The New York Times established a public editor slot at the paper in the wake of the Jayson Blair debacle. Now, they're looking to abolish the position once Byron Calame's term is up in May.
I have mixed feelings about this. The public editor at the Times has no power whatsoever, and is routinely ignored on all manner of issue, especially the one dealing with corrections of articles and reports in the paper and the New York Times magazine. Yet, that position can, under the right circumstances, provide not only feedback, but a manner of fixing serious and longstanding problems at the paper with factchecking and consistency from its editorial page and reporting. All too often, the editorial page appears to have ignored the reporting in the paper and runs columns that are lacking in facts altogether.
Only yesterday did Calame excoriate the Times for running a lengthy piece on abortion in El Salvador. Indeed, the article grossly misrepresented key details of the case of a woman serving 30 years for murder. The woman was not, as the paper presented, incarcerated for having an abortion with a sentence of 30 years, but for murdering her infant who was born alive.
The Times has stated that they have no plans to issue a correction on the piece.
That the Times would now consider eliminating the public editor position strikes me as bad timing, though the paper notes that with the creation of new blogs within the paper's online edition that feedback with readers is better.
The problem is that the paper still refuses to deal with fixing the process of correcting its reporting when it has been shown to be wrong. The paper is arrogant in its refusal to correct the record of this most recent error-filled article, and that doesn't bode well for the so-called "paper of record."
Byron York, Blue Crab Boulevard, The Donovan, Conservative Times, and Redstate also comment.
No comments:
Post a Comment