The New York Times has as its motto: All the news that’s fit to print.

The rule applies only if the story fits politically correct victimization memes.

Via Glenn Reynolds is a report from KC Johnson of Minding the Campus, which discusses one of the NYT’s reporter’s distortions when covering campus sexual assault hearings.

Richard Pérez-Peña, an unusually shaky New York Times reporter who covers campus sexual misconduct cases and gets many of them wrong, has been corrected by his bosses, though the Times didn’t announce it as a correction and managed to introduce a new error while altering the inaccurate wording of the March 19 story.

At issue is a controversial (though not at the Times) “Dear Colleague” letter sent to colleges nearly two years ago by the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights… Pérez-Peña’s recent article said “The letter did not markedly change  interpretation of the law; instead, it reminded colleges of obligations that many of them had ignored, and signaled that there was a new seriousness in Washington about enforcing them.” I wrote about this misinterpretation here.

The NewsDiffs site, which monitors alterations in news articles, noted that the Times drastically changed the faulty sentence to this: “The letter changed interpretation of parts of the law; it reminded colleges of obligations that many of them had ignored, and signaled that there was a new seriousness in Washington about enforcing them.”

Of course, the change renders the sentence all but senseless: how could the Office of Civil Rights have “reminded” colleges of “obligations” they had “ignored,” when these “obligations” did not exist before the 2011 letter altered 39 years or legal interpretation?

….If the Times got the “Dear Colleague” letter wrong, did its most recent article miss other obvious items as well? The article focuses on events at four schools–Amherst, Yale, UNC, and Occidental. In the portrayal, courageous, even plucky, “victims” (the word is used twice, along with the phrase “assault survivor,” even though the article presents no evidence that any of the people discussed by Pérez-Peña ever filed a criminal report, much less saw their case adjudicated in court with a guilty verdict for the accused) or their allies have battled sometimes indifferent administrators, merely seeking respect and fairness.

Johnson concludes:

The Times, of course, has a troubled history of slanted coverage when it comes to allegations of sexual assault on campus. The paper’s handling of the Duke lacrosse case was so bad that it yielded an eventual apology from the sports page editor. Yet the Times’ botching of the lacrosse case appears to have had no impact on how it treats the more general issue. In this respect, Pérez-Peña is simply continuing the standard established by Duff Wilson regarding Duke–ignoring procedural concerns that detract from the preferred narrative, and framing the remaining coverage around a presumption that an accuser’s story must be true.