SPOILER ALERT: HE WON’T. Erik Wemple Should Call Out His New York Times Colleagues for Their Lies.

Last year, Georgetown University held a symposium about the state of journalism. When asked what the main issue facing the press is, Wemple, a panel member, offered an honest answer: Journalists need to learn how to apologize when they make mistakes. Wemple further commented:

News organizations, when they put out these big stories, they pour their souls into these pieces, and when they turn out to be [expletive] up, they can never, ever—it takes them forever to come to grips with it. So people on the outside say, “Well, why can’t you just admit this is wrong?” No, no! We sweated over this, we edited this five times, it went through fifteen layers, we lawyered it. And it’s just like there is this emotional attachment to the work, and when news organizations drag their heels— take the [fake] gang rape story with Rolling Stone at UVA, it took them months or years [to admit it was false]. They finally had to commission an investigation, I think that is what is common to most media crises. It’s not just the first mistake. It’s the refusal and the stubborn resistance to change or to correct. … Editors [will say] ‘Well, you know, if we make a mistake we correct it.’ And that’s just not often the case.

Wemple is one of the few mainstream media reporters who has admitted that Russiagate is and always was a scam. It will be fascinating to see if he challenges his new colleagues at the Times about their appalling lies about Russiagate. He might even think about asking David Enrich when I can expect that follow-up conversation about the Times and their ridiculous Kavanaugh coverage.

Russiagate, the Covington Catholic kids, Brett Kavanaugh, Kyle Rittenhouse, and the conservatives who sounded the alarm about Joe Biden’s health years ago and were mocked. The kid who dressed up in face paint for the Kanas City Chiefs and was accused of using blackface is yet another example of the long dishonorable list of journalistic abuse at the Times. Kathy Scruggs had enough of a conscience that the Richard Jewell story haunted her for the rest of her life. “She was never at peace or at rest with this story,” Tony Kiss, one of her coworkers, once wrote. “It haunted her until her last breath. It crushed her like a junebug on the sidewalk.”

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