Inconvenient Emails from the NY Times

Now that New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt has published his official story of the events surrounding the decision to spike Stephanie Strom’s investigation of ACORN’s alleged fundraising connections to the Obama campaign, it becomes imperative for this correspondent to reiterate that Strom personally attempted to mislead AIM just days after she cut off contact with Anita Moncrief.

“The story involved allegations that Barack Obama’s campaign, in league with Acorn, a left-leaning community activist group, was guilty of technical violations of campaign finance law. Evidence supplied by the source could not be verified,” wrote Hoyt for the NY Times on May 16. “Even if the story had panned out, it is hard to see how any editor could have regarded it as momentous enough to change an election in which the Republicans were saddled with an unpopular war and an economic meltdown.”

Hoyt maintains that if the NY Times had spiked the ACORN story because of the election, “it would mean that Times editors, whose job is to report the facts without fear or favor, were so lacking in integrity that they withheld an important story in order to influence the election.”

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According to Hoyt,

“On Sept. 7, Moncrief wrote to Strom that she had donor lists from the campaigns of Obama and Hillary Clinton and that there had been ‘constant contact’ between the campaigns and Project Vote, an Acorn affiliate whose tax-exempt status forbids it to engage in partisan politics. Moncrief said she had withheld that information earlier but was disclosing it now that the conservative columnist Michelle Malkin was ‘all over it.’” (emphasis added).

Then, he asserts, “But before they were to meet, Strom said, another source gave her an internal report detailing concerns about impermissible political activity by Acorn and its tax-exempt affiliates. The resulting article was published on Oct. 22.”

Republican Lawyer Heather S. Heidelbaugh testified before the Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution hearing on March 19 that after Strom canceled her appointment with Moncrief, “[Moncrief] informed me that she had been a confidential informant for several months to the New York Times Reporter, Stephanie Strom, who had been writing articles about ACORN based on the information that she had provided.”

Last October this correspondent criticized Strom for two of her October articles on ACORN, the second of which seemed to ignore possible connections between the group and Obama’s voter registration efforts. In fact, the October 22 article in question casts the Obama-ACORN link as a matter of opinion, and simply reiterates the campaign’s assertion that they had no connection to ACORN’s GOTV (get out the vote) efforts.

Strom wrote at the time that

“Republicans have tried to make an issue of Senator Barack Obama’s ties to the group, which he represented in a lawsuit in 1995. The Obama campaign has denied any connection with Acorn’s voter registration drives.”

Given that the article was about ACORN corruption, not Obama, what need was there for this comment in the first place? As it was, the attempted absolution of this candidate came before the actual charges against ACORN were discussed.

This is especially notable in light of the recent revelation that Strom actually knew there was possible contradictory evidence at the time this was written. In my October 28 column, I called attention to her whitewashing,

“In an October 22 story, New York Times writer Stephanie Strom actually contradicts her previous article in order to minimize the association between Obama and an arguably corrupt ACORN. She now characterizes the ACORN investigation as a partisan attempt to discredit Obama.”

This correspondent later added, “Not only is it misleading for Strom to claim that the Obama campaign has ‘denied any connection with ACORN’s voter registration drives’ if Obama himself has said that ACORN was ‘smack dab in the middle of’ such efforts, but ACORN itself has acknowledged a long-standing relationship between Obama and themselves.”

Following the release of this story, Strom actually attempted to get AIM to change its record; she claimed that my story “inaccurately characterizes two articles I have written.”

“Ms. Stott [sic] claims that those articles are ‘contradictory’ when in fact they are not,” wrote Strom to AIM’s public relations officer Sarah Schaerr Norton on October 31, using her personal email account. Strom later explained that “The use of ‘But’ to introduce Mr. Graham-Felsen’s work clearly establishes that the Obama campaign was saying one thing about the Obama-ACORN relationship while its own blogger was reporting something very different. (By the way, the McCain campaign thought the Oct. 10 story was accurate enough to put it on its official Web site.)”

She then emphasized that her October 22 article had merely repeated the claim that there was no connection between Obama and ACORN’s voter registration efforts.

“Ms. Stott [sic] then claims that I contradicted that reporting in an article on Oct. 22, ‘Acorn Report Raises Issue of Legality.’ In that second article, I wrote that [sic] “denied any connection with Acorn’s voter registration drives.’” (italics original).

Strom repeated this assertion, emphasizing again in her email:

“Where is the contradiction Ms. Stott thinks she sees? The Oct. 22 article does not report that the Obama campaign denied ANY connection to Acorn, which would have been inaccurate because I already had written about some connections between Senator Obama and the organization 12 days earlier. The Oct. 22 report states that the campaign denied any connection TO ACORN’S VOTER REGISTRATION EFFORTS, which is a very specific denial.” (original formatting).

If the NY Times had actually run Moncrief’s story, Strom would not have been merely able to present the issue as a difference of opinion between Republicans and Democrats but would have actually had to report the facts.

As it was, Accuracy in Academia, AIM’s sister organization, offered to publish Strom’s claims alongside my response. She declined. “What I would like to do is run your letter, unedited, and the writer’s response, as separate postings side-by-side on the same page on the same day, linking one to the other on www.campusreportonline.net on which the article that you object to originally appeared,” wrote Mal Kline, Executive Director of AIA.

Strom insisted that we not republish the text of the emails, and—this time using her NY Times email account—wrote that “As I did not intend the email I sent AIM’s p.r. person as a letter of any sort but as a request for correction, I respectfully decline to have it printed electronically or otherwise, in part because I do not wish to get into a public exchange with the author of the article to which I objected.” Nonetheless, she concluded that “I also continue to believe that Ms. Stott [sic] erred in claiming a contradiction between the two articles but understand from your and her perspectives, that may be open to debate.”

My response to Strom’s claims, posted on November 13, can be read here.

E.D. We have honored this request, until now. As ACORN whistleblower Anita Moncrief has submitted her own e-mail traffic with Strom, most notably on The O’Reilly Factor on the Fox News Network, so shall we, in the June issue of the Campus Report newsletter. For reasons of space, we only refer to them here.

Bethany Stotts is a staff writer at Accuracy in Academia.