Welcome to The Backstory, a new weekly newsletter that takes you behind the scenes of New York Times journalism. I want this to be the start of a running conversation about the news and our judgment calls on how to cover it.
Today, journalists who witnessed Christa Pike’s botched execution in Tennessee share what they saw. I go a few rounds with a media critic who says our coverage of President Trump is “normalizing his behavior and minimizing what I think is just a five-alarm fire in the country.” And a reader asks if our election polling has gotten better since 2016.
But first, let’s look at how our journalists reported details of the Cornell University rape allegations. Here we go.
Inside our reporting about Jane Doe, the accused men and Cornell
It was 2 p.m. on a Wednesday when a group of Times journalists began digging into more than 1,000 pages of confidential records detailing Cornell’s internal investigation of an alleged gang rape in a fraternity house in 2024. Now they faced an urgent question: What to write first?
Debra Kamin, one of the reporters going through the records, told me that for her, it came down to: “What is there that no one else knows yet, and how do we bring it to the public?”
She zeroed in on text messages and testimony from Jane Doe that showed how she came to her own terms with what had happened. Editors deployed Debra and other colleagues to do that story, but also assigned a second story about the accused men. (Jane Doe had messaged one of the men that “90% of what happened that night was not consensual.” The men had all denied wrongdoing.) The story about Jane Doe was published at 12:15 a.m. Thursday; the story about the men followed roughly 12 hours later, as the reporters were trying to reach the men’s lawyers.
Our choices about what to publish — and what not to publish — invariably influence readers’ opinions about Jane Doe and the seven men she accused of sexual assault. Some readers have emailed saying The Times has leaned too hard into Jane Doe’s account and hasn’t left enough room for doubt. I think the reporting has been revelatory. But sometimes even a phrase or headline can make people wonder if we have a slant. Our original headline on that first big Jane Doe piece was “How a Cornell Student Went From Shame to Seeking Justice.” I thought that could be misread as us taking a position on justice being denied; we changed “Seeking Justice” to “Action.”
My colleagues have also debated how much to quote graphic and dehumanizing messages written by some of the accused men. We’ve published the message “free pussy” several times to show readers how one of the men talked about Jane Doe; some readers felt we didn’t use the phrase enough, and others found our use of the quote salacious. In another case, my colleague Michael Wilson had planned to use the f-word — uttered by one of the men — as the very first word in a story about them. “It was a throat-grabber,” Michael told me. “But using it would have been making assumptions about the man, like he’s been busted doing something.” Michael went with a different opening line.
Then there was a text message sent by Jane Doe to one of the men. In several articles, we quoted this part of the text: “Non of the sexual stuff was illegal and honestly i really liked being w u and matt.” We didn’t quote what followed: “so anything anyone has to say about the gangbang is out of their jurisdiction. I don’t think we should feel any shame for the part. our body our choice asf.”
“Gangbang” and “our body our choice” struck some readers as newsworthy and all but exonerating of the men. But by that logic, her saying nothing “illegal” happened made the same point. As Debra said to me, “There was never a goal of sanitizing her quote.”
There are good arguments for running Jane Doe’s full text message and for more liberally quoting the men. Journalism involves making choices. We sometimes think of ourselves as writing the first draft of history, and in our 24-hour digital news landscape, on a big story like Cornell, we keep adding drafts. As Debra said, the key point, always, is bringing news to the public.
Sound Off
You have thoughts. Let’s discuss.
Mark Jacob, a former editor at The Chicago Tribune who now writes a newsletter about media and politics, has strong views about how we cover President Trump. He thinks we’re sanitizing the president’s actions. “I feel like The New York Times might think it’s being tough on him, but it’s just not being tough enough,” Mark told me on a call. Let’s unpack that. You can watch our full exchange by clicking the play button. A short excerpt from the conversation follows.
Mark Jacob, a former editor at The Chicago Tribune who now writes a newsletter about media and politics, has strong views about how we cover President Trump. He thinks we’re sanitizing the president’s actions. “I feel like The New York Times might think it’s being tough on him, but it’s just not being tough enough,” Mark told me on a call. Let’s unpack that. You can watch our full exchange by clicking the play button. A short excerpt from the conversation follows.
Mark: This is not any normal kind of political time. This is one of the biggest crises in American history. And yet The New York Times, instead of saying that Trump is doing corrupt acts, says he’s moving the ethical lines or he’s sidestepping norms. It’s using these real soft terms. Instead of saying he lied, The Times says that he is untethered to the truth or is inverting the facts.
