Chron: The letters editor works really hard
Byron Calame, the public editor of the New York Times, has been on the warpath over some pretty shoddy practices at his newspaper of late. In a September column, Calame wrote:
I find it disturbing that any Times editor would come so close to implying -- almost in a tit-for-tat sense -- that Mr. Rivera's bad behavior essentially entitles the paper to rely on assumptions and refuse to correct an unsupported fact.
Mr. Keller's final reason for rejecting a correction was that Ms. Stanley, ''who is writing as a critic, with the license that title brings -- was within bounds in her judgment.'' He elaborated: ''Ms. Stanley's point was that Mr. Rivera was show-boating -- that he was being pushy, if not literally pushing -- and I think an impartial viewer of the footage will see it that way.''
Based on the videotape and outtakes I saw, Ms. Stanley certainly would have been entitled to opine that Mr. Rivera's actions were showboating or pushy. But a ''nudge'' is a fact, not an opinion. And even critics need to keep facts distinct from opinions.
Meanwhile, in the opinion section of The Times, the corrections policy of Gail Collins, the editor of the editorial page, is not being fully enforced. As I have written on my Web journal, Paul Krugman has not been required to correct, in the paper, recent acknowledged factual errors in his column about the 2000 election in Florida.
The Times has long been a trailblazer in its commitment to correcting errors. This is no time to let those standards slip -- even when well-known critics and columnists are involved.
The withering criticism from Calame finally shamed the executive editorial leadership of the New York Times into acting to rectify the problems he identified.
Locally, the Chronicle's equivalent to Mr. Calame has also been given a column and a web presence. We are very fortunate in Houston that, unlike the New York Times, we have a world-class paper that has no problems that need to be addressed.* Thus, the Chronicle's reader representative in recent weeks has addressed the HARD WORK of covering a big news event (twice!), and the HARD WORK of Judy Minshew, the Chronicle's letters editor.
Back in January, we suggested the Chronicle reader representative should be given a blog and a column. The executive editorial leadership of the Chronicle has elected to do both. Unfortunately, both outlets seem simply to be vehicles for the reader representative to portray the newspaper positively. It's mostly an outlet for PR, not media (self) criticism. Furthermore, columns do not remain in a free archive, suggesting that even the Chronicle editors do not view them as being of lasting importance.
From the issues addressed in the About: Chron columns and blog, one can draw conclusions about the Chronicle executive editorial leadership's view of its operation, especially when contrasted with the prominence and charge of the New York Times' public editor. Houstonians should be reassured that our local newspaper has fewer problems than the New York Times.*
* Yes, that was sarcasm for anybody who didn't pick it up. Here's one problem that still hasn't been addressed, for example.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 10/09/05 05:42 PM | Print |
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