What Happened to Skepticism?
By CLARK HOYT
NYT Public Editor
WHEN former Vice President Dick Cheney assailed President Obama’s plan to close the prison at Guantánamo last month, he used ammunition plucked right from that morning’s Times.
The top front-page headline that day, May 21, read: “1 in 7 Detainees Rejoined Jihad, Pentagon Finds.” The article reported in the first paragraph that an unreleased Pentagon study had concluded that about one in seven of the 534 prisoners already transferred abroad from Guantánamo had “returned to terrorism or militant activity.”
It was big news on a morning when Obama and Cheney would deliver dueling visions of how to keep the nation safe. “One in seven cut a straight path back to their prior line of work and have conducted murderous attacks in the Middle East,” Cheney said in a speech.
But the article on which he based that statement was seriously flawed and greatly overplayed. It demonstrated again the dangers when editors run with exclusive leaked material in politically charged circumstances and fail to push back skeptically. The lapse is especially unfortunate at The Times, given its history in covering the run-up to the Iraq war.
(More here.)
NYT Public Editor
WHEN former Vice President Dick Cheney assailed President Obama’s plan to close the prison at Guantánamo last month, he used ammunition plucked right from that morning’s Times.
The top front-page headline that day, May 21, read: “1 in 7 Detainees Rejoined Jihad, Pentagon Finds.” The article reported in the first paragraph that an unreleased Pentagon study had concluded that about one in seven of the 534 prisoners already transferred abroad from Guantánamo had “returned to terrorism or militant activity.”
It was big news on a morning when Obama and Cheney would deliver dueling visions of how to keep the nation safe. “One in seven cut a straight path back to their prior line of work and have conducted murderous attacks in the Middle East,” Cheney said in a speech.
But the article on which he based that statement was seriously flawed and greatly overplayed. It demonstrated again the dangers when editors run with exclusive leaked material in politically charged circumstances and fail to push back skeptically. The lapse is especially unfortunate at The Times, given its history in covering the run-up to the Iraq war.
(More here.)
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