NYTimes Red-faced Again

Our headline is rather presumptive, of course, because it presupposes that NYTimes editors have some sense of shame, which obviously they do not.

At any rate, PowerLine reports today that the Times' crack reporters have been caught altering history yet again. They quote from the paper itself:

An article in The Metro Section on March 8 profiled Donna Fenton, identifying her as a 37-year-old victim of Hurricane Katrina who had fled Biloxi, Miss., and who was frustrated in efforts to get federal aid as she and her children remained as emergency residents of a hotel in Queens.

Yesterday, the New York police arrested Ms. Fenton, charging her with several counts of welfare fraud and grand larceny. Prosecutors in Brooklyn say she was not a Katrina victim, never lived in Biloxi and had improperly received thousands of dollars in government aid. Ms. Fenton has pleaded not guilty.

For its profile, The Times did not conduct adequate interviews or public record checks to verify Ms. Fenton's account, including her claim that she had lived in Biloxi. Such checks would have uncovered a fraud conviction and raised serious questions about the truthfulness of her account.

An article about her arrest and the findings from additional reporting about her claims appears today on Page B1.

PowerLine concludes that:

A lot of mainstream reporters seem to believe that if a story fits with their preconceived opinions, there is no need to check the facts.

Well, yes, because they are, after all, Known Facts™ and therefore don't need second sourcing. Except that they do. Reporting over the past ten years has gotten sloppier and sloppier precisely because fact-checking has been transformed from an editorial obsession into a relativistic activity. If it's anything pro-left, it doesn't get fact checked because it must be true. Ditto with anything that's anti-right, particularly if it will cost Bush another point in the polls. But if it's pro-right, pro-Bush, pro-Iraq War, they'll check the "facts" until they find at least one person who disagrees with those facts, and then they'll run with that opinion.

Kinda reminds you of the old Pravda, don't it?