New York Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet on Monday attempted to defend his paper’s decision to wait 19 days to report the sexual assault allegation against Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, claiming this allegation was different than those against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
The Times attempted to explain its actions by having its own media columnist, Ben Smith, interview Baquet. Smith asked the tough questions about how the allegation against Biden was somehow different than the one against Kavanaugh.
First, let’s go over some important points about the allegations against Biden and Kavanaugh, as they will become important.
Biden:
- Accused by a former staffer
- 30-year-old allegation
- Allegedly told people at the time it happened
- Initially said last year that Biden acted similarly to the hair sniffing and awkward touching he displayed on the campaign trail
- Months later added sexual assault to the allegation
Kavanaugh:
- Accused by woman without any proof the two had ever even been in the same room
- More than 30-year-old allegation
- Own friend didn’t think the accuser had met Kavanaugh
- No one remembers her saying anything about it at the time
- Second accuser wasn’t sure Kavanaugh was culprit until she consulted with Democrat lawyers
- Others didn’t think it was Kavanaugh
- Third accuser represented by Michael Avenatti, walked back gang-rape claims and was referred for criminal prosecution over false claims
Back to the Times. The very first question Baquet was asked was why the Times waited so long to publish an article on Tara Reade’s allegations against Biden. Baquet responded, saying:
Lots of people covered it as breaking news at the time. And I just thought that nobody other than The Intercept was actually doing the reporting to help people figure out what to make of it. I thought what The New York Times could do and bring to the story was the expertise we had developed over doing more than a dozen of these kinds of stories.
We did what we always do. One thing we have tried to do, going all the way back to the Bill O’Reilly story, is to find out whether people talk to people contemporaneously, whether they describe their stories to people before they became public. And in fact, she had talked to a couple of people who confirm that to us.
But mainly I thought that what The New York Times could offer and should try to offer was the reporting to help people understand what to make of a fairly serious allegation against a guy who had been a vice president of the United States and was knocking on the door of being his party’s nominee.
Look, I get the argument. Just do a short, straightforward news story. But I’m not sure that doing this sort of straightforward news story would have helped the reader understand. Have all the information he or she needs to think about what to make of this thing.
But the Times didn’t do what it always does – at least not when a Republican is accused. It reported those allegations on the day they were made, instead of waiting so long to “help people figure out what to make of it.” That didn’t seem to be the criteria when it came to Kavanaugh, especially, when the Times published an article about the Deborah Ramirez claims (that Kavanaugh exposed himself to her during a drunken college party decades ago) even though it couldn’t find anyone to support the claims.
The Times didn’t care to help “the reader understand” either when editors removed exculpatory evidence from another article about another uncorroborated claim against Kavanaugh, either.
Baquet was next asked about the timing of the Reade allegations against Biden as it related to the Democratic primary, when Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) was still in the race but considering dropping out. Baquet responded:
At that time, we didn’t know he was about to drop out of the race. I guess everybody knew he was thinking about it. But I thought the biggest obligation we had, frankly, was to the story and to having multiple conversations with Tara Reade. And to be honest at that point it wasn’t like we were in a heated race with the clock ticking. The main obligation was to get a really sensitive story as close to right as we could.
There is always a “heated race with the clock ticking” when it comes to breaking news, and the Times has acted that way in the past when Republicans, like Bill O’Reilly, have been accused. Further, as stated earlier, the Times apparently had no qualms about getting “a really sensitive story as close to right as we could” when Kavanaugh was accused. On the day Swetnick – the third Kavanaugh accuser who claimed he orchestrated high school gang-rape parties and has been referred for criminal prosecution – the Times published an article about her ludicrous allegations, which were posted on Twitter by her celebrity attorney, Michael Avenatti. Avenatti was also referred for criminal prosecution over the allegations, and is currently in jail for unrelated crimes that were not foreseen at the time of the Kavanaugh allegations.
