A Lower Standard for Krugman?: Op-eds at the Times should be as factually accurate as news stories.

National Review Online ^ | June 9, 2003 | Donald Luskin

[xsysmgr]

June 9, 2003

Mr. Joseph Lelyveld
Interim Executive Editor
New York Times
229 W. 43rd Street
New York NY 10036

Dear Mr. Lelyveld,

I would like to draw your attention to a matter of journalistic ethics at the New York Times. There is a need for the newspaper to assure that facts, statistics, sources, and quotations presented in editorials and op-eds be just as accurate as those presented in news stories.

If a Jayson Blair were writing an editorial or op-ed, there would be no ethical requirement that it be balanced or neutral with respect to its political point of view, and I would defend to the death his right to take any point of view the Times wished to publish. But the editorial or op-ed formats would give someone like Blair no greater ethical scope to plagiarize, lie, fabricate sources, imagine quotations, or distort quotations than he would have had as the author of a news story.

The standards of truthfulness in the Times's editorials and op-eds, under the leadership of Howell Raines, declined to a point that would be seen as unacceptable on the news side — especially in this present period of heightened scrutiny. One op-ed columnist in particular, Paul Krugman, has consistently been at the leading edge of this decline. I will be happy to admit up-front that I am very opposed to Mr. Krugman's political point of view, but that does not change the fact that he has repeatedly violated the most basic standards of accuracy and truthfulness.

Please take the time to consider some examples from his most recent column, published Friday, June 6, the first full day of your interim leadership.

Mr. Krugman's June 6 column contains an out-of-context and misleading quotation taken from a story published in the Denver Post on May 26. That same quotation was picked up in a Washington Post column on May 28. The Post later determined that the quotation was so out-of-context and misleading that it issued a correction on June 2. The most charitable conclusion is that Mr. Krugman's column had not been fact-checked.

Here is the quotation as it appeared in Mr. Krugman's column. The person quoted is Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform. Earlier in the column, Mr. Krugman fails to identify Mr. Norquist's affiliation, but says instead only that he is "the right-wing ideologue who has become one of the most powerful men in Washington."

Which brings us back to Senator Miller, and all those politicians and pundits who still imagine that there is room for compromise, that they can find some bipartisan middle ground. Mr. Norquist was recently quoted in The Denver Post with the answer to that: "Bipartisanship is another name for date rape."

A reader of Mr. Krugman's column would reasonably conclude, first, that this quote is something that Norquist said; and second, that it represents his endorsement of coercive and abusive partisan legislative strategies.

For the record, here's the way that quote appeared in the original Denver Post story of May 26:

"Bipartisanship is another name for date rape," Norquist, a onetime adviser to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, said, citing an axiom of House conservatives.

After treating the quotation in his May 28 Washington Post column the same way Krugman would a week later, Al Kamen offered a correction in his June 2 column:

Veteran GOP operative Grover Norquist called Friday to clarify some comments in the Denver Post and in this column last week. ... that line "bipartisanship is like date rape" is not his, he said, but was coined by former House majority leader Richard K. Armey (R-Tex.) when the GOP was in the minority and being bipartisan meant getting the short end.

In its corrected version, it has entirely the opposite meaning as that implied in Mr. Krugman's column. The Post correction revealed that the quote was both not Norquist's originally, and that its meaning in light of its origin was not to endorse coercive and abusive Republican partisanship, but to complain about coercive and abusive Democratic partisanship.

Here is another apparent violation of what should be high standards at the Times. In the same column, Mr. Krugman wrote,

Most media attention has focused on the child tax credit that wasn't. As in 2001, the administration softened the profile of a tax cut mainly aimed at the wealthy by including a credit for families with children. But at the last minute, a change in wording deprived 12 million children of some or all of that tax credit. "There are a lot of things that are more important than that," declared Tom DeLay, the House majority leader. (Maybe he was thinking of the "Hummer deduction," which stayed in the bill: business owners may now deduct up to $100,000 for the cost of a vehicle, as long as it weighs at least 6,000 pounds.)

