The Tip That Didn’t Pan Out
By CLARK HOYT
NYT Ombudsman
ON March 17, a Republican lawyer, quoting a confidential source for a Times reporter, testified to Congress that the newspaper killed a story last fall because it would have been “a game-changer” in the presidential election.
The charge, amplified by Bill O’Reilly on Fox News in April and reverberating around the conservative blogosphere, is about the most damning allegation that can be made against a news organization. If true, it would mean that Times editors, whose job is to report the facts without fear or favor, were so lacking in integrity that they withheld an important story in order to influence the election.
I have spent several weeks looking into this issue — interviewing and e-mailing those involved, reading transcripts, looking at campaign finance records and conferring with legal experts. In a nutshell, I think the charge is nonsense.
The story involved allegations that Barack Obama’s campaign, in league with Acorn, a left-leaning community activist group, was guilty of technical violations of campaign finance law. Evidence supplied by the source could not be verified. Even if the story had panned out, it is hard to see how any editor could have regarded it as momentous enough to change an election in which the Republicans were saddled with an unpopular war and an economic meltdown.
(More here.)
NYT Ombudsman
ON March 17, a Republican lawyer, quoting a confidential source for a Times reporter, testified to Congress that the newspaper killed a story last fall because it would have been “a game-changer” in the presidential election.
The charge, amplified by Bill O’Reilly on Fox News in April and reverberating around the conservative blogosphere, is about the most damning allegation that can be made against a news organization. If true, it would mean that Times editors, whose job is to report the facts without fear or favor, were so lacking in integrity that they withheld an important story in order to influence the election.
I have spent several weeks looking into this issue — interviewing and e-mailing those involved, reading transcripts, looking at campaign finance records and conferring with legal experts. In a nutshell, I think the charge is nonsense.
The story involved allegations that Barack Obama’s campaign, in league with Acorn, a left-leaning community activist group, was guilty of technical violations of campaign finance law. Evidence supplied by the source could not be verified. Even if the story had panned out, it is hard to see how any editor could have regarded it as momentous enough to change an election in which the Republicans were saddled with an unpopular war and an economic meltdown.
(More here.)
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