David Kirkpatrick covers conservatives for the New York Times and generally does a good job. He was one of four reporters bylined on the John McCain story Thursday. Late yesterday, on the Times website, he offered his own thoughts on the timing of the story issue we explored here.
As far as the timing, don’t attach too much significance to the Drudge posting. We heard a second-hand report from a lobbyist about Senator McCain and Vicki Iseman more than a year ago. Early last year we began making careful, quiet inquiries into the matter. Last fall, we learned more about some of the conversations around the campaign concerning Ms. Iseman, and we kept reporting. It is impossible for us to know who told what to Matt Drudge in December or why. These days, journalists have to live with the possibility that a subject of their reporting or a source for their reporting might try to spread selective information over the Internet. It could be strategic – an attempt to game journalists into publishing prematurely, or to influence their reporting, or to start counteracting the news in advance. Who knows? In this case, it is worth remembering that what appeared on the Drudge Report did not accurately describe what we were working on, the identities of the reporters involved, their views of the story or their editors’ views of the story. So, again, who knows? Please trust me that none of the journalists involved in this article was dragging his or her feet. To be honest, we wanted this to get over with. We worked hard to prepare as fair, complete and accurate a report as possible, and to do it as soon as we could. We tried to contact as many knowledgeable people as possible. We gave Senator McCain, his advisers and Ms. Iseman plenty of time and opportunity to respond. We wrestled with some pretty tricky issues about how to handle what we learned. And we put it in the paper as soon as we could but no sooner. Mr. Meyerhofer [ED: a letter writer who sided with the Times], thanks for the vote of confidence. You are in a minority in defending this story, but here in the foxhole we welcome your company. Would this story have broken somewhere else if we had not broken it? That’s hard to say, but my guess is that some variation of it would have emerged. The Washington Post, which filed its own version this week after ours went up on our Web site, was clearly doing some similar reporting. Apparently The New Republic was considering writing an account of our work on the senator and the lobbyist even if we never published the result, so the story might have emerged there, in the guise of a media story. Who knows?
Two things struck me as particularly interesting. First, this: “We heard a second-hand report from a lobbyist about Senator McCain and Vicki Iseman more than a year ago.” That’s consistent with what I have heard but earlier than was posited in the lengthy, well-reported New Republic article on the skirmishing inside the Times, which put the beginning of the reporting in November. Second: “Apparently The New Republic was considering writing an account of our work on the senator and the lobbyist even if we never published the result, so the story might have emerged there, in the guise of a media story.” Apparently? Is it really possible that Kirkpatrick did not know this? Sure, it’s possible. But it strikes me as unlikely. The TNR story seems to be heavily sourced within the Times. And within moments of the story breaking on the Times website, the McCain campaign alleged that the Times only published because the New Republic was set to publish this week. Are we to believe that the McCain campaign knew about the imminent TNR story and Times reporters working on the piece did not?