Baquet whiffed in response to a question about whether the Times should have told people they were working on a story about Reade’s allegations against Biden:
You wish you could say to the world, “Hey, we’re working on this.” But you don’t actually know what you’re going to end up writing. Let’s say for some reason we found out something that made us not want to write a story. Then what do we say to readers? “We looked at this hard and we found a reason. We found out something that made us not want to write. But we’re not going to tell you about it.” So it felt to me like that wasn’t quite the right alternative either.
It sounds like they were looking for a reason not to report, but they couldn’t justify it after 19 days and are now deflecting. There should have been no question that they would report the story, since they immediately jumped on every dubious allegation against Kavanaugh.
In another question, Baquet was asked directly why Kavanaugh was treated differently, and the executive editor gave the following response:
Kavanaugh was already in a public forum in a large way. Kavanaugh’s status as a Supreme Court justice was in question because of a very serious allegation. And when I say in a public way, I don’t mean in the public way of Tara Reade’s. If you ask the average person in America, they didn’t know about the Tara Reade case. So I thought in that case, if The New York Times was going to introduce this to readers, we needed to introduce it with some reporting and perspective. Kavanaugh was in a very different situation. It was a live, ongoing story that had become the biggest political story in the country. It was just a different news judgment moment.
So, he’s trying to say that Joe Biden, running for president (and at a time he still had an opponent in the primary) wasn’t “in a public forum in a large way”? He called the accusation against Kavanaugh “very serious,” but it wasn’t. To this day there is no evidence his accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, had ever even been in the same room as Kavanaugh, yet her allegation was “very serious”? Ford couldn’t even narrow down the year her alleged assault took place. She at one point put the year as the mid-80s, when she was in college, meaning she may actually have been assaulted then, which actually made more sense since she claimed to struggle with mental health issues in college – but not in her last years of high school, immediately after the alleged assault.
To Baquet’s point about “the average person in America” not knowing about the Reade allegations against Biden, that’s precisely because the media didn’t make as big a deal of it as they did with Kavanaugh. In order for people to hear about it, the media would have to report it, and they downplayed the allegations or quickly moved on from them in a way they did not do with Kavanaugh, where the 24-hour news cycle continuously painted him as guilty and outlets like the Times wrote up every dubious allegation to keep the story going. That’s not to mention the Times and other outlets digging into Kavanaugh’s high school yearbook to paint him as a rapist because he, like almost every teenager, drank alcohol, sometimes excessively. They even presented a yearbook comment in a negative way to one of Kavanaugh’s old friends, which upset her. Kavanaugh and some of his friends wrote “Renate Alumnis” in their yearbooks in reference to one of their friends. Two classmates who weren’t friends with Kavanaugh’s crowd gave the times a negative interpretation of the quote – that the boys were bragging about hooking up with the woman. Kavanaugh and his friends said that wasn’t what it meant, but that’s how the Times presented it to the woman. The outlet then wrote an article based on her reaction to the Times’ negative interpretation.
Baquet was then asked whether he believed Reade’s allegation was more credible than Ford’s. It was pointed out to Baquet that “reporters didn’t speak to anyone who recalled [Ford] telling them contemporaneously.” Baquet responded:
I don’t mean to imply that the notion that the person told someone contemporaneously is the ultimate test. It’s not. There are a lot of tests. How did the person appear as they tell the story? What could the person’s motivation be? Was the person clearly in the place of the alleged assault?
Having gone through Harvey Weinstein and all of them, you make these judgments. It’s very subjective. It has to be. You just gotta add up all the pieces and talk to as many people as possible and then do a gut check. There’s no magic formula.
Of course, what makes one allegation more credible doesn’t seem to make another allegation, against a Republican, less credible.
Baquet gave it away when he said he had to make “judgments” and that it was all “subjective.” It has become clear what kind of “judgments” the Times has made.
