What the NYT Public Editor Said... and Didn't Say
 

First ... What Clark Hoyt "said" the McCain Article "Didn't Say", CQ:

On Thursday, New York Times editor-in-chief Bill Keller hysterically accused the John McCain campaign of "wag[ing] a war" on the Gray Lady simply by issuing a clear and calm denial of Keller's smear. If that's true, then give Times public editor Clark Hoyt conscientious objector status. Hoyt wants no part of defending Keller or his journalists, which he makes clear in a stinging rebuke:

The article was notable for what it did not say: It did not say what convinced the advisers that there was a romance. It did not make clear what McCain was admitting when he acknowledged behaving inappropriately — an affair or just an association with a lobbyist that could look bad. And it did not say whether Weaver, the only on-the-record source, believed there was a romance. The Times did not offer independent proof, like the text messages between Detroit’s mayor and a female aide that The Detroit Free Press disclosed recently, or the photograph of Donna Rice sitting on Gary Hart’s lap. ....
“If the point of the story was to allege that McCain had an affair with a lobbyist, we’d have owed readers more compelling evidence than the conviction of senior staff members,” he replied. “But that was not the point of the story. The point of the story was that he behaved in such a way that his close aides felt the relationship constituted reckless behavior and feared it would ruin his career.”

I think that ignores the scarlet elephant in the room. A newspaper cannot begin a story about the all-but-certain Republican presidential nominee with the suggestion of an extramarital affair with an attractive lobbyist 31 years his junior and expect readers to focus on anything other than what most of them did. And if a newspaper is going to suggest an improper sexual affair, whether editors think that is the central point or not, it owes readers more proof than The Times was able to provide. ...

I asked Jill Abramson, the managing editor for news, if The Times could have done the story and left out the allegation about an affair. “That would not have reflected the essential truth of why the aides were alarmed,” she said.

But what the aides believed might not have been the real truth. And if you cannot provide readers with some independent evidence, I think it is wrong to report the suppositions or concerns of anonymous aides about whether the boss is getting into the wrong bed.

Keller has tried to retreat on the sexual-affair front of his war ever since he launched that attack. He claims that the article wasn't about sex at all, but improper access. However, the lede of the article runs this explosive sentence before any other concerns: "Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself ..."

The Times can't retreat from that lede. Concerns over supposed favors all sprang from this supposed romantic interlude. The very plain implication of the piece was that McCain was doing favors for Vicki Iseman because she was providing sexual favors to McCain. Without that, where's his motivation to support her clients? A few plane rides, which were perfectly allowable under Senate rules at the time and which he properly disclosed?

Without the sex, there's no scandal. In fact, as the McCain camp pointed out, a look at McCain's record shows dozens of times when Iseman's clients got disappointed in his votes on the Commerce Committee. Even the one supposed intervention -- McCain's letter to the FCC -- doesn't demand a result favorable to her client, but just any decision on a long-overdue case, considered for over two years. Their one point of supposed corroboration, John Weaver, publicly repudiated the Times' version of his story, saying his intervention with Iseman had to do with her activities outside of McCain's presence, not her interactions with the Senator.

Even Lanny Davis called the charges baseless. That's Clinton administration official Lanny Davis.

Keller wants to beat a retreat from the salacious charges that have reduced his newspaper to the same status as a supermarket tabloid. Without that charge, however, no story exists. And with that reality, Clark Hoyt has no desire to march into battle at Keller's side.

UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis is "gobsmacked" at Keller's refusal to see the journalistic malpractice. Jarvis suspects that it's just spin. Doesn't that also tell us something about the credibility of the New York Times under the management of Keller and Pinch Sulzberger -- that they find it necessary and appropriate to "spin" their readers, rather than report the truth?

Next -- What he Didn't Say (it may take a few minutes for me to get the links inserted)...

What the Public Editor Didn't Say, by Denis Boyles:

Wednesday night to Monday morning is just a lost weekend to a drunk. To Bill Keller, the executive editor of the New York Times, it was something more: Enough time to stain further the paper’s already tarnished reputation — and more than enough time to realize that no reasonable explanation could be produced that would explain away the paper’s decision to run its front-page, 3,000-word hit on John McCain. For four days, everybody (not just the Media Research Center, we’re talking the Los Angeles Times and Slate, too) has pummeled Keller and his reporters. By now, it’s clear that it was a story that, according to the Washington Post’s media watcher, Howard Kurtz, is seen by a “rough consensus” of journalists as “fatally flawed.” (National Review Online’s editorial is here; Jonah Goldberg’s column on the mess is here.)

