Ex-Times editor under fire for ‘Truth’

NEW YORK — The former executive editor of The New York Times has acknowledged making some sourcing errors in her book Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts and says she will correct them.

In an email Thursday to the Associated Press, Jill Abramson wrote that some page numbers in the sourcing notes needed to be fixed and that some sources “should have been cited as quotations in the text.”

A Twitter thread posted Wednesday by Vice correspondent Michael C. Moynihan listed several examples of passages in Abramson’s book that closely resembled the work of others.

Abramson has defended herself by saying that her book includes extensive end notes, including web links to sources. It is widely believed that an outside source should be credited in the body of the work if there is a close similarity.

Moynihan lists several examples of passages in Merchants of Trut that closely resemble material in The New Yorker, Time Out and other publications. Released this week and praised by Walter Isaacson and Gay Talese among others, Merchants of Truth is a critique of the news business focused on two long-running newspapers, the Times and the Washington Post, along with Vice and fellow digital company BuzzFeed.

“I take seriously the issues raised and will review the passages in question,” Abramson tweeted Wednesday night. “I endeavoured to accurately and properly give attribution to the hundreds of sources that were part of my research.”

She has previously been criticized for alleged factual errors, with reporters at Vice and PBS among those faulting her.

On Wednesday, she responded that some criticisms arose from Vice’s unhappiness with Merchants of Truth and its portrait of hypocrisy and sexism. Abramson tweeted that her book offered “a balanced portrayal.”

In a separate statement, Simon & Schuster wrote that Abramson’s book had given “an extraordinary degree of transparency toward its subjects; each of the four news organizations covered in the book was given ample time and opportunity to comment on the content, and where appropriate the author made changes and corrections. If upon further examination changes or attributions are deemed necessary we stand ready to work with the author in making those revisions.”

Appearing Wednesday night on Fox News, Abramson disputed the allegations, saying: “All I can tell you is I certainly didn’t plagiarize in my book and there’s 70 pages of footnotes showing where I got the information.”