Writer Mark Judge, who was dragged through the mud along with Justice Brett Kavanaugh in messy 2018 Supreme Court confirmation hearings, reported this week that a New York Times reporter came close to apologizing to him for shoddy reporting. An occurrence so rare, Judge was moved to write about it on Monday in Chronicles Magazine.
New York Times reporter David Enrich responded to a question Judge sent him about Enrich’s 2018 coverage of the Kavanaugh nomination.
“I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about my role in the Kavanaugh coverage, and I would be happy to talk to you about it at some point. For now, I will just say that I have learned some lessons and would probably do certain things differently next time,” Enrich wrote to Judge, leaving him shocked.
“Wait … what? Journalists never admit when they’re wrong. About anything. Ever. Yet the substance and tone of his message suggested that of a contrite person who might believe he made mistakes. In my experience, this was an extraordinary statement coming from a reporter at the country’s leading newspaper,” Judge wrote. “Naturally, I asked Enrich to elaborate: What were the lessons learned? What would he do differently? ’This is a subject for a longer conversation that I’m not going to have over the holidays,’ he wrote. ‘Sorry.’ Then he added this: ‘I can’t imagine what it was like for you to go thru that.’ Wow. A New York Times reporter who had gone after Brett [Kavanaugh], and me, was sounding apologetic. He was recognizing that he had done some things poorly and had put me and Kavanaugh through hell.”
It is too little, too late. You can’t be on the team that makes baseless accusations of a drunken sexual assault and think “[I would] probably do certain things differently next time,” covers it.
But Enrich must be nice; he has a new book to promote — Murder the Truth: Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful. He is making the media rounds and will want folks to be fair with him.
Mark Judge and Kavanaugh were high school mates in the 1980s. When President Donald Trump nominated Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court in 2018, the left devised an ugly story to block his chances.
They trotted out Christine Blasey Ford to testify to Congress that, 30 years before, she allegedly attended a party where she was allegedly in a room with Kavanaugh and Judge. Ford said that Kavanaugh assaulted her by allegedly pinning her to a bed, trying to remove her clothes, and covering her mouth when she tried to scream. She claimed Judge jumped onto the bed, the three tumbled to the floor, and with that move, Ford was able to leave the room. Her memory was fuzzy. Kavanaugh denied it. Judge has no memory of it. The thinking public was not buying it. The left needed to bolster the story.
Mollie Hemingway, editor-in-chief of The Federalist, broke a story at the time predicting a hit piece to advance the narrative that high school Kavanaugh was a bad dude.
“Having failed to corroborate any allegations of rape against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, The New York Times is now preparing to smear him for organizing party planning and logistics more than 30 years ago. This comes on the heels of a blockbuster Times report alleging that Kavanaugh might have thrown ice at someone at some point in the 1980s,” Hemingway wrote.
Yes, party planning. Enrich received a copy of a decades-old, hand-printed letter making arrangements for a payment on overnight lodging that Kavanaugh wrote to his pals as a teenager. In it, he used typical language a teen boy would use with peers. This was 1982, an era when Hollywood was normalizing bawdy teen language with movies like “Porky’s,” “The Last American Virgin,” and “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.”
Teen Kavanaugh wrote “It would probably be a good idea on Sat. the 18th to warn the neighbors that we’re loud, obnoxious drunks with prolific pukers among us.”
The letter established that there was a party and drinking was planned. It did not prove Ford was there or that anyone was harmed. Yet it took two reporters, Enrich and Kate Kelly, to “investigate” this letter in an attempt to sully Kavanaugh’s name and bolster the plausibility of Ford’s tall tale.
A halfhearted attempt at “sorry” in a private email six years later is pretty weak for a man who makes his living with words.
The hit piece didn’t work. Kavanaugh was confirmed. We are left with a textbook example of how the media helps push political narratives.
Whether blowing things out of proportion, intimating imaginary story lines, or outright lying, members of the media lose credibility, and everyone they touch in the process is harmed, when they stray from precision truth telling.
