The Porch Overlooks No Such Thing Recent changes at the New York Times
ADLER, RENATA
The Porch Overlooks No Such Thing Recent changes at the New York Times BY RENATA ADLER 1 HERE'S NO COMPLACENCY HERE. Never has been. Never will be." (Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., publisher of the...
...NBC has decided the story was always anyway an "action/adventure" story, already largely in the public domain...
...NBC has decided meanwhile to produce a special television Then Mr...
...Apart from this work for NBC (which will shoot the film from "his perspective"), and a large contract for a book, he has a job with a lobbying firm in Washington...
...they were not even aware that it existed...
...At a retreat in Tarrytown, New York, in September 2000, Joseph Lelyveld had expressed to eighty newsroom editors, and a few colleagues from other publications, his belief that the Times had become "the best New York Times ever—the best written, most consistent, and ambitious newspaper 16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 2003 Times readers have ever had...
...WHAT WILL COME of all this...
...FACTUAL ERRORS...
...If the Times had spent a fraction of the space, energy and zeal which it devoted to its "investigation" of the errors of Jayson Blair on a genuine investigation of its own factual and ethical transgressions in covering the case of Wen Ho Lee, it would have made a valuable contribution, even marked a turning point in the history of journalism, particularly its own...
...So the saga began publicly on April 30, 2003—when both the Associated Press and Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post ran the story...
...The Pulitzer might lose some of its magic properties for them as well...
...Wen Ho Lee...
...What was beyond explanation was the need to apologize to a whole profession for an "episode" which can have caused no conceivable harm to any conscientious journalist, anywhere...
...Whatever is meant by "scapegoat," "demonize," "venality," "police state," and even "ripping off the company," this is an odd formulation of the problem...
...I used to think one needed the New York Times, and perhaps one does...
...It is hard to know what members of the Times staff can have expected from a former boss whom they had savagely attacked in every conceivable forum—from a "town meeting" in which he had to listen to insults both personal and professional and even to abase himself with the sort of confession reminiscent of a Maoist party cell (with the added ignominy of having a toy moose placed in his 14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 2003 The Porch Overlooks No Such Thing Recent changes at the New York Times BY RENATA ADLER 1 HERE'S NO COMPLACENCY HERE...
...After a while, there was some pretense that the invitation extended to complaints about any and all Times reporters, but this was clearly untrue...
...A cause of "pain" and "hurt...
...IIIHE SECOND PIECE, the "accounting" 1 (6591 words), divided each of several flawed articles by Blair into (capitalized) categories of flaw: DENIED REPORTS...
...it had become a driving force in the prosecution and vested its reputation there...
...Perhaps he hated travel, had become phobic about it...
...In any event, with the Times report, on May 2, 2003, of Mr...
...Neither the Times reporter nor anyone else from the Times (or the FBI apparently) had troubled to try so direct a route...
...The search, the grail, the motivating principle for individual reporters has become, not the uninflected reporting of news, but something by now almost entirely unrelated: the winning of a Pulitzer Prize...
...Such a barrage of furious, self-righteous email posted by Times reporters...
...Bragg had really done the reporting for a bylined piece about oystermen in Apalachicola, Florida...
...The exception was its coverage, in 1999 and 2000, of Wen Ho Lee...
...Everyone knew, or rather everyone who paid any attention to the matter knew, that racing somewhere for a single day just to claim the authority of a dateline is a common practice even among the most admired journalists writing about the most serious, contentious subjects...
...Calling attention to major or substantial errors will have no result at all...
...Rivard asked them to "acknowledge publicly" that the Times had wrongfully appropriated Ms...
...So, apparently, had a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, Rick Bragg...
...Sulzberger had assembled the Times staff to announce the appointment of a new executive editor, Bill Keller, a popular choice...
...fear, widespread and justified, of the Times...
...The narrative, by five reporters (one a fine lawyer, Adam Liptak) and two research assistants, relied on "more than 150 interviews," as well as expense accounts and phone records, to conclude that Jayson Blair, in 600 pieces written over a period of four years, had "flouted long-followed rules" at the Times in "a pathological pattern of misrepresentation, fabricating and deceiving...
