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New Book by Former 'NYT' Public Editor Offers Candid Reflections By Greg Mitchell Published: May 02, 2006 12:40 PM ET NEW YORK New York Times editors and reporters had reason enough to be wary of Daniel Okrent after he became the newspaper's first ombudsman in late 2003. Imagine how they might feel now that he is totally off the reservation, and coming out with a book on his 18-month tenure, on May 15, called "Public Editor #1." The book, published by Public Affairs, is largely a collection of his columns during that period, with brief updates, but it also includes...

Re "13 Things I Meant to Write About but Never Did" (May 22): As one of those people to whom The New York Times has become a daily ritual - even in Afghanistan - I say thank you. As should always happen when somebody takes up a new, ill-defined job, you molded it into something valuable and even groundbreaking. And in the end, you signed off with style, class and wisdom. We should all hope to have as much effect on our place of work as you did on yours - and on thousands of loyal readers. (Capt.) JONATHAN J....

About to be liberated from his duties at The New York Times, outgoing Public Editor Daniel Okrent, who was critical of the paper's pre-Iraq war coverage but in a measured way, spoke more bluntly in an interview with Salon.com this week. Okrent said the Times did "a lousy job on WMD," and, while it was "not consciously evil," it was "bad journalism, even very bad journalism." Asked if the Judith Miller-led distortions on WMD has proven more destructive than the sins of ex-reporter Jayson Blair, Okrent responded: "I don't know if I could speak to comparative sins. It certainly was...

SOMETIME in the next few days The Times's staff will be presented a statement titled "Preserving Our Readers' Trust." Prepared by a committee of reporters and editors led by assistant managing editor Allan M. Siegal, the document will offer recommendations addressing such subjects as sourcing, bias, the division between news and opinion, and communication with readers. Staff members will be invited to comment, and then executive editor Bill Keller will determine which recommendations to adopt, adapt or dismiss. I haven't seen the recommendations, but I suspect that those having to do with anonymous sources will be the most controversial among...

THE PUBLIC EDITOR et me offer two statements about this paper's coverage of the conflict in the Middle East. First: I find the correspondents at The Times to be honest and committed journalists. Second: The Times today is the gold standard as far as setting out in precise language the perspectives of the parties, the contents of resolutions, the terms of international conventions.Neither of these comments is my own. The first is a direct quotation from Michael F. Brown, executive director of Partners for Peace, an organization that seeks, it says, "to end the occupation of the Palestinian territories." The...

Last Wednesday, a lengthy Editors' Note on Page A2 scooped a scoop I had planned on the toxicity of scoops. The note addressed irregularities in a March 31 front-page article by Karen W. Arenson, "Columbia Panel Clears Professors of Anti-Semitism." The Times, the note explained, had been given a one-day jump on other media in exchange for its agreement not to "seek reaction from other interested parties." While acknowledging that this was in violation of Times policy, the note said "editors and the writer did not recall the policy and agreed to delay additional reporting until the document had become...

THE PUBLIC EDITOR ONE of the more persistent criticisms of The Times comes from those who believe the news pages are the designated disseminator of views passed down from the Olympus that is the editorial page. If there's anyone among the 1,200 newsroom employees of The Times who believes this to be true, I've failed as a reporter: in 16 months, I haven't found a soul here who has ever experienced any pressure, or even endured a suggestion, to conform to the opinions expressed on the editorial page.Hold your hoots. There may be perfectly sensible reasons why some readers believe...

A FEW days after publication of my Jan. 23 column on innumeracy ("Numbed by the Numbers, When They Just Don't Add Up"), Tom Torok, The Times's chief database editor, expressed his strong objections to what he perceived to be a damaging portrayal of his work. I had opened the column with a brief discussion of a story carrying the bylines of Torok and reporter Jacques Steinberg, and then leapt into a discussion of the misuse of numbers elsewhere in the paper. Torok believed, as he said in an e-mail message, that I used their piece "as the lead example of...

“The story is true. The story is true. I appreciate the sources who took risks to authenticate our story. So, one, there is no internal investigation. Two, somebody may be shell-shocked, but it is not I, and it is not anybody at CBS News. Now, you can tell who is shell-shocked by the ferocity of the people who are spreading these rumors.” – a shell-shocked Dan Rather desperately trying to defend his use of fraudulent documents to misrepresent George Bush’s National Guard service (September 10, 2004) In the midst of an internal investigation, Dan Rather announced that next March he...

