The NY Times and the End of Truth

By Charles P. Pierce, Esquire Magazine

13 January 12

his attempt at public-editing from Arthur Brisbane at the Times is exactly why I usually tell people to take it a little easy on the grunt reporters who have to do the day-to-day work of covering campaigns. Covering a presidential campaign on a daily basis has become so impossible that daily political journalism is very close to becoming a detriment to self-government. The people doing it are working in a dynamic that makes thoughtful consideration of what is true and what is false almost impossible. Tim Crouse wrote about this phenomenon in his absolutely essential The Boys on the Bus almost 40 years ago, and every problem in campaign coverage limned so ably by Crouse in that book - the pull of pack-thinking, the endless and grinding deadlines, the whipsaw of bias claims, the surrender of politics to the syntax and rhetoric of marketing, chickenshit editors back home, etc. etc. - is worse today and not better. The pack is bigger and more unruly. Everybody's on deadline all the time. (Twitter! File for the blog! Generate Content Across Many Platforms!) There are more - and, occasionally, better - watchdogs, especially on the Intertoobz, but even a lot of that is now hyper-amplified heckling. The marketing people are better at their jobs than the journalism people are at theirs. But, among all the problems that have gotten worse and not better since Crouse wrote his book, it's is the latter consideration, the chickenshit bosses back home, that has done the real damage.

Newspapers today are run by terrified beancounters. The industry is dying. They know it. They are casting about for any strategy to delay the inevitable and, personally, they are casting about for any parachute they can find. The beancounters owe their primary allegiance to "the company," and not to the reporter in the field. The beancounter editors and sub-editors at many - if not most - major newspapers and broadcast outlets would sell their grandmothers to the Somali pirates for a bigger office and two steps further up the masthead, which will get them closer to where the parachutes are kept. Most newspapers - most especially, the New York Times - have forced upon their reporters what are called "ethics codes," but which, in reality, are speech codes written to prevent the beancounters and careerists from having to answer angry phone calls from wingnuts. I am not kidding - under some of these abominations, a reporter literally could be disciplined for spouting off about, say, Willard Romney in a bar, if someone heard the reporter, and called the beancounter to complain. The campaign buses are filled now with young reporters who know full well that, given sufficient pressure from either inside or outside "the company,"  their bosses do not have their backs.

This is from Crouse's book. It is a conversation between two reporters, Robert Semple of the Times and Peter Lisagor of the Chicago Daily News, about the conundrum of trying to cover a lying sack of shit like Richard Nixon within the constraints of "objective" journalism:

"...[Semple said]... I may just say that he [Nixon] came to California and played on very familiar themes in terms that seem to admit no debate, that show no consideration for the complexity of the issues.... Yeah, but then the desk will go like this." He made a ripping sound and tore up an imaginary piece of paper.

"Yeah, right," said Lisagor. "...A lot of politicians make simplistic charges. It becomes a problem for the press to put these charges into their proper perspective. But a lot of reporters feel that they've discharged their obligation if they just report what the man said."

Almost 40 years later, and we get the above question, posed by the Public Editor of the newspaper where Semple once covered campaigns. 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?