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Presswatch

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When I filed that column, the Times had yet to mention the NEA scandal. That embargo ended on September 23, when the paper reported that the White House had "instructed government agencies to keep politics away from the awarding of federal grants, a step taken as the administration sought to minimize the fallout after an official at the National Endowment for the Arts urged artists to advance President Obama's agenda."

This followed the pattern to a tee. Just as the Times had reported on Van Jones only after his resignation and on the ACORN sting only after the Census Bureau had severed ties with the group, the paper did not report on the NEA scandal until after the administration had taken remedial action. (Yosi Sergant, who had led the call as the NEA's communications director, resigned September 24.)

The Times's "public editor" (ombudsman), Clark Hoyt, addressed the paper's slow response to the Van Jones and ACORN scandals on September 27, though he didn't mention the NEA:

Jill Abramson, the managing editor for news, agreed with me that the paper was "slow off the mark," and blamed "insufficient tuned-in-ness to the issues that are dominating Fox News and talk radio."...

Despite what the critics think, Abramson said the problem was not liberal bias.

In the past, whenever Hoyt has raised the topic of liberal bias, he declared that he saw no evidence of it (see Presswatch, TAS, October 2008). This time, he pointedly expressed no opinion and left the denial to Abramson. This is progress of a sort.

The most amusing detail in Hoyt's column was this:

[Abramson] and Bill Keller, the executive editor, said last week that they would now assign an editor to monitor opinion media and brief them frequently on bubbling controversies. Keller declined to identify the editor, saying he wanted to spare that person "a bombardment of e-mails and excoriation in the blogosphere."

The Obama administration was supposed to usher in a new era of transparency in government. Instead we find ourselves in a new era of opacity, not only in government but in the media. The New York Times now employs secret agent editors.