The New York Times has issued a mea culpa for their “overly cautious” coverage of E. Jean Carroll’s recently published rape allegation against President Trump. Because the allegations were sourced from another outlet, executive editor Dean Baquet explained, the New York Times didn’t feel they needed to immediately cover the widely publicized story so long as they couldn’t obtain new, original reporting.
But the New York Times had it right the first time. On the other hand, New York Magazine, which first published the story, messed it up badly. It couldn’t have made it any more dangerous for the New York Times to cover the story as news.
Carroll’s allegation is serious — a forceful charge of violent rape against the then-real estate mogul from a quarter century ago. New York Magazine says it independently verified that two friends of Carroll’s contemporaneously corroborated her account. That was about the only responsible aspect of their journalism with this story.
Rather than assign a news reporter to introduce this story to the world in an objective report, detailing how exactly the two witnesses described what Carroll said at the time, New York Magazine threw Carroll on the front cover in a defiant and staged shot and gave her a few thousand unfettered words to level allegations not just against Trump, but also against multiple other men. As an excerpt of a memoir, it’s a gutting and infuriating account. But a memoir is about the people writing it. Public accusations of this nature are, by necessity, about the accused.
That’s why serious reporting is required for such an explosive accusation. It’s all well and good for Carroll to vent in her memoir, but journalists owe it to their readers to report on this sort of thing responsibly and soberly. By allowing Carroll to wax poetic for thousands of words, accuse multiple men of different crimes, and advertise her book all while trying to publicly impugn the president, New York Magazine only undermined her credibility and its own.
The New York Times was correct to proceed with caution, at least as a matter for its news team. The commentariat rightly observed that a rape allegation with two contemporaneously corroborating witnesses ought to be investigated seriously, and news reporters tried to do their own independent reporting before publishing news stories. The New York Times did the right thing, and in apologizing after the fact seems to be setting the wrong precedent for the future.
