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.
It’s true that, in order to maintain access to sources, journalists are sometimes compelled to print information that’s been fed to them that later turns out to be a load of nonsense. That is one thing.
The other thing is, of course, that the Bush Administration often fed puff pieces to journalists, who then printed them uncritically.
Not possibly dodgy information, which even the best journalist could get his/her fingers burned on, but ‘Oh my! This administration is simply the hunkiest and the best!’ Presented in the form of an anonymous source.
Misinformation is one thing, saying that W is dead handsome and has a great bunker shot and reporting it as news from a confidential source makes the reporter look like a moron. Because said reporter is a moron.
What irked me is when Poppy Bush said something like the T word for taxes and for over twenty years, reporters were using that phrase with other things. It was so stupid and infantile.
The NYT didn’t disclose the secret Bush wiretapping program in 2004.
One problem is that the journos have become well paid celebrities and that makes them careful to protect their income and image.
This topic infuriates me. Why can’t the do: who, what, where, when, how and why.
“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?”
Why would you be calling him? Probably because of something he already did or said. If a major paper raises questions, calls and then has to report that “Mr. — did not return calls”, that is a powerful statement in itself.
Let’s say that John Q. Source gives an interview, has his lies and misleading statements called out, and throws a fit. “I’m never talking to Dick Browne from the Sun ever again!” he thunders. So what? What has been lost by that? So he goes to some other outlet next time. Hopefully they pull the same thing. It’s what journalists are supposed to do. Eventually, he either runs out of friendly outlets or he clams up. Oh noes, whatever will I do without my steady diet of disinformation from official sources!? Fuck them. Let them go on Sean Hannity if they want nothing but a tongue bath and a happy ending.
Charles Pierce has an interesting take on all this: “Should reporters in the field point out that Willard Romney is lying his ass off every time he says that the president has been “apologizing” for America? The answer is obvious. Of course, they should. The bigger question is to ask, when the Romney campaign calls some Sulzberger and bitches about “bias,” what are the consequences for the reporter, and what will the Public Editor’s reaction be?”
Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/new-york-times-public-editor-on-truth-6638107#ixzz1jLXAqMaZ
In addition, there are multiple ways for journalists to go about their jobs. The late, great Ida B. Wells was a genius at using the words of her opponents to make her case against lynching.
The late, great Molly Ivins was fond of citing one of her first editors who, during the Vietnam War, repeatedly barked at his young, idealistic reporters, “No! You can’t write and we can’t print the whole truth today! Because we still have to put out a newspaper tomorrow. What we can do is print a little piece of the truth today. Then get out there and do our jobs so we can print a little more truth tomorrow, and the next day, and the next.”
Not the entire answer, but pieces of the puzzle….
Ok given your logic.
If all reporters did not report lies from liars (i.e. fact them and rejected them as such) then wouldn’t the liar be left with no one to lie to?
And if someone who was known to be a liar was quoted by a reporter wouldn’t the reporter become suspect if he did NOT fact check the liar?
Sometimes powerful people are only powerful people because we let them be powerful.
Even if all good reporters didn’t report lies from well-placed sources, bad reporters would. I suspect there is a race to the bottom going on.
It’s more transactional. You kind of agree to serve as a conduit for their bullshit from time to time in return for them actually giving you valuable information at other times. That doesn’t mean that you go out and report that Iraq is developing WMD if you think that’s not true, but it does mean that you’ll repeat their interpretation of things even if you think it’s pure spin.
If you’re directing your reporters, you want them developing sources, not burning them. That’s why I say the best thing to do is to just not quote officials who you think are trying to deceive the public through you. Don’t run the quote. Instead, push back until they’ve qualified what they’re saying to the point that it’s supportable. An example would be a source who is saying that Reagan never raised taxes. Don;t even accept that statement. Push them to acknowledge the truth and then see what they have to say.
Boo:
We all know that most reporters don’t have the first clue about the things they report on. And just look at what reporters ask during press conferences.
Boo, you’re the only blogger I read who has mentioned this side of the story. Thanks for that.
Henry Kissinger included
“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”
Can u explain more?
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Reader comment says it all … [bold face mine]
In addition, why didn’t you add the phenomena of editors willingly being the mouthpiece of a government agency. Pure subversion and propaganda as we see with every outbreak of hostlities in foreign policy.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."I never understand this need to interpret what people “really” meant, when their words are perfectly understandable as is.
Brisbane is a professional journalist working for a major newspaper. If he had really intended to ask a different question, he should do so.
It’s nice to get so philosophical about the New York Times’s defense of misinformation. It’s easy to forget that the New York Times, like other newspapers, has a political agenda dictated by its publisher–the Sulzberger of the moment. So philosophy is not the issue.
What is the issue is the New York Times’s recent habit of allowing reporters like Judy Miller to misinform the public about critical national issues, to do it repeatedly, and to do it with impunity.
Another issue is allowing columnists on the payroll to write blatant falsehoods that could be easily checked before publication.
The issue of sources is an interesting dilemma, but sources who blatantly lie do not deserve publication. And should be immediately dropped.
Democracy depends on an informed electorate. Part of the problem is low-information voters. But part of the problem is the massive disinformation campaigns of the past 30 years–carried on by administrations and political partisans.
Sources depend on outlets for the information as much as those media depend on sources. A journalistic culture that does not tolerate misinforming/disinforming the public creates an environment in which public figures are required to be candid and truthful or the get dropped. And other media will not use them as sources.
To label the journalistic search for accurate understanding of the facts as “vigilantism” shows how far media in this country have fallen.
You gain nothing from access to sources that lie and spin.
Hear! Hear!
News organizations used to employ fact checkers. That is clearly no longer the case.
The purpose of journalism is to monitor the centers of power and hold them accountable. – Amira Hass, one of the few real journalists still working
More accurately. Newspapers from around the 1930s to the 1990s employed fact checkers. It was a historically conditioned practice; when those conditions ended, so did the practice.
Amira Hass is correct to a point. The centers of power must be held accountable for what they actually do–not for what they are suspected of doing. The job of the journalist is to find out what they actually are doing.
That is not as easily done as stating the principal. Anywhere.
Care to talk about what those conditions were?
Facts really don’t seem to matter at all anymore for the most part from what I can tell.
“Sources depend on outlets for the information as much as those media depend on sources. “
Absolutely. And a good journalist knows how to use refusal to comment to his/her advantage. It is possible to expose, isolate and ridicule sources that lie or stonewall. In today’s world, think Taibbi and Scahill, to name just two. So McChrystal will no longer speak to Taibbi. So what. So what if others in the military won’t. He’ll find some who will. A really good reporter can always find someone who will. People who routinely lie usually stab people in the back. Folks who have been stabbed are great sources. Often quite voluble.
To accept lies as the price of doing business is to accept our current culture of disinformation, lies, corruption and lack of accountability. It’s neither necessary nor OK.
That the NYT lies when it is politically expedient is hardly news. After all, the NYT led the MSM charge toward the invasion of Iraq with the flagrant lies of Judy Miller and her ilk.