How The New York Times public editor blew it

Daniel Okrent, the first public editor at the New York Times, is about to hand over the reins to his successor after an 18-month stint in the position. Reviews of his performance are coming in, and they range from “horrid” to “great.”

New York University journalism professor and PressThink proprietor Jay Rosen is among those who think Okrent did a good job and had a significant impact on the paper.

The responses to Rosen’s column on Okrent were plentiful, and negative to such an extent that he offered to publish anyone who could offer a “factual and fair” critique of Okrent. Here it is.

At his best, Daniel Okrent was a good ombudsman. Most of the time he was mediocre, often enough unable to recognize bad journalism when he saw it. At his worst, he was a dishonest bully who should never have been allowed to complete his term at the paper.

In October of 2004, Okrent published an astonishing assault on a reader, Steve Schwenk, who had sent an ugly, inflamatory email to Times reporter Adam Nagourney. Nagourney forwarded the email to Okrent who, in violation of his own stated policy on publishing emails, used it as the red meat to close a column on campaign coverage in which he identified Schwenk by name and home town, and called him a coward. Predictably, a great many Times readers and residents of the internet echo chamber used the information Okrent published to dig up Schwenk’s email address and telephone number and subject him and his family, including his children, to weeks of harrassment.

Although Okrent apologized after the fact for calling Schwenk a coward, he excused his action by likening Schwenk’s email to the act of vandalizing a church or desecrating a synagogue. In comments to Business Week, Okrent said that “I decided that someone who goes out at night and paints a swastika on the door of a synagogue doesn’t want it written about either. There have to be consequences. [What the blogger wrote] was vile. No one should ever wish that on another person.”

In his own readers’ forum, Okrent wrote that “I published the name of the man who wrote to Nagourney for the same reason that newspapers publish the names of people who commit other grievous acts. The man who vandalizes a church, say, doesn’t want his name in the paper either. But I don’t think his wishes should protect him from public responsibility for what he has done.”

In other words, Okrent believes that someone who sends an ugly, private email to a reporter deserves the same exposure as someone who is convicted of vandalism or hate crimes — he deserves to be treated like a criminal whose name is already a matter of public record — and in the process he imagines that an offended reporter holds the same value to the community as a synagogue or a church.

That isn’t rational, and it certainly isn’t the responsibility of a readers’ representative to make the judgement that a reader needs to be treated as a criminal in the pages of The Times.

In the same message he used to conflate Schwenk’s email with a crime, Okrent wrote that his email policy is to regard “all messages sent to me, or forwarded to me by Times staff members, to be public unless the writer has stipulated otherwise.

“Every message sent to my office gets an instant response asking if the writer wishes his or her name to be withheld. No signed comments are published without confirmation of authorship, either by telephone or e-mail.”

And therein lies the dishonesty. Prior to the controversy erupting around Schwenk, Okrent had never so much as mentioned a policy regarding emails forwarded to him by reporters. And prior to that statement regarding his email policy, the autoresponse to letters addressed to him read, “If you do not wish your message to be relayed to other editors and reporters, be sure to let us know;” no mention of publication there. And even now, his published policy on emails (right sidebar) makes no mention of publication or of emails forwarded to him by Times staff, an issue I raised with him and with the paper at least twice.

Note From the Public Editor: Everything readers send to our mailbox will be read by me or my associate, Arthur Bovino. If a reply is appropriate, you will hear from us shortly. If you do not wish your message to be relayed to other editors and reporters, be sure to let us know. When referring to a specific article please include its date, section and headline.

The current autoresponse to emails received by Okrent reads, “If you do not wish your message to be published or relayed to other editors and reporters, be sure to let us know.” Again, no mention of forwarded emails, and of course anyone writing to a reporter wouldn’t receive the autoresponse anyway. And if Okrent’s treatment of Schwenk is the model for the policy, an email might be published regardless the sender’s wishes; Schwenk repeatedly asked (“begged,” according to him) that Okrent keep the email private.

