Why Not Assess The Times Daily?
Jay Rosen writes:
"What were they thinking, and why did they think it?" asks Mark Crispin Miller. This is hard to know, and it may be unknowable.
When The New York Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis told The Boston Globe, ''the assessment of our reporting speaks for itself,'' she was saying: Sorry, we are not going to clarify anything about our clarification. In other press accounts, Times people were routinely unavailable or unwilling to comment. The normal stoicism the paper shows when under attack — or for some, its arrogant silence — returned the day after an extraordinary collapse.
Thus, reporter Jeff Gerth to Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post: "I don't talk about the Times' business, but as a reporter I'm glad that other people talk about theirs." Or this from Managing Editor Bill Keller, replying to a New York Observer reporter who had asked about after-effects: "If you mean, are we going to back away from aggressive investigative reporting, the answer is an emphatic, categorical 'No.' If you mean are we going to select a scapegoat to hang for shortcomings in a generally excellent body of reporting, the answer is an equally emphatic 'No.' Beyond that, your answer will be in the paper. Watch our journalism."
We will. But in the meantime, there are mysteries here. Start with the missing noun for what the paper published. Was it a correction? An apology? A mea culpa? A clarification? The headline is no help: "From the Editors: The Times and Wen Ho Lee." In fact, there is no name for what appeared on Page A2 of the September 26 Times, although Mathis gives an inanely cautious one — "the assessment." This difficulty in naming the item is a clue to its meaning. The New York Times had no descriptive term for what it published because what it published described deeds that have always gone nameless in the paper's imaginary, although these actions are quite evident to others.
Driving the agenda in official Washington (or creating a climate of such urgency that people in government feel compelled to act) is not something the Times imagines itself involved in. Neither is case-building against some figure in the news. Officially, the paper admits to itself no intention to "drive" things one way or the other. It does not take on "cases." Therefore, it accepts for itself no responsibility when things are driven by what the Times does, or when cases explode and soil everyone. From the Times' point of view, the pressure that decision-makers feel when an important story gets continual front page treatment is simply the unintended by-product of great reporting — which as we know is always "aggressive."
Of course, Times people know their work has a much larger effect because of the powerful franchise the Times holds as America's newspaper of record. But they and their predecessors earned that position, the reasoning goes. It's not their problem when people overreact to what the Times prints, or get panicky because stuff thought to be secret appears in print. Nor can they pay attention to every kook or crusader who claims to have spotted an agenda at work, since most of these charges are (in the minds of the editors) self-interested in the extreme, willfully blind to counter-evidence, or clueless about news-work and Times standards.
Thus, the only responsibility the editors have is to be accurate, truthful and fair (plus "aggressive") within the messy conditions of their craft. A philosophy like "Let the chips fall where they may ... " takes care of the rest. But when the chips fell on the Times and Wen Ho Lee, something unprecedented happened. The case fell apart, and when it fell, whatever was supposed to be holding it up looked thin and dubious. Maybe the Times wasn't the actual builder of the case, but the inspector. But when buildings fall on pedestrians, inspectors catch hell, too. Especially if it turns out that they were warned, which the Times was, frequently and publicly, in any number of critiques deploring its coverage in the Wen Ho Lee case.
It's hard to apologize, officially, for something that you do not officially do. Yet this was the rhetorical task before the editors when they composed their statement. They had to express their regret for driving the case against Lee, without admitting that their hands ever touched a steering wheel. That's why it read so strangely and got called a "non-apology" or a "half-apology" by some. Others praised the Times for conducting the review and admitting some mistakes.
But this was even odder, for no one could figure out why the Wen Ho Lee story alone deserved such treatment. There have been many other cases — the Clinton scandals, especially — where internal assessment and self-critique would have been wise, many other moments when critics of the Times hit their mark and raised questions the paper did not answer. By choosing not to explain themselves or their intentions in the nuclear-secrets affair, (Why this? Why now?) the editors left things even more opaque, when their stated goal was to clarify.
Thus, editorial page editor Howell Raines wrote: "Our colleagues in the news department published a lengthy note from the editor reviewing the paper's coverage. The critique affirms The Times's news department's commitment to vigorous, timely reporting and to fairness as an active principle." Well, maybe it does affirm fairness, but isn't this an affirmation the newspaper would seek more than once in a century? "In the spirit of self-examination, we have reviewed the editorials we published over 17 months," Raines added. What spirit does he mean? As Mark Crispin Miller notes: "The New York Times is famous, or notorious, for its stout refusal to permit, within its pages, any frank discussion — indeed, any mention — of its sins."
Competitors like The Washington Post employ an ombudsman, or reader representative, who receives complaints and investigates. The New York Times does not. Back in the 1970s, the Times successfully helped to kill off the National News Council, intended to provide a neutral public forum for disputes involving fairness and accuracy. And there is nothing like it still in the United States. I myself once sat down for an interview with a Times reporter on the tricky subject of "objectivity." Before he began, he warned me that I couldn't talk about the Times or mine it for examples.
Reporter Jeff Gerth was closer to the truth than Raines, with those bizarre words about a "spirit of self-examination" now prevailing at the newspaper. "I don't talk about the Times's business," Gerth said. (But everyone else should talk about their own.) The nation's most powerful newspaper has always had a kind of leadership position here. It takes the lead on remaining silent and stoic when serious criticism is aimed at its reporting.
My reaction when I read the editors' statement was this: why not do it every week or every day? Publishing continuous assessments would make the Times a leader in a different way, showing the rest of the news media what it means to examine yourself aggressively — that is, "without fear or favor." The newspaper's reluctance to talk about itself and its decision-making, let alone its power and the uses of that power, is intricately connected to its tone of commanding authority. But the terms of authority and the task of maintaining it do not stay the same, year after year, decade after decade. Starting tomorrow, The New York Times could begin to speak more often, and with far greater candor, about its own performance — and find that its authority in the culture only grows as a result.
