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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tom Clarke who wrote (12477)	10/16/2003 8:15:43 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 793620

"The New York Times" gets caught with a reporter's hand in the cookie jar again. Liptak lifted a quote from the "Post" and wrote it as his own. What he did is not playing "patti-cake" in the News business, folks. The red faced "Times" is going to have to do a "mea culpa" for one of their top reporters. "Washington City Paper." ____________________________________________ Cite Your Source By Erik Wemple T he sniper beat anchored the Jayson Blair scandal at the New York Times. Covering the story required that the Times gear up a ground-level police-and-courts reporting operation on unfamiliar turf. Blair met that challenge by working from other people’s reporting and using his own fill-in-the-gaps creativity. Folks at the Times have done their best to close the Blair chapter, yet they still haven’t quite solved the sniper-beat problem. On Oct. 10, Times reporter Adam Liptak wrote a roundup story on the prosecutions of sniper suspects Lee Boyd Malvo and John Allen Muhammad. There was big news on both fronts: Malvo’s lawyers had introduced a sudden change of tactics, throwing up an insanity defense for their 18-year-old defendant. As for Muhammad, he had refused to be interviewed by a prosecution psychiatrist—a pivotal event that could handicap the defendant’s attorneys. Liptak did not attend the court hearings but managed to reconstruct developments via telephone for his Page A1 story. He gathered original quotes from lawyers, prosecutors, and observers involved in the cases. But one six-word quote in the piece wasn’t the fruit of his long-distance reporting. The story quoted the prosecutor in the Muhammad case, Paul Ebert, as saying that the defendant had “thumbed his nose at the court.” To the casual reader, it was by no means a dramatic quote, and it appeared toward the end of Liptak’s 949-word story. As it turns out, however, Ebert’s statements in court that Thursday hadn’t yet entered the zone of public ownership. They were the product of journalistic enterprise—and not Liptak’s. The quote came out of a hearing called on the spur of the moment by Prince William County Circuit Court Judge LeRoy Millette Jr. Only the Washington Post and community publication the Potomac News found out about the hearing and showed up for it. Even the Associated Press’ ubiquitous sniper reporter, Matthew Barakat, apparently missed the session. The surprise hearing produced a major change in the case. In turning away the prosecution’s psychiatrist, Muhammad essentially screwed himself: Citing the lack of cooperation, Millette excluded all mental-health testimony from Muhammad’s trial, depriving his attorneys of a potentially critical source of mitigating evidence. When asked how he came up with the Ebert quote, Liptak at first responded, “That, I did take from the AP, I think.” But the quote didn’t appear on the wires, and Liptak later explained, “It was in something. It was on the Web.” That sounds right: Post sources say the Ebert quote appeared in an account of the hearing that ran on Washingtonpost.com the same afternoon. It didn’t make it into the paper’s final account of the proceedings. Wherever it appeared, it sure didn’t come from the Times’ own shoe leather. At the post-Blair Times, that’ll set off a mini-probe. “If we can say conclusively that it came from the Post Web site, we will do so,” says Times national editor Jim Roberts. Liptak is a highly regarded Timesman who helped write the paper’s mea culpa on the Blair affair. washingtoncitypaper.com