They told us at the time that its reporter witnessed the spitting incident with her own eyes. BOB GARFIELD: The New York Times stood by its story. In short, said the critics, this guy was not just a veteran gunslinger but a partisan one.
The critics noted that the story didn't report that Sparling was part of an organized counter-protest nor did it mention that he seemed to be a frequent victim of soldier-haters, at least according to his own testimony on Fox News, where he was a regular guest, and that he’d been seated at a President Bush State of the Union address in the seats just behind Lynn Cheney. Deep in an article in The New York Times, he claimed that a belligerent protester spat at him and he spat back. The coverage of that rally became a hot issue in the liberal blogosphere, mostly because of the placement of a source in some of those stories: Joshua Sparling, an Army veteran who lost part of his leg in Iraq. Do war protesters, dating back at least as far as Vietnam, spit on the troops? Is that something they really do? The question emerged in January 2007, when the anti-war group “United for Peace and Justice” held a rally in Washington. BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I’m Brooke Gladstone, with another cultural trope to debunk.
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