“They were chasing a headline at the expense of a child.”
The Times put a college kid at a fatal shooting on the word of one anonymous source. The source was wrong. The school and the kid said so immediately, and the paper answered with online editor’s notes for two months before it printed a correction. A jury made that cost $9.25 million, the first defamation loss for the Times in fifty years. The reporting failure is ordinary. The refusal to just say “we got it wrong” is the scandal.