Llewellyn
King
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February 25, 2008
The New York Times
In Hell; Good Intentions Got It There
Newspapers are very good at what they do when they do it by
rote. News breaks and reporters are assigned, photographers are
dispatched, space is allocated, headlines are written and the miraculous
convulsion that is the production of a newspaper takes place routinely
every 24 hours.
For journalists, the critical qualification is not the
brilliant turn of phrase, the incisive interviewing skill or the size of
the Rolodex. Instead, it is news judgment. It is news judgment that
enables an editor to know what to assign, a reporter what to write, a
news editor where to place it in the paper and a whole process of
production to move ahead quickly without delay, debate or second
thoughts. It is news judgment that allows the idea to exist that
journalists conspire to produce similar coverage. If you want to test
the news judgment theory, you can do so by watching a political debate,
a major speech or the Sunday morning talk shows. All the major
newspapers will cover the same items the next day, as though their
reporters had consulted with each other. The Wall Street Journal, The
Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times in isolation will
have selected the same newsworthy utterances to display.
This smooth operation of the news machine grinds to a halt
when too many editors are involved, when editorial managers inject
themselves and when the publisher's office intercedes. Take the current
humiliation of The New York Times over its story that intimated
that Sen. John McCain might have had an affair with a lobbyist. For all
of the talent at The New York Times, the story when it was
published had all the signs that it had been manhandled by a committee.
It began by hinting at sexual impropriety by the senator, and went on to
a much more valid analysis of how McCain's confidence in his own
rectitude blinds him to ethical challenges.
In most newspapers, this story would have been spiked at the
first level of editors. They would have said to the reporter, This is a
story about how you didn't get the story, or This just doesn't stand
up.
But a strange ethos dominates The New York Times. Long
ago, it read its own notices and decided that it was the greatest
newspaper in the world. That has made it hard to be self-critical. When
it has suspended normal news judgment and fairness, it has gotten into
huge trouble as it did with reporting by Jayson Blair and Judith
Miller. When The Times was edited by Abe Rosenthal, he took it
upon himself to be the ultimate arbiter; and, in hindsight, he was an
excellent editor of The Times. Since his departure, there has
been pusillanimity in the editor's office. In a double blow, Arthur Ochs
Sulzberger, a fine publisher, retired in favor of his son.
I have seen big newspapers get it wrong and get it right. In
the early 1960s, The Sunday Mirror in London, where I worked, got
it wrong. It had the biggest story of the decade the scandal involving
the party girl, Christine Keeler, the war minister, John Profumo, and a
Soviet military attache. Fearing libel suits, the paper declined to
publish. Too many people got involved in the decision managers,
financiers and lawyers overruled the editor.
In sharp contrast, a decade later, I was at The Washington
Post when Watergate broke. The editor, the wily Ben Bradlee, took
charge of the story with the direct and unequivocal support of his
publisher, Katherine Graham.
In both cases the result was the same. In England, the story
came out, the war minister was forced from office and members of the
aristocracy were disgraced as was the newspaper that had not had the
courage to publish. In Washington, Bradlee, Graham and reporters Bob
Woodward and Carl Bernstein entered the pantheon of journalistic
excellence.
In newspapers, when a major government-shaking story is in
the works, politics is irrelevant. There is adrenalin in news. Are
newspapers politicized? It is an open question. In England, the left
constantly rails against the Tory press. And in America, conservatives
rail against the liberal press. It is probably true that a majority,
though far from all, journalists lean to the left. But politics is not a
preoccupation of newsrooms. News is.
© 2008 North Star
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