...One couple whom Blair had interviewed by phone, the parents of a Marine scout then stationed in Iraq, were so "delighted" with his piece that they wrote a letter, which the Times published...
...Having leveled virtually the entire arsenal of the paper at a man whom its own narrative had already described as "troubled," it now invited the whole world to join it in this hunt...
...Just to illustrate, however, the level of corrections the Times found it worth the huge expenditure of its own space and energy to make: February 10, 2003, FACTUAL ERRORS—"Ms...
...Perhaps aware of how such an allegation would normally be treated, Mr...
...In the absence of a basis for trust, the news itself becomes unascertainable, even ceases to exist—or is reduced, as is now almost the case, to contending strategies of public relations...
...He had even said (somewhat more debatably) that "the great advantage" the Times has "over any other news organization in the world" is "brain power...
...Blair pulled details out of thin air in his coverage of one of the biggest stories to come from the war, the capture and rescue of Pfc...
...Another, a wounded soldier whom Blair also interviewed by phone, was so taken with a sentence Blair ascribed to him that he apparently could not quite bring himself to relinquish it: "he could not be sure," he told the Times, "whether he had uttered" the sentence—which the Times had, in fact, chosen, on April 19, 2003, as its "Quotation of the Day...
...4, Renata Adler is the author of seven books...
...In fact, not even the most fanatically press-obsessed reader could much care about the endlessly detailed re-reporting of what had been from the outset trivial stories...
...Perhaps, since the Times narrative said he had (among other "personal problems") a cocaine habit, he wanted to stay near his dealer...
...Blair had in fact been assigned to something important, "one of the biggest stories to come from the war...
...Mr...
...At the same time, its one inviolable belief has become simply this, not a politics, right or left, but an ideology: the Times, as an institution, believes what has been published in its pages...
...Howell Raines, Keller's predecessor, had appeared on The Charlie Rose Show a few nights before, and expressed several views critical of the paper...
...A reader has neither the time, nor the inclination, nor the resources to approach his newspaper with sufficient skepticism to doubt every single element of every story...
...Well...
...But not this Times...
...To defend this belief it will go very far...
...And the research assistant has disappeared...
...This is, in its way, a classic utterance...
...In its underlying idiocy and limitless self-regard it also manages to embody, and project through time, a virtual dCHANGES AT THE TIMES lap) through a campaign of venomous emails, posted all over the Internet...
...Then the reporter asked somebody at the lab whether he knew anything about the missing man...
...In its two long pieces, the narrative and the account, The Times had apparently been under the delusion (1) that by making corrections to already trivial stories it was conveying useful information, and (2) that it was engaged in some act of self-criticism, or even self-examination, in enumerating the errors of one small, unimportant reporter on its staff...
...You may have wondered what happened to that Iraqi lawyer...
...OTHER ISSUES—"Mr...
...Ripping off the company...
...On May 11, 2003, Sulzberger was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal...
...vendetta journalism...
...In the Jayson Blair turmoil at the Times, however, Mr...
...He had described the Times as "an irreplaceable national institution...
...In fact, it feels victimized...
...Blair, having been hired, promoted and given the status of full-time reporter under Lelyveld, and thrived under Raines, could only sustain his pace by making economies of time and energy: no travel, some appropriation of other people's work, some embellishment of stories, some fabrication...
...The paper still has some very fine editors and reporters, with highly honorable concerns...
...In any case, the hounding of Mr...
...The Times account seemed an act of journalism run more seriously amok than anything contemplated by Jayson Blair...
...Hernandez's work...
...He will be working with Jessica Lynch, to help write the story, presumably—since the Lynch family has always been (in contrast with all those who claim to speak for them) honest—the true story of Jessica Lynch...
...Do we have a system to uncover venality...
...Blair's resignation, and the reason for it, the matter should have rested...
...WHEREABOUTS...
...Well...
...Sulzberger's words were intended—and perhaps somewhere perceived—as a rebuttal to this remark...
...The most recent is Canaries in the Mineshaft...
