NY Times Reporter Admits Regret Over Role in Kavanaugh Smear Campaign

NY Times Reporter Admits Regret Over Role in Kavanaugh Smear Campaign

This is amazing. As you may recall, many people called the smearing of Kavanugh a red pill moment for them.

Mark Judge writes at Chronicles:

NYT Reporter Regrets Kavanaugh Hit: “I Have Learned Some Lessons”

The message was surprising. David Enrich, an investigative reporter for The New York Times, was responding to a question I had sent him about his newspaper’s 2018 coverage of the Brett Kavanaugh nomination. The Times had disgraced itself with its abysmal “reporting” on Kavanaugh.

Enrich responded in a way that surprised me: “I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about my role in the Kavanaugh coverage, and I would be happy to talk to you about it at some point. For now, I will just say that I have learned some lessons and would probably do certain things differently next time.”

Wait … what? Journalists never admit when they’re wrong. About anything. Ever. Yet the substance and tone of his message suggested that of a contrite person who might believe he made mistakes. In my experience, this was an extraordinary statement coming from a reporter at the country’s leading newspaper.

Naturally, I asked Enrich to elaborate: What were the lessons learned? What would he do differently? “This is a subject for a longer conversation that I’m not going to have over the holidays,” he wrote. “Sorry.”

Then he added this: “I can’t imagine what it was like for you to go thru that.”

Wow. A New York Times reporter who had gone after Brett Kavanagh, and me, was sounding apologetic. He was recognizing that he had done some things poorly and had put me and Kavanaugh through hell.

Enrich has a new book coming out: Murder the Truth: Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful which, purportedly, is about defending the integrity of journalism against those who are demanding more accountability from journalists. In reality, his book is about venerating New York Times vs Sullivan, the 1964 Supreme Court decision that held public figures could not sue media companies for libel unless they could prove that a “statement was made with knowledge of its falsity or with reckless disregard of whether it was true or false.” The book was the reason for me contacting him. I wanted to review Murder the Truth, but also to question him about his role in the Kavanaugh hit.

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