NYT versus WSJ coverage of Yusef Salaam at the Democratic National Convention

My favorite article today illustrating the magic of politics, from Axios:

Pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian Democrats attending the Democratic National Convention agree on at least one thing: Kamala Harris is on their side. … Pro-Israel Democrats who spoke to Axios at the convention rejected the notion that there is any daylight between Harris and Biden on the issue. … Abbas Alawieh, a leader of the pro-Palestinian “uncommitted” movement, said he is “hearing from a lot of folks that are closer to her that she personally is sympathetic, maybe even more than other presidents we’ve seen in our lifetime.”

Let’s turn our attention to another example of how humans on the same planet can also dwell in parallel universes…

“Members of ‘Central Park 5’ Say Trump Is Too Dangerous for Second Term” (NYT, yesterday):

The five Black and Latino teenagers accused in the attack — Korey Wise, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson and Antron McCray, known as the Central Park Five — served years in prison before being cleared in 2002 by DNA evidence and the confession of another man.

“[Trump] called us animals. He spent $85,000 on a full-page ad in The New York Times calling for our execution,” Mr. Wise said. “We were innocent kids, but we served a total of 41 years in prison.”

Asked in 2019 at the White House why he would not apologize in spite of the exonerations, Mr. Trump said, “They admitted their guilt.” The men have said that police officers coerced them into falsely confessing to the attack at the time.

Yusef Salaam was completely innocent, in other words. He and his friends were cleared and exonerated.

In another NYT article on the same glorious event, Yusef Salaam is “an Innocent Man”:

Chicago is the perfect place for an entirely innocent man who has been wrongly accused of a serious crime since that’s where vascular surgeon Dr. Richard Kimble was convicted of murdering his wife and sentenced to death (documentary film).

Let’s check into the alternative universe of the Wall Street Journal circa 2019… “Netflix’s False Story of the Central Park Five” (by former prosecutor Linda Fairstein):

At about 9 p.m. April 19, 1989, a large group of young men gathered on the corner of 110th Street and Fifth Avenue for the purpose of robbing and beating innocent people in Central Park. There were more than 30 rioters, and the woman known as the “Central Park jogger,” Trisha Meili, was not their only victim. Eight others were attacked, including two men who were beaten so savagely that they required hospitalization for head injuries.

That a sociopath named Matias Reyes confessed in 2002 to the rape of Ms. Meili, and that the district attorney consequently vacated the charges against the five after they had served their sentences, has led some of these reporters and filmmakers to assume the prosecution had no basis on which to charge the five suspects in 1989.

Ms. DuVernay depicts suspects Yusef Salaam and Korey Wise being arrested on the street. In fact, two detectives went to the door of the Salaam apartment on the night of the 20th because both had been named by other rioters as attackers in multiple assaults.

Ms. DuVernay would have you believe the only evidence against the suspects was their allegedly forced confessions. That is not true. There is, for example, the African-American woman who testified at the trial—and again during the 2002 re-investigation—that when Korey Wise called her brother, he told her that he had held the jogger down and felt her breasts while others attacked her. There were blood stains and dirt on clothing of some of the five. And then there are the statements of more than a dozen of the other kids who participated in the park rampage. Although none of the others admitted joining in the rape of Trisha Meili, they admitted attacking male victims and a couple on a tandem bike, and each of them named some or all of the five as joining them.

Nor does the film note that Mr. Salaam took the stand at his trial, represented by a lawyer chosen and paid for by his mother, and testified that he had gone into the park carrying a 14-inch metal pipe—the same type of weapon that was used to bludgeon both a male schoolteacher and Ms. Meili. Mr. Reyes’s confession changed none of this. He admitted being the man whose DNA had been left in the jogger’s body and on her clothing, but the two juries that heard those facts knew the main assailant in the rape had not been caught. The five were charged as accomplices, as persons “acting in concert” with each other and with the then-unknown man who raped the jogger, not as those who actually performed the act. In their original confessions—later recanted—they admitted to grabbing her breasts and legs, and two of them admitted to climbing on top of her and simulating intercourse. Semen was found on the inside of their clothing, corroborating those confessions.

Mr. Reyes’s confession, DNA match and claim that he acted alone required that the rape charges against the five be vacated. I agreed with that decision, and still do. But the other charges, for crimes against other victims, should not have been vacated. Nothing Mr. Reyes said exonerated these five of those attacks. And there was certainly more than enough evidence to support those convictions of first-degree assault, robbery, riot and other charges.

In the world of the NYT (and Netflix), Yusef Salaam is “cleared”, “exonerated”, and “innocent”. As of 2019, by contrast, the Wall Street Journal characterized Mr. Salaam as at least guilty of “first-degree assault, robbery, riot and other charges”.

Where it gets interesting is the Wall Street Journal’s world of 2024. “Central Park Five Reunite to Denounce Trump” (WSJ, yesterday):

Five men who were wrongfully convicted as teenagers for a brutal attack on a jogger in Central Park took the stage …

Among the men was Yusef Salaam, who last year was elected to represent Harlem in the New York City Council. “He wanted us dead. Today, we are exonerated because the actual perpetrator confessed, and DNA proved it,” Salaam said.

The misalignment has been eliminated and Americans of all political persuasions can agree that Yusef Salaam was and is a model citizen who happened to be out for a mostly peaceful evening stroll (pipe in hand?) in Central Park on a night when nine people were attacked.