A dispatch from Seoul about a defector from North Korea whose story has changed says the defector's story was "memorialized in a 2012 book, 'Escape from Camp 14,' by a former Washington Post reporter that has been published in 27 languages."
It's pretty funny that now that there is a problem with the story, the Times is referring to the author of the book, Blaine Harden, as "a former Washington Post reporter." Back when it came out, Times columnist and former executive editor Bill Keller wrote that "Harden's book, besides being a gripping story, unsparingly told, carries a freight of intelligence about this black hole of a country."
There's no mention that Mr. Harden was, from 1999 to 2002, a reporter for the New York Times, whose web site still offers readers a "send an E-Mail to Blaine Harden" function.
Why does the Times identify Mr. Harden as a "former Washington Post reporter" rather than a former New York Times reporter? There's no explanation, leaving a cynic to suspect that it's because he's writing about human rights violations in communist North Korea rather than, say, in American prisons or military detention centers, and that the Times is therefore somehow embarrassed to have been associated with him.
Maybe there's a more innocent explanation, such as, say that of the five(!) Times journalists whose names are attached to the article about the change in the defector's story, not many of them have been at the paper, or even reading the paper, long enough to remember when Mr. Harden's byline was in it. But whatever the explanation, it certainly appears odd for the Times, in this particular context, to stress Mr. Harden's Washington Post career at the expense of his time at the Times itself.