Poynter: “A blockbuster investigation from The New York Times that provoked officials to intervene in poor workplace conditions in nail salons throughout New York ‘went too far in generalizing about an entire industry,’ Public Editor Margaret Sullivan wrote Friday morning.” That’s, well, cautiously worded: as critics have demonstrated, the series got basic facts wrong and its falsehoods have hurt thousands of New Yorkers, especially struggling immigrants, in multiple ways.

Major congratulations to Jim Epstein, Elizabeth Nolan Brown, and the others at Reason and elsewhere who relentlessly exposed the faults in the Times coverage. And Sullivan’s letter is revealing about just why editors until now ignored Epstein’s Reason coverage, which blew up some of the series’ central allegations about advertised pay rates in the Chinese-language press and about supposed clusters of health effects. “The Times has not responded [because] editors think the magazine, which generally opposes regulation, [is] biased.” Some Twitter responses:

So NYT editors dismiss criticism if coming from a magazine with point-of-view? https://t.co/7WhA24d5Aj pic.twitter.com/zpaFgMBjJd

— Michael Calderone (@mlcalderone) November 6, 2015

Worth noting that NYT opposes letting illegal immigrants work https://t.co/IsX0Xlv9bC Send them back to Fujian? pic.twitter.com/oAtjxxDCCI

— Virginia Postrel (@vpostrel) November 6, 2015

Filed under: environment, minimum wage, New York Times