Took long enough.
Via Daily Caller:
The New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan apologized Monday for her editorial last August, which criticized her own paper’s Ferguson reporting for including anonymous police sources saying that Michael Brown wasn’t shot with his hands up.
In Sullivan’s initial op-ed, entitled “A Ferguson Story on ‘Conflicting Accounts Seems to Say ‘Trust Us,’” she criticized the New York Times’ “dubious equivalency” in including anonymous sources saying Brown was shot while running towards police officers along with witness accounts saying he was shot while surrendering. Sullivan would have preferred only the named witnesses– and therefore only the pro-Brown witnesses– be included in the story.
“The Times is asking readers to trust its sourcing, without nearly enough specificity or detail; and it sets up an apparently equal dichotomy between named eyewitnesses on one hand and ghosts on the other,” she wrote at the time.
Sullivan reached this conclusion, despite noting in the op-ed that her own deputy national editor James Dao disagreed. “In stories of this type, it’s rare and difficult to get on-the-record what investigators are learning,” he noted.
But after the release of a Department of Justice review, Sullivan apologized. “In the heat of a very hot news moment last summer, I criticized a Times story about the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo,” Sullivan writes. “Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I want to acknowledge that I misjudged an important element of that story.”