PUBLIC-EDITOR BLUES
NEW YORK POST
Editorial
January 4, 2006
In announcing two years ago that it would hire a "public editor" to represent its readers, The New York Times said the new position would "make us more sensitive on matters of fairness and accuracy, and enhance our credibility."
Actually, the notion of a "public editor" — some newspapers call them ombudsmen — is faintly patronizing, and a little absurd. They're meant to nibble at the edges of reader discontent — not to address meat-and-potato issues.
Anyway, fixing the Times' credibility problems of recent years would be beyond the skills of any image doctor, anywhere.
Credit Byron Calame, the current public editor, for trying to live up to the Times' promises. He's asking questions about the paper's recent front-page story disclosing the details of top-secret post-9/11 National Security Agency surveillance of persons suspected of terrorist involvement — but he's run into an in-house stone wall.
As Calame wrote in a scathing column Sunday, the Times' publisher (Arthur Sulzberger) and executive editor (Bill Keller) both "for the first time" pointedly refused to answer his written questions. Moreover, he discovered, they were "urging everyone else [at the paper] to remain silent."
To be sure, Calame mostly seems to share the concerns of the left: that the Times held the story for more than a year, partly at the White House's request, and that might have cost John Kerry the White House.
But more serious observers have another complaint: namely, that the illegal disclosure of classified information has inflicted real damage on America's ability to fight terrorism.
Which is why the Justice Department has begun a probe into who leaked the details of the NSA surveillance.
That probe won't address the timing of the Times' story: It appeared on the very morning of a key Senate vote on the Patriot Act, and several lawmakers said the Times article directly influenced them to oppose rapid renewal of the anti-terror law — which may well have been the point of running the piece that day.
Yet timing — to say nothing of the editors' motives in printing the leak story in the first place — should certainly be grist for a public editor's mill.
As for the Times itself, has Sulzberger forgotten his boast that a public editor would provide "a highway with two-way traffic" between the paper and its readers? Seems so.
The New York Times holds itself accountable to no one — as is entirely its right, of course.
But how hypocritical to pretend otherwise.
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