Not fit to print

The New York Times runs a long story by Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Nicholas Fandos on the hearing now set before the Judiciary Committee this coming Thursday on the allegation against Judge Kavanaugh dating back to 35 years ago. The scheduled hearing is to take up Christine Blasey Ford. As of last night, however, we have “The farce next time” raised by the New Yorker involving Deborah Ramirez.

Midway into the Times story we find the Times’s explanation or apologia for not having broken Ramirez’s story itself: “The Times had interviewed several dozen people over the past week in an attempt to corroborate [Ramirez’s] story, and could find no one with firsthand knowledge. Ms. Ramirez herself contacted former Yale classmates asking if they recalled the incident and told some of them that she could not be certain Mr. Kavanaugh was the one who exposed himself.”

The Times reporters write with indirection in that first quoted sentence. The indirection is in the service of obscurity. The concluding clause should read “…and could not find a single witness to corroborate it.”

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