New York Times Rips NFL's Retraction Request In Response Letter

The New York Times has responded to the NFL’s request that it retract an article from March 24, 2016 entitled: “N.F.L.’s Flawed Concussion Research and Ties to Tobacco Industry.” The Times replied to the NFL’s retraction request with a letter of its own, penned by the company’s assistant general counsel Dave McCraw.

McCraw says that the Times has a policy of correcting any errors in a story, but “nowhere does your letter identify any factual errors that we made in our reporting on the ties between the NFL and the tobacco industry.”

The letter further reasserts that the NFL’s concussion research “was deeply flawed and incomplete.” Despite serious push-back from the NFL, the Times has held firm.

You can read the entire letter below, but the coup de grace may be the last section, in which McCraw calls out NFL legal counsel, Brad S. Karp for :

"Finally, we were disappointed to see the letter’s patently unfair discussion of the ABC tobacco industry libel litigation and the role of our reporter Walt Bogdanich, who worked on the tobacco story for ABC…While your earlier letter to The Times called the tobacco industry “perhaps the most odious industry in America history,” you somehow fail to mention in either letter that it was your first that represented Philip Morris in that RICO case."

Mic. Drop.