Blog

By Stuart J. Sia

Last Wednesday, CNN’s Jake Tapper reported on journalist Catherine Herridge, the Fox News journalist who is appealing a court ruling holding her in contempt for refusing to reveal her source on a story.

Herridge’s appeal is the latest development in a case that the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF) is closely monitoring. The case’s plaintiff is Dr. Yanping Chen, a Chinese American scientist who was the subject of an investigation by the FBI between 2010 and 2016. In March of 2016, the U.S. Attorney’s Office informed Chen that no charges would be filed against her. To date, she has never been charged let alone convicted of any crime.

Less than a year later, Fox News broadcast three stories by Herridge about Dr. Chen, which used leaked information from the FBI. Herridge’s stories falsely accused Chen of spying for China, relying on bad evidence and misleading and racist insinuations. This is particularly troubling given the sordid history of discrimination, law enforcement overreach, and media stereotyping against Asian Americans and specifically people of Chinese heritage—a history that AALDEF delineated in the amicus brief we filed in the D.C. Circuit last week. One article still up on the website has a picture of Dr. Chen and her husband, who is described as “saluting” her, a clear example of the red-baiting that many Chinese and Taiwanese Americans unfairly face.

Dr. Chen sued the FBI over the leaking of her personal information and subpoenaed Herridge to reveal how she had come to possess confidential materials from the FBI. Herridge has twice refused and has been held in contempt. She maintains the dangerous falsehood against Dr. Chen, and Senator Ted Cruz filed a brief in support of Herridge that leans even more strongly into the anti-Chinese red-baiting prominent in Herridge’s reporting.

As unethical and misrepresentative as her reporting was, Herridge still has First Amendment protections. There is a long history of the government invoking “national security” to compel reporters to reveal sources. And there is a danger to destabilizing the protections of the press, which is often our most powerful advocate holding the government accountable.

But CNN’s report made little mention of Chen and the role Herridge played in spreading dangerous falsehoods about her. Herridge was presented as a good reporter fighting the good fight, not just for herself, but to ward off “the end of investigative journalism.”

Dr. Chen has been victimized twice: first by the government and then by the media. And by not properly reporting this story and giving an unfair platform to the person who used her privilege as a journalist to shamelessly vilify Chen and, in court, continued to vilify and dangerously misrepresent her as a Chinese spy, CNN further contributes to the harm she still faces. 

Rather than propping up Herridge like some sort of martyr, CNN should ask itself if it would have run the three stories Herridge wrote about Chen. Would Herridge’s characterization of Chen heavily reliant on racist tropes against Chinese people meet the ethical and reporting standards of CNN? CNN has held neither the government nor the reporter, Catherine Herridge, accountable here.

America has a long history of viewing Asians with suspicion, from the internment of Japanese Americans in WWII to the surveillance of Muslim, Middle Eastern, and South Asian communities following 9/11. The government has often invoked “national security” to justify discrimination against people perceived as foreign and un-American. Sound familiar? The media has at times challenged those tropes, and at other times, disseminated and propagated them.

Herridge was so sure a Chinese American scientist was a spy, because that idea fit the entrenched narrative of what a spy looks like. And for the viewers who consumed her three fallacious stories, she entrenched those dangerous ideas even deeper, setting a target, not only on Dr. Chen, but on all people who look like her.

Good reporting should count for something. Herridge’s reporting was not good. Worse still, it caused real harm to someone still recovering from the harm the government had already inflicted on her.

Over two decades ago, a federal judged apologized for the unfair treatment Taiwanese American physicist Dr. Wen Ho Lee endured by the government. Dr. Lee faced a similar investigation by the FBI and was jailed in solitary confinement without bail for 278 days under suspicion of espionage. Even President Clinton issued a public apology. The five news organizations who ran stories based on questionable information agreed to a settlement, but they never apologized for the danger they placed on him, smearing his name amidst a cloud of suspicion and racist innuendo.

CNN may not owe Dr. Chen anything. But the mission of investigative journalism is to ask hard questions and ferret out the truth. The puff piece on Herridge last week did neither of those things.