Given Nikole Hannah-Jones’s status as a celebrity big-foot at the New York Times—winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for her “1619 Project,” winner of a $625,000 MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, occupant of the Knight Chair in Race and Journalism at Howard University backed by “nearly $20 million” from the Knight Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Ford Foundation—you might think that if she discovered a woman wrongfully convicted of murder, she’d marshal the investigative resources necessary to make a thorough case for a presidential pardon, or for legal action to dismiss or overturn the conviction.

Instead of doing that hard work, Hannah-Jones—in her first New York Times byline since September 28 (she appeared on a Times podcast in October)—is out with a brief obituary of the woman who went by the names JoAnne Deborah Byron, Assata Shakur, and Joanne Chesimard.

Hannah-Jones doesn’t come straight out and assert that her subject was innocent, yet she certainly leaves readers with plenty of doubt. She writes, “In 1977, an all-white jury found her guilty of murdering a New Jersey state trooper who died in a shootout after a car that Shakur and her colleagues were riding in was stopped by the police. Officers later claimed Shakur fired the first shot. Shakur, who was shot twice, said her hands were in the air and she didn’t shoot anyone.”

The Times tells you the name of the murderer (and, later, the name of her child) but doesn’t mention the name of the murdered state trooper. He was Werner Foerster, 34, a U.S. Army Vietnam veteran who had a wife, Rosa Charlotte Heider Foerster, and a son, Eric, and a vegetable garden.

The Times tells you that the jury was “all white” but it doesn’t tell you the race of the person who was president in 2013 when the U.S government added Joanne Chesimard to the list of most wanted terrorists. That was President Barack Obama. The Times doesn’t tell you the name of the FBI special agent in charge in Newark who put Chesimard on that list. He is Aaron Ford, who was quoted in a 2013 press release saying, “Joanne Chesimard is a domestic terrorist who murdered a law enforcement officer execution-style.” If the Times is going to say the race of the people in the law enforcement system or the government is relevant, it seems like a double standard to mention the jurors but not the president or the FBI official.

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