Times Public Editor: Paper Shouldn't Have Published Suggestion Of McCain Affair
February 24, 2008 -- 11:55 AM EST // //

In his column today, New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt gets it right on the paper's big McCain article, arguing that the paper shouldn't have suggested the possibility that he'd had an affair with that female lobbyist without evidence as to whether it actually happened:

The article was notable for what it did not say: It did not say what convinced the advisers that there was a romance. It did not make clear what McCain was admitting when he acknowledged behaving inappropriately — an affair or just an association with a lobbyist that could look bad. And it did not say whether Weaver, the only on-the-record source, believed there was a romance. The Times did not offer independent proof,..

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.

Hoyt also asked the same question posed below on this blog: Why not run the story without the sexual dimension?

I asked Jill Abramson, the managing editor for news, if The Times could have done the story and left out the allegation about an affair. “That would not have reflected the essential truth of why the aides were alarmed,” she said.

But what the aides believed might not have been the real truth. And if you cannot provide readers with some independent evidence, I think it is wrong to report the suppositions or concerns of anonymous aides about whether the boss is getting into the wrong bed.

This was always the problem here. The issue was never whether the individual facts, as rendered in the article, were accurate or not. Rather, it was that it's simply impossible to report that aides believed that there might have been an affair without basically alleging that it happened, particularly in the context of a white hot presidential race.

If the paper is going to report that people worried that a politician might have had an improper romantic relationship, readers -- and the paper's subject -- deserve also to be given evidence, one way or the other, as to whether the affair actually happened or not. If such evidence is unattainable, or can't be presented to readers for whatever reason, then going there at all is plainly very hard to defend.

But Abramson and Times executive editor Bill Keller, who are sticking by the story, seem to disagree with this simple point. Mystifying indeed.

The comments section is broken and currently undergoing repair. To reach the homepage of this blog, click here.

---

---