Of course, Baquet absolutely stands by how the Times treated Kavanaugh, saying that he thought the Times followed its own standards on both allegations:
The standard, to be really simple, is that we try to give the reader the best information we can come up with at the time. And we try to give the reader the information they need to make their own judgments. Unless we can make the judgment. And Kavanaugh was a running, hot story. I don’t think it’s that the ethical standards were different. I think the news judgments had to be made from a different perspective in a running hot story.
The Biden accusation would have been a “running, hot story” if the media covered it the same way as it covered the allegations against Kavanaugh – immediate reporting based on little facts, searching for more people to make allegations, and then printing those allegations and anything they could to bolster the claim that he was guilty, such as vague yearbook quotes.
Smith then asked Baquet a pointed question: “Do you think that, in your heart, you’re reluctant to promote a story that would hurt Joe Biden and get Donald Trump re-elected?”
Baquet didn’t bite:
I can’t make that calculation. I won’t. I won’t let my head or my heart go there. I think once you start making those kinds of calculations, you are not a journalist anymore. You’re some sort of political actor.
Except, again, Baquet and the Times made “those kinds of calculations” when Kavanaugh was up for a Supreme Court seat.
Baquet was then asked about the now-infamous edits the Times made after Biden’s campaign complained. Their original article on Reade’s allegations included the line, “The Times found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Biden, beyond the hugs, kisses and touching that women previously said made them uncomfortable,” which was later changed to simply, “The Times found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Biden.” Baquet was asked why the line was changed:
Even though a lot of us, including me, had looked at it before the story went into the paper, I think that the campaign thought that the phrasing was awkward and made it look like there were other instances in which he had been accused of sexual misconduct. And that’s not what the sentence was intended to say.
The line exactly portrayed what had been said about Biden before. It didn’t allege sexual misconduct, just discomfort, yet it was removed. Baquet went on to explain why they didn’t offer any acknowledgement of the change:
We didn’t think it was a factual mistake. I thought it was an awkward phrasing issue that could be read different ways and that it wasn’t something factual we were correcting. So I didn’t think that was necessary.
It was certainly necessary since it was changed after a campaign complained, and it changed the nature of the allegations to make it seem like Reade’s was completely out of the blue against a man who had never had so much as a whiff of misconduct alleged against him – which isn’t true.
The Times was also called out for including the line, “Filing a false police report may be punishable by a fine and imprisonment,” a line that isn’t included when other women file similar police reports. Baquet tried to claim the line was added to bolster her claim:
I could read it as the opposite. That we were saying that filing a police report is not a frivolous matter. That’s how I interpreted it.
So, he was worried about the phrasing of the line about Biden that was taken out, but not worried about the phrasing of this line, which most read as a threat against Reade if her allegations didn’t prove true.
Finally, Baquet was asked if readers should believe Reade, to which the executive editor responded:
If we could write the sentence that said you should believe this person or you shouldn’t believe this person, we would have written that sentence. What I think readers should take away from this is that this is a serious allegation made by somebody who has some standing. It is denied strenuously by Mr. Biden and his campaign. Here’s everything we know and you have to make your own judgment.
Sometimes I think it is OK to tell readers they have to make their own judgment. I understand that people want simple answers, but in my experience editing stories like this, sometimes there aren’t simple answers and sometimes you just have to figure that the reader is sophisticated, thoughtful, will read it, weigh it and make his or her own judgment. And I think in this case, that’s the best we could offer.
And that’s a lot, by the way. We took two and a half weeks to talk to a whole lot of people to provide that information to the reader.
Maybe they didn’t write that exact sentence, but they certainly wrote enough to discourage people from believing Reade or believing the allegations against Kavanaugh. The allegations against Kavanaugh were also “denied strenuously,” but those denials were couched in ludicrous allegations and innuendo.
Perhaps their Kavanaugh reporting would have been entirely different if they waited two and a half weeks to talk to people and publish. Probably not.