Digitus Impudicus

Gray Lady Going Down



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A few years back the New York Times hired what they called a "Public Editor" in response to a series of journalistic mishaps they experienced. This person was to provide an outside check of journalistic standards, as practiced by the Times, and provide such analysis in his NYT-based column. More or less an ombudsman.

Currently, the person holding that position is Byron Calame. Also currently, the Times has made (maybe) the decision to close down that position as soon as Calame's contract runs out in May. Unfortunately (for the Times), having a "Public Editor" with access to the inner workings of the NYT, and the ability to question the reporters and editors on their practices and policies, has not done particularly well for the public image of the Times. Thus the termination of the "Public Editor" position.

This doesn't come as a complete surprise, of course. It's easy to make the noises of a credible newspaper that respects and adheres to journalistic standards. it's much more difficult to put that into practice on a regular basis. Especially if those standards come into conflict with the Times' higher priority of twitching the news around to elect Democrats, pandering to Islamist sympathizers and Arab dictators, and leaking classified information to Americas enemies whenever the opportunity arises - especially if they can spin it to make Bush look bad.

So Calame's most recent analysis was related to a front page, explosive, exclusive, surprising, amazing and revolutionary story - also completely misleading - that said a majority of women in the US lived without a spouse.

What kind of got lost in the mix is that the survey the story was based on included, well, young women who are legally barred from living with a "spouse" in most states in the US. Namely, 15-year-old girls. What's fun is that Calame saw a draft version of the story, and saw that this "interesting" little tidbit (the 15-year-olds) wasn't mentioned until the 10th paragraph of the story. But by the time the editors got done with the story, and published it, the 15-year-old girls found themselves buried somewhere in the 21st paragraph. Not to worry, though. They were still included in the survey numbers (along with the 16 and 17-year-olds).

Calame also had to deal with a reporter (the author of the story), veteran Times reporter Sam Roberts, who was a little inconsistent in how he answered Calame's questions about how the story was put together. In fact, that's what Calame ended his own column with.

After dealing with three weeks of questions from readers and from me, Mr. Roberts on Monday expressed a little less certainty about the new majority trumpeted in the first paragraph of his article. He wrote to me: “I think the essence of the article remains accurate: that, depending on how one adjusts the census’s definition, about half — maybe a little bit more, maybe a little bit less, depending on the age group — of American women are living without a spouse at any given time.”

Readers deserved this kind of more tempered perspective back on Jan. 16 — and a more tempered story, displayed on an inside page.

So with journalistic standards heading for Flatline Villa, Pinch ready to duck out the back door, and the Times abandoning even the pretense of self-critical objectivity (by ditching the Public Editor position), I'd have to say that their reporting a 4th Quarter loss of $648 Million a few weeks ago came as no surprise.

Yah, I said million. With an M. In one quarter.

So, we'll have to see what kind of party I'll have to have when the Gray Lady finally slips beneath the publishing waves. It's not like I'm going to glory in the loss of a news source - it hasn't been one for many years now. But I hope the wreckage of a once-standards-defining paper will provide an object lesson to other papers (are you paying attention, LA Times?) that if you consistently fail your readership, and engage in the same disastrously biased reporting lying that has caused many other such news outlets to suffer losses, then even you (LA Times) can find yourself on Skid Row.

Even George Soros could only save Air America for only so long.