Posted on 09/12/2004 7:28:37 PM PDT by 68skylark
NINE months into an 18-month appointment, with enough history to look back on and more than enough journalistic mud wrestling to look forward to, it's time for the public editor to sit for another interview. All questions below are exactly the sort of softballs you'd toss if you were interviewing yourself.
Q. So how was your vacation?
A. Wonderful and weird. Wonderful because vacations are inherently wonderful, but weird because every single day a certain familiar newspaper found its way into my hands - yet by the end of the first week it looked very different from the paper I'd encountered as public editor.
Q. Sunstroke?
A. No - role reversal. I'd found myself once again able to read The Times like a civilian, instead of like an auditor from the inspector general's office or the presiding official at an auto-da-fé. As in my innocent, pre-P.E. days, I would turn first to the obits and then the sports section, and not to the corrections on A2. I read the book reviews as if I were interested in the books under discussion, not in the motivations, inclinations or parentage of the discussants. I gobbled up the extensive coverage the Arts section gave to the downtown Fringe Festival. I didn't read World Business, or the fashion supplement to the Sunday magazine. It almost made me feel like a real person.
Q. What about the political coverage?
A. Sure, I read it. In fact, the day I hit my deck chair, I decided to spend August getting all my news only from The Times. I wanted to see whether total reliance on the paper would enable me to emerge into September with a view of the campaigns that accorded with reality.
Take, for instance, the Swift Boat dust-up. Instead of considering the hundreds of messages from irate readers that accumulated while I was gone, instead of interviewing editors and writers involved in the story, I simply read what was in the paper. I didn't read every word of the voluminous coverage (who reads every word, except a public editor chained to his desk or a Times hater looking for desecrations?), but I read about as much as any normal human might.
Here's what I learned: In a series of ads, a group of Vietnam veterans who served with or near John Kerry in the Mekong Delta charged him with several deceptions about his war service. The ads were financed and produced by a number of people, many of them Texas Republicans, with a connection to President Bush or his associates. One key figure, however, was a political independent who voted for Al Gore in 2000 and has been challenging Senator Kerry's post-service condemnations of certain American practices in Vietnam for three decades.
From what The Times's news coverage told me, official records contradict the central charges leveled in the ads. However, it is not accurate to say, as Senator Kerry has, that he spent Christmas 1968 in Cambodia.
If my summary is wrong, The Times erred. If it's accurate, the paper did a fine job. If my description offends you because you dislike Kerry, or because you think the extent of The Times's Swift Boat coverage lent credence to false charges, this tells me more about you than it does about The Times.
Q. That sounds pretty peevish. Is there more to it?
A. Well, yes. I concluded July with a column ("Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?") that caused several readers to assail me for making a case against gay marriage, and even more to accuse me of giving aid and comfort to supporters of the Federal Marriage Amendment by criticizing The Times's coverage of the issue. I really don't think I did the former, but judging by the enthusiastically supportive mail (including more than 400 identical - and proportionally discountable - postcards from one conservative group), I certainly appear to have ladled out the aid and comfort.
Q. Are you sorry about it?
A. As a supporter of gay rights, sure - but as public editor, not for a second. A political reporter with any claim to honesty can't ignore a story like the Swift Boat controversy, and a public editor with any aspiration to fair-mindedness can't be afraid to agree with people who might well disagree with him on everything else.
I just wish that my allies of convenience would attribute my views to me personally, and not by inference to The Times institutionally. Any sentence that begins, "As The Times's own Daniel Okrent says," should be immediately euthanized. I don't speak for the paper, and if I'm The Times's "own" anything (except, maybe, The Times's own nuisance), I'm clearly failing at this job.
Q. Any results from your challenge to the editors of America's five largest papers, asking them to refuse to report on news briefings conducted by officials who insist on anonymity?
A. Only heard from one of them. Ken Paulson, the editor of USA Today, wrote to say that his paper, in conjunction with The Associated Press, has frequently objected to the anonymity rules of background briefings. However, when his paper's objections are dismissed, it nonetheless feels required to report on the briefings because, Paulson said, "our primary obligation is to keep our readers fully informed." He concluded: "You may want to rephrase your challenge to America's newspapers. Instead of walking out, are they ready to speak up?"
I didn't hear a peep from the editors of The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post or The New York Times. Regarding the first three, I'm with the old Lindy's waiter: "Not my table." But in the months ahead I plan to annoy the last of the four on the anonymous sources issue, both in print and in person. Here are two of the questions I'll ask him: When officials who demand anonymity call a news briefing because they wish to get their story out, but are unwilling to be held accountable for it, why is The Times obliged to be their messenger? How is this different from publishing an unattributed and unsubstantiated rumor?
O.K., Keller - consider yourself asked.
Q. What else do you plan on addressing in your last nine months?
A. The list is long - corrections policy, book reviewing, the use of "experts," loaded language, Middle East coverage, honesty in photographs, what the editors mean by "news analysis" (not to mention "White House Letter," "Political Memo" and various other ways they say "not a news story").
And then, of course, there's that Godzilla hulking outside my window, campaign coverage. Just before Labor Day, I started to get my clipping fingers in shape for the coming ordeal, and by last Thursday I'd already built up an impressive collection of calluses. My colleague Arthur Bovino tells me that while I was away, many readers urged me to write about election coverage sooner rather than later, "while it still might make a difference," as several put it. My take is just the opposite: actor friends tell me that knowing the critics are in the audience will bring out their best performances, whereas the review that finally gets published is often just something to disagree with.
Q. Of course, actors don't like critics very much. How are you getting along with people at The Times these days?
A. Far better than you might imagine, or than I had predicted. I don't want to get into the racket of criticizing other papers (this one keeps me busy enough), but at least one recent report on how I've been received here may have left the wrong impression. Early on, there was exactly as much defensiveness, hostility, and contention as you might expect from a large body of people (Times news staff) that suddenly found itself invaded by a mutant virus (me). But since late spring, it's been entirely different: the body has adapted and apparently finds the virus tolerable, if not exactly pleasant. Overwhelmingly - only one truly excruciating exception comes to mind - the writers and editors I deal with are both responsive and courteous. They may not (I could say "do not," but let me hold on to my illusions) care for what I write, but they aren't letting this get in the way of how they deal with me.
I'm grateful for it, and I respect them for it. And I'm almost ready to say this job has almost gotten to be almost fun.
The public editor serves as the readers' representative. His opinions and conclusions are his own. His column appears at least twice monthly in this section.
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