Truth, Justice, Abortion and the Times Magazine
Last April, the NYT Magazine ran a story on abortion in El Salvador (Times Select membership required to read) that stated that a small number of women were serving 30 year jail terms for having had abortions. The case of Carmen Climaco, who had received such a sentence after having an abortion at 18 weeks.
On December 31st, the Public Editor of the NYT Magazine, Byron Calame, published an essay that revealed that a trial court had concluded that Ms. Climaco had strangled the infant after a full-term live birth. Calame observes:
The care taken in the reporting and editing of this example didn’t meet the magazine’s normal standards. Although Sarah H. Smith, the magazine’s editorial manager, told me that relevant court documents are “normally” reviewed, Mr. Hitt never checked the 7,600-word ruling in the Climaco case while preparing his story. And Mr. Hitt told me that no editor or fact checker ever asked him if he had checked the court document containing the panel’s decision.
In its editorials the Times frequently calls upon President Bush to admit mistakes. And in her columns Maureen Dowd does the same, helpfully advising that apologies would be good for his soul. Some of her observations:
“His advisers say it’s better for the president to appear out of touch than apologetic. He’d rather seem delusional than deluded…When a questioner named Linda asked the president to give three bum decisions he had made in office, Mr. Bush took a pass. Lincoln could admit mistakes. J.F.K. could admit mistakes. But W. thinks admitting mistakes is for powder puffs.”
Certainly the Times would not want to be considered delusional or powder puffy, so why not simply admit it made a mistake in this story?
Of course, the 1500-word article by Byron Calame dissecting the Times’ coverage appeared in the Times itself.
If President Bush were to hire a public editor or ombudsman to investigate him and allow that person, say, a few minutes of air time after each weekly radio address, he and the Times would be more nearly equal in dealing with their respective mistakes.
Having an ombudsman does not obviate the need for an apology from the Times. After all, the Times has made clear its disagreement with the finding of the ombudsman. Calame writes:
“I asked Mr. Whitney if he intended to suggest that the office of the publisher bring the court’s findings to the attention of those readers who received the “no reason to doubt” response, or that a correction be published. The latest word from the standards editor: “No, I’m not ready to do that, nor to order up a correction or Editors’ Note at this point.”
Perhaps I shouldn’t have mentioned President Bush, not a popular figure on this site. But the Times is not shy about asking a whole range of other people, multitudes in fact, to apologize for crimes high, low, and in between and frequently for crimes that are so only in the creative imagination of the Times itself. Until those so accused hire ombudsmen is the Times free to ignore its own advice about the need for apologies?
The thing I think informative about this episode is that it shows something that, despite Mr Calame’s characterization, is not an anomoly from normal media behavior.
First, one must accept the fact that the media is by-and-large liberal, and hold liberal secular views. I know that despite overwhelming evidence many deny this or cling to the fantasy that despite their personal beliefs, media persons, unlike mere mortals, have an ethic that keeps them objective.
That being said, this demostrates the tendency to treat those that agree with their world view differently from those that don’t. No NY Times reporter would ever take a Haliburton exec at his word like this. No NY Times reporter would ever question the motives of an environmental group or teachers union like they would a businessman despite the fact that these organizations are sometimes multi-million dollar enterprises with people’s livelihoods at stake.
Calame’s essay is a nice touch, but I suspect if a defense contractor had lied to a reporter to boost his stock price, the NYT might have published something with a bit more impact.
The misinformation in the article is indeed regrettable. It blunts the main issues addressed by the piece: namely the extremism of El Salvador’s abortion laws and the anti-abortion legal agenda in this country. Of course, complaining about the error and the ‘liberal media’ are ever-convenient red herrings with which to avoid focusing attention on these issues. Knowing that agenda cannot survive a head-on public debate on the issues, the anti-abortionists hope to accomplish by gradualism and public apathy what they cannot do by direct frontal assault.
Obviously, liberal media bias is a red herring. Why don’t we call the “regrettable misinformation” what it it really was. This wasn’t just some minor factual error in an otherwise truthful story. It was the centerpiece of the story. It was the evidence that the draconian El Salvadoran abortion laws were abusing poor young women. In reality it was a wholely manufactured plan of deception laid on by a pro-abortion political group who then laid it on a gullible US reporter who they knew wouldn’t check it out because it fit with what he already wanted to report. Yes the objective, not tainted by bias journalist Jack Hitt. Then they used Mr Hitt’s “article” as fodder for raising money from US pro-abortion patrons.
