Yesterday the NYT Public Editor posted a blog with the following headline:
As you might expect, the term ‘vigilante’ garnished a good deal of response, with most people advocating a dope slap. This morning, Mr. Brisbane returned with a follow up post saying he was misunderstood and giving two examples of what he meant to ask.
I’ll just talk about the first (but the second is worthy of a dope slap as well),
To illustrate the difficulty of it, the first example I used in my blogpost concerned the Supreme Court’s official statement that Clarence Thomas had misunderstood the financial disclosure form when he failed to report his wife’s earnings.
If you think that should be rebutted in the text of a story, it means you think a reporter can crawl inside the mind of a Supreme Court justice and report back. Or perhaps you think the reporter should just write that the “misunderstanding” excuse is bull and let it go at that. I would respectfully suggest that’s not a good approach.
This is such a feeble example. These are not the only two solutions. Is Clarence Thomas the only supreme court justice that has ever had to report his wife’s earnings (he’s not)? What did others report? Justice Thomas’ wife made nearly $700,000 and he checked “none” on the disclosure form. He said the mistake was “inadvertent” and not for just one year – for 5 years. Is he the only justice to have made this “inadvertent” mistake 5 years in a row? Does he have a lawyer? An accountant? Who advised him? Thomas held government posts before the Supreme Court – how did he report his wife’s income then?
It’s this last bit where the NYT (and most other news agencies) really screwed up. They left the most important fact finding up to Common Cause and the Alliance for Justice. Rep. Louise Slaughter then used their information as the basis for submitting a letter to Chief Justice Roberts. Guess what? Thomas actually reported his wife’s income correctly for the first 5 years he was a justice.
The problem isn’t that the NYT has to “crawl inside” Justice Thomas’ head (that’s a pretty scary thought), it’s that they don’t actually do much digging anymore…
2 Comments
Your comment about Judge Thomas and how you are repulsed by the idea of having to
“crawl inside” Justice Thomas’ head (that’s a pretty scary thought)”
is typical of the kind of words used by racists. I’m not sure whether you really have problems with black men in positions of authority, but you should look inside yourself to see why you wrote something like that.
It’s interesting that you associate my comment “(that’s a pretty scary thought)” with race – it never occurred to me. I was thinking politics, and there’s not really any reason to assume race and politics are closely connected.
By way of clarification, NYT public editor was the one who wrote “crawl inside”, not me.