On Sunday, the New York Times’s public editor had an extraordinary column critical of his paper’s pre-war coverage and lack of adequate follow-up. Citing similar circumstances more than 80 years ago when the Times, failing to understand the impact, was almost a cheerleader for the Bolshevik revolution, Daniel Okrent demands the Times now examine itself and report how it was duped.
In the column, he makes two key points that should be considered when examining all reporting. First, he believes that if anonymous sources are found later to have lied, reporters have almost an obligation to reveal them:
The contract between a reporter and an unnamed source – the offer of information in return for anonymity – is properly a binding one. But I believe that a source who turns out to have lied has breached that contract, and can fairly be exposed. The victims of the lie are the paper’s readers, and the contract with them supersedes all others.
He also points out that a reporter alone is rarely at fault for poor reporting
The Times’s flawed journalism continued in the weeks after the war began, when writers might have broken free from the cloaked government sources who had insinuated themselves and their agendas into the prewar coverage. I use “journalism” rather than “reporting” because reporters do not put stories into the newspaper. Editors make assignments, accept articles for publication, pass them through various editing hands, place them on a schedule, determine where they will appear. Editors are also obliged to assign follow-up pieces when the facts remain mired in partisan quicksand.
When reading letters to the editor, one finds as often as not that readers are dissatisfied not with the reporting on an issue but the placement, headline or tone of a story or even that a story was reported at all. Some of these decisions are totally out of the control of the reporter (headlines and placement, for example) and even the tone can reflect the editing process. Okrent’s criticism of his own paper can be true of others: “The failure was not individual, but institutional.”