Saying the paper published a “fatally flawed” story on Abu Ghraib, New York Times public editor Byron Calame explains the problem:

The March 11 article profiled a man who said he was the hooded Abu Ghraib prisoner famously photographed about two years ago, standing on a box with wires attached to his extended hands. The article included an interview with the man, Ali Shalal Qaissi, a one-time neighborhood mayor under the government of Saddam Hussein and now a self-styled activist for prisoners’ rights in Iraq. He had been invoking that symbol of the torture at Abu Ghraib in helping to push lawsuits on behalf of the prisoners.

...so naturally, the Times bought his story.

It turned out that The Times had the wrong man. And clear evidence of the error had existed in an unnoticed 2004 Times story.

To the credit of The Times — and to the benefit of readers — editors did not allow the embarrassment to impede a timely and very open exploration of the mistake. When the online magazine Salon quickly disputed Mr. Qaissi’s story after the article ran in The Times, the paper immediately reported on the challenge on March 14 and promised its own investigation. In a front-page story published a week after the original article, The Times reviewed the mistaken identity and Mr. Qaissi’s life in recent years. And an extensive Editors’ Note the same day acknowledged the original article’s shortcomings.

This openness, however, didn’t involve fully exploring some journalistic practices that raised questions in my mind about the handling of the story.

Searching out what has already been published about a subject — “checking the clips” in newsroom parlance — is part of the blocking and tackling of journalism. When someone claiming to be the person behind such a powerful symbol is going to be displayed on Page 1 of The Times, extraordinary care is necessary. And the absence of any intense competitive or deadline pressure left time for extra care.

Is it possible that the story was “too good” to be fact-checked?

Although the initial reporting was sloppy, as Calame points out, the way the Times handled the scandal beyond that is commendable. Calame comes off as a straight-shooter, too. Hopefully his quality-control suggestions will be adopted. But without a competition of ideas and viewpoints inside the newsroom, these sorts of errors in reporting will continue. People tend to ignore the mistakes that further their own arguments, so if the newsroom is ideologically monolithic, the mistakes that favor the dominant ideology will likely continue.

Intellectual diversity can bring about a balance that helps keep everyone honest. If the Times really wants to improve its reporting, it doesn’t just need to perform more rigorous fact-checking, it needs to create a newsroom environment in which new perspectives challenge the most closely-held assumptions of the current employees.