Here is a "followup" article on the LA Times memo on Bias. Well done, IMO.
Can John Carroll get the Times to chew with its mouth closed?
by RJ Smith - Los Angeles Magazine
FOR ONE SPARKLING MOMENT, Los Angeles Times editor John Carroll must have felt like he was standing at the center of some giant, turning wheel. Everywhere and all at once, Carroll was up there with Darrell Issa or Donald Rumsfeld as a hero of the Right.
"I don't expect it to last, but I'll take it," Carroll says with a chuckle, his hands lightly tapping a table in his third-floor office.
Carroll's coronation occurred May 22, almost immediately after he e-mailed a memo to Times section editors. The memo was promptly leaked to LA Observed, a Web log run by former Times staffer (and Los Angeles contributor) Kevin Roderick. Jim Romenesko, whose media news Web site is gravy for working journalists, picked up the story and made it national news.
Carroll e-mailed his people:
"I'm concerned about the perception?and the occasional reality?that the Times is a liberal, 'politically correct' newspaper. Generally speaking, this is an inaccurate view, but occasionally we prove our critics right. We did so today with the front-page story on the bill in Texas that would require abortion doctors to counsel patients that they may be risking breast cancer. . . .
"The reason I'm sending this note to all section editors is that I want everyone to understand how serious I am about purging all political bias from our coverage. We may happen to live in a political atmosphere that is suffused with liberal values (and is unreflective of the nation as a whole), but we are not going to push a liberal agenda in the news pages of the Times."
To all his new friends on the right, Carroll had done the equivalent of pulling the curtain up on the machinery, or revealing the secret formula to the Colonel's chicken. He'd acknowledged what they long perceived as the Times's political tilt.
Overnight the Times itself became news, and Carroll had created?accidentally, or as many at the Times think, intentionally?the biggest controversy of his three-year reign. Everybody who reads a daily newspaper thinks it has some slant or another, and in a one-horse town like Los Angeles, readers can care more than is healthy. Now Carroll had readers arguing out loud about what that slant is, and what it means.
The memo jackrabbited the Internet and was picked up by numerous conservatives. Bill O'Reilly trumpeted it (though he attributed it to L.A. Times editor "John Roberts"). Ann Coulter, Pat Buchanan, and Chris Matthews all opined. Locally, radio talk-show host Hugh Hewitt lauded the memo as an admission of what conservatives had been saying for years. And the Rush Limbaugh Club of South Orange County posted Carroll's e-mail address and urged members to hold him to his words.
The Times story that triggered Carroll's memo was written by Scott Gold, a highly regarded young reporter who had recently left the Metro staff to become Houston bureau chief. On May 22, the day of Carroll's e-mail, Gold reported that the Texas legislature had passed a law requiring women seeking abortions to undergo counseling. The consultation would include a warning that abortions might be linked to a higher propensity for breast cancer.
The connection between breast cancer and abortion has become the latest battlefield issue in the abortion debate. It's a potent argument against abortion, if true, and a potent rhetorical weapon whether true or false. So far, the evidence suggests the latter; the National Cancer Institute says there is no link.
There's a great investigative piece to be written about how the abortion wars have politicized breast cancer science. But until one runs in the Times or elsewhere, there are plenty of smaller-potatoes deadline pieces that need to be written as the controversy keeps intersecting with policy and law. That's the kind of story Gold wrote. His article referred high up to "so-called counseling." Those quotation marks registered as raised eyebrows, and he plainly communicated that he didn't think much of the Texas legislature's logic. The pro-legislation spokesman he found was not a medical expert, and the medical expert he quotes late in the piece talks about how necessary the legislation is.
Abortion is a subject many journalists?like many Americans?have always had a tough time being "evenhanded" about. It's a third-rail issue, perhaps particularly at the Times, where media critic David Shaw wrote a terrific four-part series in 1990 on mainstream journalism's pro-abortion bias.
For Gold to bear the brunt of Carroll's memo and then to see it blasted around the Internet had to have been as chastening as it was instructive. "I was predictably held up as a hero by Mother Jones and cast as the devil by Bill O'Reilly," he says, "though I've never discussed my politics with any of those people.
"I've written or contributed to more than 400 articles since I arrived at the Times and have written a few thousand before that. That doesn't make me any different than anyone else at this paper. We work hard and with great dedication to fairness, and we don't have the time or inclination to express any political bias."
