The Times Corrects Its Phony Abortion Story
Public Editor Barney Calame gets results: "The Times should have obtained the text of the ruling of the three-judge panel before the article was published, but did not vigorously pursue the document until details of the ruling were brought to the attention of editors in late November."
Posted by:
Clay Waters
1/8/2007 1:33:41 PM
Spurred by a strong piece last week by Public Editor Barney Calame (who actually used his perch to conduct a journalistic investigation), the Times issued in Sunday's paper a prominent seven-paragraph correction to last April's New York Times Magazine cover story by freelance reporter Jack Hitt, on the supposedly draconian abortion laws in El Salvador that resulted in a young woman, Carmen Climaco, being sentenced to 30 years in prison for an abortion that was ruled a homicide. As it turned out, a medical report concluded that the child was carried to term, born alive and died in its first minutes of life.
Here are the primary paragraphs of the correction:
"The Times should have obtained the text of the ruling of the three-judge panel before the article was published, but did not vigorously pursue the document until details of the ruling were brought to the attention of editors in late November.
"A picture caption with the article also misstated the facts of the ruling. [Carmen] Climaco was sentenced to 30 years in prison for a case that was initially thought to be an abortion but was later ruled to be a homicide; she was not given 30 years in prison for an abortion that was ruled a homicide."
Guest poster Thomas Lifson reported Calame's piece last week, which was prompted by a separate investigation by LifeSiteNews, which marks the correction today by noting the paper's pro-abortion bias starts right at the top:
"The pro-abortion bias of the New York Times was aired to millions. Prominent attention was paid to the fact that Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. gave a speech to graduates of the State University of New York at New Paltz in May 2006 where he demonstrated his extreme pro-abortion and pro-same sex 'marriage' militancy. In his speech he 'apologized' to the graduates saying, 'You weren't supposed to be graduating into a world where we are still fighting for fundamental human rights, whether it's the rights of immigrants to start a new life, or the rights of gays to marry; or the rights of women to choose.'"
But the online slide show accompaning the article remains uncorrected, with the false headline over a photo of Carmen Climaco: "Ms. Climaco, right, holding Carla's brother at his baptism. Ms. Climaco is now 26 years old, four years into her 30-year sentence. She had a clandestine abortion at 18 weeks, something defined as absolutely legal in the United States. But she had her abortion in El Salvador."
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