I think a lot of the debate about Arthur Brisbane’s inquiry is off-point. Brisbane, the “public editor” of the New York Times wants to know if the paper should challenge factually inaccurate information from its sources in the main body of its articles.
…some readers who [are] fed up with the distortions and evasions that are common in public life, look to The Times to set the record straight. They worry less about reporters imposing their judgment on what is false and what is true.
Is that the prevailing view? And if so, how can The Times do this in a way that is objective and fair? Is it possible to be objective and fair when the reporter is choosing to correct one fact over another? Are there other problems that The Times would face that I haven’t mentioned here?
Okay, I admit the questions invite mockery. But here’s the problem. Let’s say you’re Henry Kissinger and a Times reporter calls you up to ask you about the latest brouhaha at the State Department. You give them your interpretation, which involves some self-serving spin. Then, the next day, you pick up the paper and discover that the reporter is calling you a liar. Are you going to be more truthful next time the reporter calls, or you going to tell your secretary not to accept calls from that particular reporter in the future?
Every reporter has to juggle their desire to learn and report the truth and their need to cultivate and maintain sources. If you’re running the New York Times, a reporter who can’t get powerful people to talk to them isn’t worth a bucket of warm spit.
Going back to the Bush administration, if you could cultivate Scooter Libby as a source, you were going to get some good scoops. You could get inside the thinking in the White House that really mattered. The reporters chasing Ari Fleischer weren’t going to learn shit.
Yet, Scooter Libby was a paid liar. If you trusted him, you’d certainly wind up misleading the public. If you called his claims “lies,” he would no longer talk to you at all. Your editor would be disappointed, and you’d have less of a clue about White House machinations.
Even the greatest reporters can’t avoid a tension between truth and access, because it’s never one or the other, but degrees of both.
So, Brisbane is really asking if we want the New York Times to be the paper without any good sources. Or, perhaps to be a little fairer, he’s asking how the hell his paper can call its sources on all their lies. Should we do it in a sidebar? In the main body of the article? Some other way?
I’d suggest one way to straddle this conundrum. Don’t quote people who are obviously lying. The punishment for lying on the record should be that the quote doesn’t get printed. Obviously, you can’t do this with Mitt Romney saying the president is always apologizing for America. He’s too high-profile and his comments are too public to be ignored. A comment like that should be dissected to show how little truth it contains. But reporters talking to sources ought to just ignore lies. They should challenge what they’re hearing until their source says something honest, and then they should quote them on that.
In the end, the National Security Advisor or the Pentagon’s head of Special Operations don’t have to talk to reporters. If you’re an editor and you’ve got a reporter who can get them to talk to him, you’re not going to go racing out to call those sources bullshit-artists. And it’s not clear where the real cost/benefit ratio lies because the public benefits from access to power even when that access comes with a huge heaping pile of bullshit.
When you look back at the careers of great access reporters like Bob Woodward and Seymour Hersh, you can see the trade off quite clearly. They’ve both learned and reported things that we would never have otherwise known. And they’ve both repeated a hell of a lot of total misinformation.
That’s the nature of the business.
