Boston Globe Still Lying For Elizabeth Warren

The Globe was forced to confess that it has no evidence to support its contention that Elizabeth Warren is 1/32 Cherokee. But what was left out of its correction is telling.

The May 15 correction contains four misleading components:
1. The Globe knew on April 30 that the source document for the May 1 story was a 2006 family newsletter written and published in England, which they misleadingly described as a “record." Their correction did not acknowledge this error.

2. The correction’s statement that ”the document, alluded to in a family newsletter found by the NEHGS, was an application for a marriage license, not the license itself,” is a bit of intentional misdirection that creates the false impression that a purported, non-existent “application for a marriage license” referenced in the 2006 family newsletter was the primary document attesting to the 1894 marriage of William J. Crawford, great-great grand uncle of Elizabeth Warren, and Mary E. (Long) Wolford in Logan County, Oklahoma Territory.

3. The last sentence of yesterday’s correction states “Neither the society nor the Globe has seen the primary document, whose existence has not been proven,” re-enforcing  the false impression that the primary document attesting to the 1894 marriage of William J. Crawford and Mary E. (Long) Wolford is the so-called “marriage license application.” The Globe, however, is fully aware that the primary documents are instead the May 12, 1894 marriage license and the May 13, 1894 certificate of marriage, the originals of which are found in Book 2, pages 157 and 158 of the Logan County, Oklahoma marriage records of 1894, a certified copy of which containing the stamp of current Logan County Court Clerk ReJeinia Zmek and signed by her deputy on May 10, 2012 can be seen here. These are the only two primary documents that were ever created, a fact which Noah Bierman was well aware of, since I emailed him the May 11 Breitbart article, Warren's Cherokee Claim Based on Family Newsletter; No Marriage License Application to Be Found, that shows those two primary documents.

4. The correction failed to include relevant descriptive information about what it referred to as a “family newsletter, ”which was, in fact, the March 2006 edition of the Buracker & Boraker Family History Research Newsletters Number 34, published by R.C. Boraker of St. Albans, England, which can be seen here. The correction gave the impression the newsletter was from close relatives within the Elizabeth Warren family, and it further failed to disclose the date of the newsletter, giving some readers the impression in the correction that it may have been closer in time to the 1894 marriage than it in fact was. 

The May 1st story incorrectly referred to the 2006 family newsletter that, before the story’s publication, New England Historic Genealogical Society genealogist Chris Child told the Globe was his source document, as a “record.” That the Globe knew the original source document was a 2006 family newsletter and not a contemporaneous 1890s vital statistics record was confirmed by Mr. Child on Howie Carr’s WRKO radio program yesterday afternoon. Calling the source document a “record” gave readers of the story the incorrect impression that the source document for the story was a contemporaneous vital statistics record from 1894. The Globe knew this not to be true and also knew that a 2006 family newsletter is not a “record.”

Child told Carr that the Globe not only knew the 2006 family newsletter was his source document, he sent them a copy of it on Monday afternoon, April 30, before they broke the first version of the story at 7:48 pm on April 30. This version, titled “Genealogist says Warren may be able to claim Cherokee heritage,“ appears to be identical to the May 1 story which the Globe retracted yesterday, Document ties Warren kin to Cherokees , in all aspects but the title.