So anyone who didn’t happen to read the ninth message down the page on the particular day Okrent posted his Schwenk-specific policy would never know that his or her email, to Okrent or anyone else at the paper, is subject to publication at Okrent’s whim.

Steve Lovelady, the man who rides herd on the Columbia Journalism Review’s daily roundup of press atrocities, and whom I respect greatly (as I do Jay Rosen) asked in comments on Rosen’s column, “…when exactly, in an Internet age of universal attack and counter-attack, did “readers” become off-limits … That’s a prohibition that would put most bloggers out of business in about two hours.” But that perspective only invites the question of when The Times decided to adopt the standards of (some, irresponsible) bloggers — the answer is, on the day Okrent went after Schwenk — and when readers became public figures and fair game for reporters (or in this case, readers’ representatives), to which the answer is the same.

In the wake of all that, Okrent should have resigned. When he didn’t, The Times should have bought out his contract and hired in his stead a readers’ representative who directs his murderous indignation toward the paper, not the readers, when he runs off the rails.

Aside from diminishing the paper, himself and his office by attacking Schwenk and manufacturing an ex post facto publication policy, which should be sufficient to irreparably tarnish his performance, Okrent did a mediocre job enlivened by flashes of exceptional common sense for which I duly commended and commend him.

There were, however, many instances of obviously demented writing by Times reporters that he failed to remark. One example of those is a Jodi Wilgoren story from the 2004 campaign that boasts probably the strangest lede I’ve ever seen from a national beat reporter: “Like a caged hamster, John Kerry is restless on the road.” Imagine the reaction if, as I suggested at the time, Elisabeth Bumiller balanced that gem with a lede such as, “Like a starving jerboa, President Bush bounded into Cincinatti and quickly sniffed out an astonishingly large pile of lettuce.” (I’d now go with, “Like a sullen weasel, President Bush avoids unfriendly crowds on the road,” but at the time I was concerned with rodent parity.)

Wilgoren went on to claim for herself “authentic insights” into Kerry. Her story was far from the only one to employ loaded language during the campaign and at other times during Okrent’s stint.

Another example, from Jeffrey Gettleman writing on the June, 2004, transfer of sovereignty from the US to the Iraqi Governing Council, was so unintentionally (I think) comic that I felt it deserved special mention. In both instances, Okrent declined to act; more or less understandably in the Gettelman instance, much less so in the Wilgoren one.

Jay Rosen says that Okrent will have had a greater impact on the paper than did fabulist and plagiarizer Jayson Blair. In one sense that’s saying quite a lot, since Blair ultimately cost several people, including managing editor Howell Raines, their jobs, and created the climate that led to the creation of Okrent’s position. If one accepts Rosen’s assessment, Okrent does indeed deserve high praise for topping that last Blair achievement alone.

In another sense, though, it’s meaningless. Blair didn’t help stampede readers, and the country, into accepting a war based on an evidently impoverished rationale, and Okrent didn’t help stop it. Not that the opportunity to do either of those things arises very often, but there’s really no evidence that Okrent would have had an impact on, say, Judith Miller’s reporting even if he had been around at the time; despite his aversion to anonymous sourcing, Okrent acknowledges that the use of it by Times reporters hasn’t appreciably declined during his tenure, even after the paper issued stern new guidelines in February of 2004. Given the number of anonymous sources flitting about the paper’s pages in 2003, that’s somewhat astonishing.

That’s also why I take the second Siegal Report (the first one was The Blair Which Project), which Jay Rosen also mentions favorably in connection with Okrent’s impact, with a large grain of salt. The day after the paper announced the new report, Richard Oppel wrote a story about a major US military operation along the Syrian border that was, with one exception, entirely anonymously sourced: We heard from “the military,” “a senior American commander,” “American officials,” “senior American commanders,” and “American military officials,” along with one named Marine Colonel who, unlike the reporters, was at the scene.

