Nat Hentoff on NY Times Dishonesty

Via Betsy I saw this from Nat Hentoff in The Village Voice. He says that the Times'

editorial writers should be as accountable as the Times' reporters—when the editorial sages ignore the facts in a story and deeply sully someone's reputation.

Hentoff is a liberal and we ought to be shocked when the Times is caught lying so blatantly. Sadly, we are not.

Hentoff explains how badly the Times has treated Janice Rogers Brown and then writes

This disdain for basic research echoes a dispute I've had previously with Gail Collins, editor of the Times' editorial page.

In a number of Voice columns, I showed how Times editorials repeatedly more than implied that then Mississippi federal district judge Charles Pickering—nominated to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals—was racially biased when he got the Justice Department to allow him to impose a lesser sentence in a Mississippi cross burning outside the home of an interracial couple. (That defendant was not the ringleader and his accomplices had avoided jail time.)

The Times' own reporters, Neil Lewis and David Firestone, had gone to Mississippi to get the facts on Pickering's anti-racist record in that state, and the reason he had intervened in the cross-burning case. So had The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which did the research the Times' editorial board ignored. (Many media outlets around the country, however, ignorantly circulated "the paper of record" 's damaging characterization of Pickering.

Hentoff wraps it all up with this:

Several times, I left detailed messages for Gail Collins at the Times, giving her the true facts of Pickering's record—as Times reporters had found—but I never received an answer. Dan Okrent, the Times' ombudsman, told me he would write about this journalistic malfeasance, but he hasn't.

Will Dan Okrent's successor, Barney Calame, formerly of The Wall Street Journal, dare to call to account the writer of the April 28 editorial scandalizing Janice Rogers Brown—and will he ask Gail Collins if she deigns to have a fact checker looking at the editorials she sends out as the voice of the Times?