Mick Hartley

More from Hen Massig on the Nicholas Krystof NYT debacle. Turns out Krystof has history when it comes to believing fabrications that fit with his prejudices.

In 2014, the New York Times had a Public Editor. Her name was Margaret Sullivan. When it emerged that Nicholas Kristof had spent years platforming a fabricator named Somaly Mam, Sullivan wrote that Kristof “owes it to his readers to explain, to the best of his ability and at length, what happened and why.” Kristof did. He wrote a column titled “When Sources May Have Lied.” Editor’s notes were added to old work. The mechanism worked.

In 2017, the Times eliminated the Public Editor role. Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. announced that “readers and social media followers collectively serve as a modern watchdog.” Liz Spayd was the last to hold the job.

This week, Kristof published a column accusing Israel’s security forces of systematic sexual violence, sourced from a man who celebrated October 7, an NGO whose chairman was designated by Israel as a Hamas operative in 2013, and a fourteen-person account that grows more lurid each time it migrates to a larger platform. The Times defended the column with a statement from a spokesperson named Charlie Stadtlander, citing Kristof’s two Pulitzers. There is no Margaret Sullivan inside the building anymore. There is only Charlie.

That Somaly Mam affair:

Somaly Mam was a Cambodian woman who became globally famous on the strength of a story she told about her own childhood in sex slavery, and on the strength of the brothel rescues she said she conducted. Kristof made her career. He called her a “hero” in column after column. He live-tweeted her brothel raids to over a million followers. He featured her in his documentary Half the Sky.

In 2014, Newsweek published a piece by Simon Marks showing that Mam had auditioned girls to lie on camera. Her own backstory was fabricated. The “rescues” were sometimes police raids that generated headlines more than they helped victims. Mam resigned. The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple called for Kristof to audit his entire Cambodia archive. Kristof wrote that he wished he had never written about her, said he had been “hoodwinked,” and added editor’s notes to old columns.

His response when Margaret Sullivan and Erik Wemple pressed him was telling. He said it was hard to verify facts in Cambodia. He said he was “reluctant to be an arbiter” of Mam’s backstory. He said he didn’t know what to think.

This week, asked whether Palestinians might fabricate accusations to defame Israel, Kristof wrote that “to me that seems far-fetched.” That is the same credulity, twelve years older, applied to a higher-stakes accusation on a larger platform.

The Times has watched this reporter make this mistake before. In 2014 there was an internal voice with the authority to push him to answer for it. There is no such voice now….

American prisons logged more than sixteen thousand complaints of sexual abuse by guards in 2020. Only a small fraction were substantiated on investigation. The Times does not publish columns declaring the American prison system to operate sexual torture as standard operating procedure. No reporter there does. The verification stack for that kind of claim, applied to an American institution, requires named perpetrators, medical records, court filings, contemporaneous documentation, named victims willing to be named, or some combination.

Consider how the Kristof column handles a single allegation. A Palestinian woman is described as raped by Israelis. No witness. No complaint. No medical evidence. No prison name. No charge. No date. There is no journalistic content in that account that would permit an investigation, a defense, or a correction. There is only the accusation, and the request that the reader believe it.

That is the standard a Times opinion column applied to a sovereign state’s security forces. The same paper applies a different standard to the country it operates in. There is no longer anyone inside the building whose job it is to flag the asymmetry.

Krystof is a gullible fool,. Unfortunately there’s no one now at the NYT to rein him in.