We suspect some of our readers are pretty well tired of reading about the Kavanaugh confirmation fight. So are we. Allow us to press your patience one more time. This week a friend of The Scrapbook passed along a nearly 20-year-old article from the New York Times, and we thought perhaps our readers might enjoy pondering a passage from it.
The Times, we need hardly point out, was relentless in its effort to find any smidgen of untoward or unethical behavior in the youthful history of Brett M. Kavanaugh, to the point that every day seemed to bring forth some preposterous non-revelation about a barroom scuffle or a dirty prank perpetrated by a fraternity to which the nominee once belonged. Almost totally absent from the Times’s coverage was any acknowledgment of the doubts a reasonable person might entertain about Christine Blasey Ford’s allegation that Kavanaugh had assaulted her in 1982. The problems, to simplify, were these: No witness, including some she suggested, would corroborate her claim, and her own testimony was often ambiguous and vague.
Well, things have changed. On February 24, 1999, the paper reported on a lawsuit brought against President Bill Clinton by Juanita Broaddrick, who claimed back in 1992 that Bill Clinton had once sexually assaulted her in an Arkansas hotel room. Wrote the Times:
We’re not sure the two dailies would have regarded the allegation as “toxic waste” if it had had to do with George H. W. Bush, but then again, perhaps they would have—autres temps, autres moeurs. In any case, they were right to sit on the story.
Why? As the piece went on to say, “the problems with Mrs. Broaddrick’s accusation are obvious”:
The logic prevailing among Times editors today—that all women must be believed when they allege sexual harassment or assault, even if their accusations have no corroboration and even if the story changes over time—wasn’t much in evidence in 1999.
Could it be that political considerations affect the way the New York Times covers stories about sexual misconduct? Nah. Surely not.
