New York Times editor blasts her own newspaper

This is a story about the perils of rapid-fire online journalism and the factual mistakes and cover-ups that come from it.

It was originally supposed to be a blockbuster story about a possible criminal indictment of Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton for handling classified government information on her private email system while serving as secretary of state. That was the story the New York Times initially reported on Thursday night.

By this morning, after a series of changes in the reporting by the newspaper that only served to raise numerous questions about the facts, here was the headline in the Times:

A Clinton Story Fraught With Inaccuracies: How It Happened and What Next?

The column published under that headline was written by the Times public editor (an in-house ombudsman), Margaret Sullivan. She was clearly agitated with the way the Clinton story was handled:

The first major change was this: It wasn’t really Mrs. Clinton directly who was the focus of the request for an investigation (by the Justice Department). It was more general: whether government information was handled improperly in connection with her use of a personal email account.

Much later, The Times backed off the startling characterization of a “criminal inquiry,” instead calling it something far tamer sounding: It was a “security” referral.
 

Sullivan understandably criticized the Times reporters and editors for revising (and softening) the online story several times, without an explanation to the Times readers, before printing a retraction. A series of corrections were eventually published in the Sunday “print product” – that’s what journalists call newspapers these days.
 

Her conclusion was that the reporting and editing by her colleagues was “a mess.”

There are at least two major journalistic problems here, in my view. Competitive pressure and the desire for a scoop led to too much speed and not enough caution.

… First, consider the elements. When you add together the lack of accountability that comes with anonymous sources, along with no ability to examine the referral itself (to the Justice Department), and then mix in the ever-faster pace of competitive reporting for the web, you’ve got a mistake waiting to happen. Or, in this case, several mistakes.

Reporting a less sensational version of the story, with a headline that did not include the word “criminal,” and continuing to develop it the next day would have been a wise play. Better yet: Waiting until the next day to publish anything at all.

What this essentially represents is an attitude among many online-obsessed editors these days that if you scoop your competitors by a few hours – or even 10 or 20 minutes – that’s a journalistic victory. On Twitter, the scoops sometimes consist of beating the competition by a minute or two, or even 20 or 30 seconds.

There are editors out there who live by the mantra that “the Internet is self-correcting,” meaning that the Times’ method in this case of on-the-fly, unexplained changes in the story is considered acceptable in some newsrooms.

To be fair, the Times reporters apparently got bamboozled by some anonymous sources with bad information. Some other publications who were chasing the supposed Times scoop on Friday morning were also told, incorrectly, that the Justice Department was mulling a criminal inquiry of the Clinton emails.  

But Sullivan, the public editor, issued this warning to her colleagues:
You can’t put stories like this back in the bottle – they ripple through the entire news system.

In the end, this was not just a story about a botched newspaper/website article. This was a cautionary tale about the current state of journalism.