Greg Sargent got that answer he'd been asking for from the New York Times about their John Edwards story.
The Times responded:
We gave the Edwards camp ample opportunity to respond, and we quoted their full response in the article.
The article focused on the activities of the Center for Promise and Opportunity, and how that benefited Mr. Edwards; it did not focus on the sister charity that provided the scholarship money. In fact, when it did mention that sister charity, it cast it in only a positive light, and noted how much it had given out in scholarships.
This isn't enough for Sargent, who writes:
The Times' piece didn't prove its central assertion against Edwards in any way, shape or form. In endeavoring to support its central reported assertion, the case it built against Edwards relied largely, if not entirely, on circumstantial evidence.
--snip--
We're tempted to commit the same mistake as the paper did and assert that this proves that the paper was out to get Edwards.
Let's be ultra clear here. It is perfectly possible that Edwards did intend the nonprofit at least partly to raise his profile with an eye towards 2008. It is also possible that further inquiry into his nonprofit will all but prove that this was the primary reason it was set up. But this article doesn't prove this.
Here's how the paper should have handled this. It should have said that all these facts raise questions about whether the nonprofit's primary purpose was to keep Edwards viable for 2008. If the paper had done this, the article probably would have been legit. But the paper didn't do this. Instead, the story committed the cardinal journalistic no-no of reporting as fact more than what was known to be true.
The paper's response is also inadequate in that it continues to operate on the assumption that Edwards was the only beneficiary of the Center for Promise and Opportunity's activities - that quoting Edwards and citing beneficiaries of the sister charity covered all possible parties. That's true, if Edwards was the only beneficiary of the Center. But if, as the Edwards camp asserts, there were beneficiaries of his activities under the Center's auspices, then the Times' response has the exact same glaring hole as the original article.
The article said:
The money paid Mr. Edwards’s expenses while he walked picket lines and met with Wall Street executives. He gave speeches, hired consultants, attacked the Bush administration and developed an online following. He led minimum-wage initiatives in five states, went frequently to Iowa, and appeared on television programs. He traveled to China, India, Brussels, Uganda and Russia, and met with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain and his likely successor, Gordon Brown, at 10 Downing Street.
So where are the quotes from the organizers of those picket lines about whether Edwards' presence helped them draw attention to their issues? What about those minimum-wage initiatives? Did they have any impact on anyone anywhere, or were they merely to push Edwards' candidacy, without even any side effects helping anyone else?
When the Times response to the charge that they didn't talk to beneficiaries of his programs is that there was no one to talk to about who benefited from Edwards' activities, they are furthering the exact problem for which the article was initially criticized. The response is therefore not only inadequate but dishonest.
As Ezra Klein wrote at TAPPED
Well, Brown and Blair have spearheaded the UK's remarkable efforts against child poverty, which Edwards has mentioned in speeches. So that hardly seems problematic. Indeed, this all seems like an extremely successful venture. Edwards raised some money to fight poverty. He used a certain amount of that money to finance his own pre-presidential campaigning, which was entirely focused on poverty reduction. During that campaigning, he spent an enormous amount of time...talking about poverty, and restoring its place in the national political discussion. Given that the sum of money we're talking about is $1.3 million, how has this not been an extraordinarily effective anti-poverty center?
As long as the Times refuses to even look into the possibility that this was "an extraordinarily effective anti-poverty center," they are not doing responsible journalism.