On April 9th, the New York Times Magazine ran an article claiming that a woman named Carmen Climaco was serving a 30-year jail sentence in El Salvador. According to the Times, she received the sentence for having an abortion; a caption under her picture noted that she “was given 30 years for an abortion that was ruled a homicide.”

However, today’s New York Times contains an eye-opening revelation from public editor Byron Calame:

It turns out, however, that trial testimony convinced a court in 2002 that Ms. Climaco’s pregnancy had resulted in a full-term live birth, and that she had strangled the “recently born.” A three-judge panel found her guilty of “aggravated homicide,” a fact the article noted. But without bothering to check the court document containing the panel’s findings and ruling, the article’s author, Jack Hitt, a freelancer, suggested that the “truth” was different.

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The care taken in the reporting and editing of this example didn’t meet the magazine’s normal standards. Although Sarah H. Smith, the magazine’s editorial manager, told me that relevant court documents are “normally” reviewed, Mr. Hitt never checked the 7,600-word ruling in the Climaco case while preparing his story. And Mr. Hitt told me that no editor or fact checker ever asked him if he had checked the court document containing the panel’s decision.

Why did the Times article contain such a blatant error? Perhaps it had something to do with a translator hired by the author:

Paul Tough, the editor on the article, acknowledged in an e-mail to me that in reporting this story, Mr. Hitt used an unpaid translator who has done consulting work for Ipas, an abortion rights advocacy group, for his interviews with Ms. Climaco and D.C. This wasn’t ideal, he said, but the risk posed for sources in this situation required the use of intermediaries “to some degree.”

Ipas used The Times’s account of Ms. Climaco’s sentence to seek donations on its Web site for “identifying lawyers who could appeal her case” and to help the organization “continue critical advocacy work” across Central America. “A gift from you toward our goal of $30,000 will help Carmen and other Central American women who are suffering under extreme abortion laws,” states the Web appeal, which Ipas said it took down after I first contacted the organization on Dec. 14.

When the public editor started digging further into the story, the publisher’s office asked two editors—Craig Whitney and Gerald Marzorati—to draft a response to the concerns about the story’s accuracy:

The response said that while the “fair and dispassionate” story noted Ms. Climaco’s conviction of aggravated homicide, the article “concluded that it was more likely that she had had an illegal abortion.” The response ended by stating, “We have no reason to doubt the accuracy of the facts as reported in our article, which was not part of any campaign to promote abortion.”

But when confronted with the court documents themselves—which were never reviewed by the author—Marzorati, the editor of the Times Magazine, made an astonishing admission to Calame:

The article was “as accurate as it could have been at the time it was written,” Mr. Marzorati wrote to me. “I also think that if the author and we editors knew of the contents of that third ruling, we would have qualified what we said about Ms. Climaco. Which is NOT to say that I simply accept the third ruling as ‘true’; El Salvador’s judicial system is terribly politicized.”

I asked Mr. Whitney if he intended to suggest that the office of the publisher bring the court’s findings to the attention of those readers who received the “no reason to doubt” response, or that a correction be published. The latest word from the standards editor: “No, I’m not ready to do that, nor to order up a correction or Editors’ Note at this point.”

One thing is clear to me, at this point, about the key example of Carmen Climaco. Accuracy and fairness were not pursued with the vigor Times readers have a right to expect.

So now we know the editorial standards at the Times: an article is “as accurate as it could have been” even if the facts are completely wrong. Even if the original court record was never checked. Even if crucial interviews were translated by partisan activists. Even if those activists then use the resulting article for fundraising efforts. At the Times, none of that matters. None of that’s worthy of a correction, even after the article’s facts have been proven wrong.

No, it appears that the only standard that matters at the Times is whether the author’s conclusions are considered correct by his higher-ups.

Kudos to Calame for doggedly pursuing this. And shame on the rest of the editors at the Times for pretending that facts don’t matter.

Update: The New York Times has since corrected the article. However, for some reason, Times corrections are only available on the web for one day, so I can’t link to it.