The memo skirts one of the most vexing issues for journalists?that balance isn't always the same thing as accuracy. Carroll himself says he has doubts about the breast cancerabortion link. But more important to him is a commitment to respecting all sides of a disagreement. A newspaper, in his mind, maintains civility by equally weighing both sides of a controversy. But not all stories have another side, and there are times when to give voice to one position is to lend it more credence than it actually has or deserves. Yes, you have to respect people's beliefs, but sometimes honoring them distorts the truth. What about alien abductees? Creationists? Holocaust deniers? There might be a pro-slavery side, but does it deserve to be sought out for the sake of balance?
LONG BEFORE SCOTT GOLD WAS born, the Los Angeles Times , and Los Angeles itself, leaned to the right. There was no question what the paper's slant was, what it meant to be politically correct. When Otis Chandler became publisher in 1960, he began changing its direction. Three years later Tom Bradley was elected to the city council; eventually he became mayor, and both the Times and the city became recognizably liberal.
Chandler had turned an aircraft carrier around in 20 years: Heads are still spinning, and many readers have never gotten over what the Times has become. As its national stature grew, it became even more fittingly a symbol of the city it formerly had only purported to cover. Today when many attack the political bias of the paper, they are really attacking the politics of a liberal, multiethnic metropolis. The symbol is a target, too: There may or may not be a true center to Los Angeles, but everybody knows where Spring Street is.
I suspect a few years ago a piece like Gold's?agendaless but reflecting the subconscious biases of the reporter?might have slipped below the editorial radar and run without internal comment. But today John Carroll is making big changes at the paper, and the appearance of subconscious bias is part of what he wants to change.
"I do think that we, like every paper, slip every now and then in trying to play things down the middle," says Carroll. "And the slips more often than not are to the liberal side. You seldom see a story in which there's something you might consider a flagrant bias on the conservative side.
"I also think that a paper that's situated in a place that has a particular political predisposition?and Los Angeles tends to be to the liberal side of American politics?has an obligation to present to its readers a broader world. As a reader of a newspaper I would be offended if my paper only played back my own biases and my own politics. I want to be challenged and I want to know more. And this paper will be a narrow and parochial paper if it doesn't present the full sweep of American politics in discussing these issues."
These are considered words, the tone different from the quick-draw e-mail. He never named Gold, but by singling out the story, one of the most powerful editors in the country was seen upbraiding the work of a young reporter. Carroll says he was surprised and disappointed that the memo got leaked; there is no shortage of people inside the Times building, though, who believe that nothing has happened accidentally. They only differ on what it means?maybe that the paper is shifting rightward or that Carroll wants external critics to know he hears them. Carroll dismisses this as conspiracy mongering and says he never intended to embarrass a reporter in good standing. He has apologized to Gold.
In its own way the memo fails to play things down the middle, focusing on liberal bias rather than political bias. After the memo made the rounds, environmental editor Frank Clifford e-mailed Carroll and asked if curtailing political bias cut both on the right and the left. Absolutely, Carroll replied.
"At this point," says Clifford, "I'm willing to believe that what this memo was all about was the equivalent of telling you to tuck your shirt in and pull your tie up and sit up straight and chew with your mouth closed."
Henry Weinstein, the Times's legal affairs reporter, points to the coverage of the faltering postwar steps in Iraq as well as the freewheeling Opinion pages?where Michael Ramirez's conservative cartoons continue to confuse even the Secret Service and where Robert Scheer continues to call for Bush's impeachment?as signs that sails aren't being trimmed. "As somebody who frequently writes about controversial subjects," says Weinstein, "including the death penalty and the government's policies on civil liberties, I don't feel chilled."
Neither Weinstein nor Clifford has been afraid to criticize the Times in the past. What the memo reflects in part, I think, is Carroll's desire to distinguish the Times from modern-day, tabloid-style palaver. He tilts toward cool assessment rather than hothouse argument. He has long been a critic of overhyped language, of references to "a perfect storm," "the best," "the ultimate." "Since John Carroll has become editor," says Weinstein, "the bar has gone way up on the use of unprecedented."
In fact, Carroll followed up the bias memo with a missive about keeping verb tenses in agreement (which also got piped to LA Observed ). To the extent that Carroll's memos might have a chilling effect, it seems likely to show up in the writing rather than the reporting.
"I think the verb memo has inspired far more fear and loathing in this building," says one editor.
To some at the Times this precision has earned Carroll a reputation as a fussbudget, even a bit of a Captain Queeg. To others, it's in his attention to detail that Carroll shows himself to be his father's son. Wallace Carroll edited and published The Winston-Salem Journal and Sentinel in North Carolina, and under James Reston ran The New York Times's Washington bureau from 1955 into the 1960s. He built a reputation for quiet firmness on matters of style and decorum.
