XPost: alt.tv.pol-incorrect, alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, alt.politics.media
XPost: alt.politics.usa

Sources say Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly initially pitched their
reporting to the news side, but top editors ultimately felt that there
wasn’t enough juice to warrant a story there—punting the scoop to the
Sunday Review section. “In today’s journalistic world, the conversation
is a bit irrelevant,” one source said. “Your average reader is not gonna
really know or care where it is.”

s much as the new flurry of reports concerning Brett Kavanaugh’s college behavior has reignited a debate over his suitability to serve on the
Supreme Court, they’ve also supercharged the ever volatile climate of New
York Times outrage. The paper is once again engulfed in a familiar
maelstrom, taking heavy incoming from both sides on Twitter and cable
news. It began over the weekend, with an adaptation from Robin Pogrebin
and Kate Kelly’s new book, The Education of Brett Kavanaugh. Their
excerpt surfaced a previously unreported allegation, from former Yale
classmate Max Stier, that Kavanaugh’s friends once “pushed his penis into
the hand of a female student” during a drunken dorm party. It also
reported that “Mr. Stier, who runs a nonprofit organization in
Washington, notified senators and the FBI about this account, but the FBI
did not investigate.”



The story, which has been corroborated by the Washington Post, the Los
Angeles Times, and the New Yorker, landed with significant impact,
prompting calls for Kavanaugh’s impeachment, and provoking the inevitable presidential tweetstorm: “DO YOU BELIEVE WHAT THESE HORRIBLE PEOPLE WILL
DO OR SAY. They are looking to destroy, and influence his opinions - but
played the game badly. They should be sued!”

At the same time, a pair of unforced errors magnified the story’s vulnerability. For one thing, there was a now infamous, now deleted tweet
from @nytopinion that the Times had to apologize for. (“Having a penis
thrust in your face at a drunken dorm party may seem like harmless fun…”)
There was also a subsequently appended editors’ note: “The book reports
that the female student declined to be interviewed and friends say that
she does not recall the incident. That information has been added to the article.” It was an oversight, to be sure, but one that gave right-wing
critics something to scream about.


Of course, conservatives weren’t the only ones screaming. In liberal
corners, the Times came under fire for running the Kavanaugh revelations
in the paper’s Sunday Review section. The Review is under the purview of
the Opinion department, as opposed to the News pages, where, according to
the logic, the story would have carried more weight. Moreover, some
critics took issue with the notion of Times reporters withholding
newsworthy information to coincide with the publication of their book.
That is, indeed, a tricky thing for the Times to navigate, especially as
more reporters than ever before are landing book deals, and the paper is
trying to get a better handle on it all.

Nonetheless, if a Times journalist goes on unpaid book leave, the company doesn’t have ownership of the reporting that he or she conducts while on
leave. In a Twitter thread responding to the furor over the Kavanaugh
story, the Times’ communications department acknowledged, “The new
revelations contained in the piece were uncovered during the reporting
process for the book, which is why this information did not appear in The
Times before the excerpt.” The department also noted that the Sunday
Review “includes both news analysis and opinion pieces. The section
frequently runs excerpts of books produced by Times reporters.”

It’s not as if books by Times reporters _don’t_ get covered in the News
pages, as was the case with, say, revelations about Harvey Weinstein from
Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s new book just last week. These things are handled on a case-by-case basis, and there’s no hard and fast rule. But
in this instance, given the backlash, the rhyme or reason seems
interesting.

Why did the Kavanaugh excerpt end up in the Review? People familiar with
how things went down told me that Kelly and Pogrebin initially pitched
their scoop to the news side, but the top editors ultimately felt that
there wasn’t enough juice to warrant a story there, let alone a big
page-one treatment (the type many lefties would have been salivating
for). Instead, Pogrebin and Kelly were told that they could pitch the
Review, which is entirely independent of the News department. I asked for clarification as to what about the story wasn’t News-pages-worthy, but
the Times declined to comment, as did Kelly and Pogrebin. (A Times
spokesperson did, however, point out that “it’s not unusual for Opinion
or Sunday Review pieces to break news.”)

I got mixed reactions from insiders as to whether the Times made the
right call. Some agree that the new material, as presented in the book,
wasn’t earth-shattering, especially since the anonymous woman at the
center of the alleged penis-thrusting incident claims to not remember it.
(In a related story, the Washington Post revealed on Monday that it “did
not publish a story” about the incident last year “in part because the intermediaries declined to identify the alleged witness and because the
woman who was said to be involved declined to comment.”) Others feel that
if a piece of reporting meets the standards of the Review, then it should
meet the standards of the News department, and vice versa. Still others
find it surprising that newsroom brass _didn’t_ want what Pogrebin and
Kelly were offering. Summing up the internal vibe on this overall, one
source said, “The most charitable read is that the Times sometimes twists itself in knots with weird internal rules and traditions.”

And then there’s this perspective, as another Times source put it: “The
irony is that this book is not an attack on Kavanaugh. It’s very
balanced. If people actually read the book, they’ll see it’s very fair
and meticulous and well reported. Liberals are not going to be satisfied.
This is not an ‘Impeach Kavanaugh’ book.”

Similarly, in the words of a former high-ranking Times figure, “In
today’s journalistic world, the conversation is a bit irrelevant, because
for most of the people who read the New York Times online or on their
phones, it doesn’t matter. It’s all the same. Your average reader is not
gonna really know or care where it is. They played it up pretty big, and
I have to tell you: When I first read it, I had no idea it was in the
Review. I tapped on a link, and at the top it said ‘News Analysis.’ And I
also didn’t know it was a book adaptation, because I didn’t even get to
the end. I get the point of view of the activists. They want the Times to further their agenda, but that’s not the Times’ job.”

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

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