"Dean Baquet, [the NYT] executive editor, says 'we were overly cautious' in our handling of [E. Jean Carroll’s] allegations against the president."

Lara Takenaga writes in the NYT:

Many have written to ask us why we didn’t give the allegations more attention on our website and in print. (The Times published an 800-word story on Friday evening, but did not promote the story on its home page until late Saturday morning and did not run a print story until Sunday.) Some questioned whether the lack of prominence showed too much deference to the president’s denials, or whether it even suggested misogyny or an unwillingness to believe a victim’s account.

The Reader Center took the concerns to The Times’s top editors and sat down with Dean Baquet, the executive editor. He said the critics were right that The Times had underplayed the article, though he said it had not been because of deference to the president.... “We were overly cautious.”...

In The Times’s reporting on the Weinstein and O’Reilly cases, editors developed an informal set of guidelines for when The Times would publish such allegations. Those guidelines include locating sources outside those mentioned by the accusers who not only corroborate the allegations but also are willing to go on the record.

So the Times, even in its "overly cautious" approach, was more aggressive than required by its own policy. It ran the story, just not conspicuously. Then, when criticized for that, Baquet interposed a new rule:

[T]he Carroll story, Mr. Baquet said, was different because the allegations were already receiving broad attention.... “We were playing by rules that didn’t quite apply,” Mr. Baquet said. “They’ve allowed us to break major stories, from Bill O’Reilly to Harvey Weinstein. But in this case, it was a different kind of story.”

That is, when they are breaking the story,  they look for corroboration, but when the story is already out there, they can cover the fact that there is a story that is already public. The news is fit to print because somebody else printed it? Or is that about who is getting accused? No...

The fact that a well-known person was making a very public allegation against a sitting president “should’ve compelled us to play it bigger.”

It's about who the accuser is? And E. Jean Carroll is "a well-known person"? I'm skeptical. Baquet seems to be avoiding saying that the NYT should help out the Trump-hating side but it's hard to believe that's not what pushed him to say they were "overly cautious."

I had to look up who E. Jean Carroll is. Wikipedia:

Elizabeth Jean Carroll (born December 12, 1943) is an American journalist and advice columnist. Her "Ask E. Jean" column has appeared in Elle magazine since 1993, and was ranked one of the five best magazine columns (along with Anthony Lane of The New Yorker and Lewis Lapham of Harper's Magazine) by the Chicago Tribune in 2003....

Carroll's column became known due to her opinions on sex, her insistence that women should "never never" structure their lives around men, and her compassion for letter-writers experiencing difficult life situations. Amy Gross, former editor-in-chief of Elle and currently the editor-in-chief of O, The Oprah Magazine, describes the "Ask E. Jean" debut as "though we had put her on a bucking bronco and her answers were the cheers and whoops and hollers of a fearless woman having a good ol time."

NBC's cable channel, America's Talking, produced the Ask E. Jean television show based on the column from 1994 to 1996 (at which time the channel became MSNBC). Entertainment Weekly called Carroll "the most entertaining cable talk show host you will never see." Jeff Jarvis in his review in TV Guide said watching E. Jean and her "robotic hyperactivity drove [him] batty". He went on: "However, then I listened to her and couldn't help liking her. E. Jean gives good advice". Carroll was nominated for an Emmy for her writing for Saturday Night Live (1985) and a Cable Ace Award for the Ask E. Jean show (1995).

Carroll also runs the AskEJean.com website, based on the Elle column, where users can type in questions and receive instant video answers on topics such as careers, beauty, sex, men, diet, "sticky situations", and friends. Users can also join the Advice Vixens, where advice is provided by other users. "Top Campus Sex Columnists" features college advice columnists from across America.

In 2002, Carroll's "The Cheerleaders", which appeared in Spin, was selected as one of the year's "Best True Crime Reporting" pieces. It appeared in Best American Crime Writing, edited by Otto Penzler, Thomas H. Cook, and Nicholas Pileggi (Pantheon Books, 2002).[14]

Carroll has been a contributing editor to Esquire, Outside, and Playboy magazines. Her focus is "the heart of the heart of the country". For an April 1992 issue of Esquire, she chronicled the lives of basketball groupies in a story called "Love in the Time of Magic". In June 1994, she went to Indiana and investigated why four white farm kids were thrown out of school for dressing like black artists in "The Return of the White Negro".

In "The Loves of My Life" (June 1995), she tracked down her old boyfriends and moved in with them and their wives. Bill Tonelli, her Esquire and Rolling Stone editor, has commented: "All of E. Jean's stories are pretty much the same thing. Which is: ‘What is this person like when he or she is in a room with E. Jean?' She's institutionally incapable of being uninteresting."

For Playboy (February 1988) at the height of the "Sensitive Man" era, E. Jean told her editors that "modern women run around complaining that they want a primitive man, so I thought it would be fun to come to New Guinea and find a real one." Carroll hiked into the Star Mountains with an Atbalmin tracker and a Telefomin warrior. She became the first white woman to walk from Telefomin to Munbil in the former West Irian Jaya, and nearly died.

For Outside, Carroll wrote about (among other things) taking Fran Lebowitz camping and going down the Colorado with a group of "Women Who Run With No Clothes On". Several of E. Jean's pieces for Outside have been included in various non-fiction collections such as The Best of Outside: The First 20 Years (Vintage Books, 1998), Out of the Noosphere: Adventure, Sports, Travel, and the Environment (Fireside, 1998) and Sand in My Bra: Funny Women Write from the Road (Traveler's Tales, 2003).

E. Jean Carroll has written five books:

Female Difficulties: Sorority Sisters, Rodeo Queens, Frigid Women, Smut Stars, and Other Modern Girls (Bantam Books, 1985)
A Dog in Heat Is a Hot Dog and Other Rules to Live By (a collection of her Ask E. Jean columns, Pocket Books, 1996)
Hunter: The Strange and Savage Life of Hunter S. Thompson (Dutton, 1993)
Mr. Right, Right Now (HarperCollins, 2004)
What Do We Need Men For?: A Modest Proposal (St. Martin's Press, 2019)

Okay. I'm impressed. I see Baquet's point. She is "a well-known person"... circulating in a sphere I don't visit. Popular writing about sex and relationships.

I'm interested that Trump said about her that she's not his "type." I think people assume that means he doesn't like the way she looks, but reading about her work, I'm inclined to interpret Trump's comment to mean he doesn't go for women who are too sharply opinionated and vocal about relationships between men and women!