Recent actions & (over) reactions at NYT are a cover-up for poor checks & balances
Dasu Krishnamoorty

On 5th June, 2 senior editors of the New York Times left as a sequel to 2 cases of journalistic fraud and betrayal. The first concerned a young, black reporter Jayson Blair who plagiarized news and played with datelines. The second concerned a Pulitzer Prize-winning veteran Rick Bragg who did byline stories with the help of proxies. But a much bigger failure was the policing function by the Times Executive Editor Howell Raines and Managing Editor Gerald Boyd, the two who have quit. The former overlooked Bragg's performance and the latter the work of Jayson.

Jayson quit the paper first and NYT carried on 11 May an extraordinary four-page story on his exit. An excessive show of outrage. In contrast, the brief Editor's Note on May 23 NYT referred to Bragg's mischief. Bragg was later suspended for two weeks. The immediate questions that NYT stories on its own inadequacy pose are of newsworthiness and self-aggrandizement in the guise of self-flagellation. How is internal breakdown an event of national importance that deserved four pages? First, readers have no duty to bear the brunt of such exaggerated reaction. Second, it is a misuse of space that is the readers' natural domain. Third, it is an arrogant misappropriation of the right to define news.

The New York Times has a history of overdoing its information function. For example, it went on mourning the 9/11tragedy months after tears of the American public had evaporated. That it is a newspaper of record is no excuse to topple established news values. Another instance of relevance to the billion people from the Indian sub-continent, and the 2 million Indians living in the United States, is the failure of their prime minister to get a fraction of the space Nisha Sharma (an Indian dowry victim-heroine) managed to on the front page of NYT.

Back to the NYT news room. The report on June 6 again begins on the front page as a double column item and jumps into a whole page in NYT's Metro section. The entire story is about mismanagement in the newsroom. (How is that the headache of readers? It amounts to brazenly tell the public how crucial such a failure in the NYT is to the nation.) The report describes how the NYT intends to undo the damage it has suffered.

Full of schmaltz, the report contains liberal doses of self-praise. Read sentences like: Mr. Raines, clutching a microphone before dozens of reporters, editors, photographers and other newsroom staff members, many of whom sobbed audibly, said, "As I'm standing before you for the last time, I want to thank you for the honor and privilege of being a member of the best journalistic community in the world."

Or take another from the editorial: "The good of any particular institution depends on its people, but this one depends equally on the confidence that the readers place in it, a confidence based on the belief that every day, the paper struggles mightily to get things right." If journalism is so imperfect a business (as the editorial admits), then why all this fuss?

Here’s another gem: "For the news media, the day's events were the culmination of a story line that had played out for weeks." These words cannot hide the blunt truth of an unpardonable editorial fiasco. A reader Emily Van Ness Schurin wrote on June 6: "Try as I might, it is hard for me now to read anything in the paper and to wonder whether the story has been accurately reported or not."

Then again, isn’t it of limited interest to readers that “a committee of editors and reporters as well as several outside news media experts has been charged with taking a sweeping look at the paper's newsroom practices, and is expected to report its findings in July” ?

Yet another editorial on the same day refers to New York Times as cocky.

The president of the New York Association of Black Journalists Errol Cockfield says, 'There are many black journalists who are questioning, whether, in an effort to restore its credibility, the Times has gone too far.' I am not black but I am one of them and there are many others who have not spoken out. The entire report suggests that the world has come to a standstill because two of NYT's editors have left. Despite all this, NYT is a great newspaper but it is for the public to say that and not for the Times. Its June 6 report is but a repeat of its May 11 striptease.

On the same day, Jany Scott and David Carr wrote a tribute on the jump page to Raines and Boyd that reads like a premature obituary. They nostalgically recall, 'Yesterday, they (Raines and Boyd) returned to the same spot.' Below this tribute appears an article by James Barron on the interim editor Joseph Lelyweld. Most of it is of value to a prospective employer and very little to the reader. Even Lelyweld could not have written his bio as well as Barron did.

The NYT's coverage on June 6 has revealed a single underlying obsession: that what is good for the Gray Lady is good for America and the rest of the world. And The Gray Lady of Manhattan washing her lingerie in the public is no elevating sight!