Patrick: I hear everything you’re saying, but I would say so much of what people around America and across the world know about President Trump and his behavior has come about through our reporting. We focus on bringing those facts and that revelatory information to light, not hurling words at someone and calling them names. Tell me if you disagree. Don’t you want that information, those kinds of revelations about corruption brought to light? Or do you think it’s more important that certain adjectives get attached?
Mark: It’s not an either-or. The Times has terrific reporters who do an excellent job of ferreting out different aspects of Trump’s authoritarian behavior and corrupt behavior. The news industry needs to stand up for both itself and for the public. It needs to not live on what I call a neutrality island, which is where I think The New York Times is too much of the time.
Your questions about our journalism
Jack McCumber of Seattle asks:
How has the polling methodology changed in the last 10 years to avoid something like the 2016 presidential polling debacle?
Ruth Igielnik, a Times editor who conducts polls and analyzes the results, answers:
After the 2016 election, industry pollsters did an extensive self-review and produced a wonderful but dense report. It found that one of the major challenges that pollsters faced was that Americans had not previously voted differently by education. But in 2016, many voters with college degrees voted for Hillary Clinton and many voters without a college degree supported Donald Trump, and polls at the time were not set up to correct for that difference. After 2016, many pollsters added information about voters’ education level to their statistical models to account for those shifts.
The other big change after 2016 was how pollsters talk about uncertainty. Polls come with many sources of error, which was not always made abundantly clear. Polls can tell us a lot, but they are not as precise as people would hope! (On that front, it’s worth noting that polling error was actually worse in 2020 than in 2016, but it got less attention because it erred in the “right” direction, with polls overestimating Joe Biden’s margin of victory.)
Pollsters also now contact voters via phone, text, email and snail mail. That is not to say that some of the tried-and-true methods for contacting voters do not still work. At the Times/Siena poll, we still primarily contact voters over the phone.
Have a question? Submit it here.
Behind a botched execution in Tennessee
I’m handing things over to Megan DiTrolio, a senior editor on our Trust team and the editor of this newsletter, who spoke to three journalists who reported on the botched execution of Christa Pike.
Media witnesses often offer the only independent account of what happens inside a death chamber, and those who saw the failed execution of Christa Pike were able to provide the public with some answers. It was the fifth time Catherine Sweeney, a reporter for WPLN, and Steven Hale, a reporter for The Nashville Banner, were media witnesses to capital punishment proceedings. They were inside the prison that day, and Emily Cochrane, a Times reporter based in Nashville, was camped out in the parking lot. They shared more about their reporting:
Catherine and Steven, you’re brought into the witness room; after some time, the curtain to the death chamber opens. What do you see?
Steven: Christa Pike on the gurney. By the time that happened, we had been sitting in the witness room for an hour, so it was very strange.
Catherine: She’s still talking and lively; she and her spiritual adviser were singing songs together. Usually, by that time, a person is almost always totally unconscious. I was watching the clock, and a minute before death is supposed to be certified, she was still talking. I looked back at Steven. The curtain closes for them to certify death, and we know she’s not dead.
Catherine and Steven, when you’re inside, you don’t have phones. Emily, you were outside the prison, in the parking lot.
Emily: We need people like Catherine and Steven inside, without their phones, totally sequestered, to be cleareyed and accurate about everything they’re seeing. Other reporters like me are outside. At one point, we were escorted to the area where there were protesters for and against the death penalty. We could talk to them and get their perspective. When there’s this hourslong wait, this back and forth of legal filings, we’re outside in the parking lot, keeping people updated on what we know and what we don’t, while these two and the other media witnesses are inside keeping tabs on what’s happening. It is two halves that keep that game together.
Can empathy play a role in your coverage?
Steven: A big goal for me in reporting on this issue in particular has been trying to expand the circle of empathy. Victims, victim’s families. But also the person who is condemned. Empathy is not excusing or justifying. It’s context and information.
These were edited excerpts from our conversation. You can read the full interview here.
Correction of the Week
An earlier version of an article about a comedy writer misspelled a character’s surname and misstated the circumstances of a “Seinfeld” plot. The character is George Costanza, not Constanza. The episode writer came up with the idea to kill off George’s fiancée by having her lick envelopes with a toxic adhesive. The envelopes didn’t contain poison.
Pop quiz
According to Times style, which is the correct placement for the abbreviation of anno Domini, A.D., for year of the Lord?
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Before the years: “According to Dr. Price, the terrifying armies that descended upon Europe from A.D. 750 to 1050 were not a monolith.”
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After the years: “According to Dr. Price, the terrifying armies that descended upon Europe from 750 to 1050 A.D. were not a monolith.”
We welcome your feedback. Email us at [email protected]. And see you next week. — Patrick
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