On Sunday, the New York Times was criticized for editing a sentence and deleting a tweet noting that Biden has been accused of sexual misconduct by women who said that his hugging and hair sniffing crossed the line. The sentence and the tweet were part of a larger story on a sexual assault allegation from Tara Reade, a former Biden staffer who accused him of placing his hand under her skirt and penetrating her with his fingers.
The newsroom claimed at the time that it made the edits because the original language was confusing, tweeting, "We've deleted a tweet in this thread that had some imprecise language that has been changed in the story."
On Monday, however, Executive Editor Dean Baquet admitted that the Biden campaign's reaction to the piece played a role in making the changes. He explained the situation as part of a longer story that detailed why the New York Times waited 14 days to cover Reade's allegations.
"Even though a lot of us, including me, had looked at it before the story went into the paper, I think that the campaign thought that the phrasing was awkward and made it look like there were other instances in which he had been accused of sexual misconduct," he explained. "And that's not what the sentence was intended to say."
He added, "We didn't think it was a factual mistake. I thought it was an awkward phrasing issue that could be read different ways and that it wasn't something factual we were correcting. So I didn't think that was necessary [to explain]."
The original sentence from the story read, "The Times found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Biden, beyond the hugs, kisses and touching that women previously said made them uncomfortable." It was later changed to: "The Times found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Biden."
Baquet did not elaborate on what the campaign found "awkward" about the phrasing used in the original piece.
In explaining the editorial decisions that were put into the New York Times's coverage of Reade's allegations, the outlet also addressed comparisons to the newspaper's treatment of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh's accusers. Baquet said the paper published allegations against Kavanaugh the day they were made because the larger story of sexual assault was already present with previous accusations from Christine Blasey Ford.
"Kavanaugh was already in a public forum in a large way. Kavanaugh's status as a Supreme Court justice was in question because of a very serious allegation. And when I say in a public way, I don't mean in the public way of Tara Reade's. If you ask the average person in America, they didn't know about the Tara Reade case," Baquet explained.
He continued, "So I thought in that case, if the New York Times was going to introduce this to readers, we needed to introduce it with some reporting and perspective. Kavanaugh was in a very different situation. It was a live, ongoing story that had become the biggest political story in the country. It was just a different news judgment moment."
Biden has denied all of the allegations made by Reade. His spokeswoman, Kate Bedingfield, responded to the allegations, saying, "Women have a right to tell their story, and reporters have an obligation to rigorously vet those claims. We encourage them to do so because these accusations are false."
[Link]