Hey @mattapuzzo @nytmike – an anonymous source tells me this is the number for Isis's leader in the United States!
867-5309
Hot scoop!
— John Cole (@Johngcole) December 18, 2015
The NYT public editor addresses what are now the repeated attempts to smear Dems on the front page with scoops based on anonymous sourcoes that turn out to be bullshit. First, as discussed by Mistermix, it was HRC, this time, the President:
Mistakes are bound to happen in the news business, but some are worse than others.
What I’ll lay out here was a bad one. It involved a failure of sufficient skepticism at every level of the reporting and editing process — especially since the story in question relied on anonymous government sources, as too many Times articles do.
Here’s the background: A Times article Sunday reported that the U.S. government had missed something that was right out there in the open: the jihadist social-media posts by one of the San Bernardino killers. Its initial paragraphs read as follows:
Tashfeen Malik, who with her husband carried out the massacre in San Bernardino, Calif., passed three background checks by American immigration officials as she moved to the United States from Pakistan. None uncovered what Ms. Malik had made little effort to hide — that she talked openly on social media about her views on violent jihad.
She said she supported it. And she said she wanted to be a part of it.
It was certainly damning – and it was wrong. On Wednesday, the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, referred to such reporting as “a garble.” And, as it turns out from his statements and from further reporting, Ms. Malik had not posted “openly” on social media. She had written emails; she had written private messages, not visible to the public; and she had written on a dating site.
In other words, the story’s clear implication that those who vetted Ms. Malik’s visa had missed the boat – a clearly visible ocean liner – was based on a false premise.
On Thursday evening, an editors’ note was appended to the article; it appeared in Friday’s paper. Editors’ notes are sometimes used instead of corrections to provide more context and explanation. But there’s no question that this also functioned as a correction.
Too bad she wasn’t around for Whitewater. Whatever happened to Gerth?