Charlie Pierce

Charlie Pierce, Esquire Magazine:

The outrage against the piece was quick and volatile and, in truth, the story is a mess, as Fausset himself admitted in a very strange essay that ran virtually simultaneously to the story, the very existence of which leads the careful observer to conclude that the editors at the Times knew the story was a mess and told Fausset to cover the newspaper’s hindquarters.
The NYT's piece that sounded lot like normalization of America's Nazis drew a lot of fire (not undeserved IMO)

We regret the degree to which the piece offended so many readers. We recognize that people can disagree on how best to tell a disagreeable story. What we think is indisputable, though, is the need to shed more light, not less, on the most extreme corners of American life and the people who inhabit them. That’s what the story, however imperfectly, tried to do.

Every reporter has stories they wish they could have back. (It would be a shame if the inhabitants of this shebeen would Google some of the stuff I wrote about John Edwards back in the day.) But a newspaper is a collaborative effort. It is the job of editors to recognize when a story isn’t there—and especially so if, as Lacey claims, the story goes through multiple drafts and it still isn’t there, and especially so, as in this case, the paper has the reporter write an explainer about how the story wasn’t there. 

Pro tip, lads: if you send a guy out on a story like this in 2017, and he can’t come up with anything that Hannah Arendt didn’t say better in 1951, it really is time to move along. Anything else is flat dangerous. Ask Herbert Hoover if he'd like that speech back.