Inside the Editors' Minds

Mark Crispin Miller writes:

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. "All the News That's Fit to Print" does not include the crucial news of what the Times itself has done, or not done, to enlighten us. Of course, the paper's editors are unrelenting when it comes to the routine admission of misspellings and mistaken dates and other trivia exposed in the "Corrections" section on Page 2. ("It is WXTV, not WPIX," we read one day. "It is 'Survivor,' not 'Survival,' " we read recently.) But when it comes to major stories that the Times has either misreported or ignored, there's none of that pedantic self-exposure. ("Whitewater" — the Times' creation, and a vast non-story — comes to mind.) And when the paper wants to push a certain line — as it often does — it tends not to recognize dissenting voices, even on the Op-Ed page; but such bald propagandizing likewise goes entirely unremarked thereafter (e.g., the paper's Pravda-style promotion of "free trade").

So why this high-profile volte-face on Wen Ho Lee? Leaving poor Bill Safire twisting slowly, slowly in the wind, the paper's editors have come out with a long, unprecedented half-apology, the likes of which they could as easily have given us (at least) a thousand times before. What's the deal? Was it the specter of racism that inspired them to such near-contrition? Were they pressured by their own Asian-American employees? Does it relate somehow to their official stand on trade with China? Or did they just get sentimental in this case, the hapless Lee (despite the lingering mysteries of his case) appearing to them as a martyr like the hero of "The Fixer"?

In short: What were they thinking, and why did they think it?