As much as the new flurry of reports concerning Brett Kavanaugh’s college behavior has reignited a debate over his suitability to serve on the Supreme Court, they’ve also supercharged the ever volatile climate of New York Times outrage. The paper is once again engulfed in a familiar maelstrom, taking heavy incoming from both sides on Twitter and cable news. It began over the weekend, with an adaptation from Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly’s new book, The Education of Brett Kavanaugh. Their excerpt surfaced a previously unreported allegation, from former Yale classmate Max Stier, that Kavanaugh’s friends once “pushed his penis into the hand of a female student” during a drunken dorm party. It also reported that “Mr. Stier, who runs a nonprofit organization in Washington, notified senators and the FBI about this account, but the FBI did not investigate.”

The story, which has been corroborated by the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the New Yorker, landed with significant impact, prompting calls for Kavanaugh’s impeachment, and provoking the inevitable presidential tweetstorm: “DO YOU BELIEVE WHAT THESE HORRIBLE PEOPLE WILL DO OR SAY. They are looking to destroy, and influence his opinions - but played the game badly. They should be sued!”

At the same time, a pair of unforced errors magnified the story’s vulnerability. For one thing, there was a now infamous, now deleted tweet from @nytopinion that the Times had to apologize for. (“Having a penis thrust in your face at a drunken dorm party may seem like harmless fun…”) There was also a subsequently appended editors’ note: “The book reports that the female student declined to be interviewed and friends say that she does not recall the incident. That information has been added to the article.” It was an oversight, to be sure, but one that gave right-wing critics something to scream about.

Of course, conservatives weren’t the only ones screaming. In liberal corners, the Times came under fire for running the Kavanaugh revelations in the paper’s Sunday Review section. The Review is under the purview of the Opinion department, as opposed to the News pages, where, according to the logic, the story would have carried more weight. Moreover, some critics took issue with the notion of Times reporters withholding newsworthy information to coincide with the publication of their book. That is, indeed, a tricky thing for the Times to navigate, especially as more reporters than ever before are landing book deals, and the paper is trying to get a better handle on it all.

Nonetheless, if a Times journalist goes on unpaid book leave, the company doesn’t have ownership of the reporting that he or she conducts while on leave. In a Twitter thread responding to the furor over the Kavanaugh story, the Times’ communications department acknowledged, “The new revelations contained in the piece were uncovered during the reporting process for the book, which is why this information did not appear in The Times before the excerpt.” The department also noted that the Sunday Review “includes both news analysis and opinion pieces. The section frequently runs excerpts of books produced by Times reporters.”

It’s not as if books by Times reporters don’t get covered in the News pages, as was the case with, say, revelations about Harvey Weinstein from Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s new book just last week. These things are handled on a case-by-case basis, and there’s no hard and fast rule. But in this instance, given the backlash, the rhyme or reason seems interesting.