Joe Biden Sails Under the NYTimes’ Bar for Sexual Abuse – By Christina Cauterucci (Slate) / April 13 2020
The Times has made ‘a pattern of behavior’ its standard. What happens when an important figure doesn’t clear it?
On Sunday, the New York Times published its first piece on Tara Reade’s sexual assault allegation against Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. The article includes an unusually frank explanation of the reporting process that went into it. Lisa Lerer and Sydney Ember, who wrote the piece with support from three other colleagues, explain that their reporting began “soon after” Reade told her full story on Katie Halper’s podcast, which was released on March 25. It took nearly three weeks to get a piece to print—Sunday’s NYTimes.com article also ran on page 20 of Monday’s New York edition of the paper.
Reade was one of several women who accused Biden last year of giving them unwanted and inappropriate kisses, hugs, and touches. In late March, she told Halper he also digitally penetrated her without her consent when she was a staff assistant in his Senate office in 1993. Biden denies the allegation. The Times reporters spent the weeks since the release of Halper’s podcast interviewing “nearly two dozen” Biden employees from the early 1990s and two of Reade’s friends: one said Reade told her about the alleged assault soon after it happened; the other said Reade shared her story in 2008. Reade’s brother has also confirmed to journalists at Current Affairs and the Intercept that Reade confided in him at the time of the alleged assault, though he didn’t speak to the Times.
Despite this corroboration of contemporaneous disclosure from Reade, the Times article registers some notes of skepticism. “No other allegation about sexual assault surfaced in the course of reporting, nor did any former Biden staff members corroborate any details of Ms. Reade’s allegation,” the piece reads. “The Times found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Biden.” Lerer and Ember’s unusually detailed description of their reporting timeline reads as slightly defensive, but is perhaps a response to the criticism the paper has drawn from both ends of the political spectrum for the lapse between Reade’s public airing of her claim and the Times’ first acknowledgment of it.
From a certain perspective, the framing of Reade’s allegation makes sense in the context of the Times’ own role in the #MeToo movement and the broader landscape of contemporary reporting on sexual assault. Each of the paper’s major investigations, which have led to a rapist’s conviction and the end of a serial harasser’s career, turned up several related stories of sexual violence or inappropriate sexual behavior. A “pattern of sexual misconduct”—plus documentation of monetary settlements—helped justify the Times’ reporting on allegations that hadn’t been evaluated in courts of law. Perhaps this helps explain why, instead of reporting on Reade’s allegation on its own terms, Lerer and Ember made a point of indicating the pattern they didn’t find. On the other hand, is that really necessary? If they’d left that qualification out, readers still would have assumed as much: that if the journalists had discovered a pattern of alleged misconduct, they would have reported it. The absence of such reporting indicates a lack of such findings.
Whether they intend to or not, the explicit framing around the lack of pattern ends up making a statement about Reade’s believability. Not every sexual abuser makes a habit of committing multiple similar assaults in a span of a few years, but in recent years, both readers and reporters have become accustomed to gauging accusers’ credibility by counting their numbers. If an abuser leaves a trail of survivors in his wake, we demand they all make their allegations known to the press if any one of them is to be believed, in defiance of the personal and professional risks. (Reade says she didn’t tell her full story sooner because she was doxed after merely alleging that Biden had harassed her.) We’ve been spoiled, in the worst possible sense of the word, by the proliferation of stories detailing years-long patterns of sexual violations committed by the likes of Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes, Matt Lauer, Bill O’Reilly, Charlie Rose, and Donald Trump. We’ve come to expect every abuser to come with an entire fleet of women giving the same details.
Continue to article: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/04/joe-biden-harassment-nytimes.html
