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Hillary Clinton

Rieder: Times' flawed Clinton story shows need to explain errors

Rem Rieder
USA TODAY
Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton speaks to guests at a campaign event at Iowa State University in Ames on July 26, 2015.

There's no doubt that its story on the "criminal inquiry" that wasn't into Hillary Clinton's email practices was a major embarrassment for The New York Times.

When you are breaking a story that is this explosive about the dominant frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, you better get it right.

But the Times compounded the damage by failing to promptly and thoroughly explain to its readers what had gone wrong, and why.

No matter how careful you try to be, mistakes are built into the journalistic process. They are going to happen. As Peter Binzen,  a wonderful boss of mine years ago at the long gone Philadelphia Bulletin, used to say, "Journalism is a very inexact science."

That's truer now than it's ever been, given the ultra fast, ultra competitive world of digital journalism we live in.

But when things go terribly wrong, it's critically important to be upfront about it. And the Times fell far short of the mark.

Total transparency when things go off the rails is not just the right thing to do. It's the smart thing to do. It's an important step toward protecting or rebuilding credibility. If you own up to your errors, readers are much more likely to cut you some slack.

Not all readers, of course. Not avid Clinton partisans who are convinced that the Times -- yes, the Times, that bulwark of the "liberal media" -- is out to get Hillary. But enough to make a difference.

What's particularly disappointing in this case is that the thrust of the story was true: Government investigators later said -- on the record -- they had found classified information on the private email system Clinton used while she was secretary of state, and they want law enforcement officials to investigate.

But two incendiary elements of the Times' initial story -- that Clinton herself was the target, and that the investigators had made a "criminal referral" -- were wrong.

These are hardly minor miscues. The Times modified the story to reflect the changes. But while it has run corrections, it owes its readers more: It needs to explain what went wrong, how such errors could have made their way into the nation's pre-eminent news outlet, and what the lessons are.

Dean Baquet, the Times' executive editor,  agrees the paper fell down on this score and says he'll do things differently in the future. That's good news.

“We should have explained to our readers right away what happened here, as soon as we knew it,” Baquet told Times public editor Margaret Sullivan, who wrote a valuable reconstruction of the affair in which she also called for far more transparency. But Sullivan is in effect a readers' representative and in-house critic as opposed to someone who speaks on behalf of the paper

It's easy to use this episode as an opportunity to once again batter two much-pummeled villains, anonymous sources and the merciless pressure for speed in the Internet era. But Sullivan's recap hardly suggests this was a heedless, careless rush to publish.

Matthew Purdy, a Times deputy executive editor who was involved with the story, told Sullivan that Times reporters Michael S. Schmidt and Matt Apuzzo had “multiple, reliable, highly placed sources,” including some in "law enforcement," and that the reporters were “sent back again and again” to confirm key details.

And as Baquet says, if you have officials in a position to know confirming that this was a "criminal referral," what could you have done differently?

It's easy to say, "Well, just don't use anonymous sources -- ever." But if that's your absolute rule, there are a lot of valuable stories that will never see the light of day. The problem is that since they weren't named, these shadowy figures won't suffer any humiliation. That honor belongs entirely to the Times. You are only as good as your sources, and when they blow up on you, you own the fallout.

But there is one totally baffling aspect to the affair. How come government officials unequivocally confirmed the "criminal referral" to the Times -- both on Thursday night and Friday morning -- as well as to other news outlets, including USA TODAY, then did an about-face so rapidly? They characterized it instead as a "security referral."

As is always the case, the unfortunate collateral damage of flawed journalism is that it deflects attention away from the subject and toward the news outlet. Because, make no mistake, there is a there there. As the Times reported in a followup story, "Irrespective of the terminology, the referral raises the possibility of a Justice Department investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s emails as she campaigns for president."

Clinton's reckless and confounding use of a private email system while secretary of state was a colossal judgment lapse, and it is not going away as a subject of journalistic scrutiny and campaign combat anytime soon.

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