When is a mea culpa not a mea culpa? Probably when the New York Times does it mostly in secret.
You'll remember back in May, the New York Times published Nick Kristof's propaganda column about Israelis using specially trained dogs to violate male Hamas prisoners following the Oct. 7, 2023, terror invasion of southern Israel. The Times put Kristof's piece on the op-ed page, even though it read more like a news report, likely as a CYA maneuver.
What Hamas terrorists did that bloody day is well-documented by Hamas itself. They gleefully uploaded videos of themselves committing the most savage acts imaginable — and then some — which you can view for yourself at Hamas-Massacre.
Kristof, on the other hand, made bold claims of dog-adjacent romantic misconduct that "leaned on anonymous and Hamas-affiliated sourcing," as investigative reporter Gerald Posner put it on X this week. And he put it all-too-gently for my tastes. But you know me.
"The reaction was immediate and severe," Posner continued. "Israel's foreign ministry branded it a blood libel, Prime Minister Netanyahu threatened legal action, and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations formally condemned it.
And yet "the Times stood behind it and moved on."
Again, that's putting things too gently.
Opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury claimed that Kristof's Hamas-sourced blood libel went through "a rigorous vetting process." She told DNYUZ that her department's fact-checkers ensured "that every testimony and anecdote [Kristof] personally reported was supported by independent sources, as is the case with all sensitive pieces."
"After publication, we reviewed the factual challenges that readers and others raised, as is standard practice with any published piece," Kingsbury claimed. "Editors found no errors."
Yet nobody outside her department seems to have found a single independent source for Kristof's outrageous claims of nontraditional veterinary intimacy.
But then there's the paper's news division, and its executive editor, Joe Kahn, said on a podcast this week that maybe Kristof's piece didn't live up to actual news standards.
Talking to Business Insider's Peter Kafka, Kahn basically avoided any responsibility by reminding listeners that Kristof's column "wasn't edited by the newsroom."
Posner noted that when finally "pressed on whether the news division would have run it, Kahn first offered 'we probably wouldn't have.'" Then he paused and finally took it a little further: "No, we wouldn't have done that exact piece."
Not that exact piece, you say? So — there is some version of Kristof's baseless canine consent irregularities story that Kahn's news division would have run? Help me out here, because I'm a little confused.
This is hardly the mea culpa readers ought to (but likely won't) demand from America's so-called newspaper of record. Kahn's admission — two months late and on a podcast with a niche audience of industry insiders — is the equivalent of burying the correction on the bottom-right corner of page A19 in tiny print.
Kahn admitted that the Times has two sets of editorial standards, one for news and another for opinion—which is exactly how things ought to be. But that’s not what Kingsbury claimed. She defended Kristof’s editorial by insisting it underwent the same “rigorous vetting process” as a straight news report.
Which standard are we supposed to believe? Whatever it is, it isn't a mea culpa.
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