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NEW YORK (AP) — Between an offensive tweet and a significant revision,
The New York Times’ handling of a new sexual misconduct allegation
against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh attracted almost as much attention as the accusation itself.

The story also gave President Donald Trump and his allies fresh
ammunition in his campaign against the media, where the Times was
already a favorite target.

The revelation that led several Democratic presidential contenders to
call for Kavanaugh’s impeachment came in the 11th paragraph of a story
labeled “news analysis” that ran in the Sunday opinion section. The
story is based on an upcoming book by Times reporters Robin Pogrebin and
Kate Kelly, “The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation,” about
the junior justice’s brutal confirmation battle last year.


Headlined “Brett Kavanaugh Fit In With the Privileged Kids. She Did
Not,” the story was primarily about Deborah Ramirez, a Connecticut woman
who alleged that Kavanaugh, as a freshman at Yale in 1983, had pulled
down his pants and thrust his penis at her. Kavanaugh has denied those
claims.

Yet the authors said they’d uncovered a similar story involving
Kavanaugh at another freshman-year party, where he allegedly exposed
himself and friends pushed his penis into the hands of a female student.
The story said former classmate Max Stier reported the incident to the
FBI and senators as Kavanaugh’s nomination was being discussed, but the
story said Stier would not discuss it with the authors. Kavanaugh would
not comment on the story, a court spokeswoman said Monday.

After the story was posted online but before it was in the print
edition, the Times revised the story to add that the book reported that
the woman supposedly involved in the incident declined to be
interviewed, and that her friends say she doesn’t recall the incident.
While an editor’s note pointed out the revision, it did not say why
those facts had been left out in the first place. A Times spokeswoman
said no one was available for an interview on Monday.

The Times’ deputy editorial page editor, James Dao, posted answers to
readers’ question on the newspaper’s website Monday evening but did not
address this issue.

The failure to initially report that the woman did not remember the
alleged incident “is one of the worst cases of journalistic malpractice
in recent memory,” John McCormack wrote in the conservative magazine
National Review.

The Washington Post, detailing its own decision on the story, called
into question the Times’ decision to run with the accusation in the
first place.

The Post said that last year it had independently confirmed that
lawmakers and authorities knew of the second accusation against
Kavanaugh, but did not write about it because the woman involved would
not comment and the alleged witnesses were not identified.


The book’s authors wrote that they had corroborated the second
misconduct allegation with two officials who said they had communicated
with Stier. The newspaper did not identify them.

“Based on the corroboration, we felt mentioning the claim as one part of
a broader essay was warranted,” Dao wrote.

Placement of the accusation in the midst of an opinion-section piece
struck many in the journalism community as odd.

“How is this not a front-page story?” wrote Tom Jones of the journalism
think tank the Poynter Institute.

In a statement, the Times said the opinion section frequently runs
excerpts of books produced by the newspaper’s reporters. The new
accusations were uncovered during the authors’ reporting process for the
book, which is why they had not appeared in the newspaper before.

Still, this doesn’t explain why the new accusations weren’t pointed out
to editors and given more prominence in news pages. Todd Gitlin, a
Columbia University journalism professor, suggested bureaucratic inertia
might partly explain it - since it had been determined that the piece
would run in the opinion section, no one stepped forward to question
that.

“There have been a number of decisions on this that strike me as
dubious,” Gitlin said in an interview.

Dao said opinion section pieces have made news in the past, citing a
Maureen Dowd interview with actress Uma Thurman with accusations against Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein. He noted that the Times’ news section
did write about it — after reactions came in from presidential
candidates.

Trump, not unexpectedly, was harsh in his assessment. He said his
Supreme Court appointee was “the one who is actually being assaulted ...
by lies and fake news.” The White House also distributed a copy of a New
York Post editorial headlined “The latest Times hit on Brett Kavanaugh
is a clear miss.”

“How many stories are wrong? Almost all of the stories the New York
Times has done are inaccurate and wrong,” Trump wrote in a tweet Monday.

Trump said Kavanaugh should start suing people for libel or the Justice Department should come to his rescue. Yet Roy Gutterman, a journalism
professor at Syracuse University and director of the Tully Center for
Free Speech, said the Justice Department has nothing to do with the
case, and a libel case would be tough.

“Given the developing nature of the allegations and the sourcing of the
story, coupled with the correction, it still does not appear to rise to anything that would be actionable under libel law,” Gutterman said.

The Times also apologized for an offensive tweet sent out by the opinion section advertising its initial story. The tweet said: “Having a penis
thrust in your face at a drunken dorm party may seem like harmless fun.
But when Brett Kavanaugh did it to her, Deborah Ramirez says, it
confirmed that she didn’t belong at Yale University in the first place.”

The Times deleted the tweet and said it was “clearly inappropriate and offensive” and was looking into how it was sent.

--
Watching Democrats come up with schemes to "catch Trump" is like
watching Wile E. Coyote trying to catch Road Runner.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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