I am generally a defender of The New York Times. Even during the heights of the Jayson Blair and Judith Miller fiascos I was always telling anyone who would listen that the Times is still an American newsgathering organization without peer. The daily A section remains a marvel, with datelines and photographs from around the world and across the country. Their website is also in a league of its own in terms of available information and breadth and depth of coverage. There isn’t another newspaper (or group of newspapers), to say nothing of television channels, that even comes close to reporting that much news.
So while there are, and always will be, a lot of legitimate complains to be leveled at the Times, too many of them take the newsgathering for granted. That doesn’t lessen the validity of complains over vacuous “trend” articles, the frequent relegation of female oriented news stories to the Style section, or the rather strange group that makes up the op-ed columnists. (Maureen Dowd and Thomas Friedman treat their Times columns with the kind of yawning indifference usually seen only amongst the most checked out of tenured faculty.) But it’s worth recalling that the reason so many different people complain about the Times is because so many different people read the Times. And so many people read the Times because it’s head and shoulders above every other newspaper in the country.
That lengthy intro concluded; I have a complaint to make. The image below is from the www.nytimes.com, it’s the above the fold portion of Thursday’s front page.
Real news in blue, useless partisan hackery in red.
The lead story is outlined in red; it was written by Elisabeth Bumiller (one of the least informative Times bylines) and carried a dateline of Washington, D.C. It was essentially a write-up of an “unreleased Pentagon report” stating that one in seven of prisoners who’ve been freed or transferred from Guantanamo have taken up arms again. Setting aside the fact that there are probably unreleased Pentagon reports that deal with alien landings and Soviet weather control, it’s a transparently news-less article. Even an unsophisticated provincial like me saw it as little more than pre-emptive media spin in advance of the Obama speech on Guantanamo.
In fact, it was so breathlessly and carelessly put together that the Times subsequently changed the story and the headline after complaints that it was misleading about whether or not prisoners who may have not been terrorists before they got to Guantanamo could be said to be “returning” to terrorism if they became terrorists (itself a fuzzy term) after being released. They then had to defend the changes as well as the original story; all in all, not a proud day.
The other story I’ve highlighted, outlined in blue, was not the lead in that day’s paper, but probably should’ve been. It reported on very quiet negotiations between the Afghan government and at least some of its various opponents. The basic outline would be a withdrawal of American forces in exchange for peace; and these negotiations are occurring with the tacit support of the US Government. The State Department issued a rote denial, but the men interviewed for the story said that they had indeed met with American officials about the negotiations. If true, this has the potential to be a huge development in the course of the American war in Afghanistan.
Comparing those two stories and their relative placement in the Times is an exercise in head scratching. The lead story was a naked attempt at media-cycle spin that was so news-less it required subsequent revisitation and revision, the other contained actual news and is the very definition of diligent journalism, ferreting out new information (in a war zone) that could be very important in determining how the war eventually ends. The former was a partisan leak that could’ve been given to any organization with a significant media profile; the latter was serious and immeasurably valuable foreign reporting that is done by only a tiny handful of outfits. I love The New York Times, but this wasn’t them putting their best foot forward.
