In a lengthy, five paragraph "editors' note" published on Sunday, the New York Times conceded that Amorita Randall, one of the woman featured prominently in the March 18 New York Times Magazine cover story, "The Women's War" about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and the alleged sexual abuse of female soldiers in Iraq, in fact did not serve in Iraq as the story contended.
Sara Corbett had written in the article which featured a page-and-a-half-sized picture of Randall on a sofa: "Her experience in Iraq, she said, included one notable combat incident, in which her Humvee was hit by an I.E.D., killing the soldier who was driving and leaving her with a brain injury." Earlier, Corbett relayed how "'saying something was looked down upon,' says Amorita Randall, who served in Iraq in 2004 with the Navy, explaining why she did not report what she says was a rape by a petty officer at a naval base on Guam shortly before she was deployed to Iraq."
The March 25 editors' note concluded with strong suggestions of mental issues surrounding Randall: "It is now clear that Ms. Randall did not serve in Iraq, but may have become convinced she did. Since the article appeared, Ms. Randall herself has questioned another member of her unit, who told Ms. Randall that she was not deployed to Iraq. If The Times had learned these facts before publication, it would not have included Ms. Randall in the article."
In fact, as FNC's Brit Hume pointed out in his Monday "Grapevine" segment: "The Navy says it warned the magazine that Amorita Randall may not have ever been in Iraq, before the story was printed, a warning the Times disputes it got. The Navy says it established that the woman had never been in Iraq on March 12 -- that six days before the story's release. The Times could have pulled the magazine, which had been printed, or at least put a correction in the news section of the paper. Or it could have changed the online version of the article. It did none of those things. Instead readers had to wait until yesterday -- a full week after the story came out -- to learn the truth."
This wasn't the first embarrassing mess-up in the past year by the New York Times Magazine. Clay Waters of the MRC's TimesWatch recalled on Monday how in January "a pro-abortion story from El Salvador," run last April, "backfired when one of its main scary anecdotes about the harsh anti-abortion laws in that country turned out to be absolutely false." For more, go to: www.timeswatch.org
Clay also pointed out how the Marine Corps Times chided the paper for insufficient fact-checking on the Randall case:
The Navy, while expressing sympathy to a woman it believes is suffering from stress, is annoyed that the Times did so little to check the woman's story. A Times fact checker contacted Navy headquarters only three days before the magazine's deadline. That, said Capt. Tom Van Leunen, deputy chief of information for the Navy, did not provide enough time to confirm Randall's account of service in Iraq. Nonetheless, Van Leunen said, by deadline the Navy had provided enough information to the Times 'to seriously question whether she'd been in Iraq.'
Aaron Rectica, who runs the magazine's research desk, disputes that. He said that by deadline, the Navy had not given the Times any reason to disbelieve Randall's claim of service in Iraq. Rectica said the Navy only told the paper that Randall's commanders believed she'd been in Iraq but that no one in the unit had been in combat. |