The New York Times has been called out by one of its own editors for quietly altering a piece about Sen. Bernie Sanders in a manner that seemed intended to undermine his presidential campaign.
Margaret Sullivan serves as the public editor for the Times. Her role, which is deliberately divorced from the paper’s normal reporting and editorial functions, is to serve as an in-house critic and watchdog who answers questions from readers about the Times’ coverage.
Sullivan gave her own paper a rather thorough dressing-down Thursday for its handling of an article published late Monday about Sanders’ Senate career.
The original version of the story, titled “Bernie Sanders Scored Victories for Years via Legislative Side Doors,” was quite favorable to Sanders, highlighting various ways he scored achievements in the Senate despite being a political independent on the ideological fringe.
A few hours after the piece went live, editors began tweaking the article, without the Times giving any notice it was doing so. The title was changed to “Via Legislative Side Doors, Bernie Sanders Won Modest Victories,” which toned down the the strong positive vibe of the initial headline. The story also had two new paragraphs inserted, which seemed solely intended to denigrate Sanders’ current presidential campaign:
But in his presidential campaign Mr. Sanders is trying to scale up those kinds of proposals as a national agenda, and there is little to draw from his small-ball legislative approach to suggest that he could succeed.
Mr. Sanders is suddenly promising not just a few stars here and there, but the moon and a good part of the sun, from free college tuition paid for with giant tax hikes to a huge increase in government health care, which has made even liberal Democrats skeptical.
The changes were quickly noticed and criticized online, and they fueled accusations the Times was doing the bidding of the Clinton campaign, which the paper endorsed for the Democratic nomination in late January.
Times editors have defended themselves by claiming the edits were of a routine nature and simply served to add a little more context to the story, but Sullivan doesn’t buy it.
“The changes to this story were so substantive that a reader who saw the piece when it first went up might come away with a very different sense of Mr. Sanders’s legislative accomplishments than one who saw it hours later,” she said. “Given the level of revision, transparency with the readers required that they be given some kind of heads-up, and even an explanation.”
Sanders disputed the Times’ claims that it was just adding context to the article, saying the added paragraphs sounded more like “plain-old opinion” to her and many other readers.
Sullivan also noted that the Times’ edits were particularly egregious because they weren’t made to a breaking news story, but instead to a story that should have had ample time to be vetted beforehand.
“Given its sensitivity and importance (it ended up on the front page on the morning of major primaries), why didn’t senior editors vet the story and make all the editing changes before it went online?,” Sanders wrote. “Digital platforms, after all, are not a test run, and non-urgent stories don’t need to be pushed out as quickly as this one apparently was.”
Sullivan faulted the Times for rarely using editor’s notes to explain story updates and alterations, and argued the paper should consider adopting a new system that would encourage their use.
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