Once again demonstrating that it knows exactly on which side its bread is buttered, the New York Times has attempted to alter its coverage of history to make its benefactors look oh, so much better. But this is the age of instant media and the whole world is watching and easily catches the Times with its pants down around its ankles.
Corporate media—including the Times; especially the Times—has been reluctant to cover the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations that have now spread across the country. This weekend the New York City police entrapped more than 700 protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge who were then arrested.
Shortly before 7PM on Saturday 1 October, the Times’ lede began, “After allowing them onto the bridge, the police cut off and arrested dozens of Occupy Wall Street demonstrators.” Not entirely accurate, but orders of magnitude more accurate than the change made about 20 minutes later: “In a tense showdown over the East River, police arrested hundreds of Occupy Wall Street demonstrators after they marched onto the bridge’s Brooklyn-bound roadway.”
The two versions were juxtaposed at the speed of internet. Nick Greene, writing for the Village Voice, asked Andy Newman, the Times’ city room bureau chief why the change was made and got the following response:
“At every point yesterday as the story unfolded, we offered the most complete account we could of a large and chaotic scene that could not be grasped by any one person. The earlier version had almost no input from the police. The later version reflected the accounts of the police, protesters, and of course our reporters at the scene. The later version, read in its entirety (not just the one highlighted sentence in that photo), reflected the various perspectives much more thoroughly. The final version of the piece was more thorough still.”
Oh yes, thoroughness, of course. Never mind what video from the scene showed, the Times had to get input from the police. In the name of, cough, thoroughness. Never mind that the Times’ own freelancer, Natasha Lennard, one of those arrested, reported that police allowed the protestors onto the Brooklyn Bridge.
As Newman reports, Lennard’s on-the-scene published account initially included this graf:
“After allowing marchers from the Occupy Wall Street protests to claim the Brooklyn-bound car lanes of the Brooklyn Bridge and get partway across, the police cut the marchers off and plunged into the crowd and began making arrests around 4:15PM Saturday.”
Lennard’s graf was excised from subsequent versions of what the Times published.
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