In terms of capturing the public’s attention, there may be no bigger story right now than the spread of the Ebola virus. The Times has given the story a great deal of attention with news stories, analysis, editorials, Op-Ed pieces and more. And most of it, from my reading, has been very good.
However, I have heard from readers with legitimate concerns or complaints about some important specifics. Here are three examples:
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I won’t be posting here this week as I am heading for Copenhagen to give a talk about media ethics in the digital age.
Denmark, it seems, has had something of a rough year on that topic, as Columbia Journalism Review wrote in May:
On April 28, Danish newspaper BT broke the news that the gossip magazine Se og Hør (“See and Hear”) purportedly paid a contractor for the banking services company Nets to monitor the credit card activity of members of the royal family and other celebrities.
A little over a week later, the case has become the biggest media scandal in Danish history, and new revelations emerge each day. It has profoundly shocked a country far more accustomed to being hailed as a model of transparency than for News of the World-type shenanigans. And although many here within the media believe Se og Hør’s to be isolated in its tactics, a few critics have openly wondered whether something isn’t rotten in Denmark’s media culture as a whole.
The foundation associated with a large Danish media group, Berlingske, is putting on a conference to consider the challenges. Nick Davies, the British journalist who is the author of “Hack Attack: The Inside Story of How the Truth Caught Up With Rupert Murdoch,” which took up the British phone-hacking scandal, is also scheduled to speak.
I’ll be back soon to pick up on the many topics that readers have brought to my attention in recent days. Thanks to those who responded in comments, emails and on Twitter to my second-annual report to readers in Sunday’s paper. I very much appreciate the kind words — and have taken note of your constructive criticism as well.
The public editor looks back at a year of anonymous sources, false balance and some of the other usual suspects.
Readers of this blog may know that I’m particularly interested in the situation involving James Risen, a Times investigative reporter who is at risk of going to jail to protect a confidential source from his 2006 book, “State of War.”
What’s happened to Mr. Risen is one of the two most telling journalism episodes of the past decade or so, the other being the Edward Snowden leak. They share common themes, of course: the growth of post-9/11 government surveillance in America and the role of the National Security Agency in spying on American citizens, among others. (I interviewed Mr. Risen at his home in suburban Maryland last year about his and fellow Times reporter, Eric Lichtblau’s, extraordinary warrantless-wiretapping story that was delayed for 13 months, finally appearing in 2005; it won a Pulitzer Prize.)
There have been some developments in the Risen story — and some fascinating coverage. I’ll summarize them here and comment only to say that I admire Mr. Risen’s toughness and a great deal of his work.
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Columnists play by different rules than news reporters. By definition, they express their opinions. Columnists also, appropriately, get a lot of leeway in what they write and how they write it.
Having acknowledged that, I nevertheless understand the complaints of those readers who are bothered by something they have recently learned about David Brooks: his son is a member of the Israel Defense Forces. In a recent Hebrew-language interview in Haaretz magazine, Mr. Brooks was asked about his worries as a father. The article noted that the columnist’s “connection to Israel was always strong.” It continued:
“He has visited Israel almost every year since 1991, and over the past months the connection has grown even stronger, after his oldest son, aged 23, decided to join the Israel Defense Forces as a ‘lone soldier.’ ” (The reference is to a soldier whose family is not living in Israel.)
Mr. Brooks described the situation as “worrying.” He added: “But every Israeli parent understands this is what the circumstances require. Beyond that, I think children need to take risks after they leave university, and that they need to do something difficult that involves going beyond their personal limits. Serving in the I.D.F. embodies all of these elements. I couldn’t advise others to do it without acknowledging it’s true for my own family.’”
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It’s hard to dispute the public’s dismay over climate change. When hundreds of thousands of people take to the Manhattan streets, as they did in the People’s Climate March last month, something big is clearly happening.
But a year ago, the signs weren’t particularly good for coverage of the environment in The New York Times.
A special group (or “pod”) of reporters who had that expertise had been disbanded, and the Green blog had been discontinued. I wrote about it several times, including a column that demonstrated that the amount and quality of coverage had declined.
Now, I’m glad to report, things are looking up again. Since the survival of the planet ranks pretty high on my list of what matters, it seems worth noting here exactly what’s happening and why.
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Has New York Times coverage of the fight between Amazon and book publishers tipped in favor of the publishers?
In more than two years as public editor at The Times, I’ve encountered very few subjects that have aroused as much passion and reaction as an Arts & Leisure article about the TV producer Shonda Rhimes and the stereotype of the “Angry Black Woman” the story leaned on. I wrote about it on Monday, and quickly hundreds of readers responded in deeply felt comments; my email has been overflowing with more commentary; and many people I know, inside and outside The Times, have been eager to talk about it. And other writers (Emily Nussbaum at The New Yorker, Linda Holmes at NPR, and many others) have taken it up.
The article and its aftermath tapped into something important – actually, many things: racial issues, mainstream media coverage of race and people of color, diversity on The Times’s staff, the role of strong editing, how people encounter stories in the digital age, and much more.
I talked late Monday with Dean Baquet, the executive editor, to get his view. His opinion is of particular interest because he made history a few months ago when he became the first black editor to lead The Times; he replaced the paper’s first female executive editor, Jill Abramson.
