I was astonished at your front page article last Friday ("Survivors"). My purpose here is not interact with Natalie Greenfield's account as reported by that article, but rather to marvel at the slipshod reporting procedures employed by the Daily News.
There were numerous factual claims made in that article, and those factual claims were attached to names. I wonder - how many of the claims were erroneous? Because you didn't bother to check, you have no idea. Your masthead says that you are "committed to ethical and accurate coverage of the news." How committed? Was a phone call going to be too much of a strain? Given the nature of an article like that, why would you run it without the reporter doing some rudimentary fact-checking?
If you named our church, as you did, and if you reported certain claims about us as fact, as you did, you had an ethical and professional obligation to check to see if there were another side to the story. This is what you failed to do.
I see that your circulation is now down to 5,100. Keep up the diligent work and I think you can get it into the 4,000s by July.
Douglas Wilson
Moscow
