A 9/11 Story's Facts Unravel
The Times reports that the Daily News "published an article describing how Officer Borja had rushed to the trade center site after the twin towers fell, breathing in clouds of toxic dust that seared his lungs, and how he had chosen not to wear protective gear because the federal government had declared the air safe." The Daily News also wrote that Borja had "volunteered to work months of 16-hour shifts in the rubble," information that was later cited by Sen. Hillary Clinton in a letter to President Bush requesting more money for ground zero workers. The Times notes that some of those claims were repeated in other stories by the Daily News and in other news outlets.
But in interviews with Borja's family and a review of government records, the Times writes that "very few of the most dramatic aspects of Officer Borja's powerful story appear to be fully accurate."
The paper's research and interviews (with Borja's widow, Eva, and his son, Caesar) revealed instead that Borja "did not rush to the disaster site, and that he did not work a formal shift there until late December 2001, after substantial parts of the site had been cleared and the fire in the remaining pile had been declared out." According to a memo book in which Borja kept track of his work and shown to the Times by his wife, "there is no record of his working 16 hours in a shift. He worked a total of 17 days, according to his records, and did not work as a volunteer there. He signed up for the traffic duty, his wife said, at least in part as a way to increase his overtime earnings as he prepared to retire."
"It's not true," Borja's wife is quoted as saying to the Times regarding the Daily News' account of her husband rushing to ground zero immediately after the collapse of the World Trade Center.
Borja's son told the Times that he "never tried to correct" the impression that his father was a first responder because "I never knew the truth of whether my father was there or not. It was always a mystery for me. I never thought of correcting them because I honestly believed it myself."
The Daily News has responded to the Times article with its own interview with Borja's son, which quotes him as asking: "Why are they attacking my father's honor? I don't see my father [as] any less of a hero. To me, heroes are heroes."
The Daily News also released a public statement yesterday that says, in part, that "Sadly, Ceasar Borja is not here to defend himself to the New York Times as it questions his actions three weeks after his death."
And, true to form, The New York Post gleefully reports (in a piece titled "Death of A Myth") the shortcomings of its rival paper. The story was "hype," writes the Post, "courtesy of The Daily News, the circulation-starved daily which had seemingly gotten its hooks into a good one."
But at another New York daily, Newsday, columnist Ellis Henican lashes out at the press for promulgating the story. "It was a story too good to check out," he wrote, "once the news media and the politicians got done shaping it for their own special purposes." He added later that while politicians also bore some responsibility, "none of this would have happened without the news media."