From: EvanGahr@aol.com
Subject: Part 2: All the News that's Fit to Steal
I left a voice mail message early last week for NYT Washington Bureau Chief Dean Baquet, saying the Times policy is to credit the first publication to report something exclusively so why didn't they give proper credit.
I was pessimistic anything would come of this because I dealt with him two years ago about another one of my stories I wanted the Times to follow up and he repeatedly made promises he didn't keep: first he promised to have a reporter call me. He didn't. When I reminded him weeks later he promised again. Nobody called. Then he promised to call me and didn't.
But you never know.
I was pleasantly surprised when he called back this time. I repeated what I said on the voice mail about proper credit. He said actualy we reported this during the campaign.
Actually, they didn't. The Times and other publications reported about a poli sci thesis that Obama supposedly wrote at Colubmia but it never surfaced. The only thing he wrote at Columbia that anyone found is the Sundial essay.
I subsequently told him this and he agreed he was mistaken.
I said you wrote it's "unclear" how the essay "surfaced" on the internet but how could it be unclear if it was in the Washington Post and Politico?
"You're acting like a jerk," he explained, but "I'll look into it."
A jerk? He's Washington Bureau Chief of the New York Times and he can't come up with a more sophisticated term than jerk?
How about petulant?
A jerk? What is he a girl? "That guy is such a jerk" goes one popular refrain.
I probably was a little petulant on the phone but the plain reality is that if he has integrity he'll issue a correction, if he doesn't he won't. It's not going to turn on my less than stellar phone manners.
It's remarkably deceitful what the Times did. They used the "unclear" line because saying it was in the Washington Post and Politico would have made they look foolish for writing about something six months after it was in two major publications and one highly visible conservative one. (When I attacked Obama last year over his ties to rappers--a few months before the rest of the media reported the connection--I got attacked by people on Huffington Post and elsewhere plus heard from conservatives who read it.)
Anyway, "unclear" makes it sound like the Times in its infinite wisdom found the essay that had been overlooked and now brings it to readers' attention.
I was playing the conversation over in my head and remembered that he said "I get calls like this all the time" but you're the only one who acts like a jerk.
"Calls like this all the time?" Does that mean the Times is ripping people off on a regular basis?
So who's jerking who around?
