Free Republic

NEW YORK: The New York Times on Wednesday retracted the basis of a story in Tuesday's paper that erroneously reported that Supreme Court nominee John Roberts had authored an unsigned memo on libel law. In an unusual move, the newspaper published two versions of the correction, one on the regular A-2 corrections page, and another on A22 in the national news section, which ran 243 words. The second version was also written by the same writer of the original story, Adam Liptak. Liptak's first story, published on an inside A section page, reported that a multi-paged memo on the precedent-setting...

September 28, 2005 Libel Memorandum Attributed Falsely to Court Nominee By ADAM LIPTAK Judge John G. Roberts Jr., nominated to be chief justice of the United States, was not the author of an unsigned memorandum on libel law that was the focus of an article published in The New York Times yesterday. The Times erroneously attributed it to him. Bruce Fein, a Washington lawyer who was general counsel of the Federal Communications Commission in the Reagan administration, said yesterday that he wrote the memorandum, a caustic critique of New York Times v. Sullivan, the 1964 Supreme Court decision that revolutionized...