Credit Where Credit Is Due

The New York Times Public Editor admits the New York Times should have credited this blog, Hella Winston, and others for the work we did in exposing child sexual abuse in the Brooklyn haredi community and related public corruption.

Originally published at 11:02 pm CDT 5-19-2012

The New York Times' Public Editor Arthur Brisbane wrote a column for Sunday's paper called "Credit Where Credit is Due." It deals with the Times' series on child sexual abuse in Brooklyn's haredi community, and it points out some of the sources the Times' reporters and editors stole from, including FailedMessiah.com.

The article begins with praise from Brisbane for the Times' reports and a long quote from Survivors for Justice president Ben Hirsch about the massive impact the Times' reports have had.

Then Brisbane gets into the heart of the matter at hand (the links are in Brisbane's original) :

…But what about the other, smaller news organizations and independent journalists who got there ahead of The Times, breaking important elements of the story first, laboring in the face of intense community opposition? No credit went to them in The Times’s series.

As appreciative as [Survivors for Justice president Ben} Hirsch said he was for The Times’s powerful articles, he expressed dismay at the paper’s “riding roughshod over the dedicated hard work of journalists that preceded and made possible The Times’s current coverage.”

The issue of crediting others arose even before the second part of the series was published online on May 10. Melissa Ludtke, executive editor for the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University, complained to me that the first article failed to acknowledge the previous investigative reporting of others, particularly that of Hella Winston, a freelancer for The Jewish Week who is a fellow at the Schuster Institute.

I sent Carolyn Ryan, The Times’s metro editor, an appeal from Ms. Ludtke to give such credit in part two. But it didn’t happen. And after the second article’s publication, I heard from others complaining about uncredited foundational reporting — scores of articles in recent years — by additional publications, including The Jewish Daily Forward, the FailedMessiah.com blog, New York magazine and more.

Reading this material, it became clear to me that while there was important new material, many of the essential elements in The Times’s series had been reported previously.

To cite one example, The Times’s second article, which focused on the Brooklyn district attorney, Charles J. Hynes, reported that his office had made inflated claims about the effectiveness of an abuse hot line he had set up. Ms. Winston had reported similar findings in The Jewish Week two weeks earlier.

The lack of credit stings. “You get so much flak — these are difficult stories,” Ms. Winston told me, “People come down on you.” The Times couldn’t have found all its sources among victims and advocates by itself, she added: “You wouldn’t have known they existed, you wouldn’t have been able to talk to them, if we hadn’t written about them for years.”

Responding to the complaints in an e-mail message to me, Ms. Ryan said, “We were never under any illusion that we were the first outlet to report on abuse in the community, nor did we claim to be.” She acknowledged the work of other outlets as well as a front-page Times article in 2009 as precedents in the coverage.

Ms. Ryan said that other outlets published articles over a period of months when The Times was doing its own extensive, independent reporting: interviewing more than 120 people, scrutinizing court records and creating databases of legal cases. But she said The Times credits others only when it uses “exclusive information that they reported first.”

I asked her about the inflated claims for the hot line, first reported in The Jewish Week. She said The Times, by its own means, had reached the same findings before The Jewish Week’s article was published.

“In other words, what she reported was not news to us,” she said.

Larry Cohler-Esses, assistant managing editor for The Jewish Daily Forward, said The Times wasn’t obligated to attribute every previously reported development. But, he said, it should have found somewhere in the lengthy series for a “nicely written paragraph characterizing in one place what the role of these newspapers had been in the foundation of this issue.”

I would agree. Especially since, in its first article, The Times paused to trace the rising awareness of child sexual abuse since 2008. Instead of noting the role of the community press, The Times simply told of victims telling their stories on radio call-in shows, on blogs and to victims’ advocates.

Mr. Hirsch, the victims’ advocate, traced the rise of awareness differently. After New York magazine published a groundbreaking exposé in 2006, he said, Mr. Cohler-Esses and Ms. Winston established trust with survivors and pushed the story forward.

“With every story published by The Jewish Week, The Jewish Star, The Forward, the Failed Messiah blog, the wall of silence was weakened,” he wrote.

I polled four veteran journalists who specialize in ethics, and all agreed that The Times should have provided some form of credit for previous reporting.

Kelly McBride, a senior faculty member at the Poynter Institute, observed: “It looks like The Jewish Week has been reporting on this for a long time, an entire body of work, done in smaller pieces, targeting a difference audience. It does not have the narrative flair of The Times. That is what The Times does so well: they put a story into a narrative so that you can recognize the significance.”

She added, “But there is no reason not to credit.”

She struck another theme, echoed by other ethics experts: that providing such credit would have enabled readers to find other sources of information on the subject, especially through online links.

The Times’s articles were superb, bringing together disparate elements and telling the story in a compelling way. But fairness dictates what the emerging expectations of the Internet era also dictate: readers should be told more clearly about precedent coverage by others.

The Times has little to lose in doing so, except perhaps the impression that it got the story alone.

Comments

[Poof]

What happened to the story on Andrew Parker and the animal therapy center? Seemed to have vanished.

[JJJ]

What about credit for UOJ?

[ah-pee-chorus]

very nice. it validates all of shmaryas complaints regarding the times articles lack of acknowledgement, gives the deserved credit to winston and failed messiah, and even speaks of their fighting in the trenches. it once again underscores the importance of this blog and its leading role in protecting the unprotected.

of course it would have been nice if the original reporters had done the right thing, but at least its vindication.

CONGRATS SHMARYA!! YEYASHER KOCHACHA!

[Yerachmiel Lopin]

Well praise be, the public editor set the record straight. This is a nice ending to that aspect of the story. Maybe the public editor can now go back and figure out why the NYT got suckered by Hynes two years ago and treated him as the guy who was getting the Jewish community to finally deal with the problem. But I suppose much more important is the that the record has been set straight.

