Please, Please Do Litigate "Voter Fraud" Investigations in Your Paper

Probing the election fraud gospel according to True the Vote, in today’s NYT. Good read: nyti.ms/U2vRi4

— Sam Sifton (@SamSifton) September 17, 2012

And from the Times public editor this weekend:

The national editor, Sam Sifton, rejected the argument. “There’s a lot of reasonable disagreement on both sides,” he said. One side says there’s not significant voter fraud; the other side says there’s not significant voter suppression. “It’s not our job to litigate it in the paper,” Mr. Sifton said. “We need to state what each side says.”

Reading the very good voter fraud story, which hews closely to facts, instead of “teaching the controversy,” AKA “teaching the two sides of a story that really only has one side,” makes Sifton’s unexpected comments odder. I do want my newspaper to tell me the truth, after, sure, telling me what both “sides” said — even when it’s unpleasant! I would like my paper to tell me the truth. (The truth in this case being that a fairly well-funded group of Republicans are trying to keep poor and/or black people from voting this election.)