It is always entertaining when the 'newspaper of record' shames other publications for their mistakes and failings.
They omitted some critical information last week in the Kavanaugh story and blamed it on editorial process.
Reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly said in an interview on MSNBC that they wrote in the draft of their Sunday Review piece that a woman who Kavanaugh was said to have exposed himself to while a student at Yale had told others she had no recollection of the alleged incident. Their editors, they say, removed the reference. “It was just sort of. . . in the haste of the editing process,” said Pogrebin.
Couple more of these and they will be in Buzzfeed level of trustworthiness.
The thing is, though, there is no more "newspaper of record". The newspaper industry has been in such a downward spiral for such a long time that, like any other industry bleeding money, quality has severely suffered. Try to find a single notable paper that adheres to the objectivity guidelines of the AP guidebook. Hell, even the AP doesn't do that anymore.
This is unnecessarily harsh. The New York Times is a massive company with hundreds of journalists and editors.
If every once in a while a journalistic organization makes a mistake, I think it's reasonable to point it out, have them publicly correct the record, and then let it go.
Harping on every honest (if sloppy) mistake as if it is evidence that an organization is totally incompetent or dishonest is something autocrats do to de-legitimize journalism itself. So long as 99% of the time, they don't make mistakes, and so long as they promptly acknowledge and correct the mistakes when they are called out, I think journalism done in good faith (like the work done at The Times) deserves our benefit of the doubt in an era when it is under unprecedented attack by leaders worldwide.
The difference now is the agenda is obvious because more viewpoints are available online, and in the past the agenda would - sometimes - be supported with hard journalism from real sources, including field reporters.
Now there's a lot more newswire and PR copy pasta and Google searching.
I'm fine with this, so long as they don't insist on their objectivity. Otherwise everything they say must be filtered through an undefined lens that readers either a) don't have time for and are thus victimized by the 'untruth' or b) believe and desire the confirmation bias and are thus victimized by misinformation.
It seems bias is becoming encouraged, quite disappointing.
However, this mistake was a piece of information that even the Washington Post said was the reason they did not report on it [1]. To confound it, this was a piece seemingly to drum up interest for the books that the writers of the story also wrote.
Those facts don't make this seem to be an honest mistake. Those facts makes it look to be two authors promoting a book and hoping a bombshell article will drum up sales for their books. It's awfully convenient that the editors took out a couple of details that make it a non-story.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/a-book-on-kav...
My take on all of that was the Saddam Hussein was running a con. He wanted his regional adversaries to have the thought that he had WMD but wanted the UN inspectors to never find a "smoking gun". The analogy would be someone making a gun gesture in their coat pocket and then finding themselves confronting someone who really does have a gun...
On top of that he clearly didn't adhere to the restrictions imposed on him after the first Gulf War leading to the second Gulf War to eliminate any possibility of him having WMD and to enforce the restrictions.
Other explanations for our motivation to go to war never made sense to me such as "it was for the oil". Much cheaper (in blood and $$) to just purchase the oil if that was our goal, but the oil economy is basically private so it doesn't even make sense as a government goal. But I digress...