Opinion | New York Times publishes editor's note confessing reporter's massive conflict of interest - The Washington Post

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New York Times reporter Katie Rogers last week wrote an article about the competition for prime excerpt destinations among the authors of the latest crop of books about former president Donald Trump’s final lap in office. As the piece noted, Michael C. Bender, a Wall Street Journal reporter and author of “Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost,” secured excerpt placement in such outlets as CNN, Vanity Fair, Axios and the Daily Mail.

For an insider’s perspective on the promotional chaos, Rogers turned to Matt Latimer, co-founder of the literary agency Javelin:

“It’s high pressure. Scoops, titles, where you are on Amazon,” said Matt Latimer, the literary agent at Javelin who negotiated the deal for Bender’s book and a murderers’ row of other political titles. “It’s like ‘The Godfather’: ‘This is the business we’ve chosen.’”

One omission, however: The original piece failed to mention that Latimer also represents … Katie Rogers, who is working on a book about Jill Biden. A starker, more classic Washingtonian conflict of interest would be hard to concoct. A January squib in Politico Playbook noted that Rogers, “a key chronicler of Melania Trump’s tenure, will be writing a book about Jill Biden’s first year as first lady. Rogers is repped by Javelin’s Matt Latimer, and her book will be published by Crown.”

In other words, Rogers had a contractual relationship with the person she was quoting in prime book-promotion space: Section A of the New York Times.

David Kuhn, a literary agent at Aevitas Creative Management, said the cascade of Trump books could end up “cannibalizing each other.”

“There’s so many different planets that have to align for a book to truly break out,” he said.

The story appeared to provide no explanation for the switcheroo. So the Erik Wemple Blog, last Friday, asked the Times for one. On Saturday morning, we received a note from newspaper spokeswoman Danielle Rhoades Ha that an editor’s note had been attached to the story. It was dated Saturday, July 3:

Editors’ Note: July 3, 2021

A remark from the literary agent Matt Latimer has been removed from this article. Mr. Latimer's comment should not have been included, because he has represented the author on a book project.

We asked the Times how this sequence of events came about: Was there a disclosure in the initial piece that was mistakenly deleted? Or did Rogers forget about the conflict? Why was there no explanation when the newspaper first swapped out the quote from Latimer? Shouldn’t the paper have fessed up to the quote switcheroo? On Wednesday, Rhoades Ha said, “After the story was initially published, Katie and her editor agreed that they should replace the quote due to the appearance of a conflict of interest.”

All those questions may seem like investigative overkill for one quote in one article. But the Times’s 1,700-strong newsroom has a cluster of people to guard against just this sort of thing, plus a detailed primer on ethical journalism. Putting aside the ethical finger-wagging for a moment, let’s ponder this one: Did no one at the paper think that quoting Latimer would go unnoticed by Playbook-reading Washingtonians?

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Opinion | New York Times publishes editor's note confessing reporter's massive conflict of interest - The Washington Post
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