NYT Ombudsman Thinks McCain Story Should Not Have Run

February 24th, 2008 (3) Posted By .

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I’m with the O’Reilly. The bulk of the American media is a criminal enterprise engaged in the traffic of calumny and libelous innuendo, stealing the life breath of human beings, their reputations, for profit. It is a unique crime, a comination of assault as savage as any physical one, and a theft of a variety of actual assessts, from personal and professional relationships, the ability to work, all the fruits of those very reputations. Journalists are low-life, low-end street criminals who lack the testes to simply hold a gun to a man’s head and demand his wallet. Or to simply literally assassinate them. But de facto, that is all they do.

American Thinker:

Thomas Lifson

Clark Hoyt, the ombudsman for the New York Times, goes on the record writing that the story linking Senator John McCain to a female lobbyist should not have run:

…I asked Keller why he decided to run what he had.

“If the point of the story was to allege that McCain had an affair with a lobbyist, we’d have owed readers more compelling evidence than the conviction of senior staff members,” he replied. “But that was not the point of the story. The point of the story was that he behaved in such a way that his close aides felt the relationship constituted reckless behavior and feared it would ruin his career.”

I think that ignores the scarlet elephant in the room. A newspaper cannot begin a story about the all-but-certain Republican presidential nominee with the suggestion of an extramarital affair with an attractive lobbyist 31 years his junior and expect readers to focus on anything other than what most of them did. And if a newspaper is going to suggest an improper sexual affair, whether editors think that is the central point or not, it owes readers more proof than The Times was able to provide.

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