Evan Gahr writes: The New York Times yesterday published a humongous front-page story about an anti-war essay that a Columbia University undergraduate named Barack Obama wrote in March 1983.
The piece, written by veteran reporters David Sanger and William Broad, even included part of the actual essay--yellowed with age--from a now defunct campus publication, Sundial.
Sanger and Broad, who don't seem to notice Obama expressed the same kind of views disseminated by Soviet apologists at the time, declared with typical Timesean omniscience that the article "came to light on the internet just before the inauguration" but precisely "how the article found its way on the internet is unclear."
Uh, unclear to anyone who doesn't read Human Events, the Washington Post or the Politico.
The Obama essay didn't just show up on the internet out of the ether one day.
It was missing from the Columbia archives and not accessible to the public online. But I managed to browbeat Columbia into giving me a scan of the article. On January
9, I was first journalist to write about the essay, exclusively for Human Events, a longstanding conservative publication, not a blog.
The Washington Post gossip column January 13 did its lead item on the essay, which they noted I "excavated."
The same day, Ben Smith wrote about the essay on his widely-read Politico blog. Smith posted the actual essay--with credit to me.
So much for the mystery.
The Times claim about the article's unknown origins is demonstrably false. Moreover, someone at the Times surely knew it was false because the paper posted the essay, which appeared online only at the Politico.
So they took something Politico but don't know where they got it?
Given that the Times is imploding thanks to online competition why would the once mighty paper of record want to pretend that traditional reporting is nothing more than internet gossip?
Sanger and Broad could not be reached for comment.
Craig Whitney, in charge of Times standards, promised to look into the matter upon his return to the office tomorrow.
<--EVAN GAHR has embarassed liberals with their own words for the New York Post, Washington Times, Wall Street Journal and American Spectator.
