If you subtract out the Gawker snark and passive-aggressive tendencies, here's a reasonable account of a New York Times investigation of former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.
A point of personal privilege: Sorkin told New York that Gawker "misquoted" him in an earlier item on claims from some at the Times that he ripped off the reporting of his colleagues Don Van Natta Jr. and Gretchen Morgenson for his book. Van Natta and Morgenson had used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's call logs, as well as an ethics waiver Paulson received from the White House allowing him to work directly with his former employer Goldman Sachs. Both documents figure prominently in Sorkin's promotional push for Too Big to Fail, and some at the Times claimed that Sorkin had learned of their existence from the Times and piggybacked on the paper's reporting. Sorkin told Sherman that we misquoted him when we reported that he'd told us that he first FOIA'd the logs and the waiver in June; in fact, Sorkin says, he'd only FOIA'd the logs at that time. Here's what happened: Sorkin told us he'd FOIA'd the logs and—according to our notes of the conversation—"all the ethics documents" in June. We took that to mean the ethics waiver. Sorkin has since explained to us that it did not—he used FOIA in June to try to obtain the logs and the original ethics letter that Paulson wrote when he joined Treasury pledging not to work on Goldman Sachs issues, but not the waiver that later relieved Paulson of that obligation.
Additional Gawker reporting (and they actually do reporting; not just snark) describes how the call logs were eventually published, not just quoted from selectively to put a story together.
The grand irony of this flap is that much of it would have been rendered moot had the Times simply done what Sorkin did so effortlessly: Put the documents at issue online. Had Van Natta and Morgenson's story been accompanied by images of Paulson's call logs and waiver, it probably never would have occurred to Sorkin to claim ownership over them in his publicity campaign for the book. But that's another Times world disconnect between the youthful web-focused culture and the old-school diggers—after Van Natta and Morgenson spent months working to get access to the documents, they apparently didn't think to push their editors to share the originals with their readers. Others did: Talking Points Memo got hold of the waiver on August 10, the day after the Times story, and put it up in their document collection without much fanfare. And you can read Paulson's call logs—"actually see inside what Treasury was doing," as Sorkin put it on CNBC—on the Department of Treasury's web site.
