Politico's Dylan Byers reported that New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet “refused to publish” a letter from the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, which expressed “grave concern” with a recent flawed Times report on Clinton's email use.
The July 23 Times story, which has now been corrected twice and which came under heavy criticism from the Times' public editor and veteran journalists, originally falsely claimed that two inspectors general had requested a criminal investigation into Clinton's email use. In reality, the probe was not criminal and was not focused on Clinton personally. “Despite the overwhelming evidence,” Byers noted, “the Times did not remove the word [criminal] from its headline and its story, nor did it issue a correction, until the following day.”
Byers explained that in response, the Clinton campaign “sent a nearly 2,000-word letter to the executive editor of The New York Times this week.” The campaign then forwarded the letter to reporters after “Baquet refused to publish it in the Times”:
“We remain perplexed by the Times' slowness to acknowledge its errors after the fact, and some of the shaky justifications that Times' editors have made,” Clinton communications director Jennifer Palmieri wrote in the letter to Dean Baquet, which the campaign forwarded to the On Media blog late Thursday night.
“I feel obliged to put into context just how egregious an error this story was,” Palmieri continued. “The New York Times is arguably the most important news outlet in the world and it rushed to put an erroneous story on the front page charging that a major candidate for President of the United States was the target of a criminal referral to federal law enforcement. Literally hundreds of outlets followed your story, creating a firestorm that had a deep impact that cannot be unwound. This problem was compounded by the fact that the Times took an inexplicable, let alone indefensible, delay in correcting the story and removing 'criminal' from the headline and text of the story.”
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“In our conversations with the Times reporters, it was clear that they had not personally reviewed the IG's referral that they falsely described as both criminal and focused on Hillary Clinton,” Palmieri wrote. “Instead, they relied on unnamed sources that characterized the referral as such. However, it is not at all clear that those sources had directly seen the referral, either. This should have represented too many 'degrees of separation' for any newspaper to consider it reliable sourcing, least of all The New York Times.”
Palmieri's letter, which runs 1,915 words long, includes three other complaints: 1. That the “seriousness of the allegations... demanded far more care and due diligence than the Times exhibited prior to this article's publication. 2. That the Times ”incomprehensibly delayed the issuance of a full and true correction." And 3. That the Times' “official explanations for the misreporting is profoundly unsettling.”
“I wish to emphasize our genuine wish to have a constructive relationship with The New York Times,” Palmieri writes in closing. “But we also are extremely troubled by the events that went into this erroneous report, and will be looking forward to discussing our concerns related to this incident so we can have confidence that it is not repeated in the future.”