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Journalist Who Exposes U.N. Corruption Disappears From Google

By Michael Y. Park

Fox News

February 18, 2008

Lee is the editor-in-chief, Webmaster and pretty much the only reporter for Inner City Press, a pint-sized Internet news operation that's taken on Goliath-sized entities like Citigroup since 1987.

Since 2005, he's been focusing almost entirely on stories that deal with internal corruption inside the U.N., posting several stories online almost daily.

He's been especially interested in the inner workings of what could be called the practical-applications arm of the international organization, the United Nations Development Programme.

Many of Lee's stories were featured prominently whenever Web users looked for news about the U.N. using the powerful Google News search engine, a vital way for media outlets both large and small to get their articles read.

"I think they said, 'If we can't get this guy out of the U.N., let's disappear him from the Internet,'" Lee said.

It began with an innocuous-sounding yet chilling form letter from Google to Lee, e-mailed on Feb. 8:

"We periodically review news sources, particularly following user complaints, to ensure Google News offers a high quality experience for our users," it said. "When we reviewed your site we've found that we can no longer include it in Google News."

As soon as he read it, Lee immediately suspected one thing: That someone at the UNDP had pressured Google into "de-listing" him from Google News — essentially preventing Inner City Press from being classified on Google News as a legitimate news source and from having its stories pop up when someone conducts a Google News search.

Over the last couple of years, Lee has proved to be a constant — and controversial — thorn in the U.N.'s side.

Though his writing is clunky, his methods unorthodox (and often highly annoying) and his news judgment sometimes more than a little off the mark, Lee has hit his share of bull's-eyes and became an outlet for whistleblowers inside the U.N.

In 2006, for example, he drew attention to human-rights abuses by the Ugandan People's Defense Force during a U.N. disarmament program, including incidents in which four people were killed and over 100 homes destroyed.