IN my Oct. 31 column, I took a crude hatchet to The Times's wimpy reliance on "experts," "analysts" and other commentators whose words may decorate a given article but often provide neither coherence nor much more than the illusion of balance. Surprisingly, I didn't hear from any experts determined to defend their positions in the address books of Times reporters. Maybe that's because some of them have established impregnable beachheads: Prof. Stephen Gillers of N.Y.U. has made 24 appearances in The Times so far this year (five under his own name, the rest in pieces by Times writers); Tom Wolzien...

October 17, 2004THE PUBLIC EDITORPolitical Bias at The Times? Two Counterarguments.By DANIEL OKRENT ast week, I argued in this space that The Times is not systematically biased in its campaign coverage - a position that necessarily invites rebuttal. I consequently asked two prominent critics of The Times to take a whack at it. Leading off, Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University and the author most recently of "Letters to a Young Activist"; batting second, Bob Kohn, a California lawyer and the author of "Journalistic Fraud: How The New York Times Distorts the News and...

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...

Other Voices: The Liberal Question and the Privacy Question By DANIEL OKRENT EW Public Editor columns have attracted reader mail as intense as the comments provoked by my last two, "Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?" (July 25) and "When the Right to Know Confronts the Need to Know" (July 11). Many of the messages were informed by experience both personal and professional, especially those concerning the latter piece, about an alleged case of sexual abuse. In addition to the letters published here, readers might be interested in a particularly eloquent demurrer from Times reporter Nina Bernstein, which...

The Great Divider By James K. Glassman "Is the New York Times A Liberal Newspaper?" asked a headline on Sunday. The first sentence had the answer: "Of course it is." If that sounds like a dog-bites-man story, then consider the kicker: The article appeared in The New York Times itself. Its author was Daniel Okrent, who last December became the paper "Public Editor," or ombudsman. Okrent's skillful, fact-filled piece eviscerates The Times for its coverage of "social issues: gay rights, gun control, abortion and environmental regulation, among others. If you think The Times plays it down the middle on any...

Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?By DANIEL OKRENTPublished: July 25, 2004 F course it is.The fattest file on my hard drive is jammed with letters from the disappointed, the dismayed and the irate who find in this newspaper a liberal bias that infects not just political coverage but a range of issues from abortion to zoology to the appointment of an admitted Democrat to be its watchdog. (That would be me.) By contrast, readers who attack The Times from the left - and there are plenty - generally confine their complaints to the paper's coverage of electoral politics...

OF course it is. The fattest file on my hard drive is jammed with letters from the disappointed, the dismayed and the irate who find in this newspaper a liberal bias that infects not just political coverage but a range of issues from abortion to zoology to the appointment of an admitted Democrat to be its watchdog. (That would be me.) By contrast, readers who attack The Times from the left - and there are plenty - generally confine their complaints to the paper's coverage of electoral politics and foreign policy. I'll get to the politics-and-policy issues this fall (I...

When the New York Times decided to hire a "public editor," it wanted to heal a damaged institution. The Jayson Blair scandal -- which began with a reporter's fabrications and ended with the firing of two top editors -- had badly bruised the paper's credibility. The public editor would scrutinize the Times's future performance and act as an advocate for readers. Daniel Okrent, a veteran magazine editor, has been the Times's public editor for seven months. But instead of bringing calm, the experiment has created fresh tensions within the Times about such subjects as the paper's coverage of weapons of...

June 27, 2004THE PUBLIC EDITORThe Report, the Review and a Grandstand PlayBy DANIEL OKRENT PORTS columnists have forever used the phrase "hitting to all fields" to introduce pieces that cover a variety of subjects. Unlike the best of them, who work a different story into every sentence, I can manage only three swings. Conveniently, I've aimed one to right field, one to left and one straight up the middle.Stretching across four columns of the front page, the June 17 headline "Panel Finds No Qaeda-Iraq Tie; Describes a Wider Plot for 9/11" caused some readers, including Vice President Dick Cheney, to...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Institutional failures at The New York Times led to it being used in a "cunning campaign" by those who wanted the world to believe Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, the paper's ombudsman said on Sunday. Daniel Okrent, who has the title "public editor," wrote in a scathing review of the paper's coverage of the weapons issue ahead of the Iraq invasion last year that The Times had been guilty of flawed journalism. "Some of The Times's coverage in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq was credulous; much of it was inappropriately italicized...

UNLESS I acquire some unexpected clout around here in the next 48 hours, Times readers will wake up on Tuesday morning to read a prominent story announcing the nominees for an artistically meaningless, blatantly commercial, shamefully exclusionary and culturally corrosive award competition. Let me put it another way: unless Times editors have overcome several decades of their own inertia, readers on Tuesday will find a prominent story serving the pecuniary interests of three privately controlled companies whose principals have earned the right to convene in what Damon Runyon once called "the laughing room." That was Runyon's term for the sound-proofed...