Times should come cleaner on Russian dirt

WHAT else did the New York Times get wrong? The paper’s already damaged reputation took a big hit last week when former FBI Director James Comey testified before Congress that the Times screwed up in a key story that tried to make the case that Donald

Trump’s campaign colluded with the Russians during the election.

In the front page piece that ran on Feb. 15, the Times said that “phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election, according to four current and former American officials.”

Five Times reporters contributed to the article, which — if true — would have been pretty damning. And so it became a focal point of last week’s hearing.

The only problem was that the Times article was wrong. And — de- spite the Times’ effort to downplay and ignore its massive goof — Comey, in no uncertain terms, said it was “not true.”

Referring specifically to the Times piece, Comey said: “The challenge, and I’m not picking on reporters, about writing stories about classified information is the people talking about it often don’t really know what’s going on and those of us who actually know what’s going on are not talking about it.”

“In the main,” Comey continued, the Times story “was not true.”

Okay, there’s a little wiggle room in there when you say “in the main.” But Sen. Tom Cotton ( R-Ark.), a member of th Senate Intelligence Committee, made sure there was no misunderstanding when he asked Comey: Would it be fair to characterize the story as “almost entirely wrong?” Comey answered, “Yes.” We all make mistakes, but this one by the Times was a doozy.

So how did the Times handle its embarrassment? It buried Comey’s statement on Page A21 in last Friday’s paper with an innocuous headline: “Disputing Times Article About Inquiry into Russia.”

The only quote from Comey was that “in the main, [the article] was not true.” The Times then went on to ex- plain in depth that other media outlets had since done their own reporting and come up with pretty much the same conclusion.

Of course, it’s easy to get sources to say things once they’ve read them in the paper. And if Comey had addressed those stories, he’d say they were also wrong. This is a case of journalistic “misery loves company,” and the Times was more than willing to share the blame.

The rest of the article went on to justify how the Times could have come to its conclusions — maybe the communications it was writing about “did not meet the FBI’s black and white standard of who can be considered an ‘intelligence officer.’ ”

What the Times didn’t say was that maybe it was simply the case that they were dead wrong, as Comey said pretty clearly.

What did the “four current and former American officials” who the Times hung the Feb. 15 story on have to say about Comey’s statement? “The original sources [for the Feb. 15 story] could not immediately be reached after Comey’s remarks.”

Well, that’s odd. Comey spoke Thursday morning and there were five reporters on the story. They couldn’t reach any of the four sources in the roughly 12 hours they had be- fore the Times went to press for Friday’s paper!?

How about on Friday? Could the Times reach any of the four sources then? It isn’t surprising that the sources were so hard to reach. For one thing, they gave the Times bad information. And you don’t want to talk to reporters after you’ve screwed them.

And as I wrote in this column last week, a source of mine — yes, anonymous — told me that the Justice Department obtained a warrant to monitor the Times and other journalists’ communications.

That’s when sources head for the hills. (And, yes, if my source turns out to have been mistaken about the surveillance issue, which as a journalist myself, I find thoroughly frightening, I will own up to it prominently.)

The Times, as you might have heard, was heartbroken that Democratic candidate Hillary

Clinton lost the election. In fact, dumbfounded is probably a better word because — with the help of the Times and many other newspapers — the editors at the Times were likely certain that Hillary was a shoo-in.

In fact, some of the leaked e-mails from Democratic campaign head John Podesta showed Times reporters giddily giving advice and encouragement to the Clinton campaign. The Times’ own internal critic — its public editor — sharply criticized the paper after the election for its onesided coverage. And the Times publisher, Arthur (Pinch) Sulzberger, vowed in a letter to its readers that it would do better. I have called Sulzberger’s letter an “apology” although Sulzberger bristles at that characterization. So, what else could the Times have gotten wrong? Just about everything since it had been acting more like an appendage of the Democratic Party than as an independent and trustworthy newspaper. I’m not thrilled that Trump is president, and I disagree with almost everything he has said and done since elected. But he was elected and the Times can throw as many temper tantrums as it wants and run as many poorly sourced stories as it can conjure up, but the fact remains — the people wanted this guy in office. Tough break for the Times. But if nothing else, the paper should at least try to save what dignity and professionalism it has left.