corrente

A person signing himself Arthur Bovino (sigh) writes, in response to our post "Hearty laughter from readers as Times crudely buries Clarke revelations" (back here), that we should take a look here for sadly overworked Times ombudsman Daniel Okrent's thoughts on Izvestia on the Hudson's coverage of the breaking Clarke story. We have, and we're disappointed. But not surprised.

Sometimes, we can both spot an article so certain to provoke response that we may as well stop reading the rest of the paper that day and use our commuting time to start preparing answers to mail we haven’t even seen yet.

Great. So Okrent is saying that the responses never add value, so it's not necessary to anticipate, or seek to change behavior? Sheesh. How do we get this mule's attention, except by continuing to wield our 2x4s?

This was the case Monday, March 22, when we separately encountered "Former Terrorism Official Faults White House on 9/11," by Judith Miller, on page A18. It was a volatile combination of subject (Richard A. Clarke’s book attacking the Bush administration’s anti-terror policies and practices), writer (Miller was a lead writer on last year’s reporting on weapons of mass destruction, and had often written about Clarke or used him as a quoted source), and placement.

Dunno what was "volatile" about it. It seemed straightforward to me. Clarke's interview on 60 minutes was explosive, and I wanted to see how The Newspaper of Record was going to cover it. All too soon, I found out.

In any case, the issue was not the writer, but the quality of the writer's past work, which Okrent does not address. Rather than think or research for himself, Okrent appeals to "authority," Bill Keller, who predictably defends Miller's work. Okrent's "policy" not to "address issues that arose before my tenure began" makes this easy for Keller to do: The Times can wring its hands over Jayson Blair, and at the same time issue itself a free pass for its disgraceful role both in Whitewater and the "Goring" of election 2000. For Keller's role in that last episode, see The Howler here and here. So why should anyone who isn't on the Times masthead accept Keller as an authority on anything?

For readers who came in late, working girl Judith "Kneepads" Miller earned her sobriquet the old-fashioned way: For her view of reportage as stenography, see back here. For more of the ugly, sordid details, see Atrios; Kos; and the A1 Project.

By early afternoon, more than 100 readers — so far as we could tell, not motivated by any organized Web effort — ...

Thank you!

... had written to protest how The Times had underplayed the story. Among them were several present and former members of The Times’s editorial staff.

So Clarke isn't the only one to escape from a sick institution!

Wrote one, "A bunch of editors were asleep at the switch."

Certainly that is more trusting and charitable than saying that they were awake at the switch!

I asked managing editor Jill Abramson how and why the decision was made. In an e-mail message, she noted that "the core of Clarke’s allegations" had featured prominently in a front page, above-the-fold article by Philip Shenon on Saturday, March 20.

Uh, right. Like coverage on a Saturday morning is the same as coverage on a weekday—and the week when Clarke is going to testify before the 9/11 commission. How stupid does the Times think its readers are? Can they imagine that nobody keeps track?

She also said that The Times is "conservative about being part of book publicity roll-outs,"....

Well, well, well. Looks like what the Times laughingly calls its "news room" has its mind made up on this story already, doesn't it? Should we cover the substance of the book? Naah...

Back in the day, when the Times really was a great, courageous paper, Clarke's material, and his story, would have appeared in the pages of the Times first! It's a concept called "reporting," and one example was The Pentagon Papers. As it is, Amazon (where Clarke's book is still #1) is slowly eviscerating the Times business model by disintermediating its analytical functions. Too bad, but they have to earn their readership.

.... as the paper had been in January when former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill’s revelations about his experience in the Bush administration were first released. "We’d rather be in on the front end, with our own enterprise, than be manipulated into helping sell a book," Abramson concluded. "And we hardly buried the news in the book."

I disagree, both in principle and on the specifics.

Bravo! Give yourself a pat on the back, Dan!

When I wrote about The Times’s treatment of the O’Neill book in my Public Editor column on Feb. 1 ("All the News That's Fit to Print? Or Just Our News?"), I argued that if it’s consequential, it shouldn’t matter where it comes from; whether or not you’re promoting a book is less important than whether you’re serving your readers. As The Times’s subsequent coverage of the story demonstrates, this one was hugely important.

Thank you.

Tuesday’s paper presented a front page, above-the-fold report on Clarke’s charges and the White House’s defense; inside, a lengthy news analysis contextualized the controversy, and a boxed sidebar ...

Authored by none other than Judith Miller!

quoted verbatim excerpts from Clarke’s book. (It was good coverage, and in some respects — including giving full exposure to the book — it almost seemed designed to compensate for the weak first-day effort.)

Well, the Times does do that. (The Times lost me when they identified the bourgeois rioters as Republican operatives a week after Florida 2000 was decided, though they had the evidence some days before.) But a newspaper is supposed to COVER THE NEWS, not offer "make goods" for NOT covering the news!

As I write (Tuesday afternoon, around 5) The Times's Web site has five additional items on the unfolding story.

Thank you.

That’s all good news, and so is a not-so-peripheral lesson that can be derived from all of this. However deeply buried some readers considered the Clarke story (leave alone whether or not anything not on Page One is ipso facto “buried” [Thanks!—Lambert] ), it nonetheless surfaced and survived. Conspiratorialists who think The Times can stick a fork in a piece of breaking news by underplaying it should note that a truly important story will develop a life of its own, driven by events and public demand.

What a weird way of justifying the Times's coverage. "We didn't manage to kill the story off (like we did with Bush AWOL, back here) so everything's OK!"

The Times may be playing catch up on this one, but at least there’s still a story to catch up to.

RIght. Thanks. I think.

NOTE There are times when I think that only the invective of a scatologist like Alexander Pope could capture the reality of the exchange I've documented above, and our position with the SCLM. See The Dunciad, book III here, and search on "A place there is, betwixt earth, air, and seas." The part of Jove is not played by Bovino, of course, but by Okrent himself.