Langewiesche claims he “did not personally check out many stories he heard… ‘I’m not a truth squad as far as 9/11 goes… I’m a reporter. I was interested about what people really believed. My readers understand that and have understood that for years.’” (Newsday, 11/18/2002, p. A8)

Apparently, Jeffrey Goldberg, a reader of Langewiesche who wrote a New York Times review of Langewiesche’s book (10/20/2002) only understood that “Langewiesche discovered…instances of looting by firemen, policemen and construction workers.” Now looting by firefighters is a stated fact in the NY Times believed by millions of NY Times readers who still don’t know that Mr. Langewiesche was only reporting “what several Ground Zero construction workers had told him” as opposed to researched facts  and sources as we would rightly assume. (Daily News, 10/19/2002,  p. 10).

And moreover, that Langewiesche did not talk to FDNY Headquarters or firefighters to research his looting stories because he was “writing about the response, not what happened” at the Trade Center. (Newsday, 11/19/2002,  p. A8)

Ironically, Atlantic Monthly Managing Editor, Cullen Murphy, tries to defend Langewiesche by stating that they did “5 months of fact-checking” of his writing. And yet the FDNY Headquarters or the two Firefighters Unions were never contacted by Atlantic Monthly or Langewiesche to check Langewiesche’s “stories” regarding allegations of firefighter looting, even though the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics calls for journalists to “seek out subjects of news stories to give them the opportunity to respond to allegations of wrongdoing” and “test the accuracy of information from all sources.” # # #