New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan weighs in on the paper's high-profile bungle of a story about the San Bernardino shooters and their supposed social media posts—a story referenced repeatedly during Tuesday's Republican debate. Sullivan calls the mistake "a bad one" that "involved a failure of sufficient skepticism at every level of the reporting and editing process."
I talked on Friday to the executive editor, Dean Baquet; to one of his chief deputies, Matt Purdy; and to the Washington editor, Bill Hamilton, who edited the article. All described what happened as deeply troubling. Mr. Baquet said that some new procedures need to be put in place, especially for dealing with anonymous sources, and he said he would begin working on that immediately.
“This was a really big mistake,” Mr. Baquet said, “and more than anything since I’ve become editor it does make me think we need to do something about how we handle anonymous sources.”
The reason given for the screw-up, however, is dodgy:
“Our sources misunderstood how social media works and we didn’t push hard enough,” said Mr. Baquet, who read the article before publication. He said those sources apparently did not know the difference between public and private messages on social-media platforms.
That's impossible to believe. Anyone close enough to the story to be a trustworthy source on the claim that a suspect did this or that on social media would necessarily know what type of messages they were; this is an admission that the "source" involved not only didn't have that knowledge, but didn't know enough about the subject they were ostensibly providing information on to know that the difference between "public" and "private" communications are different things. Is the source a pizza delivery man who overheard thirty seconds of conversation and went to the Times with it? And how could two reporters who themselves have a social media presence presume the "public" part and not verify that?
Mr. Baquet staunchly defended Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Apuzzo (who, he noted, won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting at The Associated Press on the New York police’s surveillance of Muslims), calling them “really fine reporters who have broken a lot of great stories” in recent months. Mr. Hamilton agreed, and noted that Mr. Apuzzo and Mr. Schmidt cover two of the most sensitive beats in Washington — national security and law enforcement, respectively, including the F.B.I.
Mr. Baquet rejected the idea that the sources had a political agenda that caused them to plant falsehoods. “There’s no reason to think that’s the case,” he said.
But there necessarily should be, in cases like this. The claim went from the New York Times pages to being a major anti-administration talking point throughout the media and on the Republican debate stage. If the claim was used nationwide as evidence that the administration was incompetent, there's certainly reason to believe the hyper-anonymous source might have intended that.
More to the point, the past botched New York Times story by these two writers—a claim that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was the subject of a supposed "criminal investigation" over her use of email; not only was this anonymously sourced false, it was unambiguously a claim that supported a particular "political agenda." Specifically, the "political agenda" being promoted by Rep. Trey Gowdy's ongoing investigation into all things Clinton, an investigation whose most scandalous claims Times reporter, Michael Schmidt, has reliably seemed to find himself the conduit of.
This isn't suggesting corruption on the part of the reporters, mind you. But two front-page stories based on anonymous sources revealing scandalous anti-administration info that turns out to be false in its key accusations suggests, at the least, professional gullibility.
Sullivan calls this a "red alert," and says:
The Times need to fix its overuse of unnamed government sources. And it needs to slow down the reporting and editing process, especially in the fever-pitch atmosphere surrounding a major news event. Those are procedural changes, and they are needed. But most of all, and more fundamental, the paper needs to show far more skepticism – a kind of prosecutorial scrutiny — at every level of the process.
That is the very least that should happen. But the New York Times helped lead the nation to war by promoting false stories from "anonymous" sources that merely sought to use the paper as an influential mouthpiece for their own claims—an effort the Times eventually, begrudgingly itself admitted the error of—and for us to be back in that same position now, with editors still quite certain in multiple front-page stories that their "sources" didn't mean any harm by passing on the incendiary-but-false information—suggests that such editorial skepticism is remarkably difficult to come by.