Okrent was asked about the anonymous sourcing in the Oppel piece — reported by Oppel and John Burns in Baghdad, and Eric Schmitt in Washington — in a Salon interview by Steve Kettmann (who has freelanced for The Times on Okrent’s watch), and responded that “I would have to know who the officials were and Oppel’s history with those officials, and whether they were reliable sources and whether he did cross-confirming with other officials.”

Finding out those things sounds like a good idea, and they’re the kind of things Okrent himself has said readers deserve to know. Perhaps he hasn’t looked into it because of short-timer’s syndrome or because no reader other than Kettmann has advanced the notion. Regardless, one could view the story as a bellwether of Okrent’s impact, and not just on the anonymity score: with the paper’s Baghdad bureau holed up inside a heavily fortified and guarded compound, Okrent might have considered advocating a disclaimer on Iraq stories similar to the one the paper included on stories from reporters embedded with US troops. “We don’t get out much and we’re relying almost entirely on secondhand reports at best, so take that into account.”

I asked senior editor Bill Borders about that after reading this Robert Fisk story in Counterpunch; Borders replied that the paper’s Iraq reporters had already made sufficiently clear that they were reporting under difficult circumstances. But better safe than sorry, I say.

The Oppel story suffers especially, and demonstrates the need for scrutiny of it, in comparison to Ellen Knickmeyer’s brilliant Washington Post reports, on May 10 and May 11, the same days that the Siegal Report (actually the “Credibility Group” report) and the Oppel piece appeared, respectively.

It isn’t Okrent’s fault that Knickmeyer hitched a ride to the border and scooped the bejeebers out of The Times, but the relative merits of the two stories don’t bode well for his legacy.

(No Times-bashing sidetrack would be complete without a mention of James Bennett’s plaintive “Mystery of the Insurgency” piece in the May 15 Week in Review section. That’s not Okrent’s fault either, but it’s a seriously discouraging piece of reporting.)

Almost as important as what’s in a paper, perhaps more so in some instances, is what isn’t. Given The Times’ experience with reporting on Iraq, one might expect that the exposition of a secret UK memo seeming to confirm the accusation that the invasion of Iraq was a done deal long before the Bush administration was through describing it as a last resort, to prompt a bit of introspection and historical exploration. Instead, the first (and to this point only, I think) reference to the memo disclosed by the London Sunday Times was the brief mention in this Alan Cowell story on the British elections.

Symetrically enough, the first major US story on the memo originated with Knight Ridder’s Washington bureau on May 6. Knight Ridder was the only outside news source favorably mentioned by name in The Times’ Iraq mea sorta culpa.

I may have missed the followup — I hope someone will let me know if that’s the case — but I do know that the paper’s White House correspondent, has as of today not solicited a non-answer from Scott McCellan about the memo. As a reader, I’d like my representative to ask someone about that.

Another story that is perhaps more important in terms of the way The Times and the press at large cover the Bush administration is the recent Bush roundtable with students in Holland from which reporters were excluded after a couple of pointed questions from the students. The Los Anegeles Times ran a story on it, but the New York Times appears not to have.

Both stories, the memo and the banning of the press from the unscripted roundtable, go so explicitly to the credibility of The Times and the press as a whole that it’s difficult to understand how someone in Okrent’s position could fail to spotlight them. And, as with the paper’s continuing reliance on unnecessarily anonymous sources and the inability to acknowledge when their reporters are so compromised that notice to readers is required, pace the unacknowledged restrictions on movement and reporting in Iraq, the failure to recognize and adequately cover important stories casts doubt on the degree of influence Okrent will have had upon the paper.

I’m glad the management at the paper surrendered to the necessity of an ombudsman. I enjoyed much of the interaction I had with Okrent up until the Schwenk Incident (Robert Ludlum’s ghost … are you there?), and I look forward to the arrival and ritual hazing of Okrent’s replacement.

Meanwhile, I remain thoroughly unconvinced that Dan Okrent did a particularly good job or has wrought much change at The Times or anywhere else.