The Stories You Love Most Are The Ones We Do Worst

I have spent five weeks reading every story this newspaper has published about Nibiru since January 2019. There are thirty-one of them. This column is about what I found, and the newsroom saw it for the first time when you did.

The count

Fourteen of the thirty-one rest, in whole or in substantial part, on tablet PX-1207.

That is one object. It is a broken object. It has an eleven-month hole in its provenance that this newspaper reports honestly every single time, to its credit, and it is read by two of the three scholars who have examined it as an entirely ordinary ledger.

A desk that has built fourteen stories on one contested fragment has not been reporting. It has been re-describing.

The recycling

Three stories — 4 March 2021, 19 August 2023, and 2 February 2025 — cite this newspaper's own earlier coverage as a source in a way a reader could easily mistake for external corroboration.

The August 2023 piece contains the sentence "as this newspaper has previously established." Nothing had been established. Something had been reported, once, from the same fragment, by the same reporter.

That construction is the oldest trick in aggregation and it is beneath a paper that publishes a Sources & Method box on every story specifically to make tricks like it visible. I have asked the managing editor for a standing rule that our own back numbers may never appear in a sources box without the words "our own earlier reporting" attached, and she has agreed, and it is in force from today.

What the desk does well, since I am going to be believed less if I only complain

Dr. Nkemelu sends her transliterations to scholars she expects to disagree with her, before she writes, and then prints their disagreement at full length without softening it. Dr. Sørensen-Ruiz volunteered in his right-of-reply statement that no other newspaper that has telephoned him about this fragment has done the same.

That is genuinely excellent practice. It is also not a substitute for a second object.

What I am asking for

Three things, and I am asking in public because that is the job.

One. No further story that rests solely on PX-1207. The desk has an object; it needs a corpus. Fourteen stories from one fragment is not a beat, it is a loop.

Two. The phrase "as this newspaper has previously established" should not appear in these pages again. If we established it, cite the evidence, not the article.

Three. A Null Result on Nibiru. This newspaper runs a standing series in which it investigates a claim its readers believe and reports honestly that it could not stand the claim up. In seven years it has never once pointed that series at the single subject its readers care about most. That is not an oversight. That is where the series stops being brave.

I put all three to the editor-in-chief on Tuesday. He agreed to the first two immediately.

On the third he said, and asked me to quote him exactly: "You are right and I do not want to do it and we will do it."

To readers who will write to me about this

You will. You do every time.

The letters I get about this subject fall into two piles and both piles are wrong about what I am for. The first says I am undermining the newspaper. I am not; I am the part of the newspaper that does this, and the fact that I can publish this at all is the strongest thing this masthead has to say for itself.

The second says I have not gone far enough, and that the real story is why the paper covers this subject at all.

That is a fair question and I have an answer I do not much like: because you read it. The newsroom metrics page is public, and the Nibiru stories are not the best-reported things we publish, and they are near the top of the most-read list, and both of those sentences will still be true next month.

I am the reader's advocate. Some of what I have to advocate against is what readers reward.