THE PUBLIC EDITOR WEIGHS IN

By now it's old news for everyone that the Times headline reporting on the 9/11 commission's staff report's conclusions on the relationship between Saddam and al Queda left a lot of people (including me) very, very unhappy. Today the Times Public Editor (otherwise known as an "Ombud" at every other paper) Daniel Okrent weighs in, and while he tries to be gentle (probably too gentle to satisfy many critics) what he has to say is far harsher than anything the Gray Lady's had to to tolerate on her own pages before.

Stretching across four columns of the front page, the June 17 headline "Panel Finds No Qaeda-Iraq Tie; Describes a Wider Plot for 9/11" caused some readers, including Vice President Dick Cheney, to accuse The Times of "outrageous" (Cheney's word) distortion of the 9/11 commission's staff report. I don't buy "outrageous," but "distortion" works for me - specifically, the common newspaper crime of distortion by abbreviation. The staff report was largely concerned with attacks on United States soil, whereas the headline bore no such qualification. The headline also leaned on two of those words whose brevity makes them dear to all newsrooms: the resolute "no," and the imprecise "tie." Assistant managing editor Craig Whitney, who oversees the front page, argues that "tie" in the headline is "a correct shorthand summary" of the report's conclusion that there appeared to be no "collaborative relationship" between Al Qaeda and Iraq.

That's the problem with shorthand: If it's not written in your own hand, it's very hard to read. Headlines also pose two conundrums. The more complex the story, the more likely you are to get a headline that oversimplifies it. And the more complete the coverage associated with the headline, the less likely readers will find their own way to the gist of it. The main news section on June 17 contained eight separate articles on the staff report, consuming nearly 550 column inches. Unable to wander through all these glades and thickets of prose, many readers rely on headlines to provide as much of a summary as they are prepared to absorb.

While headlines may be short, their impact is large. Willful distortion? I don't see it. Misstep? Sure. Is an apology needed, as Internet columnist Bob Kohn, one of the paper's most forceful (and, often, most incisive) critics on the right, demanded by e-mail? No. Good reporting and careful presentation are what's needed. If out-of-tune headlines required apologies, the newspaper business would soon turn into a cacophony of confession.

My God, he even had something nice to say about Bob Kohn! If you aren't familiar with Bob's work, check under the blogroll for my review of his wonderful book, Journalistic Fraud.

At the end of this column each week the Times notes that "The public editor is the readers' representative." I don't always agree with everything he writes; sometimes he doesn't go far enough for my tastes, perhaps sometimes you feel the same, or believe he goes too far. But he's thoughtful and, more important given the paper he works for, we finally have someone who's actually taking our concerns seriously.

Not just Okrent himself but the very idea of having a Public Editor, remember, is a probationary thing at the Times. He keeps saying things like, the Vice President had a point when he called the Times' coverage outrageous, Bob Kohn can be "insightful," and boy, I worry for him. We may have to launch a letter writing campaign when the time comes.

I'd do that before letting them go back to being able to shut us out the way they did before.

Comments

[Rebecca]

While stating that headline impact was large, Okrent does not even attempt to float an idea as to how to remedy this problem - he even rejects apologies as out of hand. His attitude seems to be "that's just the way it is, folks - deal with it". Can you imagine the Times giving this sort of pass to any other business or governmental entity? Me neither.

[Media Hound]

Here's how to headline Okrent's comments:

" Times Denies Blatant Bias, Says Practice 'Common' "

[IceCold]

Taken in isolation, this incident and Okrent's response are merely ridiculous, but taken in context (distortion as a common problem at the NYT), it is indeed, outrageous. In that context, the placement on the front page, the size of the headline, and the actual copy of the story itself -- these were definitely any reasonable person's definition of outrageous. We're not talking about the Augusta National golf club membership policy here -- we're talking about a major issue directly related to the largest attack on our soil in US history, and to an ongoing war.

"Good reporting and careful presentation are what's needed." Ha! Exactly, Mr. Okrent. Until fairly recently these things weren't so hard to find in major media. By trying to deflect discussion to the issue of the story's content from the indefensible headline, he merely reminds us of the bigger problem at the NYT -- bad reporting -- and also emphasizes how toothless he really is -- analytically, I mean. This is not a matter of taste -- none of my objections to NYT distortion have anything to do with taste.

