The New York Times may still be known as the “paper of record,” but the paper’s unresponsiveness in correcting the record is not something that is going to burnish its reputation. On July 20, the Times published a story about the first of a recent spate of undercover videos showing affiliates of abortion provider Planned Parenthood unethically and possibly illegally negotiating the sale of fetal parts to medical researchers. The videos are produced by a pro-life activist group, the Center for Medical Progress. In order to avoid accusations that the videos are deceptively edited, the group has fastidiously released the full footage of its video stings along with more digestible short videos highlighting the most newsworthy revelations.
Mistakenly, the Times story, headlined “Planned Parenthood Tells Congress More Videos of Clinics Might Surface,” reported that the Center for Medical Progress only released the “full recording last week after Planned Parenthood complained of selective, misleading editing.” This is not true. Both the edited and unedited versions were released at the same time, a fact that was easily verifiable to anyone looking at the Center for Medical Progress’s
YouTube channel. The error was almost immediately pointed out by bloggers, and numerous individuals on social media notified Times reporter Jackie Calmes and various New York Times editors.
The story was not corrected promptly. In fact, two days later a New York Times editorial cited this erroneous detail as proof that the Center for Medical Progress was being deceptive. “The full video of the lunch meeting, over two hours long and released by the Center for Medical Progress after complaints by Planned Parenthood, shows something very different from what these critics claim,” read the editorial.
A drumbeat continued sounding across the Internet urging the Times to correct its blunder. This publication (among others) ran a blog item headlined “After Two Weeks, New York Times Still Hasn’t Corrected Major Error in Planned Parenthood Story” on August 4. The Times finally corrected the piece the following day.
Not content simply to note the facts, the correction offered a bizarre excuse for the error. “While the full-length video of more than two hours took longer to download than the nearly nine-minute edited footage, the full video was in fact posted at the same time as the edited version,” read the correction. Of course the download time has no bearing at all on whether the two videos were released at the same time—indeed, YouTube is a streaming service, not one that requires you (or even easily allows you) to download a video before watching it. Apparently some editors at the Times also thought this an odd issue to raise, because the initial correction was itself subsequently corrected to delete this superfluous rationalization. The editorial was also finally corrected, on August 6.
Suffice to say, that it would take 16 days to get a straightforward factual correction at the New York Times on such a high-profile story tells us nothing flattering about the paper’s journalistic standards.
