[C]learly there’s a pattern here with the Times Magazine.
From the outside looking in, it seems as if the Times
Magazine is fond of hiring writers normally aligned with
liberal publications and foundations. They then are given
a long leash to write on contentious issues and end up
making major distortions of the truth that would seem to
reflect a strong liberal bias.
The Soft Bigotry of The New York Times Magazine
Another Mother of all scandals.
By Mark Hemingway
National Review Online
Two weeks ago, The New York Times Magazine’s cover story told the tale of six-year Navy veteran, Amorita Randall. Randall told Sara Corbett, a contributing writer for the Magazine, that she had been raped twice in the Navy, and that while stationed in Iraq in 2004 she was the victim of an improvised explosive device attack that left her with a brain injury.
The trouble is that according to an editor’s note in this past Sunday’s Times Magazine, Navy records report that in 2004 Randall was in Guam, not Iraq. And, by the way, she was she never in Iraq. Further, there are no records that back up Randall’s claims she was raped. While lots of traumatized women don’t report rapes, unfortunately her claim that she was in Iraq certainly casts doubt on everything Randall says.
For their part, according to an article in the Navy Times, the Navy is understandably “annoyed,” particularly because a Times Magazine fact-checker didn’t contact them until three days before the story went to press — not enough time to verify much of the article.
The tone of the original article doesn’t help much either — even the writer seemed to be hedging her bets as to the veracity of her subject. As Randall recalls her fictional IED attack, Times Magazine writer Corbett cautioned: “It was difficult to know what had traumatized Randall: whether she had in fact been in combat or whether she was reacting to some more generalized recollection of powerlessness.” Now here’s a fun experiment: Corral the nearest veteran and ask them if they’re sympathetic to a “generalized recollection of powerlessness” from a person who lied about a brain injury as a result of a nonexistent combat record. You’re almost guaranteed to provoke a response that makes R. Lee Ermey sound like Fred Rogers.
This comes on the heels of another, criminally ignored scandal at The New York Times Magazine last year. Jack Hitt’s cover story on April 9, 2006, centered on abortion restrictions in El Salvador, relaying the story of a woman named Carmen Climaco who had been sentenced to a 30-year jail term for aborting a fetus at 18 weeks, or as Hitt put it: “Something defined as absolutely legal in the United States. It’s just that she’d had an abortion in El Salvador.”
After Hitt’s article, pro-life groups howled in protest. Climaco had not, in fact, been sentenced to 30 years for an abortion; she’d been convicted of strangling an infant that had already been born. It turned out that Hitt had received much of his information about Climaco’s case from a translator with close ties to an abortion-advocacy group — one which immediately used the Times Magazine piece in an online fundraising appeal. The claim that she’d had an abortion at 18 weeks came from an estimate submitted by a doctor at Climaco’s trial who hadn’t seen the infant. That report was found by the judges in the case to be flawed, and was totally at odds with the report of the doctor who performed the infant’s autopsy.
Remarkably, the Times Magazine didn’t issue a correction to the Hitt piece. Only after being queried by the Office of the Publisher at the Times about a possible error, did the Magazine respond. “We have no reason to doubt the accuracy of the facts as reported in our article, which was not part of any campaign to promote abortion,” said a note by the paper’s standards editor Craig Whitney and approved by Times Magazine editor Gerald Marzorati.
On December 31, 2006, the New York Times public editor Bryon Calame finally devoted an entire column to eviscerating Hitt’s story. With the help of a Times stringer in El Salvador, Calame was able to locate a copy of the relevant court documents which clearly contradict Hitt’s story. In the column, Calame stopped just shy of directly challenging the Times standards editor, who still said he was “not ready ... to order up a correction or Editors’ Note at this point,” even after an English translation of the damning court documents had been made available. “Accuracy and fairness were not pursued with the vigor Times readers have a right to expect,” Calame concluded.
Finally, a week after Calame’s column, and almost exactly eight months after the story ran, an “Editor’s Note” was appended to the original story on the Times website.
Now aside from the breathtaking failure of The New York Times Magazine to enforce any sort of journalistic standards in either of these cases, you might ask yourself what both of these stories have in common. It’s admittedly something of a tenuous link, but perhaps worth mentioning if only to make a point.
After I read the about the Times Magazine’s problem over the weekend I immediately Googled “Sara Corbett” in conjunction with “Mother Jones.” Sure enough, Corbett has written for the ballyhooed liberal bimonthly. As had Jack Hitt. Further, while there were no problems found with the article per se, another recent Times Magazine article on abortion rankled quite a few people; Emily Bazelon questioned whether women who’ve had abortions suffer as a result, titled “Is There a Post Abortion Syndrome?” Bazelon is, not improbably, Betty Friedan’s cousin and previously had written a skeptical article about the group Feminists for Life for — you guessed it — Mother Jones.
Now, I’m not advocating a political-neutrality litmus test for magazine writers, nor do I even think that because you’ve written for Mother Jones you necessarily must subscribe to whatever brand of watered-down socialism the magazine is currently selling. Further, there’s plenty of good journalism to be had at Mother Jones, which is why it’s an incubator for The New York Times Magazine which, accuracy-issues aside, is usually full of good writing.
But clearly there’s a pattern here with the Times Magazine. From the outside looking in, it seems as if the Times Magazine is fond of hiring writers normally aligned with liberal publications and foundations. They then are given a long leash to write on contentious issues and end up making major distortions of the truth that would seem to reflect a strong liberal bias.
Not that the journalistic establishment is likely sees it that way.
When recently discussing the Hitt scandal recently with a journalist I respect who regularly contributes to such liberal-journalistic tent poles as Harper’s and Rolling Stone, I was told that “noting errors of some of its reporters (Hitt) and the giant blind spots of others (Bazelon), Mother Jones publishes and develops better reporters than the conservative magazines.”
Obviously, I don’t think that’s true. In fact, I think that next time editors at The New York Times Magazine want to assign an article about abortion or the war they might try taking a look at the masthead of National Review, The Weekly Standard, or even Reason, where there is a tremendous amount of under-recognized journalistic talent. If nothing else, they can’t do much worse than their ideological and error-prone stable from Mother Jones.
— Mark Hemingway is a writer in Washington, D.C.
article.nationalreview.com |
