At Huffington Post (9/13/12), Ryan Grim and Michael Calderone are raising questions about the somewhat mysterious disappearance of a New York Times news article:
On Wednesday, the New York Times published a provocative story bylined by David E. Sanger and Ashley Parker, leading with the news that Mitt Romney had personally approved the blistering Tuesday night statement on the attacks in Libya and Egypt that landed his campaign in trouble.
But hours later, the newspaper wiped the story out and replaced it with a significantly rewritten piece bylined by Peter Baker and Ashley Parker….
The later version, which appeared on the front page of Thursday’s paper, fleshed out the controversy with more details, but no longer included a couple key anonymous quotes from people close to the candidate, one who offered the rationale behind Romney’s decision—to call out the Obama administration for supposedly “sympathiz[ing] with those who waged the attacks”—and another who criticized it.
HuffPost quotes an email it got from Peter Baker, the co-author of the second version: “As we reported more through the day, we found Republicans criticizing Governor Romney on the record, so why use an anonymous one?” Baker said. “There are too many blind quotes in the media and we try not to use them when it’s not necessary.”
But there are obviously not a lot of “adviser[s] to the campaign” going on record to criticize Romney’s statement. Ironically, the original piece’s allowing an insider to air views that would otherwise probably get them fired is one of the rare fully justified uses of anonymous sourcing in campaign journalism—which is generally used to protect insiders from embarrassment over how much they gush about their candidates (FAIR Blog, 8/20/12).
And no one from the Times explains what happened to the quote from the other adviser, the one where they say, “We’ve had this consistent critique and narrative on Obama’s foreign policy, and we felt this was a situation that met our critique.” As Talking Points Memo‘s Josh Marshall (9/12/12), who seems to have been the first to call attention to the switched articles, paraphrased: “So basically, we saw this thing happen. It fit with our campaign narrative. So we pounced.”
What’s worrisome about the switcheroo and the disappearing quotes is that the New York Times (7/16/12) has already acknowledged that it sometimes gives sources in both parties “final editing power over any published quotations.” As Jeremy Peters reported (FAIR Blog, 7/16/12):
Romney advisers almost always require that reporters ask them for the green light on anything from a conversation that they would like to include in an article.
Which is not the same thing as allowing a source to retract a quote that’s already been published—but it’s too close for comfort.
UPDATE: New York Times Washington bureau chief David Leonhardt’s assurance to Talking Points Memo (9/13/12) that “the campaign did not complain about the Web version of the story” does not add up. A quote that was attributed to an unnamed adviser became a quote from a named adviser, Lanhee Chen, in the final version—but with the juicier half of the quote deleted. Of course the Times didn’t start using his name without talking to him, so obviously some kind of negotiation went on. If the Times wants to maintain these negotiations did not amount to “complain[ing],” that’s a semantic game.
As for the deletion of another unnamed adviser’s criticism of Romney, Leonhardt said: “We didn’t need that quote for the story to make the point that Romney’s response yesterday was clumsy…. The story said that and showed that without the quote.”
The point of that quote, however, was not that Romney’s response was clumsy, but that someone in Romney’s own camp thought his response was clumsy. Ordinarily that would be considered newsworthy; that the Times saw fit to drop it is highly mysterious, if it wasn’t the result of a complaint—or let’s just say “input”—from the Romney campaign.
Both NYT versions of the Romney gaff don’t quite grasp its significance. With not even a day of respect for those grieving their deaths, Romney reacted to the assassinations of US Ambassador John Christopher Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi, Libya, with the flat-out lie that “the Obama Administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.”
Stevens and his colleagues were civil servants doing a dangerous job for their country that had nothing to do with party politics, much like the G.I.s now fighting two wars for the United States. Romney’s remarks demean America, not its current President.
His disgraceful failure to support the President after such a national tragedy is consistent with a campaign to destroy the American democracy that began with the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Reagan, who was never anything more than a spokesman for the corporate elite, said in his first inaugural address of January 20, 1981: “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem.”
Our government, at the time, was a democracy. It’s laws derived from more than 200 years of consensus among people of different views and backgrounds, and those four courageous Americans who died in Libya died for a foreign policy that had by tradition been bi-partisan.
Since Reagan, we have seen that democracy destroyed by fabulous concessions to the corporate elite, an obviously politicized, corrupt Supreme Court, and laws in 23 states that are meant to disenfranchise voters. We no longer present a unified, bi-partisan face to our friends and enemies abroad; our democracy has been replaced by a plutocracy, and unless the media begin to understand this and react to it, the Congress will become completely useless and the plutocracy will be replaced by a dictatorship.
Excellent comment.
“Stevens and his colleagues were civil servants doing a dangerous job for their country that had nothing to do with party politics”, says one commentator.
This is true only in the sense that both Democrats and Republicans support aggressive, interventionist, U.S. actions in the mid-East. But Stevens was hardly an honorable idealist working for the common good. He was an operative for American imperialism, working behind the scenes with Colonel Muammar Gaddafi when he was still held in favor by the U.S. (referring to Gaddafi as “engaging” and “charming”), and negotiating lucrative deals for American oil companies. He served as a link to the “rebels” – reactionary Islamists, former Qaddafi officials, foreign mercenaries recruited, financed, trained by Western governments and brought in to Libya to overthrow the government. Those foreign forces also included a sizable al-Qaeda component, who are now likewise active in a similar war for regime-change in Syria. The overriding aim was to capitalize on local opposition and unrest to establish a pliant government which would serve America’s strategic and economic interests.
