Tuesday New York Times Smackdown: Eric Wemple
: Will the New York Times ever finish cleaning up Clinton story?: "Rep. Elijah Cummings... criticized the paper...
...saying that the reporters didn’t do their homework. ‘[I]f the Times spoke with Republicans in Congress, even off the record, they could have checked their facts with me or other Committee Democrats,’ wrote Cummings, who took strong issue with the statement of New York Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet that the paper’s errors may have been ‘unavoidable.’ Jennifer Palmieri, communications director for the Clinton campaign, told CNN’s Brian Stelter in an interview, ‘It took them not just a long time to correct it, but it took them an indefensible time to get rid of ‘criminal’ in the headline and the lede.’... Yet the New York Times story remains defiant:
Two inspectors general have asked the Justice Department to open an investigation into whether sensitive government information was mishandled in connection with the personal email account Hillary Rodham Clinton used as secretary of state, senior government officials said Thursday.
The irony here is that this error has sat uncorrected for 11 days on an article that Times editors apologized for being slow to correct. ‘We should have explained to our readers right away what happened here, as soon as we knew it,’ said Baquet to New York Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan.
The Erik Wemple Blog asked New York Times Associate Managing Editor for Standards Phil Corbett this morning why the paper hadn’t addressed the bogus double-IG referral question. He responded that he would check on the situation. A high-profile story already freighted with corrections and needing one more: That’s an issue tailored for Sullivan, the paper’s internal watchdog. Yet she hasn’t pressed the matter....
We asked Sullivan why she wasn’t advocating for the Times to take that last step, along with another question: ‘My primary role is to respond to the concerns of Times readers. That’s the approach I took in writing on this subject twice in the past week,’ she responded. Hey: I’m a reader! The Erik Wemple Blog is a New York Times subscriber and demands to know!
Another thing we’d like to know from Sullivan is why she sat on the letter that the Clinton campaign sent to the New York Times on July 28.... Sullivan tells the Erik Wemple Blog that she did cite the campaign’s letter.... Indeed, but she didn’t address head-on the revelations in the letter — revelations that she was unable to pry out of New York Times staffers for her original post.... Sullivan was granted wide access to the players — a courtesy that doesn’t appear to have been extended to others. From the looks of things, then, the New York Times decided it was going to give its version of events to Sullivan, write up an editor’s note and then move on....
Sullivan’s roundup was critical though not nearly tough enough, which left an accountability void into which the Clinton campaign jumped with the release of its July 28 letter. Last week, the Erik Wemple Blog requested a full-on interview with Sullivan about this stuff. She, sounding a lot like a private editor, declined.
