Media Curmudgeon

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March 13, 2007

NY Times, Half In and Half Out Of the Kitchen

The plain-talking Harry S. Truman once said, “If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen." The New York Times is in the heat of the media spotlight because it is America’s “newspaper of record” and is generally considered to be the best newspaper in the country, followed closely by the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. However, in terms of being able to take the heat of criticism, sometimes the Times is half in the kitchen and sometimes half out.

In the Sunday, March 11, 2007, Week In Review section, the Times’ ombudsman, Byron Calame, wrote in The Public Editor, under the headline “Reporting the News Even When a Competitor Gets There First” about the Times, The Washington Post and the scandal at Walter Reed. Calame was tough on the Times editors and asked, “Why were readers of The New York Times left without a word of news coverage of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center scandal for six days after it had been exposed by The Washington Post? That was the question posed to me in the wake of The Post’s Feb. 18 scoop by readers thirsty for news of the poor care given those wounded in Iraq.”

Calame goes on to criticize the Times for burying the story for a week. Bill Keller, the Times’ executive editor, acknowledged to Calame that the paper “could have been quicker in responding to the Post’s stories.” Keller also wrote in an email in response to Calame’s questions: “The treatment of wounded soldiers at the nation’s most prestigious military hospital in time of war was worth pursuing in the Post’s wake. We are now on the story, but as far as the conditions at Walter Reed, we ended up, for the most part, covering the consequences of the Post’s work.” The Times was “slow,” Mr. Keller wrote, because the digging done by the two Post reporters over four months “was hard reporting to match” and the paper’s Pentagon reporters were pursuing other articles.

The public editor goes on to include several of Keller’s rationalizations for being slow, but concludes with this Keller quote: “The easy explanation, and one that contains a good measure of truth, is pride,” he acknowledged. “Reporters (and editors) don’t enjoy being beaten.”

Then Calame writes: “Excessive pride, I believe, is the fundamental problem. The desire to be first with the news still permeates the newsroom at The Times and other newspapers in a way that makes editors and reporters feel defeated when they have to conclude that the information in another publication’s exclusive article is so newsworthy that it has to be pursued.”

And he concludes his column with, “In February 2004, my predecessor wrote a column chiding the paper for failing to pursue the exclusives of others. During my almost two years as public editor, I have continued to see this problem that directly affects readers. The reality is that when significant news breaks — even in the form of an exclusive in a competing publication — The Times must be committed to getting on the story. Anything less seriously damages the paper’s value to readers.”

The public editor took the Times to task, properly, for burying the story and not listening to earlier criticism, thus implying that the Times’ editors say they want criticism, but then seem slough it off. But at least the Times is willing to publish the criticism—it is half in the kitchen on this.

It is half out of the kitchen, though, when it comes to criticizing Bill Keller’s boss, Arthur Sulzberger, and his family. In my February 22 blog, “Shame On You, Pinch,” I detailed the circumstances of the Ochs-Sulzberger family taking $640 million of their assets away from Morgan Stanley because of criticism of the Times management and the structure of the company’s stock. I accused the Sulzberger family of the kind of economic bullying they would not put up with for the newspaper and that the Times editorialized against during the investigation of Wall Street analysts after the Internet stock bubble burst.

The Times ran a sanitized story about the asset pull-out, but it only quoted a spokesperson of the Times, not from Morgan Stanley---the Wall Street firm was smart enough to keep its mouth shut to the Times reporter. So, it was half in the kitchen for mentioning the “asset shift,” but half out for sanitizing it.

However, on March 12, the Wall Street Journal carried an article by Sarah Ellison titled “New York Times Hears Key Holders’ Complaints.” The article detailed the complaints and showed a chart of the New York Times Co.’s stock 41.2% decline. I don’t think you’d see an article like this in the Times.

As far as being able to take the heat of the kitchen, I think Bill Keller is half in the kitchen and has clothes on, but publisher Arthur Sulzberger is half out of the kitchen with no clothes on, but the Times editors are too cowed to tell him he’s naked, and I’ll bet his family or the board won’t tell him either.

Posted by Charles Warner at March 13, 2007 08:21 PM

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MrSticky at April 11, 2007 07:31 AM writes:

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