Kicking Khanna
Last-minute SF Weekly hit piece raises ethical questions

By Camille T. Taiara

Over at congressional candidate Ro Khanna's San Bruno headquarters on election night, the news was grim: Khanna, a 27-year-old lawyer who had challenged incumbent congressmember Tom Lantos, was handily losing the Democratic primary. Khanna – who presented himself as the antiwar alternative to Lantos – tried to keep the mood upbeat: the campaign, he said in a concession speech, mobilized a lot of voters and forced Lantos to defend his record.

But when the Bay Guardian spoke with him that night, Khanna was a lot less upbeat about a critical feature story by Peter Byrne in the SF Weekly's last issue before the election – an article Khanna described as an "ambush."

"He pretended to be our best friend," Khanna told us. "We played basketball. He was pretending to be very sympathetic to the campaign. And he took quotes out of context and fabricated them.... I know it comes with being in politics, but I was very upset by it."

The article, titled "Neo Con Artist," led to a lengthy SF Weekly correction and has raised serious ethical questions in some journalistic circles.

"With less than a week before an election and no time to run corrections, it's extremely irresponsible to run an attack piece on a candidate without being very, very sure you've got the facts right," John McManus, director of Stanford University's Grade the News project, told us by e-mail after reviewing the article and Khanna's written response.

Byrne raised some valid questions about Khanna's politics. Khanna may be a whole lot better on foreign policy issues than the infamously hawkish Lantos – the ranking Democrat on the House International Relations Committee and a staunch supporter of the Iraq war, the USA PATRIOT Act, and Israel. But on some issues, Khanna is no radical lefty – particularly in Bay Area terms. The failed candidate supported the war against Afghanistan. He favored extending the no-fly zones over post-Gulf War Iraq. And he describes himself as "first and foremost, committed to defending Israel's security in the Middle East" – not exactly the words of an ardent critic of Israel's behavior toward the Palestinians.

And several of Khanna's top campaign contributors are indeed Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who favor outsourcing high-tech jobs abroad, where labor costs are lower, as Byrne noted.

But it's also clear the SF Weekly didn't play fair.

Khanna "favors exporting well-paying Silicon Valley jobs to India and other emerging Third World techno-markets," Byrne wrote, in a statement apparently gleaned from a campaign event the reporter attended. A videotape of the same event, however, shows Khanna offering a very different take:

"I think we need to have incentives – enterprise zones and tax incentives ... to create jobs here.... There are plenty of jobs that are being outsourced to China, because people in China are getting paid 50¢ [an hour] ... and aren't having to comply with environmental laws. And so somehow we have to figure out a way to balance the incentives so that there are incentives for corporations to stay here and that can compete with the 50¢-wage workers in China," Khanna stated.

Khanna also explained that he supports increased investments in education – including science and math – and favors providing displaced workers with health care benefits, long-term unemployment insurance, retraining, and help in finding new jobs. Khanna, in short, does not support outsourcing jobs but instead has a concrete plan for dealing with the realities of a global economy and its impact on labor in the United States.

But what's most disturbing is that Khanna alleges Byrne characterized him as a pawn of pro-outsourcing businesspeople – without ever asking him directly about his position on the issue.

"If he wanted to say I'm not progressive enough, that's his right," said Khanna, who had the endorsements of the Bay Guardian, Sup. Matt Gonzalez, and many other progressive leaders. "He could have said to me, 'Here's what I'm concerned about, can you clarify your position?' But he never did that."

In a detailed letter responding point by point to the SF Weekly's allegations (see www.votero.com/weekly_response.htm), Khanna said, "For some reason, the reporter decided that the views of my Silicon Valley supporters should be attributed to me, but that the views of Lantos' supporters, who have actually engaged in outsourcing, should not be attributed to him."

Byrne e-mailed us a statement saying, in full, "In several public forums that I attended, Rohit Khanna was asked about his position on off shore job outsourcing. In an interview on Feb. 17, 2004, at 10:17 AM, I specifically asked Khanna about his position on off-shore job outsourcing. His comments on this issue were accurately reported in my article."

Khanna says Byrne interviewed him twice, but never in either interview asked him about outsourcing. And the SF Weekly posted a long correction on its Web site (www.sfweekly.com/issues/2004-02-25/feature2.html/1/index.html) that admitted the paper had "mischaracterized" Khanna's position on the issue and included a section of the video transcription. (We asked Byrne by e-mail why the paper ran a correction if his reporting was accurate, but he hadn't responded by press time.)

By the time the SF Weekly's correction was published in the March 3 issue, of course, the election was over.

Susan Rasky, a senior lecturer at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, said the next questions to ask are why the SF Weekly's editors didn't catch the problem earlier and whether they intend to take any steps to make sure it doesn't happen again. Because Rasky hadn't looked into this particular incident personally, she said she couldn't comment on the specifics. But, she said, "the readers need to be satisfied that when they pick up a publication, they're getting an accurate representation of what they're reading about."

This isn't the first time in recent months Byrne and the SF Weekly have been hit with allegations of misrepresenting someone's positions. In a letter published in the paper's Feb. 4 issue, Lucien Canton, director of the Mayor's Office of Emergency Services, accused Byrne of "tak[ing] many of my comments out of context and ... fabricat[ing] others," in a Jan. 21 cover article on the poor state of San Francisco's post-Sept. 11 emergency preparedness. The paper ran no correction to that story.

Politicians complain about the press all the time, and reporters are supposed to do stories that make their subjects angry. But if Khanna is telling the truth, the story was a late hit – and for Khanna, the correction was too little, too late.

E-mail Camille T. Taiara