And it's even worse than some thing -- no one seemed to notice that Safire dropped the ball on this very issue last week. His column on the subject just gave the editorial department a pass, implying that they were victims of the bad reporting. This, in response to their astoundingly arrogant and snarky demand for an administration apology on the Iraq-AQ matter. Who writes the editorials, a dachsund? Can't they read and think for themselves? Anyone who's followed even the bad media coverage of this topic dropped their coffee when they saw the preposterous headline -- the editorial department can't spend the 3 minutes it took to go to the commission website and read the report themselves? The water-cooler social influence that seems to cause pulled punches and corrupts rigorous thought seems to have moved on from Friedman (an utterly conquered victim) to Safire.

I concur, Cori, that it's better to have this guy in place. But mostly because he confirms how deep and wide the rot really is. Depressing.

[Ron Hardin]

What paper calls it an ombud? As far as I can tell, that's more or less the opposite, though my intuition about Swedish is not very strong. The -man part is your representative against the ombud. I'm not sure because my references are a little ambiguous on the formation. In any case, it's a ``Why this strange transformation? Ah, to be sure! an issue feminist and the dreaded -man suffix.'' Well, okay, but as Fowler says of split infinitives, if you're going to avoid them, you ought to do it in such a way that your swerve from their path isn't noticeable. Otherwise it gets noticed every time it comes up instead of whatever you're saying. My dictionary defines ombudsman as a ``person who ...,'' or as it's called, the unmarked gender, meaning it can be either.

[Cableguy]

The damage was already done by the Times (and used by CBS/NBC/ABC/CNN). This kind of after-action report does little to repair the damage.

[Todd]

"The more complex the story, the more likely you are to get a headline that oversimplifies it. And the more complete the coverage associated with the headline, the less likely readers will find their own way to the gist of it."
Isn't this what opening paragraphs are for? To fill out the 'oversimplifications' and give the reader a more complete idea of 'the gist' of the story?

You know: "The report released today by the 9-11 Commission reveals that while there may have been communication between al Qaeda and Iraq going back several years, there is no evidence that they were cooperating in mounting terror attacks." A news report isn't a friggin' puzzle; readers shouldn't need to 'wander through all these glades and thickets of prose' to figure it out.

[Ron Hardin]

A Swedish speaker says that an Ombud is a person who represents another, a very generic sense.

An Ombudsman is pretty much what it is in English : ``("employee (e.g., in a union) who has the duty of representing members in questions concerning the organisation or the individual member.")''

So the words exist already, and don't mean the same thing. Which is the sense I get without the information, from who knows what source, but it's part of English.

[dauber]

All right, all right, I get the point. I'm too happy with the guy being even moderately willing to recognize any sin at all on the Times' part, so I'm too willing to settle. But maybe you guys are too demanding: do you really expect any rep of the MSM to see right off the bat what makes us so unhappy? (He's not going to comment on the editorial page; it just ain't gonna happen.)

I'm happy to get the camel's nose under the tent, you want them to cop to everything. I'm probably too easy, you're probably too unrealistic.

Does he have any clout? Come on. Of course the damage is already done, there's nothing any ombud can do that isn't after the fact, and it's pretty clear they've decided to ignore him over there. The clout he has is for people like us to be able to say, "even their own ombud says . . ."

[dauber]

And Ron, for God's sake, I wasn't trying to be gender neutral (or Swedish): I find "ombud" the easier, more streamlined term, and I do find it being used at more of the places I look at these days, for whatever reason.

[Ron Hardin]

The language though knows Ombudsman, and so it begins life as a compound noun with a -man suffix, which tells you what sort of verbs it can be subject of. Ombud therefore, if it is to mean anything, has to be the rest of the compound noun, making sense as Ombudsman when you add -man. At least, that's how I analyze the linguistic instincts of English.

The force against that inclination is perceived as political correctness, which has done a similar number on other words.

Ombud itself, absent the -man word, would have no entry into English at all. Words aren't labels you can just stick on things but get there on some kind of heritage. Labels for that matter don't operate the way the label-theorists think, in real life. A double error for the theory of words as labels.

One way in is simply importing a foreign word for the thing; you start by using it as foreign, and it takes on all the valencies of the foreign word with respect to English, and then takes on its place in English, if there's a need or interest in it. Moreover, it's compatible with the foreign word, a link.

Wittgenstein said somewhere that Esperanto was an abomination, for its having words without history.