Today Jesse Singal published a lengthy review of a letter that a group of journalists sent to the NY Times back in February complaining about the paper’s coverage of trans issues. This is obviously not a new topic. In fact, Singal writes that one person has already written an excellent takedown of the letter. That person was Erik Wemple at the Washington Post. Wemple reviewed the complaints found in the letter and found they just didn’t add up to any evidence of journalistic malpractice. On the contrary, Wemple found many of the complaints leveled by the letter didn’t withstand scrutiny at all.

So the ground Singal is working here isn’t new but it is important. He goes through every allegation made in the letter and points out why they aren’t true or are otherwise misleading. And yet, he writes, there are still people in the media who seem unwilling the acknowledge that the letter accusing the Times’ trans coverage of being shoddy never made the case it set out to.

…the journalists’ letter, which of course we should hold to a higher standard than GLAAD’s own, was a deeply unfair hatchet job which denigrated, by name, a number of Times journalists who have done an admirable job covering a very complicated set of issues: Emily Bazelon, Azeen Ghorayshi, and Katie Baker. If you read the letter, you will see shockingly few accurate, substantive complaints about any of their work, with a single, minor exception that the Times has since addressed (I’ll get to it). What you’ll find plenty of, on the other hand, are outright lies and apparent lies as well as some real slippery language that wouldn’t pass muster with any fair-minded adult newspaper editor…

In a saner media landscape, Wemple’s thorough evisceration would have put these unfair claims to bed for good. Alas, that hasn’t happened. A lot of people in media, including plenty with big microphones, continue to run around acting as though the Times has seriously erred in its coverage of transgender issues, despite a notable dearth, all these months later, of any proven instances of journalistic wrongdoing remotely worthy of a rolling-billboard response…

Worse, I haven’t seen any indication that a single signatory has removed his or her name from the letter since Wemple’s article came out. Keeping your name on an open letter after you have discovered that it contains a false claim against someone is as straightforward a violation of basic journalistic principles as you’ll find. I really think the signatories should be pressed on this.

Singal’s review of the claims in the letter and how they relate to the facts is thorough and clear. I’d recommend reading it if you haven’t gone down this road before or if you don’t recall some of the details. He concludes:

By the time of Wemple’s article, GLAAD had had months to figure out exactly why the Bazelon article, which was more responsible for the uproar than anything else the Times had published on trans issues, warranted such vociferous attacks — remember, there was a truck! There’s fundamentally still no there there. It doesn’t matter how many billboards GLAAD commissions or how inflammatory its press releases get. The truth matters, and the truth is not on GLAAD’s side here.

The second half of his post is criticism of the media that used the anti-Times’ letter as an excuse to roll out sympathetic coverage with little to no effort made to examine the claims themselves. Singal focuses on WNYC’s show On the Media. Here again I’m not going to go over all of his review of the coverage but the gist is that the reporters involved were far too credulous to the point that the fact they are repeating talking points from activists doesn’t seem like an accident.

…the segment suffers from a jarring absence: any acknowledgement of the criticisms of the letter. Wemple’s article — a major effort to investigate the open letter that found major factual problems with it, and which was published in the second-most important newspaper in the country — goes completely unmentioned. Listening to this segment as an unfamiliar newcomer to the controversy, you’d come away thinking that the open letter contained accurate criticisms of the Times’ coverage of trans issues — that is, you’d come away completely misinformed.

(I should note that OTM is far from the only offender here. Wemple’s article notes that “For a mediasphere already saturated with media criticism, the [open letter controversy and subsequent internecine Times chaos] gained extraordinary traction, launching a cavalcade of follow-up stories from NPR, WNYC, the Guardian, Vanity Fair, the Daily Beast, Semafor, Vox and others.” Not a single one of those articles or segments noted any of the false or questionable claims in the letter, and I’m not aware of any mainstream treatment of the controversy that did so prior to Wemple’s investigation. This is a very low bar to trip over.)

Regular readers know I’ve occasionally been critical of Wemple but this is the second case I’m aware of where he is the only person at a major media outlet who bothered to look at a big story through a critical lens which might reflect badly on the left (the other was his outstanding look back at journalists who promoted the Steele dossier).

It’s pretty remarkable when you think about it. Literally every major news outlet could have taken this story on given what a big splash it made at the time. It was undoubtedly big media news (as was the Steele dossier). But out of an entire industry it comes down to one guy who isn’t playing left-wing stenographer.

If I’m really generous, it’s perhaps understandable that no one wanted to be the first person to grab this particular hot potato. Even if that was true two months ago, what’s their excuse now? How much courage does it take to follow Wemple’s example and simply verify and report what he wrote two months ago?

Answer: More courage than anyone else in the media has.