NY Times ADMITS FAILURE TO NOTE BIAS in PAGE 1 STORY ALLEGING RACIAL BIAS IN NBA REFS

Pinchy Sulzberger's 2 main agendas at the NY Times seem to be race and gender. Now with the page 1 NBA referees' racism yarn by Alan Schwarz on May 2nd, he's exposed himself a bit more. There's trouble waiting outside every door, and a once-great newspaper like the NY Times could do some good in the world. Yet with plenty of its own scandals, it hasn't learned. I stopped subscribing several years ago, but still pay a modest fee to use Times Select. Documenting the sinking of the Titanic is worth it. The addendum to the Times' original article by Mr. Schwarz came out today showing FAILURE TO NOTE BIAS OF SOURCES:

Editors' Note: May 5, 2007

"A front-page article on Wednesday about an academic study that detected a racial bias in the foul calls of referees in the National Basketball Association noted that The New York Times had asked three independent experts to review the study and materials from a subsequent N.B.A. study that detected no bias.

The experts, whose names the authors of the two studies did not learn until after the article was published, all agreed that the study that detected bias was far more sound. That study was conducted by Justin Wolfers, an assistant professor of business and public policy at the Wharton School, and Joseph Price, a Cornell graduate student in economics.

After the article was published, The Times learned that one of the three experts, Larry Katz of Harvard University, was the chairman of Mr. Wolfers’s doctoral thesis committee, as Mr. Wolfers had acknowledged in previous studies. Because of this, Mr. Katz should not have been cited as an independent expert.

An updated version of the Wolfers-Price study added acknowledgments for Mr. Katz and a second expert The Times had contacted, David Berri of California State University-Bakersfield. They were thanked for brief “helpful comments” about the paper they made to Mr. Wolfers via e-mail messages after reviewing it for The Times. These later comments would have been mentioned in the article if editors had known about them."

• From the NY Times, 5/5/07, Editor's Addendum to story, 'Study of NBA Sees Racial Bias in Calling Fouls'

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