Hilarity ensued in mid-january after Arthur Brisbane, “public
editor” of the New York Times, posted a blog entry titled
“Should the Times Be a Truth Vigilante?” He was compelled to
publish a follow-up post hours later to reply to his “large
majority of respondents” who answered his question “with, yes, you
moron, The Times should check facts and print the truth.”
Being a “truth vigilante” turns out to mean something different
from being truthful. Something very different, as we can see from
the two examples in Brisbane’s initial post. Here is the first,
“mentioned recently by a reader”:
As cited in an Adam Liptak article on the Supreme Court, a court
spokeswoman said Clarence Thomas had “misunderstood” a financial
disclosure form when he failed to report his wife’s earnings from
the Heritage Foundation. The reader thought it not likely that Mr.
Thomas “misunderstood,” and instead [thought] that he simply chose
not to report the information.
That’s the whole example. A reader was suspicious of Justice
Thomas’s explanation and faulted the Times for failing
to…well, to do what exactly? The reader doubts the sincerity of
Thomas’s explanation but has no factual basis for disputing it.
Liptak may or may not agree with the reader’s opinion that it was
“not likely” Thomas was telling the truth. In either case, this is
not a difficult call. It is obviously wrong for a reporter to
insert his personal opinion into a news story, especially when that
opinion lacks any factual support.
Brisbane then offers as an exemplar of a “truth
vigilante”—seriously, you cannot make this stuff up—former Enron
adviser Paul Krugman:
On the campaign trail, Mitt Romney often says President Obama
has made speeches “apologizing for America,” a phrase to which Paul
Krugman objected in a December 23 column arguing that politics has
advanced to the “post-truth” stage.
As an Op-Ed columnist, Mr. Krugman clearly has the freedom to
call out what he thinks is a lie. My question for readers is:
should news reporters do the same?
If so, then perhaps the next time Mr. Romney says the president
has a habit of apologizing for his country, the reporter should
insert a paragraph saying, more or less:
“The president has never used the word ‘apologize’ in a speech
about U.S. policy or history. Any assertion that he has apologized
for U.S. actions rests on a misleading interpretation of the
president’s words.”
I’m sorry to be rude, but that’s just dumb. It may be a fact
that Obama hasn’t used the word “apologize” (I haven’t checked),
but that proves nothing. One can apologize without using the word
“apologize.”
The characterization of Romney’s interpretation as “misleading”
is, again, a matter of opinion. It may be an opinion for which one
could offer persuasive factual support, but neither Brisbane nor
Krugman makes any effort to do so. Krugman merely asserts that “the
so-called Obama apology tour is a complete fabrication, assembled
by taking quotes out of context.”
Brisbane’s examples make clear that when he poses the question
whether the Times should become a “truth vigilante,” what
he is asking is whether the entire paper should become an opinion
sec-tion-whether the Times’s news pages should emulate
Krugman, albeit perhaps with a somewhat softer tone (“misleading
interpretation” instead of “complete fabrication”).
To hear Brisbane tell it, there is a demand for such a
transformation. He writes that he gets e-mails from “readers who,
fed up with the distortions and evasions that are common in public
life, look to The Times to set the record straight” and who “worry
less about reporters imposing their judgment on what is false and
what is true.”
If that kind of “judgment” is what they want, they can get it
from Krugman and the paper’s other columnists and editorialists.
Why do those readers feel something is lacking in the paper if
reporters are more restrained about expressing their opinions than
opinion writers are?
Because reporters have an authority that opinion writers do not
have. You can reject Krugman’s “judgment,” or Thomas Friedman’s or
Maureen Dowd’s or the editorial board’s, by dismissing it as a
product of their ideological predilections. That is not so easily
done with a news story. If a Times editorial declares it
“not likely” that Justice Thomas is sincere, that’s just a matter
of opinion. If a Times news story does, it’s a fact.
Or so Brisbane’s readers seem to imagine. In reality, reporters
owe their authority precisely to the expectation that they adhere
to an ethos of impartiality. Jill Abramson, who as Times
executive editor oversees the paper’s news coverage, seems to grasp
this point. As she writes in a response to Brisbane, which he
included in his second post:
We have to be careful that fact-checking is fair and impartial,
and doesn’t veer into tendentiousness. Some voices crying out for
“facts” really only want to hear their own version of the
facts.
Tendentiousness is a synonym for bias, a shortcoming of which
the Times’s news pages have often been accused, including
in this column. But Brisbane has stood the question of political
bias on its head. What they’re debating at the Times is
not whether the paper is biased, or how it can become less biased,
but whether it is biased enough.
And although Abramson ultimately answers in the negative, the
overall tone of her reply to Brisbane is defensive. “The kind of
rigorous fact-checking and truth-testing you describe is a
fundamental part of our job as journalists,” she insists. “We
routinely have a team or reporters fact-checking debate assertions
in something close to real time.” As an example of the
Times’s “providing facts to challenge false or misleading
assertions,” she notes that “we constantly point out the scientific
consensus on climate change.”
Traveling in politically conservative circles in New York, I
often run into people who tell me they’ve canceled their
Times subscription, or are holding out from doing so only
for the crossword puzzle or the food section, because they’re so
fed up with its liberal slant. (Full disclosure: I am an employee
of the Wall Street Journal, a Times competitor,
and a shareholder in the Journal’s parent, News Corp. Thus such
stories never fail to brighten my day.)
Even though self-described conservatives make up 40 percent of
America’s population in Gallup’s latest survey, their defection is
probably not a threat to the Times’s survival. That
percentage, after all, is far lower in New York and similar urban
areas that are the Times’s target audience.
But when Abramson observes that “some voices crying out for
‘facts’ really only want to hear their own version of the facts,”
she perhaps unwittingly identifies the threat that the narrowing of
the Times’s readership poses to the quality of the paper’s
journalism. Those voices, after all, belong to the Times’s
customers. They want the reporters who work for Abramson to be less
disciplined about keeping their opinions to themselves. Abramson
has reason to be defensive. Not only is her paper biased, it is
under commercial pressure to become more biased.
