New York Times attacked from all sides

By Lee Bandy
SouthCarolina Insider

(2/27/08) Journalists are beating up the New York Times for publishing a highly controversial story suggesting that presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain had an extramarital relationship with a Washington lobbyist in 1999.

The Times quoted unnamed former associates of the Arizona senator.

The piece included significant details about whether McCain had done legislative favors for the female lobbyist.
The Times was harshly criticized by fellow journalists. And it continues today. The story has legs, as journalists like to say.

A rough consensus is emerging among political reporters that the Times story was fatally flawed.

You don’t accuse someone of being engaged in sexual relationship and attribute the charge to an anonymous source.

In 1992 when Bill Clinton was running for president, Gennifer Flowers held a news conference to announce that she had carried on an affair with Clinton.

The Times devoted one paragraph of a news story to her charges.

“I’m ashamed for my profession,” Max Frankel, the paper’s editor said afterward. “We don’t want to report on the candidates’ sex lives.”

Many journalists with no ideological ax to grind have criticized the piece.

Times ombudsman Clark Hoyt said “if a newspaper is going to suggest an improper sexual affair, whether editors think that it is the central point or not, it owes readers more proof than the Times was able to provide.”

Times Executive Editor Bill Keller seemed taken aback by the volume of reaction and by how lopsided the opinion was against the Times decision to print the story.

The paper has been attacked from all sides – Democrats, Republicans and independents. Many saw the piece as a cheap shot.