The Soft Bigotry of The New York Times Magazine - Mark Hemingway



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March 27, 2007 6:30 A.M.

The Soft Bigotry of The New York Times Magazine
Another Mother of all scandals.

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Two weeks ago, The New York Times Magazine’s cover story told the tale of six-year Navy veteran, Amorita Randall. Randall told Sara Corbett, a contributing writer for the Magazine, that she had been raped twice in the Navy, and that while stationed in Iraq in 2004 she was the victim of an improvised explosive device attack that left her with a brain injury.

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The trouble is that according to an editor’s note in this past Sunday’s Times Magazine, Navy records report that in 2004 Randall was in Guam, not Iraq. And, by the way, she was never in Iraq. Further, there are no records that back up Randall’s claims she was raped. While lots of traumatized women don’t report rapes, unfortunately her claim that she was in Iraq certainly casts doubt on everything Randall says.

For their part, according to an article in the Navy Times, the Navy is understandably “annoyed,” particularly because a Times Magazine fact-checker didn’t contact them until three days before the story went to press — not enough time to verify much of the article.

The tone of the original article doesn’t help much either — even the writer seemed to be hedging her bets as to the veracity of her subject. As Randall recalls her fictional IED attack, Times Magazine writer Corbett cautioned: “It was difficult to know what had traumatized Randall: whether she had in fact been in combat or whether she was reacting to some more generalized recollection of powerlessness.” Now here’s a fun experiment: Corral the nearest veteran and ask them if they’re sympathetic to a “generalized recollection of powerlessness” from a person who lied about a brain injury as a result of a nonexistent combat record. You’re almost guaranteed to provoke a response that makes R. Lee Ermey sound like Fred Rogers.

This comes on the heels of another, criminally ignored scandal at The New York Times Magazine last year. Jack Hitt’s cover story on April 9, 2006, centered on abortion restrictions in El Salvador, relaying the story of a woman named Carmen Climaco who had been sentenced to a 30-year jail term for aborting a fetus at 18 weeks, or as Hitt put it: “Something defined as absolutely legal in the United States. It’s just that she’d had an abortion in El Salvador.”

After Hitt’s article, pro-life groups howled in protest. Climaco had not, in fact, been sentenced to 30 years for an abortion; she’d been convicted of strangling an infant that had already been born. It turned out that Hitt had received much of his information about Climaco’s case from a translator with close ties to an abortion-advocacy group — one which immediately used the Times Magazine piece in an online fundraising appeal. The claim that she’d had an abortion at 18 weeks came from an estimate submitted by a doctor at Climaco’s trial who hadn’t seen the infant. That report was found by the judges in the case to be flawed, and was totally at odds with the report of the doctor who performed the infant’s autopsy.

Remarkably, the Times Magazine didn’t issue a correction to the Hitt piece. Only after being queried by the Office of the Publisher at the Times about a possible error, did the Magazine respond. “We have no reason to doubt the accuracy of the facts as reported in our article, which was not part of any campaign to promote abortion,” said a note by the paper’s standards editor Craig Whitney and approved by Times Magazine editor Gerald Marzorati.

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