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The article on the television producer Shonda Rhimes hadn’t yet appeared in Sunday’s paper, but the virtual world was ablaze in protest over it on Friday after it was published online.
Written by the longtime TV critic Alessandra Stanley, its first paragraph – with a reference to Ms. Rhimes as an “Angry Black Woman” – struck many readers as completely off-base. Many called it offensive. Some went further, saying it was racist.
Another reference to the actress Viola Davis as “less classically beautiful” than lighter-skinned African American actresses immediately inspired a mocking hashtag. (Ms. Stanley’s article was pegged to a show, starring Ms. Davis, that will debut this week on ABC, “How to Get Away with Murder.”)
One email from Patricia Washington, a longtime Times subscriber, addressed Dean Baquet, the executive editor, with a copy sent to me. She wrote:
I am deeply offended by the story written by Alessandra Stanley about Shonda Rhimes being an angry black woman. At first, I tried to give Ms. Stanley the benefit of the doubt and thought that she was attempting to be irreverent. Then I realized that she was being racist, ignorant, and arrogant. It is interesting that I have never seen any of Ms. Stanley’s stories refer to any white producers of TV or film programs in racist, stereotypical terms. As awful as the story is, she got her facts wrong because Shonda Rhimes is not the executive producer of the new show, “How To Get Away With Murder.”
I am a black woman and a lawyer. I have worked very hard to achieve in my profession and earn respect. I live in a very nice suburban community in Maryland. And yet, none of that makes one bit of difference because a New York Times writer can make whatever offhanded, racist opinions about a successful TV producer who is a black woman she cares to make, and because she has the protection of The New York Times behind her, can publish it. Because Ms. Stanley is a New York Times writer, her story has reached a national audience. Why is Ms. Stanley allowed to characterize Ms. Rhimes as she did and get away it? Why is she allowed to characterize Viola Davis as she did in her story and get away with it?
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The Times could do a lot more to alert readers about conflicts of interests of sources used by the paper.
President Obama’s session last week with opinion columnists and magazine writers included some journalistic big guns. And the subject could not have been more important: his strategy on dealing with the terrorist group known as ISIS.
But regular citizens can’t know much of what was said there, because it was off the record. Word of it crept out in a Times story by Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent titled “Paths to War, Then and Now, Haunt Obama.” The article noted that columnists from The New York Times were in attendance but that they were not the sources of its information.
Later, Michael Calderone of The Huffington Post picked up on that and provided much more depth, naming journalists including Dexter Filkins of The New Yorker, David Brooks and Thomas Friedman of The Times, Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post, and Steve Coll, the dean of the Columbia journalism school.
Soon, I began to hear from readers who didn’t like the sounds of this.
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Sometimes, as I read The Times, a word will stop me cold. That happened yesterday morning as I read the photo caption on a timely Room for Debate about the videotaped assault by Ray Rice on his wife, Janay Palmer, that has been so much in the news. The word: “altercation.”
An altercation seems like something you might witness on the subway when too many passengers are jammed onto the 1 train: a few harsh words and a mild shove. In other words, it seemed like a significant understatement for Mr. Rice’s violent assault on Ms. Palmer. But a dictionary definition backs up Room for Debate’s choice pretty well. It’s “a heated, sometimes violent, quarrel or conflict.”
But word choice is a constant source of reader email to my office, and often the readers make very good points. It matters – sometimes a lot.
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Updated, Monday, 10:42 a.m.
Nobody wants a news story to read as if it were a scientific journal article, full of technical language, footnotes and arcane references.
But in the process of making science news understandable to the general public, hazards can arise. Writers and editors want to be engaging and direct, but sometimes the science isn’t really there to support a clear conclusion.
That’s one reason, no doubt, that complaints about such studies bring plenty of email to my office – especially when studies concern health issues.
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It started with the biologist Richard Dawkins, who on Twitter last month suggested that women have a moral obligation to abort their fetuses after they get a Down syndrome diagnosis. Responding to a question from a pregnant woman, he wrote: “Abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice,” he wrote on Twitter. He said that he based this on his belief that suffering should be reduced whenever possible.
Then came the rebuttal, on the Times’s Op-Ed page, from Jamie Edgin of the University of Arizona and Fabian Fernandez of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, which made the opposite case, though not on moral grounds, which they said was a different discussion. They wrote: “Recent research indicates that individuals with Down syndrome can experience more happiness and potential for success than Mr. Dawkins seems to appreciate.” They cited various studies and other kinds of evidence.
Soon after, came the comments to that Op-Ed article, many of them very strongly felt. Some of them urged abortion and emphasized the social cost of caring for Down syndrome children.
One commenter, JohnB wrote this assessment of the parents of Down syndrome children:
They will never have an intelligent conversation with their child. They have no hope that their child will ever achieve anything of consequence in the world, and little hope that it will even rise to the level of mediocrity. Their child will never be able to care for them in their old age, and (hopefully!!!) will never give them grandchildren. You can rationalize all this after the fact, but this is NOT what any prospective parent wants! All rationalization aside, Down syndrome is an unmitigated tragedy, and abortion is the best choice.”
Kari Wagner-Peck, whose son has Down syndrome, thinks those comments constitute a form of hate speech and should not have been posted. On her blog, she wrote about the discussion in the comments:
Read more...Readers are not always sure what to make of profiles, which, even when nuanced, can come across as puff pieces.