It's always interesting when people who tout the "people's right to know" decide to sit on information that they don't want the people to know. This, sadly, is more common than you would think.
Jack Crowe and Tobias Hoonhout at National Review discovered a reporter who now works for The New York Times sat on public records which he obtained in April that cut against Elizabeth Warren's continuous claim in her campaign stump speeches that she was dismissed from a teaching job for being visibly pregnant:
Reid Epstein, who was then working for The Wall Street Journal, filed an open-records request with the Riverdale Board of Education on April 2 seeking “to inspect or obtain” copies of public records relating to Warren’s time teaching at Riverdale during the 1970-1971 school year. In response to his request, Epstein received school-board minutes on April 10 that challenge Warren’s story, according to documents obtained by National Review through the New Jersey Open Records Act.
Epstein, who moved to the Times on April 19, never broke the story. Reached for comment, a Times spokeswoman said that the “records were inconclusive” and the potential story required further sourcing.
Sure they did. As we know, the Times runs ads with the slogan "The truth is more important now than ever." Or in this case, "the truth can wait for a few months if we don't like it."
Then in October, the Washington Free Beacon also obtained the school-board minutes, and reported that they demonstrated the Riverdale Board of Education had approved a second-year teaching contract for pregnant Elizabeth Warren in April 1971. Rather than accepting the Board’s offer of continued employment, Warren chose to tender her resignation, which was “accepted with regret.”
One day after the Free Beacon reported on the apparent discrepancy, the Times published an article by Thomas Kaplan that disclosed Epstein had "contributed reporting from Washington." It carried this weird headline:
Elizabeth Warren Details Her Account of Losing Teaching Job Because of Pregnancy
Ms. Warren said she had grown more comfortable talking about her experience over the years, explaining why her description of the 1971 episode in her stump speeches differs from how she discussed it in the past.
The spin was this: when it was discovered that Warren had said in a 2007 interview that the decision to leave Riverdale was her choice, that was wrong and now she could tell the truth, that some rising tide of feminism caused her to be....more honest?
Warren has been lying in her biography again, and the "truth" squad at the Times tried to change the subject. Look at this throat-clearing passage:
The Republican National Committee said Tuesday that Ms. Warren had been “caught lying.”
Pregnancy discrimination can begin as soon as women reveal they are pregnant, or are visibly showing, and can continue to affect them for years. In physically demanding jobs, pregnant women risk being fired if they ask to take rest breaks, and in the corporate world, women and mothers may be steered away from prestigious assignments or excluded from client meetings if a boss perceives them to be less committed to their work than other employees.
Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, wrote on Twitter about Ms. Warren’s experience, “This happened to women ALL the time.”
But did it happen to Warren? Kaplan wrote a second story two days later that NB's Clay Waters wrote about, shaming how "Republicans employed a tactic — questioning a female candidate’s authenticity — that is at once often a sexist trope in politics and a strategy used against Hillary Clinton in 2016."