[CALA NY]

It is irrelevant that spent hours on the phone with CALA advocates. The point is that the word is getting out. Let's keep doing our work.

[Litvish]

Congratulations Shmarya for finally getting credit for all your hard work on this.

[Shmarya]

APC, L, YL – thanks!

JJJ – I mentioned UOJ in print when the Times' pieces came out and complained that he should have been credited, and I know many people told the Times that, as well.

[14th street]

shmarya!!!! wow getting the credit.. we are all really proud of you. i just hope you dont abandon us to go work for the NY times..we need you more then ever doing the work of the maccabis. fighting the eruv rav....may gd bless you and you shall see only success in your future endeavers!!!!

[dh]

Enormously proud of you. You are one strong man - don't stop.

[Eli, what me messiah?]

Congratulations and not just because it's the right thing for Shmarya and the others who have pressed this for years, but also because, as pointed out, "providing such credit would have enabled readers to find other sources of information on the subject, especially through online links."
In other words, giving due credit would have made for better, more useful articles.
Anyway, still great to see this.

[mike]

https://calany.wordpress.com/2012/05/16/please-sign-petition-charles-j-hynes-resign-as-da/

[marc]

How about donating some money to shmaya for pushing the agenda forward see link

[Yaakov]

Shmarya:

Your hard work and constant effort are evident to anyone who doesn't have a reason to ignore them. You've spent a long time cultivating this outlet and your sources, and you are using them for many good things.

It is pleasing to see your blog's name in the Times story; an incremental victory. I hope this will add some credibility for you, and help you advance even further.

While we certainly do not always agree, you have a unique voice and it deserves to be strengthened so a larger audience can be exposed to the things you write about.

Kol haKavod!

[Harvey]

Shmarya: You have, through your dedicated work, done an immeasurable service to the community.

[Jake]

Shmarya

Recognition well deserved.

Then irony is that Hella Winston has been less than forthright about her sources over time and had not given credit where credit was do.

[WoolSilkCotton, rock star and sports superstar]

Shmarya, now you are officially awesome! Congrats.

[Jake's Ass]

Then irony is that Hella Winston has been less than forthright about her sources over time and had not given credit where credit was do.

Posted by: Jake | May 20, 2012 at 06:43 AM
-------------------------------
Jake,
Name a single instance Winston has not given credit where credit was "do."

[SkepticalYid]

It sounds as if the NYTimes was pressured by Hirsch into disclosing the uncredited sources they used. Good for him, it was overdue. And Yasher Koyach to Shmarya! The countless hours you've invested in advocating for those who have little support in their own communities deserve public recognition!

[Daniel Cohen]

http://rotter.net/forum/scoops1/17682.shtml

Important!, Judith

[ShowMeTheMoney]

All this talk of "credit" - is there any money to be paid by the New York Times for supplying them with material?

[Shmarya]

Shmarya

Recognition well deserved.

Then irony is that Hella Winston has been less than forthright about her sources over time and had not given credit where credit was do.

Posted by: Jake | May 20, 2012 at 06:43 AM

Not from what I've seen. She's never taken anything from me w/o asking me first and she cites her sources.

Because we sometimes work the same stories, we sometimes end up having some of the same sources. And she always identifies them (or not) exactly as they asked me to do.

[FMReader]

The big question here is whether the Times will continue its coverage. Already, it seems to be lagging behind the Guardian, the Post and Failed Messiah. One would think that with all of its resources it would be out front, but it isn't. That said, there seems to have been no better publicity for this issue than the Times's coverage

[FMReader]

And lest we forget, Shmarya was himself acknowledged by the Times in a 2010 column by Samuel Freedman. Even odder then that he was left out of this series.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/09/us/09religion.html

[Korbendallas72]

Yasher koach!

[WanderingJew]

Shmarya: You have, through your dedicated work, done an immeasurable service to the community.

Posted by: Harvey | May 20, 2012 at 06:37 AM

Which community?

[MarkfromShortHills]

Shmarya, you deserve all the encomiums you have received, and more. What you have achieved is the highest and best function of journalism and for a blog to receive credit from The New York Times is a seldom event indeed.

Congratulations, yasher koach, and good on you!

[Der Bik]

The New York Times is (in)famously one of the craziest working environments on the planet.

The paper's editors and journalists balance cut-throat hyper-ambition against an obsessive-compulsive fear of "offending" anyone.

While I respect Shmarya's coverage of the ultra-Orthodox pedophilia issue, I hope he understands that the the NYT journalists working on the story were likely sick with worry that they were going to cause "offense." (The NYT's internal ethnic politics are notoriously thorny and fraught and filled with pathological levels of anxiety and dread.)

As FMReader notes, the real question is whether the NYT will pay attention to this story in the long-term.

Given the careerism and phobias that traditionally define the paper's coverage of events, it's likely the NYT won't be devoting much space to this particular issue in the near future.

[Robert J. Barron, Attorney-at-Law]

Shmarya,

As you (well) know, I'm a lawyer; but I've never discussed the fact that I also spent 22 years in the US Army Reserves, and retired at the rank of Major. When I was sworn in to the military; and when I was sworn in as a lawyer, I took another oath as well. Both oaths containing wording vis-vis upholding the Constitution of the United States. Obviously, the Constitution includes the First Amendment. Thinking about the work you have done, and the effect on society you have had, I have rarely been more proud to have taken an oath to defend the Constitution, and all parts therein, then when I read this article.

[Shmarya]

Posted by: Robert J. Barron, Attorney-at-Law | May 21, 2012 at 06:59 PM

Thank you!