Why isn’t anyone asking the obvious question. If the effects of the law in El Salvador are so draconian and harsh, why do its opponents have to use a deceptive story and produce a woman who strangled her infant and shoved it under her bed as their prime example of abuse? The Hitt story, like all the other criticisms of the El Salvadoran law also raises the spector of women dying or suffering horrible injury from untreated ectopic preganancy but does not provide a single credible example of any such thing ever having happened.
This wasn’t an “error,” it was a deliberate fraud to promote a political agenda and to raise money for it.
I would say the “centerpiece” (if there is one) is the story of the woman identified only by her initials (D.C.) who has a “back-alley” abortion and is ultimately not prosecuted for it. And the Times story actually says there are FEWER horror stories since the passage of the stricter law, not more. (“According to nearly a dozen doctors and nurses I interviewed in San Salvador, there has been a decline in the incidence of harrowing coat-hanger/pesticide-type abortions in the time since the law was passed.”)
It is interesting to contrast the extreme characterizations of the Times story by “pro-lifers” in the blogosphere with what Calame actually says. Go to blogsearch.google.com and search for “Calame” and “abortion,” and you will see things like “all the abortion lies fit to print.” Contrast that with Calame saying, “The care taken in the reporting and editing of this example didn’t meet the magazine’s normal standards.”
It’s interesting how those supporting legal restrictions on abortion will go to great lengths to avoid discussing their proposals and the potential real-life consequences.
To quote from Hitt’s piece:
“… [In response to Tim Russert's] repeated question: Would you prosecute a woman who had an abortion? [Republican representative and senatorial candidate] DeMint said he thought Congress should outlaw all abortions first and worry about the fallout later. “”
Sounds about right to me.
Antonio,
It’s more interesting that when abortion proponents are caught in an outright fraud, the divert attention and talk about things that have nothing to do with the subject.
Lest you think I am avoiding a subject, I would seek a law that focuses primarily on the provider – they are the ones profiting and exploiting other’s problems – but you can’t foreclose the possibility of punishment of the putative mother. That has to be a possibility.
With regard to this so-called fraud, does anyone know whether there’s been a critical assessment of the court document by some organization that doesn’t have an ax to grind, or are we all simply taking the LifeSiteNews information at face value?
Here’s today’s (January 7) Editors Note from the Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/07/pageoneplus/corrections.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
An article in The Times Magazine on April 9 reported on the effects of laws that make all abortions illegal in El Salvador. One case the article described was that of Carmen Climaco, who is serving a 30-year prison sentence in El Salvador.
The article said she was convicted in 2002 of aggravated homicide, and it presented the recollections of the judge who adjudicated Ms. Climaco’s case during the pretrial stage. The judge, Margarita Sanabria, told The Times that she believed that Ms. Climaco had an abortion when she was 18 weeks pregnant, and that she regretted allowing the case to be tried as a homicide. The judge based her legal decision on two reports by doctors.
The first, by a doctor who examined Ms. Climaco after the incident, concluded that she had been 18 weeks pregnant and had an abortion. A second medical report, based on an examination of the body that was found under Ms. Climaco’s bed, concluded that her child was carried to term, was born alive and died in its first minutes of life.
The three-judge panel that received the case from Judge Sanabria concluded that the second report was more credible than the first, and the panel convicted Ms. Climaco of aggravated homicide.
The Times should have obtained the text of the ruling of the three-judge panel before the article was published, but did not vigorously pursue the document until details of the ruling were brought to the attention of editors in late November.
A picture caption with the article also misstated the facts of the ruling. Ms. Climaco was sentenced to 30 years in prison for a case that was initially thought to be an abortion but was later ruled to be a homicide; she was not given 30 years in prison for an abortion that was ruled a homicide.
Ms. Climaco is now preparing to appeal her conviction. The Times is continuing to investigate the case.
Having covered U.S. courts for seven years as a reporter for The Associated Press and Newsday, I would normally consider the word of a judge on the outcome of a case she supervised to be reliable. It’s always a good idea to check the files of a case, however voluminous, but reporters who don’t specialize in writing about the law often might not do that – especially if the judge in the case gave what seemed to be a thorough interview. I wouldn’t read too much into this mistake. The better-late-than-never editor’s note in The Times should settle the issue.