Speaking of journalistic malpractice: The New York Times's Fox Butterfield has long been a favorite SCRAPBOOK whipping boy. Butterfield, who covers the criminal justice beat, writes a numbskull story once a year in which he notes declining crime rates and wonders, "Why is the number of inmates in prisons and jails around the nation still going up?" The possibility that crime rates go down when more criminals are incarcerated never manages to penetrate Butterfield's, or the Times's, ideological forcefield.
Now, though, we have an explanation for why Butterfield seems locked in a time warp: He's just been rewriting his own old clips. In the Manhattan Institute's City Journal, Heather Mac Donald does some brilliant detective work showing how Butterfield often heedlessly recycles his own material, barely recast. Here is Butterfield in an April 4, 1999, article:
Rana Sampson, a former police sergeant in the city, who is director of public safety for the University of San Diego, said: "What N.Y.P.D. did was throw people at the problems. You can't put a cop on every corner, and do you really want to live in a society with a cop on every corner?"
And here is Butterfield precisely 11 months later, in a March 4, 2000, piece for the Times:
Rana Sampson, a former police sergeant in New York who is director of public safety for the University of San Diego, said: "New York has paid a huge price. What the N.Y.P.D. did was throw people at the problem, putting cops on every corner, but who wants to live in a society like that?"
Then Mac Donald sticks the fork in: "Butterfield never got around to checking whether his good friend Sampson still worked at the University of San Diego in 2000; she didn't." Oops.