This quotation from Mr. DeLay is an out-of-context fragment of a larger statement. As reported in a June 4 story in USA Today,

"There are a lot of other things that are more important than that," House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, said of addressing low-income families. "If it is a part of a bigger bill ... and can get us some votes over in the Senate, then I'm more than open to it.''

Mr. Krugman's selected fragment gives the impression that Mr. DeLay is callously indifferent to the plight of "12 million children." But the full context of his statement reveals that this matter is, in Mr. DeLay's mind, simply part of a larger legislative context — as one might reasonably expect any single element of the tax code to be. I was made aware of this by Steven Antler, an economics professor at Roosevelt University.

Further, Mr. Krugman's fact-checkers should have detected his incorrect assertion that the child tax credit was the victim of a "last minute" "change of wording." Mr. Krugman asserted the same thing in his June 3 column, in which he called it a "last minute switcheroo." As Senate Finance Committee chair Charles Grassley explained in a May 29 statement, issued in response to a Times news story of the same date which made the same incorrect assertion,

The change reported in today’s New York Times was not a last-minute revision. The accelerated refundable child tax credit was not in the President’s original proposal, and it was not in the bill passed by the House of Representatives. This credit, a new and expanded spending program, was added to the jobs and economic growth bill on top of the tax-cut provisions during the Senate Finance Committee markup. When House-Senate conferees were forced to fit all of the tax cuts and all of the new government spending into a $350 billion package, the add-ons, including this new government spending, were dropped from the bill.

Also, Mr. Krugman provides no source for the claim that the change in the tax bill "deprived 12 million children." In his June 3 column, he claimed it was "eight million children," and didn't cite a source then, either.

One source that Mr. Krugman does cite in the most recent column is the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. He says,

... as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out, this latest tax cut reduces federal revenue as a share of G.D.P. to its lowest level since 1959.

This organization is cited frequently by the Times — and very frequently by Krugman (at least 14 times other than the most recent column, including Mr. Krugman's columns of 5/29/01, 8/21/01, 9/30/01, 1/11/02, 2/19/02, 4/19/02, 7/30/02, 8/6/02, 8/30/02, 9/20/02, 12/27/02, 1/21/03, 3/21/03, and 5/9/03). In recent Times news stories, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities is identified truthfully as a "liberal group" (as in this news story on May 29) or a "liberal research group" (as in this news story on June 1). Mr. Krugman posted a bulletin on his personal website on May 28 admitting that the CBPP is "Democratic in orientation."

Why are Mr. Krugman's op-eds held to a lower standard of disclosure about the political orientation of sources than Times news stories or messages on his own website?

Mr. Lelyveld, in the Times code of conduct issued in January 2003, you state that "staff members" who "recklessly provide false information for publication betray our fundamental pact with our readers." You state in the code that "It is our policy to correct our errors, large and small, as soon as we become aware of them."

I see in those statements no exclusion for editorial writers or op-ed columnists.

Sincerely,

Donald L. Luskin

— Donald Luskin is chief investment officer of Trend Macrolytics LLC, an independent economics and investment-research firm. He welcomes your comments at don@trendmacro.com.

[gridlock]

...drip...drip...drip...

[xJones]

Kick 'em while they're down, they deserve it. The somewhat less than adequate Pinch-a-loaf has no clue.

[finnman69]

krugman truth squad ping!

[finnman69]

I expect Krugman to issue some smarmy rebuttal to this shortly.

[wildbill]

What about Dowd's recent use of ... to smear Bush?

[WOSG]

Yes, now is the time to write to your local paper and other papers and hold the New York Times to account! Here is my letter to letters@nytimes.com ... write your own:


Sir,

This scandal at the New York Times is the direct consequence of the
politicization of your news reporting. Once you skew the news for one
reason, the web of lies inevitably grows out of control.

The New York Times wont get its reputation back until it puts
truth-telling ahead of Liberal issue advocacy in its news stories.

[Leisler]

KRUGMAN, HANDS UP!

[section9]

I expect Krugman to issue some smarmy rebuttal to this shortly.

He will have to.

This letter was directed to Krugman's managing editor. Krugman will now be compelled to respond. Prior to this, Krugman issued responses on his website and did so in a rather oblique manner.

However, he will do so on his website. He will not do so in the pages of the Times.

