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By Paul Zummo Posted in Uncategorized — Comments () / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Janice Rogers Brown finds a defender in a somewhat unusual place: Nat Hentoff of the Village Voice. He writes a scathing critique of the New York Times' editorial on Brown, and condemns their lack of fact-checking. After running through those opinions which reveal Brown to be much less of an extremist than the Times potrays her, he writes

None of the above were mentioned at all in the April 28 New York Times editorial skewering Justice Brown. This disdain for basic research echoes a dispute I've had previously with Gail Collins, editor of the Times' editorial page.

In a number of Voice columns, I showed how Times editorials repeatedly more than implied that then Mississippi federal district judge Charles Pickering-nominated to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals-was racially biased when he got the Justice Department to allow him to impose a lesser sentence in a Mississippi cross burning outside the home of an interracial couple. (That defendant was not the ringleader and his accomplices had avoided jail time.)

The Times' own reporters, Neil Lewis and David Firestone, had gone to Mississippi to get the facts on Pickering's anti-racist record in that state, and the reason he had intervened in the cross-burning case. So had The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which did the research the Times' editorial board ignored. (Many media outlets around the country, however, ignorantly circulated "the paper of record" 's damaging characterization of Pickering.

Finally, Mike Wallace, who had read my Voice columns, went to Mississippi, and on March 28, 2004, CBS's 60 Minutes got some of Pickering's reputation back. He noted, as had I-but not the Times' editorials-that in the 1970s Pickering sent his children to the by then largely black public schools in Mississippi and had, at his peril, testified against a dangerous Ku Klux Klan leader.

Several times, I left detailed messages for Gail Collins at the Times, giving her the true facts of Pickering's record-as Times reporters had found-but I never received an answer. Dan Okrent, the Times' ombudsman, told me he would write about this journalistic malfeasance, but he hasn't.

Will Dan Okrent's successor, Barney Calame, formerly of The Wall Street Journal, dare to call to account the writer of the April 28 editorial scandalizing Janice Rogers Brown-and will he ask Gail Collins if she deigns to have a fact checker looking at the editorials she sends out as the voice of the Times?

Meanwhile, Ed Whelan has a terrific piece in yesterday's Bench Memos which, as the title of the piece suggests, puts the record of judicial nominees in perspective. In particular, he examines the record of a Clinton-appointed judge whom the Democrats consider to be the type of "stellar" judge they have in mind. Read it, it's an amazing bit of analysis.