Saturday, July 29, 2006

Count to ten before hitting "publish"

[UPDATE 3: the NYT Lamont endorsement]

Earlier today, the New York Times posted the web version of a story that will run in tomorrow's print edition [byline: Adam Nagourney], and it dropped a by-the-way scoop -- that the paper will endorse the challenger, not the incumbent Joe Lieberman, in the Connecticut Senate Democratic primary. It was so by-the-way that it was in brackets:

[The New York Times, in an editorial published on Sunday, endorsed Mr. Lamont over Mr. Lieberman, arguing that the senator had offered the nation a "warped version of bipartisanship" in his dealings with Mr. Bush on national security.]

But the editorial still isn't posted [see updates], so the news side of the paper jumped the gun on its editorial side. The story now seems to be undergoing hasty additions, again in brackets, because there's a paragraph there now that we're pretty sure is new:

(The Times has endorsed Mr. Lieberman for the United States Senate only once in his four campaigns. A 1988 editorial endorsed the incumbent, Lowell Weicker. In 1994, The Times endorsed Mr. Lieberman. In 2000, The Times endorsed the Gore-Lieberman presidential ticket but made no endorsement in the Senate race in Connecticut.)

Which doesn't address the question of primary endorsements. We suspect that the decision to have this addition in round brackets and the earlier one in square brackets is the least fraught of the discussions in the NYT offices right now.

[UPDATE 4: Brad DeLong lays out in detail the bizarreness of the Nagourney article]

UPDATE 2: The NYT is playing hard to get with the editorial endorsement. Even though there are no links on the main page yet to the Sunday editorials, the ones about John Bolton and the Negro Leagues are already posted, their urls easily guessable. We're guessing that Lieberman's will be here, but they could play trixy and post it as a Connecticut regional editorial.

[UPDATE 1: The commenters in this TPM Cafe thread also find the sequence of events very strange]

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