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Today we learned why rape allegations against POTUS ran in the book section of the New York Times. "The Times did not find independent sources — people beyond the two friends Ms. Carroll cited in her book — who could verify her account at the time of the article’s publication."
According to this account published by the Times reader center nytimes.com/2019/06/24/rea… the editors mistakenly applied a standard developed for cases where the Times had to decide whether to publish allegations it had heard about and itself investigated.
Another way to put it might be... the Times is saying it misjudged the importance of the accusations in @ejeancarroll's book because it could not add to the story. (Therefore did the story really exist? Well, perhaps as a BOOK story it did. Yes. That way we signal we know of it.)
Baquet has signed on to these statements:
"We were overly cautious...”
"He said the critics were right that The Times had underplayed the article..." "it had not been because of deference to the president."
"he had concluded that it should have been presented more prominently."
"We were overly cautious...”
"He said the critics were right that The Times had underplayed the article..." "it had not been because of deference to the president."
"he had concluded that it should have been presented more prominently."
Here's what the Times appears to be saying with this explanation... We started out thinking that if we did not deem the allegations credible because of original work we did, then the allegations were not credible. Then we realized that's nuts and doesn't match the world we're in.
As @gabrielsnyder put it in @CJR, "Whether something amounts to news should be about the credibility and significance of the facts—not whether an outlet is first, second, or eighth to the story." cjr.org/public_editor/…