Sunday, the paper’s “public editor,” Clark Hoyt, weighed in on the controversy. I say “weighed” but his tread was positively catlike. Another missed opportunity, I suppose. But let me help. Here’s what the paper’s public editor didn’t say, but should have:

“Get a grip! The function of the Times is not to print ‘news.’ It’s to provide like-minded readers with a comforting view of the world.” If its purpose is to print “all the news,” then the Times, like all newspapers, is an old-fashioned product made obsolete by advances in technology. Therefore, what constitutes “news” at the Times is not only a moving target, it’s a series of different targets, depending on who the paper wants to take knock off. But that kind of bias surprises no one: The litany of “I-told-you-so” comments that follow every one of these gaffes by the Times is pointless. The Times no longer pretends to offer a chronicle of the day’s events. Its business has changed: It now provides brain cocoa for its dwindling band of readers by offering a daily validation of the assumptions shared by most of them. In doing so, of course, it also alienates more than half its potential market. If that’s a business plan, it’s a bad one (if the spiraling value of NYT stock is any indication — and of course it is). The most recent announcement of newsroom layoffs won’t be the last.

“Obviously, we’d never have printed this story if it had been about any leading Democrat.” As Kurtz points out, “When Gennifer Flowers held a news conference in 1992 to announce that she had carried on an affair with Bill Clinton, the New York Times devoted one paragraph of a news story to her charges.” Kathleen Willey fared little better. Juanita Broaddrick would have been happy to get that much coverage. The Clinton years, with its huge inventory of underreported misadventures, left the Times hopelessly discredited — not so much by what they printed, but by what they didn’t print.

“News is now a series of narratives — stories with good guys and bad guys. The purpose of our piece wasn’t to report ‘facts.’ It was to take a guy that we had proclaimed ‘good’ and make him ‘bad.’” Of course, the Times sets the agenda for the Left in America; what appears on its pages is echoed and amplified by the rest of the press. Its recent endorsement of McCain had left the paper in a tricky situation, and the hit piece was the way out. A new narrative was born. Thus, among many examples, the AP’s series of follow-up pieces about infidelity and dishonor, including this particularly odious piece of work by Libby Quaid (mercifully unsigned in the International Herald Tribune). The headline: “Cindy McCain joins coterie of political wives who stood by their men.” The lead:

Cindy McCain did not hesitate as she stepped toward the microphone, taking her place in the history of political wives who stood by their men in the face of rumored or alleged marital infidelity.

Quaid goes on to compare Cindy McCain with Lee Hart, Dina McGreevey, Suzanne Craig, Hillary Clinton, and other wives of men who had actually, and not allegedly, done them wrong. The Times’s slam of McCain doesn’t even rise to the level of rumor.

“Even if we didn’t have any substantiation for our claims, it’s in our interest to assume they’re true anyway.” Here’s Hoyt offering some heavily varnished truth:

"The pity of it is that, without the sex, The Times was on to a good story. McCain, who was reprimanded by the Senate Ethics Committee in 1991 for exercising “poor judgment” by intervening with federal regulators on behalf of a corrupt savings and loan executive, recast himself as a crusader against special interests and the corrupting influence of money in politics. Yet he has continued to maintain complex relationships with lobbyists like Iseman, at whose request he wrote to the Federal Communications Commission to urge a speed-up on a decision affecting one of her clients."

Keating was 17 years ago. What’s new in this story that would merit a 3,000-word front-page story? What’s that “complex relationship” about? Is it unusual for elected officials to prod the bureaucracy on behalf of others? Hoyt’s assumption is one obviously shared by Keller and the four reporters responsible for the hit. In fact, it’s the same assumption that compelled the piece.

“This job of mine is pretty stupid.” The office of the “public editor” was invented to give some cover to the Times as it emerged from the calamitous editorship of Howell Raines. The idea was to give lip service to the myth of an objective press accountable to readers. The first public editor was Dan Okrent, who was straightforward and honest, giving Pinch a few sleepless night, no doubt. In his farewell column, Okrent said what everybody knew: The New York Times is a liberal newspaper.

Clark Hoyt is no Okrent. For him, the word “liberal” is just another baseless, right-wing allegation, as in “a conservative backlash against the ‘liberal’ New York Times.” Hoyt doesn’t yet understand what Okrent knew quite well: The problem at the Times isn’t bias, which is always acceptable. It’s hypocrisy. The Times claims to represent a set of journalistic ideals. But their daily practices show a blatant, if situational disregard for the standards of their profession — standards which certainly would have forbidden the appearance of the McCain story in the first place.