From
TPM:
The publisher of the New York Times announced Wednesday that the paper was eliminating its public editor position, a role currently held by Liz Spayd.
“The responsibility of the public editor – to serve as the reader’s representative – has outgrown that one office,” Arthur Sulzberger Jr. wrote in a memo to colleagues, which was obtained by TPM. “Our business requires that we must all seek to hold ourselves accountable to our readers. When our audience has questions or concerns, whether about current events or our coverage decisions, we must answer them ourselves.”
For a long time now, we have been talking about the central paradox that prevents the New York Times from moving forward. Going back all the way to the 19th century, the New York Times has been widely noted as being snobbish, prissy, and holier than thou. Perhaps from the paper's very inception, The New York Times has been defined by an unshakable belief in its own superiority.
While this was always a dangerous assumption, for most of the paper's history the risk was minimized by high quality and standards of journalism . When things started to go bad, however, the NYT was fundamentally incapable of honestly assessing and effectively addressing the problems. Judith Miller was not an anomaly; she was an unsurprising and completely representative result of the culture of the paper.
The great irony of a New York Times public editor position is that the more one is needed, the less doable the job becomes. When the paper was having a good run (and it has had quite a few), a public editor could point out real flaws that the paper was willing to address, because the criticism did not undermine any fundamental tenet of superiority. Unfortunately, the past quarter century or so has marked an all time low for the gray lady. Here is a partial list:
Whitewater;
Bush V Gore;
The Iraq war;
False balance;
Credulous reporting of untrustworthy anonymous sources;
Weakness in the face of (mostly conservative) pressure;
Inadequate coverage bordering on complicity with stories like swift boating and birtherism;
And finally, a determination to cling to all vendettas with the Clintons that arguably resulted in the Trump presidency.
Some of the public editors, most notably Margaret Sullivan, aggressively pursued their duties and tried to give voice to the most valid criticisms being made about the paper. The NYT, however, showed no interest in acting to rectify those problems and often gave the impression of not even caring.
Perhaps the selection of Liz Spayd was a reaction against the blunt honesty of Sullivan. From the very beginning, Spayd publicly and enthusiastically bought into the best-newspaper-ever belief system. It permeated her columns and put a clear boundary on her criticisms. She was exactly what her bosses had always wanted and the result was a PR nightmare. It turned out that having a public editor who instinctively cited with her editors over the public was a bad idea.
Here is a sample from last year:
Public Editor
From Wikipedia
The job of the public editor is to supervise the implementation of
proper journalism ethics at a newspaper, and to identify and examine
critical errors or omissions, and to act as a liaison to the public.
They do this primarily through a regular feature on a newspaper's
editorial page. Because public editors are generally employees of the
very newspaper they're criticizing, it may appear as though there is a
possibility for bias. However, a newspaper with a high standard of
ethics would not fire a public editor for a criticism of the paper; the
act would contradict the purpose of the position and would itself be a
very likely cause for public concern.
I don't want to impose a template, but generally one expects public
editors to serve as the internal representative of external critical
voices, or at least to see to it that these voices get a fair hearing. A
typical column might start with acknowledging complaints about
something like the paper's lack of coverage of poor neighborhoods. The
public editor would then discuss some possible lapses on the paper's
part, get some comments from the editor in charge, and then, as a rule,
either encourage the paper to improve its coverage in this area or, at
the very least, take a neutral position acknowledging that both the
critics and the paper have a point.
Here are some examples from two previous public editors of the New York Times.
Clark Hoyt
The short answer is that a television critic with a history of errors
wrote hastily and failed to double-check her work, and editors who
should have been vigilant were not. But a more nuanced answer is that
even a newspaper like The Times, with layers of editing to ensure
accuracy, can go off the rails when communication is poor, individuals
do not bear down hard enough, and they make assumptions about what
others have done. Five editors read the article at different times, but
none subjected it to rigorous fact-checking, even after catching two
other errors in it. And three editors combined to cause one of the
errors themselves.
Margaret Sullivan
Mistakes are bound to happen in the news business, but some are worse than others.
What I’ll lay out here was a bad one. It involved a failure of
sufficient skepticism at every level of the reporting and editing
process — especially since the story in question relied on anonymous
government sources, as too many Times articles do.
…
The Times needs to fix its overuse of unnamed government sources. And it
needs to slow down the reporting and editing process, especially in the
fever-pitch atmosphere surrounding a major news event. Those are
procedural changes, and they are needed. But most of all, and more
fundamental, the paper needs to show far more skepticism – a kind of
prosecutorial scrutiny — at every level of the process.
Two front-page, anonymously sourced stories in a few months have
required editors’ notes that corrected key elements – elements that were
integral enough to form the basis of the headlines in both cases.
