Last week, we carped about a New York Times story retailing Gore-camp complaints that Clarence Thomas should have recused himself in Bush v. Gore. Somehow we missed the Times's own thoroughgoing second thoughts on the story, which it printed in this December 13 editor's note:
An article in late editions yesterday reported an assertion that Justice Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court faced a serious conflict of interest because of his wife's work for the Heritage Foundation, which would help staff government posts if George W. Bush won the presidency. . . . The headline said, "Job of Thomas's Wife Raises Conflict-of-Interest Questions." In its 12th paragraph, the article said that the federal judge who raised the conflict question was an associate of Vice President Al Gore's family, and the 14th paragraph reported that The Times had been directed to that judge by "someone in the Gore campaign." The partisan nature of the source should have been made clear more promptly and reflected in attribution in the headline. The headline's plural reference to "questions" exceeded the facts of the article. The article quoted Mrs. Thomas as saying that her transition efforts were nonpartisan, not on behalf of the Bush organization. But those comments were omitted in editing and appeared only in the latest New York regional editions.
Couldn't have put it better ourselves.