Conservative critics have equated the Times’s handling of the Platner story with the way they say the paper inadequately reported on former president Joe Biden’s mental and physical decline. In both cases they say the Times was purposely coddling Democrats whom the paper supported politically. These are damaging charges which the Times has denied.
During my 17-year career at the Times, I never saw partisan considerations color news stories. The Times’s policy, then and now, is to tell readers everything newsworthy that their reporters have confirmed as accurate and is important for readers to know.
Caution is necessary when the paper publishes a story close to voting day that could swing an election. The reason is that doing so would give candidates insufficient time to respond. The damaging June 4 story on Platner’s bad behavior with women was published only five days before Maine voters cast their ballots in the Democratic US Senate primary, which Platner won.
Since that story, other publications, including Politico and The Washington Post, have run more serious allegations against Platner from two of the women, Racicot and Fifield, who were included in the Times story. That led to the suspicions that the Times withheld material to help Platner politically.
Having done some reporting myself on this controversy, I don’t give much weight to the allegations published by The Washington Free Beacon, The Free Press, and others. Unfairly, another Times reporter, Pulitzer Prize winner Jodi Kantor, who spearheaded the Times’s #MeToo coverage that revealed sexual abuse by Harvey Weinstein, was hammered in a Wall Street Journal newsletter, Free Expression, today. Gratuitously, its author, Jack Butler, demeans the Times as “the puzzles-and-recipes company.”
It’s unclear whether Platner will drop his candidacy in coming days, in time for Maine Democrats to name a replacement. He has denied any sexual abuse, but there are so many red lights flashing that supporters like Senators Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, as well as many others, are asking him to withdraw. The Maine seat long occupied by Republican Susan Collins was considered winnable by Democratic leaders.
I thought that another allegation from Fifield that the Times did publish was very damaging, too — that he knew full well that his tattoo was a Nazi symbol called a Totenkopf. Platner has said he thought the tattoo was a skull and crossbones.
Polls will soon show whether Platner’s support among voters has crumbled. My suspicion is that distrust of the press and politicians is so deep that the recent news stories about Platner may not count so much with voters.
My views are colored by my own experience reporting for years on the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas conflagration.
Jane Mayer and I coauthored the book “Strange Justice,” in which we concluded, from a great weight of evidence we collected during our reporting, that Thomas had lied to win confirmation to the Supreme Court. We interviewed (or tried to) all the corroborators we knew about for both Hill and Thomas. We found a pattern of behavior that supported Hill’s charges of being sexually harassed by Thomas, which he denied. (Nothing has happened in the 25 years since his confirmation to lead either Mayer or me to question Hill’s veracity.)
The Times reporters on the Platner story have been criticized by Fifield, who has worked for conservative groups like Independent Women and the Heritage Foundation, for not contacting all of the people she told them to call who could corroborate her story. On whether the reporters called all the corroborators, Danielle Rhoades-Ha, senior vice president and head of external communications for the Times, said in an email, “No comment on that beyond what is in the story.”
Sources sometimes change their stories. The terms of interviews, like off the record and not for attribution, are sometimes misunderstood.
Racicot deepened the seriousness of her allegations against Platner in a story published by Politico on Monday. “I remember him grabbing my pelvis and being really forceful of me,” Racicot told Politico. “I remember the specific moment where I thought to myself, like, ‘This is no longer my choice.’” In a Washington Post story posted on Tuesday, she said that Platner had secretly removed condoms when they had sex (she was not using birth control). Platner has denied her account.
Readers should know what is known — or not known — and what changes in a story. I believe this is what the Times has done.
As always, I remain open to reporting on new information, especially in such a fast-moving and high stakes story. This is what readers, already untrusting of journalists, are owed.