DO NOT miss the editor’s note from The New York Times today, in which the paper admits that it got an early look at Columbia’s internal report on intimidation of students by pro-Palestinian professors, in its own words, “on the condition that the writer not seek reaction from other interested parties.”

Specifically, those “other interested parties” were the students who had brought the complaints — and whose complaints were whitewashed by the report.

This is a real humiliation for the Times, and a big victory for my friend and former colleague at The New York Sun, Jacob Gershman, who exposed the unethical Times “deal” the day after it occurred. (Jacob and the Sun are also the subjects of the Village Voice’s cover story this week, in which the lefty rag tries to cast aspersions on the Sun’s coverage of the Columbia affair. The impact of the Voice’s attack is lessened, however, by the fact that the Voice itself has taken largely the same view of the Columbia story in its coverage.)

Here’s the Times’ editor’s note in full:

A front-page article on Thursday described a report by a committee at Columbia University formed to investigate complaints that pro-Israel Jewish students were harassed by pro-Palestinian professors. The report found “no evidence of any statements made by the faculty that could reasonably be construed as anti-Semitic,” but it did say that one professor “exceeded commonly accepted bounds” of behavior when he became angry at a student who he believed was defending Israel’s conduct toward Palestinians.

The article did not disclose The Times’s source for the document, but Columbia officials have since confirmed publicly that they provided it, a day before its formal release, on the condition that the writer not seek reaction from other interested parties.

Under The Times’s policy on unidentified sources, writers are not permitted to forgo follow-up reporting in exchange for information. In this case, editors and the writer did not recall the policy and agreed to delay additional reporting until the document had become public. The Times insisted, however, on getting a response from the professor accused of unacceptable behavior, and Columbia agreed.

Last Wednesday night, after the article had been published on The Times’s Web site, the reporter exchanged messages with one of the students who had lodged the original complaints. The student was expecting to read the report shortly. But because of the lateness of the hour, and concern about not having response from other interested parties, the reporter did not wait for a comment for later versions, including the printed one, after the student had read the report.

Without a response from the complainants, the article was incomplete; it should not have appeared in that form. The response was included in an article on Friday.

Doesn’t make one trust anything the Times OR Columbia is saying about the university’s anti-Semitism problem, does it?