The Times led its print edition Monday with an article based in part on photographs that the State Department said were evidence of Russian military presence in popular uprisings in Ukraine. The headline read: “Photos Link Masked Men in East Ukraine to Russia.”

And the article began:

For two weeks, the mysteriously well-armed, professional gunmen known as “green men” have seized Ukrainian government sites in town after town, igniting a brush fire of separatist unrest across eastern Ukraine. Strenuous denials from the Kremlin have closely followed each accusation by Ukrainian officials that the world was witnessing a stealthy invasion by Russian forces. Now, photographs and descriptions from eastern Ukraine endorsed by the Obama administration on Sunday suggest that many of the green men are indeed Russian military and intelligence forces — equipped in the same fashion as Russian special operations troops involved in annexing the Crimea region in February. Some of the men photographed in Ukraine have been identified in other photos clearly taken among Russian troops in other settings.

More recently, some of those grainy photographs have been discredited. The Times has published a second article backing off from the original and airing questions about what the photographs are said to depict, but hardly addressing how the newspaper may have been misled.



It all feels rather familiar – the rushed publication of something exciting, often based on an executive branch leak. And then, afterward, with a kind of “morning after” feeling, here comes a more sober, less prominently displayed followup story, to deal with objections while not clarifying much of anything.

The problems with the first article did not go unnoticed by readers and commenters. Ken Miller, a professor at Columbia University Medical School, called the photo story “egregious, being based entirely on alleged identifications of individuals in pairs of photographs where the faces were so fuzzy there was no way to see anything more than a vague and perhaps entirely coincidental resemblance (not to mention that the authenticity of the photographs themselves wasn’t established in any way).”

And the reporter Robert Parry (formerly of Newsweek and The Associated Press) on Consortiumnews.com sees a pattern in Times articles, often based on administration leaks, that “draw hard conclusions from very murky evidence while ignoring or brushing aside alternative explanations.”

Thursday morning, I asked the foreign editor, Joseph Kahn, to talk about what had happened.

Mr. Kahn rightly points out that The Times has made a major commitment to covering the Russia-Ukraine story over the past several months, using as many as 12 staff reporters, many of them on the ground. He calls the coverage “voluminous, competitive and excellent.”

He rejects the idea that The Times’s coverage has lacked skepticism and sees this instance as a result of a simple mistake: the State Department’s mislabeling. He also makes the point that, after hearing about objections to the photographs, “we spent the better part of a news cycle” trying to pin that down for the follow-up article.

“We were the ones who dug into that,” he said. In addition, he said, this article has to be seen within a larger reporting context: “This was not our first word on the subject, and it wasn’t intended to be our last.”

Mr. Kahn said he was well aware that many readers and commenters see a great deal of Times coverage through the jaundiced lens of its flawed reporting in the run-up to the Iraq war – as do both Mr. Miller and Mr. Parry, who are quoted above.

“We still have that in mind, too, and we are on guard,” Mr. Kahn said. But he said that was not a germane comparison in this case because he does not believe that the photographs were doctored or intentionally misrepresented for propaganda purposes. And he noted that the first article – published on a tight deadline, he said, because of competitive pressures – was not entirely dependent for its conclusions on the photographs, but also included other reporting that led to similar conclusions.

Here’s my take: The Times’s coverage of this crisis has had much to commend it, especially the quality of the on-the-ground reporting. But this article, with its reliance on an administration leak, was displayed too prominently and questioned too lightly. The Times’s influence demands that it be cautious, especially when deciding to publish what amounts to a government handout.