{"id":3712,"date":"2006-12-31T10:05:45","date_gmt":"2006-12-31T10:05:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/12\/abortion-el-salvador-and-the-times.html"},"modified":"2006-12-31T10:05:45","modified_gmt":"2006-12-31T10:05:45","slug":"abortion-el-salvador-and-the-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/12\/abortion-el-salvador-and-the-times.html","title":{"rendered":"Abortion, El Salvador, and the Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last spring, the NYTimes Magazine<\/em> ran an almost 8,000-word story on abortion in El Salvador. One of the central stories involved a woman who was supposedly jailed after obtaining an abortion at 18-weeks of pregnancy.<\/p>\n

Problem was, that wasn’t the situation at all.<\/p>\n

She was jailed after being tried and convicted for murdering her full-term newborn baby.<\/p>\n

Today, the Times <\/em>public editor addresses the issue<\/a>, giving due credit to those who first exposed the, er, inaccuracy.<\/p>\n

\n
\n

Complaints about the article began arriving at the paper after an anti-abortion Web site, LifeSiteNews.com<\/span><\/a>, reported on Nov. 27 that the court had found that Ms. Climaco\u2019s pregnancy ended with a full-term live birth. The headline: \u201cNew York Times Caught in Abortion-Promoting Whopper \u2014 Infanticide Portrayed as Abortion.\u201d Seizing on the misleading presentation of the article\u2019s only example of a 30-year jail sentence for an abortion, the site urged viewers to complain to the publisher and the president of The Times. A few came to me.<\/p>\n

The care taken in the reporting and editing of this example didn\u2019t meet the magazine\u2019s normal standards. Although Sarah H. Smith, the magazine\u2019s editorial manager, told me that relevant court documents are \u201cnormally\u201d reviewed, Mr. Hitt never checked the 7,600-word ruling in the Climaco case while preparing his story. And Mr. Hitt told me that no editor or fact checker ever asked him if he had checked the court document containing the panel\u2019s decision.<\/p>\n

Mr. Hitt said Ms. Climaco had been brought to his attention by the magistrate who decided four years ago that the case warranted a trial, so he had asked the magistrate for the court record. \u201cWhen she told me that the case had been archived, I accepted that to mean that I would have to rely upon the judge who had been directly involved in the case and who heard the evidence\u201d in the trial stage of the judicial process, Mr. Hitt wrote in an e-mail to me. So he didn\u2019t pursue the document.<\/p>\n

But obtaining the public document isn\u2019t difficult. At my request, a stringer for The Times in El Salvador walked into the court building without making any prior arrangements a few days ago, and minutes later had an official copy of the court ruling. It proved to be the same document as the one disseminated by LifeSiteNews.com, which had been translated into English in early December by a translator retained by The Times Magazine\u2019s editors. I\u2019ve since had the stringer review the translation of key paragraphs for me.<\/p>\n

snip<\/em><\/p>\n

Exceptional care must be taken in the reporting process on sensitive articles such as this one to avoid the slightest perception of bias. Paul Tough, the editor on the article, acknowledged in an e-mail to me that in reporting this story, Mr. Hitt used an unpaid translator who has done consulting work for Ipas, an abortion rights advocacy group, for his interviews with Ms. Climaco and D.C. This wasn\u2019t ideal, he said, but the risk posed for sources in this situation required the use of intermediaries \u201cto some degree.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ipas used The Times\u2019s account of Ms. Climaco\u2019s sentence to seek donations on its Web site for \u201cidentifying lawyers who could appeal her case\u201d and to help the organization \u201ccontinue critical advocacy work\u201d across Central America. \u201cA gift from you toward our goal of $30,000 will help Carmen and other Central American women who are suffering under extreme abortion laws,\u201d states the Web appeal, which Ipas said it took down after I first contacted the organization on Dec. 14. An Ipas spokeswoman called the appeal \u201cmoderately successful.\u201d<\/p>\n

The magazine\u2019s failure to check the court ruling was then compounded for me by the handling of reader complaints about the issue. The initial complaints triggered a public defense of the article by two assistant managing editors before the court ruling had even been translated into English or Mr. Hitt had finished checking various sources in El Salvador. After being queried by the office of the publisher about a possible error, Craig Whitney, who is also the paper\u2019s standards editor, drafted a response that was approved by Gerald Marzorati, who is also the editor of the magazine. It was forwarded on Dec. 1 to the office of the publisher, which began sending it to complaining readers.<\/p>\n

The response said that while the \u201cfair and dispassionate\u201d story noted Ms. Climaco\u2019s conviction of aggravated homicide, the article \u201cconcluded that it was more likely that she had had an illegal abortion.\u201d The response ended by stating, \u201cWe have no reason to doubt the accuracy of the facts as reported in our article, which was not part of any campaign to promote abortion.\u201d <\/p>\n

After the English translation of the court ruling became available on Dec. 8, I asked Mr. Marzorati if he continued to have \u201cno reason to doubt the accuracy of the facts\u201d in the article. His e-mail response seemed to ignore the ready availability of the court document containing the findings from the trial before the three-judge panel and its sentencing decision. He referred to it as the \u201cthird ruling,\u201d since the trial is the third step in the judicial process.<\/p>\n

The article was \u201cas accurate as it could have been at the time it was written,\u201d Mr. Marzorati wrote to me. \u201cI also think that if the author and we editors knew of the contents of that third ruling, we would have qualified what we said about Ms. Climaco. Which is NOT to say that I simply accept the third ruling as \u2018true\u2019; El Salvador\u2019s judicial system is terribly politicized.\u201d<\/p>\n

I asked Mr. Whitney if he intended to suggest that the office of the publisher bring the court\u2019s findings to the attention of those readers who received the \u201cno reason to doubt\u201d response, or that a correction be published. The latest word from the standards editor: \u201cNo, I\u2019m not ready to do that, nor to order up a correction or Editors\u2019 Note at this point.\u201d<\/p>\n

One thing is clear to me, at this point, about the key example of Carmen Climaco. Accuracy and fairness were not pursued with the vigor Times readers have a right to expect. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last spring, the NYTimes Magazine ran an almost 8,000-word story on abortion in El Salvador. One of the central stories involved a woman who was supposedly jailed after obtaining an abortion at 18-weeks of pregnancy. Problem was, that wasn’t the situation at all. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3712","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3712"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3712\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}