Errors and Omissions

A superb critique of Supreme Court "knock and announce" editorial

The following letter appeared today in the New York Times:

To the Editor:

I, too, disagree with the Supreme Court's stance outlined in "The Don't-Bother-to-Knock Rule." However, I fear that your editorial perpetrated a sin of omission that may be significant in understanding this decision.

If I understand the case correctly, the police had a warrant to search the premises. Nowhere did your editorial mention a warrant.

For a reader unfamiliar with the case, the editorial left the impression that now the police can simply arrive without a warrant at anyone's door, anytime, announce that they are outside and three seconds later just enter the house. That is decidedly not the case.

Although I think the Supreme Court decision is wrong, the police did have a warrant, and that makes the case different from what your editorial led the casual reader to believe.

Warren Kaplan
Merrick, N.Y., June 16, 2006

Very well said, Mr. Kaplan. An omission can be worse in many cases than an explicit error. What is left out can significantly change the impact of what's actually said. In this case, the fact that the case involved a warrant in many minds (including Mr. Kaplan's and my own) added ambiguity to the civil liberties impact of the decision--ambiguity that the Times editorial improperly stripped away.

newspapers, media, errors, omissions

posted by Unknown @ 6/17/2006 10:12:00 AM