New York Times Needs Dale Carnegie

Democrats in Self-Destruct Mode CCLXX

Much pleasure may be had from this column by J.D. Mullane, from the wild hinterlands of eastern Pennsylvania (brackets in original).

I always imagined the newsroom of The New York Times as a frenetic place with dour men and women earnestly cobbling together the important news of the day, with editors occasionally interrupted by clerks who say, "The president is returning your call."

Busy, busy, busy.

So it was a treat to hear from a couple of Times journalists who graciously took time from their busy, important day to tell me I'm dumb and a hack.

Reporter Richard Perez-Pena and editor Peter Putrimas were miffed at last week's column criticizing The Times' top editor, Howell Raines, who resigned after star reporter Jayson Blair was nabbed last year plagiarizing, fabricating and inventing quotes for Page 1 stories at the nation's most powerful paper.

To me, it's important for readers to know that it's not reporters like Blair who make a newspaper good or bad — it's editors.

Editors control everything — hiring, news content, slant, headlines, who gets to cover the war and who gets to cover the local crossword puzzle competition.

Pecking through my words like an Upper West Side pigeon, Perez-Pena called me a distorter of truth and dismissed the editor versus reporter idea.

"What a dumb thing to say!" he huffed in an e-mail. "A great cook with lousy ingredients makes a bad meal, period."

Dazzling, this logic.

Editor Putrimas was angrier than a metrosexual out of hair gel — especially when I called Times editors "largely unseen boobs."

"A Jayson Blair slipped through our net and now we must pay the price, even to the point of putting up with hacks in the hinterlands like you who think they know a lot but who use their journalistic forum to foment half-truths and unfounded opinion," he sneered in an e-mail.

He unloaded rote bravado: that Times editors are a dedicated bunch who take to the ramparts to protect high standards of journalism.

"We go to great lengths to insure [sic] that facts are accurate, that interpretations are sound and that people can trust what they read in our pages."

Really? Let's test that.

In 2003, Times columnist Maureen Dowd misquoted words in a speech by George Bush, making it seem like the president naively announced that al-Qaida was no longer a threat. Through the use of ellipses, key words were erased from Bush's speech, and Dowd's misleading quote was widely reprinted and quoted in newspapers, on TV and in the foreign press.

A few columns later, Dowd used the entire Bush quote, in context, but neither she nor those hardworking, trusty Times editors have ever explained or forthrightly corrected the original quote.

However, at least six newspapers were forced to correct the Bush quote for readers, and one paper even dropped Dowd's column altogether.

Then there's The Times' Rick Bragg, a gifted and lyrical writer.

In 2002, The Times published his beautiful piece profiling oystermen on Florida's Gulf coast.

He describes "white egrets that slip like paper airplanes just overhead, and the jumping mullet that belly-flop with a sharp clap into steel-gray water."

Sweet.

The story appeared with Bragg's byline and a dateline from Apalachicola, Fla. Just one problem: Bragg didn't do any on-scene reporting, as readers were led to believe.

An uncredited freelancer, J. Wes Yoder, spent several days on the oyster boats collecting the details and doing the story's heavy lifting, while Bragg was an hour away in Fort Walton Beach.

Bragg merely supplied the pretty phrasing.

Worse, Bragg only briefly visited Apalachicola to snag the dateline, a deceptive journalistic practice that Slate.com has called the "dateline toe-touch."

Bragg resigned in 2003 and The Times published an "editor's note" that gave the freelancer credit.

But Dowd, who would have been instantly fired here in the hinterlands, still works for the "newspaper of record."

These writers aren't the newspaper's backbenchers or foolish interns willing to perpetrate journalistic fraud to grab 1A. Dowd and Bragg have Pulitzers.

These are people who were anointed the best by Times editors, the — ahem — smartest editors in the business.

So, boys, spare me the lectures about distortions of truth, half-truths, unfounded opinion, and your sad, gray newspaper's dedication to accuracy and regard for reader trust.

The strange thing is that, after all this self-inflicted scandal, no one in the business will say what's obvious:

The New York Times no longer represents the gold standard of journalism.

Tinfoil, maybe, but not gold.

Here's Mullane's column, Apr. 15, that startled the NYT journalists (journalists?) out of their cozy, insulated existence:

.... Even after Jayson Blair, many of us in the journalism business still reflexively consider it the best paper in the country, though the Blair scandal and the airing of the newsroom's dirty laundry prove it isn't.

As a newspaper reader and as a consumer of news, you are probably unaware of The Times' influence on journalism. You should, since what you read in daily papers or see on network or cable news or hear on radio or read on the Internet is usually traceable to The Times' front page.

This is why The Times reporters enjoy a highfalutin status within the journalism business.

Still, reporters don't make a newspaper good or bad. A newspaper's reputation rests with those who push the levers and make decisions regarding content — the editors.

Editors hire and fire. They control the budget. They decide what news to play up or down or bury or ignore. Editors decide whether to fill their pages with touchy-feely stuff or the hard stuff that causes the political bosses to have sleepless nights.

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein at The Washington Post were great reporters, but they couldn't have written about President Nixon's corrupt administration if it hadn't been for Ben Bradlee, the paper's editor, ordering them to expose the scandal that Watergate became.

Howell Raines might be gone, but many of the editors remain who kept silent and collected a paycheck while Jayson Blair typed his way into infamy.

As long as these largely unseen boobs control the nation's most powerful newspaper, The New York Times will be easy to mock.

Starry-eyed kids sitting in journalism schools around the country should keep dreaming but should also consider working for a more credible outfit.

The Blog from the Core asserts Fair Use for non-commercial, non-profit educational purposes.

P.S. Dale Carnegie? Vide.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Sat. 04/24/04 06:40:12 AM
Categorized as Democrats in Self-Destruct Mode & Media.