From link
In March, the newspaper published a highly touted article about Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal email account that,
as I wrote in an earlier column, was wrong in its major points. The
Times’s public editor defended that piece, linking to a lengthy series of regulations that, in fact, proved the allegations contained in the article were false. While there has since been a lot of partisan hullaballoo about “email-bogus-gate”—something to be expected when the story involves a political party’s presidential front-runner—the reality remained that, when it came to this story, there was no there there.
Then, on Thursday night, the
Times dropped a bombshell: Two government inspectors general had made a criminal referral to the Justice Department about Clinton and her handling of the emails.
The story was largely impenetrable, because at no point did it offer even a suggestion of what might constitute a crime. By Friday morning, the
Times did what is known in the media trade as a “skin back”—the article now said the criminal referral wasn’t about Clinton but about the department’s handling of emails. Still, it conveyed no indication of what possible crime might be involved.