Our Boy Done Good

Justin Elliott is usually pretty invisible to our readers but every once in a while we let him out from behind his curtain running the many moving parts of our front page news section to hone his reporting and writing chops. He dogged that NYT Page 1 story last month about the purported recidivism rate of Gitmo detainees, showing how what the Times reported didn’t match what the (flawed) Pentagon report it was based on actually said. Conservatives quickly scooped up the Times story as a key talking point in opposing the closing of the Gitmo prison. Today the Times ran an extensive correction to the original story, and the paper’s Washington bureau chief concedes it should not have been on the front page.