reporting:

DeFede gave Hiaasen the notes he made of his interview with Teele around 9 p.m. The first page of those notes included this quote from Teele: "Who did I piss off in this town."

Hiaasen used that quote in every edition of the paper because he said it came from DeFede's recollection of what Diaz said was an off the record interview with Teele and before the tape recorder was turned on. But off-the-record means off-the-record.

Hiaasen has no explanation as to why he used the DeFede notes of his taped interview that referred to the state attorney's attempts to link Teele to a transvestite prostitute. DeFede marked that section of the notes off-the-record -- something Hiaasen acknowledged in a previous e-mail to me.

He said in that e-mail that he excised the off the record material from the paper after he learned it came from the tape. I would think that he knows the off-the-record material never should have been published.

The Herald was so anxious to get Teele's taped, off-the-record comments on the "transvestite" issue on the record that the day after they fired DeFede they asked a reporter to interview him about it. DeFede understandably declined.

Hiaasen says he did not use any of the quotes from DeFede's transcribed notes except for Teele's "who did I piss off" comment in the paper's last edition. Instead, he used a trick to get that taped information in the paper. Here's how Hiaasen did it, from the article in question:

"In the first discussion [with DeFede], the former commissioner spoke very emotionally about his legal problems and various allegations that had been made against him." He then quoted DeFede's recall of his taped conversation with Teele.

As I said, I regret not telephoning Hiaasen. But acting ethically also means paying attention to the words off-the-record and avoiding the use of journalism trickery to get that material into a newspaper.