...This last point rests on two fairly odd assumptions: first, that a man who has "discussed" with a reporter a "fact . . . on the condition that it not be published" can, in most cases, expect the reporter to see to it that it is not published...
...Frankly," NBC's Entertainment president Jeff Zucker said, Private Lynch had only "a minor role...
...Ballenger said he discussed the fact that his son, James IV, had dropped out of college on the condition that it not be published, and that he was upset to see it in the paper...
...The hounding began...
...A newspaper that insists on infallibility in large matters, while pointing out, as the Times does in correcting Jayson Blair, "The sister of Corporal Gardner is named Cara not Kara," is a less trustworthy source of news than a paper without a Corrections column of any sort...
...Sulzberger said that there is little anyone could have done to prevent Mr...
...1HE SAGA BEGAN on April 26, 2003, when the Times published a piece which a 27-year-old staff reporter, Jayson Blair, had essentially cribbed from an article published eight days earlier in the San Antonio Express-News...
...Retrace did, however, produce one, innocent casualty...
...Systematic fraud...
...What a scandal...
...Most likely, though, on the basis of the versatility and frequency of his pieces (sometimes, though the Times narrative does not mention this, two and even three bylined pieces in a single day), Blair was staying near home in order to write...
...Stories published under deadline pressures, in an effort to cover the world on a daily basis, are bound to contain quantities of misinformation...
...But the subjects of these pieces did not care...
...As the Times' powers have grown (through the attrition of other newspapers), its sense of the vulnerability of the individual in the face of those institutional powers has vanished...
...Bragg would have been out "in a heartbeat...
...He had even said (somewhat more debatably) that "the great advantage" the Times has "over any other news organization in the world" is "brain power...
...She is currently a University Professor at Boston University...
...Lying...
...For all the lectures he was apparently subjected to, for all the talk of "disciplinary" action, "short leashes," "reprimands" (in much of the narrative, the Times sounds for all the world like a cross between the Curia and a particularly dull reformatory or boarding school), Blair showed that, while he had little respect for the system, he was all right with individuals...
...Well...
...Let's not begin to demonize our executives—either the desk editors or the executive editor or, dare I say, the publisher"), he said, "This is not a Howell problem, this is not an Arthur Sulzberger problem—this was a bad man doing bad things...
...Blair had clearly incurred, at the Times, a lot of envy...
...It is hard to know what members of the Times staff can have expected from a former boss whom they had savagely attacked in every conceivable forum—from a "town meeting" in which he had to listen to insults both personal and professional and even to abase himself with the sort of confession reminiscent of a Maoist party cell (with the added ignominy of having a toy moose placed in his 14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 2003 The Porch Overlooks No Such Thing Recent changes at the New York Times BY RENATA ADLER 1 HERE'S NO COMPLACENCY HERE...
...Astonishment and dismay, however, expressed on many blogs...
...The staff, however, was preoccupied with something else...
...No, we don't...
...Blair's having visited her home in Los Fresnos, Texas...
...A series of pieces in the Times, between March 6, 1999, and September 26, 2000, played a major part in sending an innocent man to prison, and keeping him there, for nine months, in solitary confinement, often in shackles—until a federal judge, appointed by President Ronald Reagan, apologized to him on behalf of the United States government and ordered his release...
...Bragg's work, and who had asked to work for him, in order to learn from him...
...A complaint of misquotation or any other error to a web address at the Times called retrace, everyone agrees, would be as futile as, say, a letter to the Book Review pointing out a complete and deliberate misrepresentation of a non-fiction book...
...I used to think one needed the New York Times, and perhaps one does, but not this Times...
...Not one of Blair's pieces, mostly soft, human-interest news of the sort which the Times has increasingly favored, seemed harmful either in intent or in effect—at least for their subjects...
...With one exception, the Times had paid no attention to the problems raised by any of them...
...politically correct "diversity" as defined by category (racial, ethnic, gender, sexual preference) so as virtually to exclude individuality, and thereby paradoxically assure uniformity...
...Jessica D. Lynch . . . Mr...
...Pp RENATA ADLER become, in this case, an obsession, a subject of limitless horror and indignation for the Times...