There's even a way in which the "liberal bias" and the "verb tense" notes are related. A gentlemanly North Carolinian with a soothing voice and puppy dog eyes, Carroll seems destined to wrench the Times out of the streams of hype and ideology and toward something calmer and more poised.
Frank Clifford got his first newspaper job in 1968, writing for Wallace Carroll at the Journal and Sentinel . Clifford had worked for a Southern poverty program and was hired to cover issues of race and poverty. "The paper hadn't done this before," says Clifford. "All kinds of people had warned me, 'Wallace Carroll is a very conservative fellow and you're going to be very unhappy trying to write about these topics.' Well, the only thing that Wallace Carroll ever criticized me for was spelling mistakes. So there's a certain kind of déjà vu in all of this."
I LIKE FIXING NEWSPAPERS," Carroll has said, and when he arrived in May 2000 the Times needed major repairs. The year before, the Times Sunday magazine had published an issue celebrating the opening of the Staples Center. Subsequently it was learned that publisher Kathryn Downing had structured a deal whereby the Times would share profits from the issue with Staples. Going into business with the people you were covering was an amazing blunder that devalued the Times among readers and journalists everywhere.
Less than a year later, the Chicago-based Tribune Company purchased Times Mirror, and editor Michael Parks was out. The Times job came open just as Carroll seemed headed toward a decrescendo. He was pondering leaving The Baltimore Sun , where he was editor, to run the Nieman Foundation, the prestigious journalism program at Harvard. At 58, he was a silver eminence.
Meanwhile, the Times was rudderless. Carroll found a staff that had been embroiled in scandal and office politics. He moved quickly to restore their confidence in the paper's new owners, and readers' confidence in the Times. He has swept through the paper, replacing editors, revamping sections when he's not creating whole new ones. He's crafted a superb investigative team for the national desk and wants to do the same for Metro; in his three years the Times has won six Pulitzers. He has restored integrity. Talk of Staples was supposed to be dead as disco. So it's surprising to once again hear the debacle invoked in connection with the latest Times business venture.
In September the Tribune Company will launch Distinction , a glossy bimonthly targeting top-income brackets. It will be available in Westside hotels and restaurants, and mailed to some 50,000 households in high-end zip codes. Distinction has hired a publisher (Jane Kahn), an editor (Laurie Pike), even a society writer (Merle Ginsberg). (So far no horse-racing columnist.) But what's shocking is that its editors and writers will answer to the Times's advertising department. It's not supposed to work this way at magazines that report, review, recommend. If they say it's a five-star restaurant, who's been paid by whom to say it? Sweetheart, get Bill O'Reilly on the horn: This really is disturbing.
The Tribune Company has created Angeles Publishing to produce Distinction. (Full disclosure: Distinction will be going after a chunk of the readers and advertisers that Los Angeles targets, which makes the magazine our competitor.) Shell game or ethical shelter, either way this new entity is supposed to solve potential problems. Many loom. Times brass have created Angeles to keep Distinction, um, distinct from the newspaper, but at least some confusion seems unavoidable.
Carroll and the advertising director have agreed that Distinction's reporters should not represent themselves as Times employees. However, a report in Women's Wear Daily said that Pike sent out material to local publicists heralding the magazine's connection with the paper. (Subsequent material clarifies the relationship.)
"It's a separate publication, and it is not edited by the Los Angeles Times. I'll have as much control over it as I have over Los Angeles magazine, which is less than zero," says Carroll. "I'll read it when it lands on the doorstep, if I'm in the select demographic group."
Times staffers are having Staples flashbacks. It's an inexact comparison because that was a case of a newspaper sharing profits with the people it was covering. Distinction doesn't involve Times writers or editors. "I don't know if there's an active business partnership with any advertisers or not," says Carroll. "I have no idea how this outfit runs, but it's not in this newsroom, I can tell you that."
Yet Staples was also about what mischief can happen when the wall between editorial and advertising crumbles. Now Tribune is leaping over the wall and building a strange new annex. It's a troubling precedent. Magazines slap headings like "Special Advertising Section" over content that goes through advertising rather than editorial portals. But Distinction is something new.
Carroll points out that Tribune publishes a variety of publications, and nobody thinks the Times has anything to do with The Recycler, which the parent company owns. But this one shares building space and an advertising staff with the Times. Unlike The Recycler, this one appears to have editorial content. "I don't think it causes a problem for this newspaper," Carroll says. "People know what this newspaper is." Maybe. And maybe after he reads the first issue, he'll compose his thoughts in a memo.
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