Be Seeing You,

Chris

[Leisler]

The Times is an old rundown neighborhood that grand parents say used to be the place. Krugman is the squeegee-man at the corner of Editorial and Page. Dowd, the old crack junkie off in the shadows.

[ConsistentLibertarian]

Whether Dick Armey changed his views about bi-partisanship after 1994 or not, on May 26th 2003 Norquist was endorsing the view that `bi-partisanship' is another word for date rape.

Maybe that's why Mr. Krugman attributed the remark to a Republican who recently endorsed it rather than the Republican who first coined it?

(Aside: How many on FR would disagree with Norquist on this point? How would an appeal for bi-partisan compromise fare on FR? Isn't this view widely held among core Republicans?)

[Tamzee]

This was wonderful... I'd love to see them try to respond :-)

[MainFrame65]

Here is my response Saturday to a couple of local articles about the Times. Our carpetbagger editorial staff here just loves them. The comments relating to this thread are four paragraphs from the end.

****

To the Commercial Appeal, Memphis

Your story about the troubles at the New York Times was a stark but incomplete look at the problems there. All of the things you mention are true. Jayson Blair's egregious and repeated journalistic fraud was the trigger, but he had a lot of help breaking the rules before he was fired. Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd were responsible for this failure, perhaps even more than Blair himself. And their failures encompassed both style and substance. Style, in that they managed by intimidation, fear, and personal favorites instead of direction, evaluation, and competence. And substance, as demonstrated by the departure of Rick Bragg for improper reporting practices that had become common there.

Now the Times has responded to this crisis by firing the individuals named above and appointing a committee to "review newsroom policies, including hiring practices, the use of unidentified sources and freelancers, and byline and dateline practices." All things that they did wrong, but they already know that. The unasked question is, why were these men able to do so much wrong for as long as they did? The unmentioned moose in the room is the publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., a member of the family that controls the board of directors and is therefore unremovable.

Sulzberger might have learned from this episode, but his actions so far are reflexive and cosmetic rather than fundamentally corrective. He fired the publicly identified violators and is examining the processes, but if he fails to re-identify and reinvoke basic principles it will just happen again. He, along with Raines and Boyd, perverted the stated mission of the Times by elevating diversity, political correctness, and leftist advocacy above collecting, analyzing, and honestly reporting "All the news that's fit to print." They need to return to the primacy of that mission.

They need to do a few other things, as well. Under Raines, opinions and agendas had migrated from the editorial pages to the news coverage, and the monochromatically leftist columnists seemed to violate the principles of editorial integrity with complete impunity. The most recent egregious example is the malicious misquote of the President by Maureen Dowd, still uncorrected by the Times even though it has been widely noted in other venues. Additionally, Paul Krugman continues his biweekly prevarication and distortion in their pages, faithfully echoed locally by The Commercial Appeal.

Unfortunately, the Commercial Appeal has followed the Times down some of these same questionable paths, with the same loss of integrity, balance, and readership. Your constant flacking of policy positions in your news coverage, best illustrated by how often a state income tax appears on other than the editorial pages, is painful. We already know you dislike income tax opponents, you can stop now. And I cannot recall any local guest columnist who ever expressed a view within the mainstream of Memphis opinion.

You say in another story that you are reassessing your news practices, but you need to reassess your dedication to basic principles as well. For one thing, you need some intellectual and political diversity on your editorial board. The Mid-South is decidedly NOT the Northeast, and has no desire to adopt its liberal proclivities. Please, in your reporting, tell us about ourselves and stop insisting that we become like you. We're from here, and we like this place. And we are well-educated, modern, adept, and sophisticated, in spite of our local dialect and accent.

Think of it this way. If I were going to visit a new place, one of the things I might do to learn about it would be to read a local newspaper. Perhaps the New York Times would give me some of the flavor of New York. But I don't think my California sister would learn much about my city from the Commercial Appeal.

--
(name & address deleted)
Memphis TN 38134

[ReleaseTheHounds]

Krugman Truth Squad PING!

[gcruse]

PLEASE TAKE ME OFF YOUR PING LIST.
This is my second request.

[ReleaseTheHounds]

Done (first request)!