...Grounds for dismissal, certainly—once Blair had made the cardinal mistake of stealing from a publication whose power to expose the theft was greater than the Times' power to conceal it...
...Maureen Dowd was partly right in comparing this spectacle to Lord of the Flies—with this difference: the Times, in recent years, has lost any awareness of the relation between the one and the many, of the real moral questions raised by piling on and ganging up...
...Not inconsistent with these considerations was the fourth document of May 11, 2003, the briefest of all (31 words...
...One of the finest, most beloved and respected editors at the Times, in the years of its greatest reliability, distinction, and aspiration toward objectivity and fairness, told me that he had never, in any publication, been quoted accurately...
...When he praised, as he often did, some other writer's work, he had the good sense for instance, uncommon even in professional writers, to single out "something far down in the story," as one of the Times really fine reporters said, "so you'd know he read it...
...For one thing it begins with a perfect example of the self-refuting sentence...
...On a single day, March 24, 1999, the paper had carried on its front page a story that Dr...
...The paper will continue for a while, in its self-regard based on the values and achievements of another time...
...the identity and reliability of sources...
...It too bore the headline A series of pieces in the Times played a major part in sending an innocent man to prison and keeping him there for nine months...
...Too 20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 2003 busy with extensive cross-checking and multiple vetting of sources...
...The apology, if any, seemed misdirected...
...Jessica Lynch has withdrawn her cooperation...
...In retrospect, and in the context of the Jayson Blair pieces, the coverage of Wen Ho Lee looks worse than ever, based on profound, unacknowledged, continued and truly damaging errors—which the Times to this day insists were not errors at all...
...On May 2, the Times reported his resignation, and added an Editors' Note to the effect that the paper had begun "an internal review" of the piece in question, that it regretted the "breach of journalistic standards," and that it planned an "apology" to the "family" that was the subject of the piece...
...We might have been in the realm of dateline—or perhaps whereabouts—fraud again...
...This is, in its way, a classic utterance...
...and second, that when a Mr...
...A reporter who had actually traveled that day from Washington to Los Alamos saw the Times exclusive story and despaired...
...The Times, committed to an image of infallibility on every important factual matter, will neither acknowledge them nor respond in any way...
...The normal reader did not care...
...Raines had claimed, however, that the Times had become a "culture of lethargy and complacency...
...It is difficult to catch someone who is deliberately trying to deceive you," said another...
...Perhaps the reporter had called without reading the casualty lists released each day by the DOD...
...and then to scour the earth for some good faith source of factual information...
...He said not only that stringers were not uncommon but also that he had always considered it a point of honor actually to go to the place mentioned in the by-now-sacred dateline, in time to claim it honorably for his piece...
...The paper was not just the instrument of other powerful institutions against the individual...
...But these are distinguished reporters, and their actual location, at the time of reporting, is part of the essence of their work...
...A "reader" now apparently questioned whether Mr...
...PLAGIARISM...
...The next day, May 1, 2003, Jayson Blair resigned...
...to look in vain to the corrections column and find a correction of middle initials...
...Certainly...
...One would hardly know from the ensuing outcry that the practice is so widespread it is an assumed and honored part of the journalistic tradition...
...Bragg had, in fact, made extensive use of the notes of a stringer, a young man named J. Wes Yoder, who greatly admired Mr...
...The Lord of the Flies aspect, the fact that the critic in this case was a former boss, whom it had very recently humiliated and deposed, was incidental...
...When there were many newspapers, with conflicting political positions, there was at least some equivalent of what is, in the law, the adversary system, and the idea that through this conflict some sort of truth is sorted out...
...Pulling details out of thin air," the Times seemed to forget was, from the very first day, the essence precisely of the story of Pfc...
...Institutions change, but this is not the language of a change for the better in a newspaper...
...Adams did not suffer from back pain...
...Ballenger, having been "upset" to see a fact he regarded as private published in the paper on February 3, 2003, finds it published again in the same paper on May 11, something of value has been achieved...
...Had the Times not been "caught" in this public way, the paper surely would have done nothing...
...This last was mystifying...
...Then Mr...
...It was brief, and remarkable mainly for the nature of its apology...