In a world undergoing revolutionary upheaval – Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, and more – U.S. imperialism scrambles to find allies and exploit chaos for its own ends. Yesterday’s enemies become today’s “friends”. The U.S. utilized the precursors of al-Qaeda in the 1980s in Afghanistan to drive out the Russians. After 9/11, al-Qaeda became public enemy no. 1. Now, al-Qaeda is back in the fold, helping to do our dirty work in Libya and Syria. Qaddafi himself was depicted as a mad-dog lunatic in the 1980s; then he became an ally of sorts in the past decade; finally reverting to an enemy once again. The goals of U.S. imperialism – hegemony, domination, control of critical resources, the subordination of rival powers – remain constant. The strategies and tactics shift rapidly, as situations and conflicts quickly spiral out of control, while new opportunities arise.
Stevens was instrumental in setting up the “freedom fighters” in Libya a year ago. Now, it appears, his former clients have turned against him and murdered him. The bloody, violent chain of events has come full circle. Stevens reaped what he sowed.
I’ve had the same, or a similar experience with The Guardian. On a recent visit to England, I bought a Guardian before getting on a train to London to fly to Italy. The date of the flight and the paper was June 7th, 2012. The very interesting article was about downgrades and changes to the British armed forces. (Not sure that was the exact word for their military.) I do recall they were cutting regular forces and weapons to rely more on drones and a word for special ops.) I clipped it it out and brought it back to New York. Emailed Readerseditor asking about it. No reply. Searched online. Nothing. Told/asked the BBC which made a one sentence innocuous announcement that the Royal something or other would be preserved. Nada about drones or special ops. Finally I searched their sites for Uk drones and found a list of countries that have drones, a long list. Under one line was UK with NA next to it. I.e. not available. The great champions of “the truth” and Julian Assange. Free speech, especially bad news about America. Yes, we are one of the evil empires. Yes, plenty of bad to say about U.S. I’m not disputing that. But I want the truth about everything, everyone. For example, Just Foreign Policy didn’t mention Asssange having a Russian TV show. Think of how prevalent free speech is in Russia. Brave Russian woman, mostly, journalists covering Chechnya tend to get beaten badly, and if they don’t stop, are mysteriously murdered. No investigation. Julian Assange would never cover Russia or China. Which makes me think his main motivation was just to make America look bad, which most of the world appreciates. But he’s no hero. There wasn’t even anything terrible in Wickileak cables. I asked a Canadian friend whether she thought Canadian soldiers intentionally killed civilians. Yes, a friend’s kid said he enjoyed killing. Wickileaks is fine, it’s the hypocrisy and censorship from the left that bothers me. Left and right leaders in latin America tend to seek an end to constitutional term limits. If it’s leftist and there’s a coup, it’s a humanitarian disaster; if a rightist an outrage. St Fidel is another example. OF COURSE we should end the stupid blockade. A Canadian leftist friend says all problems there now are because of the blockade, and after we end it, all problems will be because we ended it. Fidel himself said his economic system, classical communism, didn’t work. Another Canadian friend said America invaded more places than anyone else in the 20th C. Could be true. By a large margin, the most killed were by Hitler, Mao, and Stalin. You can debate who wins the prize of worst mass murderer. I know the DOD says we have 800 bases around the world. A main reason we’re hated. We never really leave anywhere. Bases and “trainers”. But I’d like to see a map with everyone’s bases everywhere, and who gets weapons where. In Europe they come from Eastern Europe. Opium there come from the Taliban’s nice fields we irrigated for them. They claim to be holy, but they’re criminals, a Pakistani cab driver told me the other day. Russia sends weapons to Chavez, who sends some to Cuba. To Salafists we’re infidels. They want a caliphate. Whole world Islamic. I like music. Wars don’t work. Drones don’t work. We need to change our offense dept to a defense dept. How?
April, I liked your post, or the spirit behind it; but bits of it puzzled me. There is plenty about the increasing use of drones by the British armed forces (yes, that’s what we call them – or used to until our media started slavishly using US vocabulary for everything to do with war) in the Guardian and elsewhere. I found this easily – http://bit.ly/NSwI2I – which does say that the number of drones possessed by the British Army is “not known”, though it says that the RAF has “at least 10” heavy drones. Why do you assume that the Guardian is being coy, rather than that the Ministry of Defence is very secretive?
And what is your problem about the Russians selling weapons to Venezuela? I can’t imagine that you believe the lies some put about that Venezuela is a military threat to the United States. It is the US that, one way or another, is constantly threatening Venezuela, and so (not surprisingly) the Venezuelans are trying to strengthen their not-very-formidable defences.
This is such a non story.On a scale of one to ten it is a one.Some people in the state dept or Obamas circle came out saying this was the fault of one man…..the man who did the movie.That was quickly cleared up and clarified.Mitt commented on that….later doing the same in smoothing over his statements.The only deep seated sentiment here that lingers is the fact that Obama extended a hand early on to the trouble spots in that area of the world, and it has been bitten clean off showing the failure of his policies.That and his snubbing of our traditional allies.Mitt is still on the outside looking in,and these are not policy statements.