It’s a cautionary tale for news organizations: Some content simply refuses to die.
Time magazine yesterday published online a scathing letter to the New York Times written by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, accusing the paper of “misrepresentations of the truth,” “duplicitous behavior” and “titillating and tantalizing” coverage.
The letter from Mr. Wright, however, is more than a year old.
It was sent to Times reporter Jodi Kantor March 11, 2007, in response to a story she had written five days earlier detailing Sen. Barack Obama’s “decision to distance his campaign from Mr. Wright because of the campaign’s apparent fear of criticism over Mr. Wright’s teachings.”
The letter was not published in the Times. Instead, it appeared in the bulletin of the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, where Mr. Wright was pastor at the time
What’s past is prologue, apparently.
Old news or not, Time posted the letter on “The Page: Politics Up to the Minute,” a frequently updated blog written by political analyst Mark Halperin, who had been alerted to the old letter by a sharp-eyed source. He posted it under “Essential Reading.”
It did not take long for New York Times political editor Richard W. Stevenson to fire off a response, beginning his five-paragraph defense of both paper and reporter, “I see that you have posted Rev. Wright’s letter of a year ago.”
A snappy news package was born: The magazine published both letters and added multiple news links and photographs.
“We didn’t say Rev. Wright’s letter was ’news’ or ’previously unreported,’ ” Mr. Halperin said yesterday.
“So much has been written about him, but we’ve heard so little that was actually done in his own voice. Just to hear that voice in a fuller way was interesting to me. Plus the event about which he was writing and the period he was writing about are still important.”
Mr. Halperin was convinced that the lengthy critique and its cavalcade of details from “Barack’s spiritual journey” should not fade into some lost archive.
“I knew the letter was not brand new, but I wanted to bring it to the public, to call attention to all sides and dimensions of the story,” Mr. Halperin said.
The Times still stands by the account, rejecting Mr. Wright’s claim that the reporter had teased out five piquant minutes from a two-hour interview.
“Putting aside the question of why a letter that is more than a year old is suddenly getting new circulation, it is worth noting that at no time has Mr. Wright challenged the accuracy of either story written by Ms. Kantor — both of which, given the events of the last several weeks, seem remarkably prescient about the potential political peril in the Obama-Wright relationship,” Mr. Stevenson said.
He did not return a phone call for comment yesterday.
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