Today’s NYT has a page one story about homeless people living in tent cities. It’s clearly designed to elicit maximum sympathy — Gawker calls it “recession porn” — the piece reads like an entry in the annual “Bad Hemingway contest“:

The chief flicks his spent cigar into that same river. There is talk of rain tonight.
Behind him, the camp stirs. Other tent cities have sprung up recently around the country, but Rhode Island officials have never seen anything like this. A tea kettle sings.
[snip]
The rain falls harder, pocking the river’s gray surface, surrounding the dark camp with a sound like fingers drumming in impatience. The chief hears it, but what can he do? He finishes his dinner and lights another cigar.

However, that’s far from the biggest problem with the article. The subject of the article — the cigar-chomping “chief” — is described thusly:

The chief, John Freitas, is 55, with a gray beard touched by tobacco rust. He did prison time decades ago, worked for years as a factory supervisor, then became homeless for all the familiar, complicated reasons.

The blog NYTpicker notes that saying Freitas is homeless for “all the familiar, complicated reasons” elides over some pretty critical information:

A quick Google search — which [NYT writer Dan] Barry was far too busy noting the fact that “a tea kettle sings” to bother with — reveals that Freitas was convicted of raping a child in the late 1970s and of sexual assault in 1985.
In March of 2008, Freitas turned himself in to Massachusetts authorities, after a failure to register landed him on that state’s list of Ten Most Wanted Sex Offenders. Freitas was listed as a “Level 3″ sex offender, which — according to a March 21, 2008 account in the Attleboro, Mass. Sun Chronicle — means he was “considered by the state to be the most likely to commit new sex crimes.”

Uh, whoops. I’m sure even Freitas deserves some compassion, but I’m not sure NYT should spill purple ink all over page one making a child rapist the face of the recession.