The New York Times has a new Public Editor — and he wasted no time zeroing in on a flaw he sees in his new organization: it has begun blindly accepting what some pointed to in recent weeks as a notable shift in the White House and military descriptions of Iraq where insurgent attacks are increasingly being attributed to Al Qaeda.

The Public Editor is Clark Hoyt, who had an extensive and a highly distinguished editing and reporting career with the great, late Knight-Ridder Newspaper chain which was swallowed up by McClatchy Newspapers. Among other things, Hoyt ran KRN’s journalistically solid Washington bureau which directed the chain’s highly praised and enterprising Iraq war coverage. He has also given a lot of thought about to where the news biz is going. (DISCLAIMER: I worked for Hoyt briefly before I left KRN’s Wichita Eagle-Beacon to accept a job as a reporter on the San Diego Union. He had become the EB’s Managing Editor.)

His piece is remarkable because it minces no words about the need for newspapers to always remain skeptical, strive to be accurate and to not fall into being sucked into official spin, which often can come in the form of changing the language (much as “pre-owned cars” replaced “used cars”).

Here is the link to his piece, titled “See Al Qaeda Around Every Corner.” But for our purposes here, we’re going to look at parts of it out of order.

First, from the end, his conclusion:

I went back and read war coverage for much of the month of June and found many stories that conveyed the complexity and chaos of today’s Iraq. Times reporters wrote that Iraq’s political leaders were failing to meet benchmarks that would show satisfactory progress to the American government, that a formerly peaceful Shiite city in southern Iraq was convulsed by violence as rival groups fought for control, and that Sunnis feared their own country’s army because it is dominated by Shiites.

But those references to Al Qaeda began creeping in with greater frequency. Susan Chira, the foreign editor, said she takes “great pride in the whole of our coverage” but acknowledged that the paper had used “excessive shorthand” when referring to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. “We’ve been sloppy,” she said. She and other editors started worrying about it, Chira said, when the American military began an operation in mid-June against what it said were strongholds of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.

On Thursday, she and her deputy, Ethan Bronner, circulated a memo with guidelines on how to distinguish Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia from bin Laden’s Al Qaeda.

It’s a good move. I’d have been happier still if The Times had helped its readers by doing a deeper job of reporting on the administration’s drive to make Al Qaeda the singular enemy in Iraq.

Military experts will tell you that failing to understand your enemy is a prescription for broader failure.

Hoyt’s piece raises issues here.

(1) The inclination of officialdom, particularly in the Bush administration, to use language to foster images and trigger emotional reactions. Al Gore dealt with this extensively in his book The Assault On Reason.

(2) The basic dilemma of a newspaper (magnified even more so in this new medium you’re reading here called weblogs) that big stories and tons of information are gathered, written, edited and placed in “news holes” quickly so from the standpoint of time, certain things may not be totally thought through and other things may simply fall through the cracks.

(3) The basic job of a newspaper to always be skeptical of everyone of any party and to question – something that may anger axe-to-grind partisans but is critical if the news media is to be more than a public relations stenographic media easily manipulated by those in power who realize journalists are human and could unintentionally or otherwise take the easy way out.

He begins his piece by laying out a development others have noted:

AS domestic support for the war in Iraq continues to melt away, President Bush and the United States military in Baghdad are increasingly pointing to a single villain on the battlefield: Al Qaeda.

Bush mentioned the terrorist group 27 times in a recent speech on Iraq at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I. In West Virginia on the Fourth of July, he declared, “We must defeat Al Qaeda in Iraq.” The Associated Press reported last month that although some 30 groups have claimed credit for attacks on United States and Iraqi government targets, press releases from the American military focus overwhelmingly on Al Qaeda.

Why Bush and the military are emphasizing Al Qaeda to the virtual exclusion of other sources of violence in Iraq is an important story. So is the question of how well their version of events squares with the facts of a murky and rapidly changing situation on the ground.

And then he zeroes in on the Times:

But these are stories you haven’t been reading in The Times in recent weeks as the newspaper has slipped into a routine of quoting the president and the military uncritically about Al Qaeda’s role in Iraq — and sometimes citing the group itself without attribution.

And in using the language of the administration, the newspaper has also failed at times to distinguish between Al Qaeda, the group that attacked the United States on Sept. 11, and Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, an Iraqi group that didn’t even exist until after the American invasion.

But Hoyt didn’t end it there.

It’s clear he did HIS OWN REPORTING and didn’t just dash off a piece off the top of his head about what he felt needed improvement at his new newspaper:

Middle East experts with whom I talked in recent days said that the heavy focus on Al Qaeda obscures a much more complicated situation on the ground — and perhaps a much more dangerous one around the world.

“Nobody knows how many different Islamist extremist groups make up the insurgency” in Iraq, said Anthony H. Cordesman of the bipartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Even when you talk about Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the idea of somehow it is the center of the insurgency is almost absurd.”

Shibley Telhami, the Anwar Sadat Professor of Peace and Development at the University of Maryland, said, “I have been noticing — not just your paper — all papers have fallen into this reporting.” The administration, he added, “made a strategic decision” to play up Al Qaeda’s role in Iraq, “and the press went along with it.” (Actually, that’s not entirely accurate, but we’ll get to that in a moment.)

He then cites Times stories that fell into the trap and adds some more tidbits such as:

Indeed the most recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, representing the intelligence community’s consensus assessment, summed up the situation this way:

“Iraqi society’s growing polarization, the persistent weakness of security forces and the state in general, and all sides’ ready recourse to violence are collectively driving an increase in communal and insurgent violence and political extremism.” Al Qaeda and the Mahdi Army, a Shiite militia, were mentioned as “very effective accelerators for what has become a self-sustaining intersectarian struggle between Shia and Sunnis.”

In other words, the story of Iraq isn’t the story of all Al Qaeda all the time.

Hoyt is a heavy-hitter and anyone who thinks he’s going to be perfunctory Public Editor better think again. His pieces are likely to be highly readable, thoughtful and, for the Times, potentially course-correcting, stand alone columns.

In other words, anyone who thinks Hoyt will be (using the word used in one of the Times’ less stellar recent journalistic efforts) a “trophy” Public Editor will be as accurate as those who suggest that all insurgent attacks stem from Al Qaeda terrorist attacks.

UPDATE: The always thoughtful Dave Schuler has some thoughts about this controversy as well and whether the subject of the controversy matters. Read IT ALL HERE.