By: E&P Staff In a much-awaited commentary, Daniel Okrent, public editor of The New York Times, declared on Sunday in his column that the newspaper's editors' note last week on some of its Iraq war coverage "got it right. Mostly."
Meanwhile, Executive Editor Bill Keller continued to defend the editors' note, and blamed "overwrought" critics for overreacting to the Times' WMD coverage. Asked why he finally published the editors' note, Keller (quoted in The Washington Post on Monday) replied: "Mainly because it was a distraction. This buzz about our coverage had become a kind of conventional wisdom, much of it overwrought and misinformed."
In his column, Okrent wrote that the paper should have acted sooner, and needs to make up for the untruths in some of its stories on weapons of destruction by investigating how it was fooled. He made other critical comments, but by and large his criticism was restrained, and probably will not satisfy critics of the Times' editors' note, which ran last Wednesday.
For example, while he faulted the newspaper for placing its editors' note on page 10A, he did so by simply printing a comment by a reader. He failed to note that many newspapers that also had to correct the Times' stories that ran in their pages played their own editors' notes much more prominently.
He also did not fault the paper for not naming any guilty parties, particularly the reporter, Judith Miller, who wrote or co-wrote four of the six disputed stories that the paper studied. Okrent argued that the "failure was institutional, not individual," and indicated that editors bore much of the blame themselves.
Okrent strongly criticized the paper's "coddling" of sources, its "hunger for scoops" and reporters tailoring stories so they have a better shot at making page one. In fact, he raised so many questions one wondered, in the end, why he felt the editors' note got it "mostly" right.
Comments
No comments on this item Please log in to comment by clicking here