...In recent years, executive editors of the Times have tended to find the paper much improved during their tenure...
...Blair wrote that Private Lynch's father, Gregory Lynch Sr., "choked up as he stood on his porch here overlooking the tobacco fields and cattle pastures...
...Howell Raines, Keller's predecessor, had appeared on The Charlie Rose Show a few nights before, and expressed several views critical of the paper...
...Whether or not these were expressions of complacency, they would have been unthinkable for the predecessors of these men—for the executive editors, Turner Catledge, say, or A.M...
...But once won, the Pulitzer turns into both a shield and a weapon—a shield in defense of otherwise indefensible pieces by Pulitzer Prize winning reporters, a weapon in the struggle for advancement within the hierarchy of the Times...
...Then one remembers something Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to quote from Michael Polanyi: People change their minds...
...Hernandez, whose piece had been cribbed...
...pack journalism...
...Stringers, legmen, a form of apprenticeship since before the days of the green eyeshade...
...Jessica D. Lynch—at every stage of the military's coup in promoting through an obliging press a fiction, a highly implausible, unusually effective piece of propaganda, as "one of the biggest stories to come from the war...
...On the contrary...
...A "dateline" in itself is meaningless...
...Instead, on September 26, 2000, the Times published an Editors' Note, "a public accounting" (1663 words), and, two days later, an editorial "Overview" (1725 words), in which it appraised its own coverage of the case of Wen Ho Lee and found it good—"careful reporting that included extensive cross-checking and vetting of multiple sources," of which the paper remained "proud...
...If John F. Burns, of the Times, is reporting on his treatment by agents in Baghdad, it is crucial that he is in fact there and not filing on the basis of a call from a bedside phone at the Plaza in New York...
...she said she suffered from shoulder and neck pain...
...The first piece (7165 words) was a narrative, which cast Jayson Blair as a sometimes charming, basically calculating villain, whose intent was not (as any reader of ordinary intelligence might have thought) to publish a lot of pieces and get ahead, but to deceive and victimize his too credulous, forgiving—and even understaffed—employer...
...N THIS INSTANCE, howevhad an exchange of emails of the San Antonio paper, er, Robert Rivard, the editor 1 with the editors of the Times—who said they would "look into the matter...
...Raines had claimed, however, that the Times had become a "culture of lethargy and complacency...
...The Anguiano family had been in no way harmed by Jayson Blair's piece...
...FABRICATIONS...
...Other reporters, more famous and highly regarded than Blair, had made mistakes with more serious consequences, not just for individuals but in matters of national importance...
...If Lally Weymouth of Newsweek is reporting on an exclusive interview with Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, it is important that she has in fact spoken directly with him in Karachi...
...OCTOBER 2003 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 21 CHANGES AT THE TIMES program in time for the November sweeps...
...On the other hand, at least one editor gave the right warnings, at the right time: the place to address problems with Blair's reporting was internally, and the way to resolve the would be to stop publishing his work...
...From the subsequent public expressions of outrage by Times reporters it was not hard to guess who the "reader" was, or were...
...I don't want us to become a police state where you suspect every employee of ripping off the company...
...The investigators may have been too scandalized to name it with precision...
...No apology, then, to the few "conscientious journalists" (the late Lars-Erik Nelson of the New York Daily News chief among them) who virtually dismantled the Times' case against Dr...
...it consisted mainly of an interview with Juanita Anguiano, the single mother of an only son, Specialist Edward J. Anguiano, of Los Fresnos, Texas, the last American soldier still missing at that RENATA ADLER time in Iraq...
...Readers who noticed that "WHEREABOUTS" did not, in any obvious way, belong in a list of transgressions had to realize that the "dateline"—the place the reporter claims to be filing his story from—had Not even the most fanatically press-obsessed reader could much care about the endlessly detailed re-reporting...
...This is not the role envisioned in the First Amendment for the press...
...This is why the Times Corrections column, with its restriction to silly and often repetitive minutiae, creates a disingenuous impression of care for accuracy while it undercuts the fundamental integrity of the paper...
...and OTHER ISSUES...
...Riddled with lies...
