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Over the past few weeks I’ve found myself more and more frustrated with the political coverage presented in the NY Times. I can reluctantly tolerate Paul Krugman abandoning his great economic pieces to pursue less-than-apt political ones; I know that columnists will be columnists and the op/ed section of any newspaper is going to be a bit more impassioned come election time. But when research and the reporting of events and quotations loses its objectivity, there is no longer worth to a publication.

One of the problems with calling the NY Times out on its poor reporting is that they change their stories after they’re published, and so it is often difficult to find good examples in hindsight. I’m not referring to a dangling modifier or a mis-spelled last name; I’m referring to the subtraction of an incorrect fact or the addition of a relevant quote that puts things into a different perspective altogether.

Thanks to a few tips from e-cquaintances, I’ve caught them red-handed this time with two different versions of the same article. Here’s version 1. Here’s version 2. I’m putting them up for download below because I suspect that it’s only a matter of time before they take the first one down.

Download version 1 in PDF format.

Download version 2 in PDF format.

The Headline

The most obvious distinction between the two versions comes in their respective headlines. The original headline (“Few From Obama’s Youth Remember His Drug Use”) implies the possibility that Obama lied in claiming to have used drugs. That’s not me reading between the lines; Serge F. Kovaleski, the writer, raises this possibility directly:

…or he added some writerly touches in his memoir to make the challenges he overcame seem more dramatic.

The second headline (“Old Friends Say Drugs Played Only Bit Part in Obama’s Young Life”) holds a completely different implication. The claim is no longer that “few” people remember Obama’s drug use, but that his drug use only played a “bit part” in his life. Mr. Kovaleski now is backhandedly acknowledging the truthfulness of the drug use claim while at the same time seeking to minimize it. The tone remains dark and accusatory, as if this contradicts Obama’s claims. But if you go back and read Dreams from My Father, you’ll see that only a page and half is devoted to his drug use; never did he imply being anything more than an occasional user.

The Story

Below is a breakdown of the substantive differences between the two stories, as well as an analysis of their respective tonal differences and implications. Again, punctuation and syntactical errors are completely forgivable; I’ll only focus only on differences of factual presentation and differing modifiers that change the meanings of their respective sentences. All bold and italicized emphasis is mine unless otherwise noted.

In paragraph 5, Mr. Kovaleski adds a key modifier. The original version states:

Mr. Obama’s account of his younger self and drugs, though, significantly differs from the recollections of others.

In the second version, however, Kovaleski tells us more about his sample audience:

Mr. Obama’s account of his younger self and drugs, though, significantly differs from the recollections of others who do not recall his drug use.

Mr. Kovaleski is now implying that his sample, as a whole, does not recall Obama’s drug use.

But in the very next paragraph, we learn that this is a false implication. In fact some of Obama’s old acquaintances do recall his drug use. But rather than present this fact at face value, he changes the focus. Mr. Kovaleski’s implication now is not that Obama hasn’t used drugs, but that he’s “only” used marijuana. The original version states:

In more than three dozen interviews, friends, classmates and mentors from his high school and Occidental recalled Mr. Obama as being grounded, motivated and poised, someone who did not appear to be grappling with any drug problems and seemed only to dabble with marijuana.

But the second version has yet another implication: not that he only dabbled with marijuana, but that his dabbling was exclusively with marijuana. The movement of the word “only” changes the entire meaning of the sentence. Have a look

In more than three dozen interviews, friends, classmates and mentors from his high school and Occidental recalled Mr. Obama as being grounded, motivated and poised, someone who did not appear to be grappling with any drug problems and seemed to dabble only with marijuana.

Here’s a quick recap of Mr. Kovaleski’s claims thus far, chronologically:

1. It is disputable whether or not Obama used drugs.
2. Obama only used marijuna a little bit.
3. Obama dabbled with no drug other than marijuana.

The next paragraph in version 1 is altogether missing in version 2. I don’t see any inherent bias in it, but for posterity, here’s the quote:

“It didn’t stand out to me,” said Michael Ramos, who was one of Mr. Obama’s closest friends at the Punahou School in Honolulu. “It was not the focal point of our lives. It wasn’t like we all thought we’ve got to do something to help Barack because it’s getting out of control.” About Mr. Obama’s using cocaine, he said, “I didn’t know him to do that.”

Both versions end with a misleading quote from a classmate at Occidental:

“I would never say that he was a druggie, and there were plenty there,” she said. “He was too cool for all that.”

The implication is that Obama was never the druggie that he claimed to be. The truth is that Obama never claimed to be a druggie.

The Conclusion

I’m not ready to declare intentional deception; I’m not ready to accuse Mr. Kovaleski of disingenuously implying facts known to be incorrect. I understand that the news media is fast-moving and that mistakes happen and are corrected. At a time when the NY Times has to compete with bloggers and live television coverage, I expect that articles will be rushed and subsequently prettied and rearranged. What I don’t expect is substantive changes that alter the tone of a given article. At best, this was misleading and sloppy journalism.