Megan McArdle of The Atlantic digs up some embarrassing information on The New York Times’s Edmund Andrews, and the scoop raises questions for him and for the Times.

McArdle finds that Andrews, who reports on the economy, natch, didn’t disclose—in either his New York Times Magazine piece or his book—critical information about his wife’s financial history, information that muddies his story quite a bit. His book (excerpted in the Times Mag) is about his family getting caught up in the great credit crisis, buying a house they clearly couldn’t afford and drowning in the debt. It seems she was caught up before the bubble began.

The odd thing about Andrews’ omission is that he’s already disclosed a lot of embarrassing information about his family’s abysmal financial management (really a lack thereof). That’s what makes the magazine piece work. You don’t come away from it with much sympathy at all for Andrews. You do come away with renewed amazement at the complete insanity of the financial industry: It was falling over itself to lend half a million dollars to people like this?

…I was handing over $4,000 a month in alimony and child-support payments. That left me with take-home pay of $2,777, barely enough to make ends meet in a one-bedroom rental apartment. Patty had yet to even look for a job. At any other time in history, the idea of someone like me borrowing more than $400,000 would have seemed insane.

I’ll turn it over to McArdle now:

At the end of his book’s harrowing account of mortgage mistakes and credit card crises, Edmund Andrews writes: “While our misadventure had certainly been more extreme than those of many other Americans, our situation was not all that unusual.” And indeed the book reads like the story of an American Everyman, easily sucked in to the alluring world of easy credit as he struggled to blend a new family. The terrifying implication is that it could happen to you—to anyone who leads with their heart and not their head.

But en route to that moral, it turns out the story has been tidied up a little. Patty Barreiro, Andrews’ wife, has declared bankruptcy twice. The second time was while they were married, a detail that didn’t make it into either the book or the excerpt that ran in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine.

She draws the right conclusion:

But this is material information that changes the tenor of his story. Serial bankruptcy is not a creation of the current credit crisis, and it doesn’t just happen to anyone, particularly anyone with a six figure salary.

By omitting relevant information, Andrews is essentially misleading his readers. The new information that his wife has already declared bankruptcy twice changes the story quite a bit. Instead of a tale of how everyone—even Timesmen—lost their heads in the bubble, you now have a far less interesting tale of someone who simply can’t manage her finances—bubble or no. I’m guessing this is why the bankruptcy information didn’t make it into the story.

More problematic is that his wife’s latest bankruptcy came in 2007, which is right in the middle of the events described in the piece. That is critical information. Leaving it out raises credibility questions on everything else in the piece, especially with regards to Andrews’ wife.

For instance, Andrews essentially says his wife is a spendthrift here but makes her out to be a “good” spender—one who’s unselfish:

Patty spent little on herself, but she refused to scrimp on top-quality produce, Starbucks coffee, bottled juices, fresh cheeses and clothing for the children and for me. She regularly bought me new shirts and ties to replace the frayed and drab ones in my closet. She thought it wasn’t worth agonizing over nickels and dimes.

Ryan Chittum , a former Wall Street Journal reporter, is deputy editor of The Audit, CJR's business section. If you see notable business journalism, give him a heads-up at rc2538@columbia.edu.