...Readers, who have long been aware that most journalists, particularly famous journalists, do a lot of their interviews by phone, probably pay little attention to even the most exotic datelines...
...Normally, as Jayson Blair had every reason to know, calling attention to errors in the Times, provided that they are absolutely trivial (misspellings of first or last names, mistaken middle initials, misidentifications of who is standing on the left and who on the right in photographs), may result in a Correction...
...Since then I have met no one with experience of being quoted who has not made the same observation...
...By turns accusatory, sanctimonious, sympathetic, self-exonerating ("the deceit of one Times reporter does not impugn the work of 375 others"), the article quoted outsiders, deans of journalism schools for example, to support the Times' view of Blair's career, its importance and his motives...
...The Times' appetite for hounding had reached the Internet...
...Blair turns out after all to have been a fairly sturdy fellow, who read the Times "culture" very well...
...Sulzberger had assembled the Times staff to announce the appointment of a new executive editor, Bill Keller, a popular choice...
...On Sunday, B May 11, with four pieces, beginning on OCTOBER 2003 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 17 CHANGES AT THE TIMES 4'4- HERE HAS NEVER BEEN asystematic effort to lie and cheat .. . comparable" to Blair's, said one...
...the enforcement of received ideas...
...Readers with information about other articles by Jayson Blair that may be false wholly or in part," it said, "are asked to e-mail the Times: retrace@nytimes.com...
...But that's it...
...Rosenthal, who said he only wanted to be remembered as the editor who "kept the paper straight...
...What is needed is the return of someone who would want to be remembered for having kept the paper straight...
...BRAGG HAD QUIT...
...And, far from an apology, in all subsequent Times pieces about the matter, continued attacks on Dr...
...No matter...
...A minor reporter had made a mistake, and a miscalculation...
...Much later, word from the Times' current executive editor Bill Keller that if such an "outrage" had even been suspected, Mr...
...But a five-year moratorium on the awarding of Pulitzer Prizes to journalists at powerful publications might be the greatest service to journalism the Pulitzer Committee could now perform...
...And the real hero will be one Mohammed Odeh al-Rehaiefthe Iraqi lawyer who, in earlyversions of the story, witnessed Private Lynch being "slapped," and therefore walked six miles, back and forth, several times, to inform the American military and draw a map of the hospital where she was...
...For one thing it begins with a perfect example of the self-refuting sentence...
...The FBI was looking for this suspect, to question him...
...Among those who deserved an apology, the Times included "all conscientious journalists whose professional trust has been betrayed by this episode...
...OCTOBER 2003 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 19 CHANGES AT THE TIMES IHE SENTENCE, however, brought inescapably to mind another "episode" for which the Times has never offered an apology to anyone, least of all to its genuine victim, Dr...
...In its underlying idiocy and limitless self-regard it also manages to embody, and project through time, a virtual definition of the word "complacency...
...IT Is TRUE that Jayson Blair's having almost never traveled to the place reflected in the dateline of his pieces seemed an extreme case...
...But if a reader has reason, as he clearly does, to distrust his newspaper—not its Jayson Blairs, but its whole conception of what is important, what is true, what part genuine self-doubt as opposed to searching for scapegoats and examining other people's datelines plays in the process of finding out and reporting 22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 2003 what is true—then the news itself will cease to matter to him...
...No, no, no, he didn't come," she said, according to the Times...
...Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., publisher of the New York Times, July 14, 2003...
...For one thing it begins with a perfect example of the self-refuting sentence...
...BY THEN, MR...
...The story, like many of Blair's stories—like many stories of far greater importance published routinely by the Times, among other newspapers—was largely false...
...Travel takes time...
...Rosenthal did keep the paper straight, in a time that now seems unimaginably remote—with a first-rate staff and the discreet support of the Times' publisher in those years, Sulzberger's father...
...Lee had once hired as a laboratory assistant a Chinese citizen "already under investigation as a spy...
...In any event, the current Sulzberger's words on the subject of complacency, or non-complacency, marked the culmination of what has become the saga of the New York Times and Jayson Blair...
...The Times went straight to the heart of the matter...
...Bragg was suspended for two weeks...
