Most corrections are simple. The Times gets something wrong – inevitable when it publishes well over 100,000 words a day – gets a complaint, and quickly publishes a correction. This may happen dozens of times in a typical week.
Others turn into something far more complicated before a correction is ever published, if indeed it ever is. Editors meet with other editors. Parts of the story are re-reported by Times researchers. The writer pushes back. Days go by. Weeks. Even, on rare occasions, months.
Such was the case with a correction to a Sunday magazine cover story about the former senator and former presidential candidate Gary Hart, an excerpt from a book by a former Timesman, Matt Bai, now at Yahoo, titled “All the Truth is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid.” The story appeared in print on Sept. 21, after going online the previous week. The correction appeared Monday online (it can be found at the bottom of the story) and will appear in print, in the magazine, later this month, or about two months after the article was published.
Behind it is a tale worth telling. (Michael Calderone, the media reporter at the Huffington Post who doesn’t miss much, wrote a good account of this on Tuesday.)
It has to do with some famous words from Mr. Hart when he was campaigning for the Democratic nomination in 1987. The candidate, who was denying accounts of marital infidelity, said to E. J. Dionne Jr., then at The Times: “Follow me around. I don’t care. I’m serious. If anybody wants to put a tail on me, go ahead. They’d be very bored.”
Mr. Bai’s book disputes the conventional wisdom that investigative reporters at The Miami Herald saw these words as a challenge and decided to take him up on it, staking out the Colorado senator’s townhouse in Washington and eventually catching him in an affair with Donna Rice. Mr. Bai wrote that “no one at the Herald had a clue” about Mr. Hart’s dare until they were en route to the stakeout.
Mr. Bai wrote that this point is “far more than a technicality.”
Even when insiders and historians recall the Hart episode now, they recall it the same way: Hart issued his infamous challenge to reporters, telling them to follow him around if they didn’t believe him, and then The Herald took him up on it. Inexplicably, people believe, Hart set his own trap and then allowed himself to become ensnared in it….This version of events conveniently enabled The Herald’s reporters and editors to completely sidestep some important and uncomfortable questions. As long as it was Hart, and not The Herald, who set the whole thing in motion, then it was he and not they who suddenly moved the boundaries between private and political lives. They never had to grapple with the complex issues of why Hart was subject to a kind of invasive, personal scrutiny no major candidate before him had endured, or to consider where that shift in the political culture had led us. Hart had, after all, given the media no choice in the matter.
Mr. Bai’s version of the chronology flips this on its head. The Herald journalists weren’t rising to a challenge, he asserts. They had already made their plans. He says the investigations editor and one of his reporters, Tom Fiedler, first read an account of Mr. Hart’s comments on the plane. He imagines a scene on the plane in which “anyone sitting next to Fiedler would probably have seen him jolt upward in his seat as if suddenly receiving an electric shock.”
Here’s the problem: What Mr. Bai describes is not the way it happened, according to a former Herald investigative reporter and the paper’s former investigations editor, among others. In fact, they say, the Herald journalists had seen a pre-publication version of a New York Times Magazine article with the “follow me around” quote well before they got on the plane, as they were still deciding what to do.
Soon after the Bai article appeared, I heard from James Savage, the former investigations editor at The Herald, seeking a correction. He said that if I didn’t believe him I ought to talk to Jim McGee and Mr. Fiedler, two of the reporters involved. Eventually, I did speak to all three of the former Herald people, to the Times Magazine editor, Jake Silverstein, to the paper’s associate managing editor for standards, Philip B. Corbett and to Mr. Bai. I’ve also read plenty of background material and email correspondence. (I held off on writing anything about it here until the correction process played out. I have no control over that process.)
The disagreement is on two levels. The first is a narrow one. When, precisely, did a Herald journalist first see the “follow me around” quote in The Times – on the plane to Washington, after the decision to stake out his home had been made, or a day or two earlier, when The Herald was still considering what to do?
The second, bigger question is whether The Herald was right to investigate Mr. Hart’s love life. Mr. Bai’s book makes the argument that the decision to do so may have deprived America of a great president for no good reason and that it adversely affected the course of American political journalism. The Herald journalists believe that there was a legitimate reason to look into the behavior and the false public statements of a senator who wanted to be the president.
I think Mr. Bai’s exploration of the overall subject is entirely legitimate and often fascinating. Does the public’s right to know end at the bedroom door? What if a presidential candidate has publicly lied about his behavior? Does overt deceitfulness speak to one’s character or fitness for office?
But I also think The Times was right to publish this correction. I don’t believe that the Herald journalists who were personally involved are trying to revise history, as Mr. Bai sees it. Putting their recollection of the chronology on the record is important. For example, Wikipedia is already citing Mr. Bai’s book, and Jack Shafer, in his Oct. 31 book review in The Times, highlights Mr. Bai’s version. Now, with the correction appended to the Times story, at least some doubt is cast.
(It seemed curious to me that Mr. Bai didn’t talk to people like Mr. Savage and Mr. McGee during his reporting of this section of the book. He said it wasn’t necessary because The Herald’s own account of the events – written in 1987 — strongly suggests that his version is accurate. He says it was affirmed multiple times, including to a Times fact-checker, by Mr. Fiedler, whose version of events now matches that of Mr. Savage and Mr. McGee. I don’t agree with Mr. Bai that The Herald’s reconstruction proves anything about the chronology.)
The correction – after all the discussion and time — has made no one happy. Mr. Bai strongly objects to it, and stands by the accuracy of his reporting.
“There’s a principle at stake, which is that in our business we don’t go around changing stories, even in small ways, just because someone decides after the fact to remember it differently, even if that someone is a guy we admire,” he said.
Mr. Savage told me in an email Tuesday that, while he certainly appreciates that a correction was made, “I’m disappointed” that the changes to the online version of the story were not more sweeping.
As a postscript here, I’ll note that I have also heard from the journalist Bill Dedman, whose request for a correction to another part of the story has been turned down by The Times. He takes issue with a part of Mr. Bai’s story that says that the name of The Herald’s tipster, Dana Weems, “escaped notice in contemporary accounts of the scandal.” Mr. Dedman notes that he wrote a front-page story about Ms. Weems for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in May 1987; it was republished by The Associated Press. Mr. Silverstein told me that The Times interpreted Mr. Bai’s wording to mean that Ms. Weems didn’t become part of the broader narrative at that time– and has declined to correct. Mr. Bai told me that he has made a small wording change to the next version of his book to reflect the objection.
I’m in sympathy with Mr. Dedman’s request. And, really, how much trouble could a simple correction be?