That’s not acceptable for Times readers or for the paper’s credibility,
which is its most precious asset.
If this isn’t a red alert, I don’t know what will be.
But these are strange days at the
New York Times and the new
public editor is writing columns that are not only a sharp break with
those of her predecessors, but seem to violate the very spirit of the
office.
In particular, Liz Spayd is
catching a great deal of flak
for a piece that almost manages to invert the typical public editor
column. It starts by grossly misrepresenting widespread criticisms of
the paper, goes on to openly attack the critics making the charges, then
pleads with the paper's staff to toe the editorial line and ignore the
very voices that a public editor would normally speak for .
[Emphasis added]
The Truth About ‘False Balance’
False balance, sometimes called “false equivalency,” refers disparagingly to the practice of journalists who, in their zeal to be fair, present each side of a debate as equally credible, even when the factual evidence is stacked heavily on one side.
There has been a great deal of speculation as to what drives false
equivalency, with the leading contenders being a desire to maintain
access to high-placed sources, long-standing personal biases against
certain politicians, a fear of reprisal, a desire to avoid charges of
liberal bias, and simple laziness (a cursory both-sides-do-it story is
generally much easier to write than a well investigated piece). Caring
too much about fairness hardly ever makes the list and it certainly has
no place in the definition.
Spayd then accuses the people making these charges of being irrational, shortsighted, and partisan.
I can’t help wondering about the ideological motives of those crying
false balance, given that they are using the argument mostly in support
of liberal causes and candidates. CNN’s Brian Stelter focused his show,
“Reliable Sources,” on this subject last weekend. He asked a guest,
Jacob Weisberg of Slate magazine, to frame the idea of false balance.
Weisberg used an analogy, saying journalists are accustomed to covering
candidates who may be apples and oranges, but at least are still both
fruits. In Trump, he said, we have not fruit but rancid meat. That
sounds like a partisan’s explanation passed off as a factual judgment.
But, as Jonathan Chait points out, Weisberg has no record of being a
Hillary Clinton booster. The charge here is completely circular. He is
partisan because he made a highly critical comment about Donald Trump
and he made a highly critical comment about Donald Trump because he is
partisan.
But the most extraordinary part of the piece and one which reminds us
just how strange the final days of 2016 are becoming is the conclusion.
I hope Times journalists won’t be intimidated by this argument. I hope
they aren’t mindlessly tallying up their stories in a back room to
ensure balance, but I also hope they won’t worry about critics who claim
they are. What’s needed most is forceful, honest reporting — as The
Times has produced about conflicts circling the foundation; and as The
Washington Post did this past week in surfacing Trump’s violation of tax
laws when he made a $25,000 political contribution to a campaign group
connected to Florida’s attorney general as her office was investigating
Trump University.
Fear of false balance is a creeping threat to the role of the media
because it encourages journalists to pull back from their responsibility
to hold power accountable. All power, not just certain individuals,
however vile they might seem.
Putting aside the curious characterization of the Florida AG
investigation as a tax evasion story (which is a lot like describing the
Watergate scandal as a burglary story or Al Capone as a tax evader),
equating her paper's pursuit of the Clinton foundation with the
Washington Post's coverage of Trump is simply surreal on a number of
levels.
For starters, none of the Clinton foundation stories have revealed
significant wrongdoing. Even Spayd, who is almost comically desperate to
portray her employer in the best possible light, had to concede that
“some foundation stories revealed relatively little bad behavior, yet
were written as if they did.” By comparison, the Washington Post
investigation continues to uncover self-dealing, misrepresentation, tax
evasion, misuse of funds, failure to honor obligations, ethical
violations, general sleaziness and blatant quid prop quo bribery.
More importantly, the Washington Post has explicitly attacked and implicitly abandoned Spayd's position. Here's how the Post
summed it up in an editorial that appeared two days before the NYT column.
Imagine how history would judge today’s Americans if, looking back at
this election, the record showed that voters empowered a dangerous man
because of . . . a minor email scandal. There is no equivalence between
Ms. Clinton’s wrongs and Mr. Trump’s manifest unfitness for office.
Charles Pierce's characteristically pithy response to this editorial was "
The Washington Post Just Declared War on The New York Times -- And with good reason, too."
If is almost as if Spayd thinks it's 2000, when the NYT could set the
conventional wisdom, could decide which narratives would followed and
which public figures would be lauded or savaged. Spayd does understand
that there is a battle going on for the soul of journalism, but she does
not seem to understand that the alliances have changed, and the New
York Times is about to find itself in a very lonely position.
[Apologies for earlier cut and paste errors.]
