“I just sent the following short letter to the New York Times in response to their request from readers for other “defects” in past articles. However this particular case gets resolved in the course of their investigation, the matter I describe is a serious indictment of what passes for reporting at the Times these days, and for that reason, I thought you might want to share it with your readers:
In an Editorial Observer column by Times reporter Adam Cohen entitled “Why the Supreme Court Needs to Visit Cass High School,” (March 31, 2003), Cohen reports under a Detroit byline on his recent visit to Detroit’s Cass Technical, an inner-city, virtually all-black high school in Detroit. Describing Cass as a “wreck, with dingy classrooms, ancient lab equipment, broken hallway clocks” Cohen cites Cass as the embodiment of his premise that schools with large minority enrollments tend to be seriously underfunded, and that as a general rule, the higher the percentage of black students, on average, the worse facilities a school has.
As someone who travels regularly in this part of Detroit, I don’t dispute the description, or even the premise, generally speaking, but I was nevertheless struck by a glaring omission in this article – the fact that a new Cass is under construction adjacent to the current Cass building. What’s more, after a few minutes of research on Nexis, I learned that the new facility is budgeted for $114.5 million. To put things in perspective, only two other high schools in the entire United States have ever been built in the $100-million range. The new building is a six-story, air-conditioned glassy building that is laboratory-intensive, with music, art and dance studios. How, I wondered, could Cohen have missed the gigantic construction site right next door to the school that he visited, or the sign prominently announcing that the building under construction is the new Cass Tech? In fact, much of the new building is already standing. How could the prospective move not have come up in conversations with administrators that Cohen supposedly interviewed?
At the time, I chalked the omission up to liberal bias, and penned a letter to the Times mocking Cohen under the heading “Why New York Times Reporter Adam Cohen Needs to Visit the New Cass High School.” In light of recent events, I wonder whether there is another explanation. I don’t suppose it is possible, is it, that Mr. Cohen never visited the Cass school in Detroit? It seems worth investigating, doesn’t it? The only other explanations I can think of are (a) incredibly slopply reporting, or (b) blatant bias. Which is it?
Of course, it could also be both.
EMAIL OF THE DAY II: “The news about Rick Bragg doesn’t surprise me. In Feb. of 2001, Bragg wrote a story after Dale Earnhardt had been killed at Daytona. It was written as if he had been in a Wal-Mart in Mooresville, NC, at the moment the news of Earnhardt’s death was learned by the shoppers. He described the sorrow of the locals and their specific reactions. At the time, I asked myself what-the chances were that Bragg happened to be in a Wal-Mar in Mooresville, NC, at the very moment people learned that Dale Earnhardt had died.-Not very great. In fact, more like nil. But that’s how the story was written. And it wasn’t written as if recounting the story from the memory of others. It-was a “first hand” account.-As an editor myself, I wondered why the NYT editors would not question this. Now I know.” – more feedback on the Letters Page.
The Dish 