A follow-up to the Columbia University anti-Israel ‘investigation’: An Editor’s Note in today’s NY Times confirms the NY Sun expose that The Times’ Karen Arenson agreed to Columbia’s conditions for publicizing the report before its official release. From the Times’ mea culpa:
A front-page article on Thursday described a report by a committee at Columbia University formed to investigate complaints that pro-Israel Jewish students were harassed by pro-Palestinian professors. The report found “no evidence of any statements made by the faculty that could reasonably be construed as anti-Semitic,” but it did say that one professor “exceeded commonly accepted bounds” of behavior when he became angry at a student who he believed was defending Israel’s conduct toward Palestinians.
The article did not disclose The Times’s source for the document, but Columbia officials have since confirmed publicly that they provided it, a day before its formal release, on the condition that the writer not seek reaction from other interested parties.
Under The Times’s policy on unidentified sources, writers are not permitted to forgo follow-up reporting in exchange for information. In this case, editors and the writer did not recall the policy and agreed to delay additional reporting until the document had become public. The Times insisted, however, on getting a response from the professor accused of unacceptable behavior, and Columbia agreed.
The ‘other interested parties’ that Columbia insisted on excluding from The Times’ exclusive were, of course, the pro-Israel complaintants themselves. Strange how this fundamental principle — never to trade full coverage for exclusive access, in a quid pro quo — was simply forgotten by the Times journalists… who got themselves a front-page scoop.
How did this ‘Editor’s Note’/correction come about? Read Steven Weiss’ account of getting the runaround from The Times.
Note that The Times still hasn’t acknowledged that two of the profs on the committee signed a divestment from Israel petition themselves — hardly a sign of impartiality in this matter.
Here’s the full Columbia committee report, and a followup article on the students’ response that The Times ran the following day.