...This is, in its way, a classic utterance...
...Terrible...
...In its underlying idiocy and limitless self-regard it also manages to embody, and project through time, a virtual definition of the word "complacency...
...And you know something, I guess I am not unhappy with that...
...In July, in the course of the infamous Charlie Rose Show, Howell Raines said, "The newspapers that we have produced over the past twenty months are the best in the history of the Times...
...Page One, and totaling approximately 15,000 words, the Times let loose...
...Such conflicts may exist today among magazines, which also have the time, in the absence of daily deadlines, for genuine research and even for thought...
...The military will help with the program...
...coerced agreement...
...After the Hunt Valley article in late March, Mr...
...The porch overlooks no such thing...
...The behavior of those assembled was characteristic in some ways of an institution whose chief principle of action has become increasingly this: it will not permit itself to be criticized, contradicted or even questioned, in public...
...Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., publisher of the New York Times, July 14, 2003...
...In any event, Howell Raines had said on The Charlie Rose Show that the Times was complacent...
...18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 2003 The narrative piece did contain, near the end, one nearly perfect anecdote, the capstone of its accusations, in a claim that Mr...
...RENATA ADLER Editors' Note...
...Huffy, in a wonderfully schoolmarmish way, "The porch overlooks no such thing" could be one of the great lines in press criticism, if not in journalism itself...
...Venality...
...NEWSPAPER, surely, cannot be said to have a subconscious and yet, in raising his curious question of apology, the Times called attention to what is really an unlikely nexus, not just between the "episodes" of Blair and Lee—each an unprecedented "investigation" by the Times of what has appeared in its pages—but in issues they raise: responsibility in the exercise of power...
...Journalistic fraud...
...Rivard took the trouble of sending copies of his email to others...
...The original article had been written by Macarena Hernandez, a former intern (and colleague of Blair's) at the Times...
...The difficulty is to sustain, within the news itself, a continuous process of correction...
...Bragg did the unpardonable: he spoke the truth, in public...
...Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., publisher of the New York Times, July 14, 2003...
...As an intellectual matter, it was clear that there was something wrong with this list...
...Bragg, who holds a Pulitzer Prize, was not without risk for the pack...
...and the issue of genuine openness to correction and journalism in good faith...
...It turned out the research assistant was a graduate student, an intern, who had returned to his regular studies at Penn State...
...Though "Correcting the Record" was the title of the narrative (7165 words)—as it was of the next of the four Jayson Blair pieces, of May 2, 2003—the Times never disclosed what the porch does overlook...
...Lee—or to the many, perhaps somewhat less conscientious journalists who trusted the Times' story and took it up, or to readers who were and perhaps remain misled by it...
...HE ADDRESS on the web inviting fur1 ther complaints about Blair ran in the Times for several days...
...Institutions can change as well...
...Blair, who had worked at the Times nearly four years, from putting false information in the paper...
...The staff, however, was preoccupied with something else...
...HE THIRD TIMES PIECE 011 that Sunday, May 11, 2003, carried the headline: "Editors' Note...
...In fact, it did nothing, until after the AP and Washington Post stories appeared...
...In the interim, some other prize will do...
...he could easily be reached on the university's website or by phone...
...The Times should simply have dropped, for its insignificance, the matter of Jayson Blair...
...He had described the Times as "an irreplaceable national institution...
...If it was owed to anyone, one would have thought, it was to Ms...
...On April 28, 2003, two days after the Times' publication of the piece, the Department of Defense announced that Sgt...
...UT NO...
...Had the Times not been "caught," in this public way by rival publications, the paper would surely have done nothing and acknowledged nothing...
...Anguiano was dead...
...On April 30 and May 1, however, the Times apparently found it necessary to phone his mother, to confirm in time forits report of May 2, that she "did not recall Mr...
...Echoing the by now famous remarks quoted in his own paper earlier in the day, to the effect that there would be no searching the newsroom for "scapegoats" ("The person who did this is Jayson Blair...
...Bragg did the unpardonable: he spoke the truth, in public...
...Everyone makes mistakes...
Vol. 36 • October 2003 • No. 5
