New York Times editor Dean Baquet admitted on Wednesday that Times reporters who reported on the death of Osama Bin Laden should’ve been consulted more before the Times Magazine published a cover story questioning the facts around Bin Laden’s death.
The controversy Baquet responded to revolved around the Sunday Magazine cover story; a 7,000-word cover piece written by media reporter Jonathan Mahler titled, “Do We Really Know The Truth About His Death?”
In an interview with public editor Margaret Sullivan, Baquet conceded Washington, D.C. reporters “should have been consulted more” before the story ran in the magazine. But he argued critics “are reading it wrong” and that Mahler wasn’t writing a national security investigation story, but instead, a media story.
“It was a media story… a very good one,” Baquet continued. Mahler also defended his story, saying, the “vast majority understand that this was a media-process story about how history gets written.”
Critics of the piece, many coming from within the Times’ newsroom, argued the story pushed forward unverifiable claims about the Pakistan raid and didn’t present a substantial amount of new reporting.
They also think the story gave off an impression the Times was discrediting its own narrative built from years of reporting, books and of course, reanactments confirmed from members of the elite unit that killed Bin Laden, Seal Team 6.
Reporters also think Mahler didn’t consult them enough to leverage their expertise and prior reporting on Bin Laden’s death.
“Dean has spoken to us and he’s heard our concerns,” Times national security reporter Eric Schmitt told The Huffington Post. “I’m glad I work at a newspaper where we can have these kind of candid conversations.”
Baquet concluded that the internal tussle over the Times Magazine story reflects a paradox within the paper of record.
A remaining issue, he said, is something of a paradox: That The Times Magazine both needs to remain independent of The Times’s newsroom in its editorial approach but also to consult with the newsroom when appropriate.