By Jeffrey Page

I came across a remarkable double standard in crime reporting at The New York Times.

The paper ran a story on Saturday about the arrest of a man who had been sending bizarre love letters to Tatiana Schlossberg, 20, the daughter of Edwin Schlossberg and Caroline Kennedy. You know who they are.

The letters make your skin crawl. “I know you. I know the feeling of you,” the Times quoted from one of the more recent letters. “I know your shape, your sound, your warmth and your taste.”

The Times identified the man and informed us that he was 41 years old, unemployed, a native of Pakistan and a naturalized United States citizen. Ever see information like that in a story about a frightening yet relatively minor crime? The man’s name is Naeem Ahmed. By publishing usually omitted information, was the Times implying some kind of connection between a Middle Eastern name and an obnoxious intrusion into the lives of a famous family?

If not, why was the use of Ahmed’s place of birth and citizenship status necessary for the story?

Maybe the answer lay in another story in Saturday’s paper.

It was the extraordinary account of the arrests of three men – a sheriff, a county attorney, and a hospital administrator – in West Texas, all charged with prosecuting two nurses who informed state medical authorities of alleged improper activities at the local hospital.

The Times reported the charges and the background, but carried not a word about where they were born or their citizenship – perhaps because the sheriff’s name is Roberts, the county attorney’s name is Tidwell and the administrator’s name is Wiley. Good old easy-to-pronounce Anglo-Saxon names. Americans through and through, presumably. If Sheriff Roberts had been born in Inner Mongolia we don’t know because the Times didn’t think it was necessary to note his place of birth. We can assume the sheriff is an American citizen, but what about that administrator?

I was going to write a letter to Arthur Brisbane, the Times’ public editor, to ask for an explanation of the two treatments. But then I read his weekend column about the Times web site’s wildly incorrect report that Gabrielle Giffords had died of her wounds in Tucson. This blunder got into the story when the reporter writing it informed his editor that he had, in Brisbane’s words, “a few changes he wanted to make.”

Since when is the assassination of a member of Congress considered one of “a few changes?” His editor never saw the change. And so, the revised story, incorrectly noting Giffords’ death, ran. It was corrected 10 long minutes later.

An editor told Brisbane that “everything” should go past two editors.

Considering the case of Naeem Ahmed, the same standard – two editors signing of on a story – might have worked at the city desk and not made the Times look like a place with different rules for dealing with people of different backgrounds.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com.

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