It had all the elements of high drama: a major newspaper (the New York Times) running an expose raising potentially-explosive questions about the political and sexual activities of a Senator poised to get a major party’s Presidential nomination (John McCain). Controversy. Press coverage. Partisan recriminations. So who came out most damaged?
According to Jay Rosen, one of the nation’s top journalism professors and a leading media issues blogger, the New York Times emerged with a shiny, black eye. And his opinion that the Times didn’t have all of its bases covered, and ran a piece that in some ways can be portrayed as offbase, is echoed by Time’s own Public Editor.
Meanwhile, a new Rasmussen Reports poll finds that these aren’t the best of times for the Times:
Just 24% of American voters have a favorable opinion of the New York Times. Forty-four percent (44%) have an unfavorable opinion and 31% are not sure. The paper’s ratings are much like a candidate’s and divide sharply along partisan and ideological lines.
By a 50% to 18% margin, liberal voters have a favorable opinion of the paper. By a 69% to 9%, conservative voters offer an unfavorable view. The newspaper earns favorable reviews from 44% of Democrats, 9% of Republicans, and 17% of those not affiliated with either major political story.
Rosen has written two MUST READ POSTS that must be read IN FULL. Writing about them actually does an injustice to them, so we’ll give you a small excerpt from each long, info-packed piece — and urge you to go to the original links and read them in full.
The first one titled Public Editor to Bill Keller: “You Haven’t Got it” says, among other things:
.Clark Hoyt’s verdict: wrong to run. Mine: “Times editors are smart people prevented by their own codes from thinking politically. Yet those same codes permit intrusions into politics, like the Vicki Iseman story, that require them to think politically or risk terrible missteps.’
“It’s hard to see how editorial judgment at the Times could suffer a defeat in the court of opinion more clear cut than this.”
Now in the pages of the New York Times, readers can be told about “prosecutorial discretion,” and they are expected to be grown-up enough to handle this wrinkle in how the world works. But when it’s time for a lesson in Editor’s Discretion suddenly all sophistication disappears, and we are supposed to believe that the Times had no choice: if sources said “romance” we have to say romance.
But the readers who can handle “not every crime deserves to be prosecuted,” are the same readers who understand that the New York Times did not have to say a word about the romance to publish the essentials of the story. Politically, they are miles ahead of where Abramson’s explainer stands: wiser than their newspaper. This seems to me a kind of credibility gap. How are you going to explain politics to me, if you don’t even understand the politics of what you published last Thursday?
Read the entire piece. At the end he also adds this laser-like observation:
Final note: I don’t know Bill Keller, and don’t claim to understand him. Watching him from a distance, and reading his explanations of things, I get the sense that he while he has accepted the need for transparency, intellectually, he is pulled, as many at the Times are pulled, toward an opposite idea: the cathedral of news. An authority so strong that it doesn’t have to explain itself, or take questions from doubters at all. Instead you have to watch the paper for what the paper decides to do next. This notion is not dead at the Times. But it’s the opposite of transparency. It’s an idea about editorial mystique.
Let’s not forget Keller’s declaration on Thursday: “We think the story speaks for itself.” The next day the Times was publishing 6,000 words that spoke further for the story that was to speak for itself.
Rosen also serves up a second MUST READ post that needs to be read in full, titled:
Cliff Notes Version of the Q and A with New York Times Readers About the McCain Investigation:
Here is my condensed version of the Q and A with readers that ran in the New York Times Feb. 21. It was meant to explain the decision-making that went into its article on John McCain’s involvement with lobbyist Vicki Iseman.
You can read theirs. Or try mine, which distills theirs down to the essential press think in it
Click on the link and read it all.
PERSONAL NOTE: In my newspaper career I wrote from overseas for a slew of newspapers from around the world, a news magazine and did some radio reports from Madrid. Then I came back and worked as a reporter on two newspapers owned by big newspaper chains.
Neither my undergraduate work at Colgate University or my graduate work in getting a masters in journalism at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism prepared me for two ill-fated instances in my newspaper career where editors at each of the newspapers at which I worked saw a great story and wanted to get it in the paper ASAP because they feared the completion would get it first.
In retrospect, these were smaller versions of the trap the Times apparently fell into. The stories were seemingly solid but when managers at several levels feel there is the need to get something into the paper immediately because they believe its a hot story and/or the competition knows about it and could do it first real soon, the scene is set for small mistakes that don’t look so small when the paper finally comes out.
It isn’t that the journalists — or press outlets — involved are evil, or have political agendas. It’s that they let their guards down for a mini-second and make a judgment that they might not otherwise make amid fears that a competitor may be looking over their shoulders and be poised to turn a long-worked story-in-waiting into a re-write of another news outlet’s “scoop.”
Stories seldom speak for themselves, in reality.
Stories that could entail lawsuits or change history are invariably the product of oversight at higher levels in terms of solid sourcing, confirmation quotes, and the filling of journalistic holes.
It’s just that in the heat of perceived competition and the frenzied rush to get it out there first there is a risk that somewhere an “i” won’t be dotted — and that can lead to a black eye.
Cagle Cartoon by Olle Johansson, Sweden
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.