Behind the Times Read Online Free

the
London Sunday Mirror
, which had identifiedBowman and published her picture the week before. Several
Times
people found the Siegal-Golden citation of television laughable: “When have we ever given a shit what NBC said before,” I was told by a reporter who attended the staff meeting. Michael Gartner, the president of NBC News and a law school graduate, at least stood on half-firm ground when he made his decision. A First Amendment absolutist, Gartner had for years made the argument that press accounts ought to treat rape victims like other victims of violent crime, “to take the stigma out of being raped.” After the rape-beating of the Central Park jogger, Gartner argued both publicly and within NBC News for the use of her name on principle (“specifics add credibility to the story”). There was also the matter of fairness, pending a jury’s verdict: during the Central Park arraignments and trial, the accused rapists, blacks and Hispanics from the projects, were named. The jogger, white, Wellesley- and Yale-educated, an investment banker, was not.
    The
Times’
editors could make no such claims of consistency. During the jogger case, the editors withheld her name. Then, Al Siegal pushed off responsibility onto the
Times’
readers, as Golden later did in the Bowman case. “News organizations don’t functionin a vacuum,” Siegal said in April 1990. “Society would find it repugnant to add to her obloquy. If we faced a similar degree of revulsion from our readers at revealing defendants, we’d consider it.”
    What changed for the
Times
when the scene of the alleged rapes moved from Central Park to Palm Beach? Some of the protesters detected class bias at work: the community college drop-out accorded less consideration than the Yale MBA and Wall Street banker (the perfect
Times
reader, demographically).
Times
columnist Anna Quindlen made just such a charge in her Sunday Op-Ed page space two days after the staff meeting; as far as the editors of the
Times
were concerned, Quindlen wrote,women who have prestigious jobs will be treated more fairly than “women who have ‘below average’ high school grades [and] are well known at bars and dance clubs.” Others wanted to know why the
Times
hadn’t produced a similar investigative profile of the well-connected man in the case, William Kennedy Smith. They were told, “one is in the works.” (When it eventually appeared, there were new outcries. A
Washington Post
profile of Kennedy Smith quoted several women, most of them anonymously, who described his loutish and sometimes violent sexual behavior; the
Times’
KennedySmith article, produced by the Washington bureau, didn’t include these alleged episodes. Bureau people later said they were unable to confirm the accounts to the editors’ “satisfaction.”)
    If not social standing as a determinant of
Times
treatment, then perhaps some cultural gap separated the buttoned-down, over-fifty senior
Times
men from the barhopping Palm Beach woman, and from some of their own junior reporters. The heaviest applause during the staff meeting came when a
Times
woman, age thirty, told Frankel and Siegal: “I go places at night with people you might find questionable, and God forbid anything should happen to me, because I’m sure you could find someone that I went to high school with who’d be willing to say anonymously that I had a ‘wild streak.’ ” There was considerable intellectualizing about why the male editors “didn’t get it,” or seemed punitive about a woman involved in date rape (Palm Beach) as opposed to stranger rape (Central Park). More than anything, though, the staff overlooked a practical explanation for the Bowman story: the editors had already made an investment of the
Times’
prestige in the Palm Beach story. A team of investigative reporters and supervising editors had produced a “competitive” story over several days of high-profile effort, and the editors wanted it out. NBC provided