What the New York Times Took from the Jews

Failed Messiah
May 15, 2012

http://failedmessiah.typepad.com/failed_messiahcom/2012/05/what-the-new-york-times-took-from-the-jews-345.html

The Village Voice has a list of what the New York Time's reporters took from FailedMessiah.com, The Jewish Week and other Jewish publications along with CBS 2 and the Guardian in the Times' articles on child sexual abuse in the haredi community of Brooklyn.

The Village Voice has a list of some of the parts of the Times short series on child sexual abuse in the haredi community of Brooklyn that were taken without attribution from Jewish media, including FailedMessiah.com.

The vast majority of what the Times took it took from Hella Winston's award winning reporting in The Jewish Week, but the Guardian, CBS 2 NYC, and, yes, FailedMessiah.com were also ripped off, while New York Magazine's seminal reporting from 2006 and some work done much more recently by the Forward was clearly used by the Times to shape its reporting but was not mentioned. On top of that, UOJ's work, which drove this issue early on, went unmentioned by the Times.

The part of the Times' reports that is getting the most media attention is Hynes' agreement with Agudath Israel of America that allowed Agudah to insist that haredim bring suspicions and allegations of child sexual abuse to rabbis, not the D.A. or police. The rabbis would then decide if the evidence was great enough to report to law enforcement or ACS.

That agreement and its implimentation was first reported by me here on FailedMessiah.com on November 27, 2011.

The Times got Agudah's executive VP, Rabbi Chaim Dovid Zwiebel, to talk about that deal and reported what Zwiebel said. But it did not credit me or FailedMessiah.com with breaking the story of the deal and the story of the closed meeting about the implementation of that deal:

The second half of the Times story opens with the shocking charge that Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes has effectively consented to the rabbinic leadership's efforts to cover up the sex-abuse scandal. The DA's approval of the cover-up was first reported last November by Shmarya Rosenberg in his blog Failed Messiah. Rosenberg reported that religious leaders claimed in a private meeting that Hynes supported their policy, but it was the Times that first reported [more than five months after FailedMessiah – Shmarya] the actual meeting last summer in which an influential rabbi told Hynes his group was telling Jews not to go to the police with sex abuse allegations without first checking with a rabbi.

Sharon Otterman, one of the reporters of the Times series, did not respond to a request for comment yesterday. The other reporter, Ray Rivera, declined to comment on the record. The Times's public editor, Arthur Brisbane, also declined a request for comment, telling the Voice that he's looking into the issue himself.