Portrait Of A Non-Apology, New York Times Style

A few days ago, Earl Wilson, public editor of the New York Times, wrote a column about his employer’s coverage of the Tucson shootings. Titled Time, the Enemy, it is a masterpiece of the non-apology.

A little background. Like most of you with one or more siblings, my parents were of zero tolerance when moments came where they found themselves being petitioned for redress of grievances, one offspring leveling a charge against another. The aggrieving party would swiftly and surely find themselves in a most uncomfortable situation, phrases such as “you march right over there and apologize” along with “don’t just say it — mean it” being prominently featured in the parental discourse. Granted, such times occasionally brought on maximum exertion of whatever youthful thespian skills were available, but by and large the apologies were sincere. Fear of what would take should they be anything but was a powerful motivation.

Alas, Mr. Wilson (no relation that I know of) apparently was raised in a different fashion.

Shall we?

Jim Roberts, the assistant managing editor who has helped create today’s NYTimes.com, likes to call it the 1440/7 news cycle — 1,440 minutes every day, seven days a week, each one of those minutes demanding news for delivery to a networked world.

See how hard these poor folk slave for us ungrateful cretins?

Unfortunately, during a few of those minutes on Jan. 8, The Times had the story wrong.

No! Really?

In that brief window of time, NYTimes.com was reporting that Representative Gabrielle Giffords was dead of gunshot wounds. The error and some other aspects of the coverage of the Tucson shootings illustrate how difficult it is in the current environment to be both timely and authoritative.

“Some” other aspects? Like, say, accusing the right in general and Sarah Palin in particular of inciting the shooting? Do tell. But we should give them a pass. After all, being timely and authoritative is h-a-r-r-r-d. (Authoritarian, not so much. But I digress.)

The circumstances were these: A major breaking news event, occurring on a Saturday afternoon with a small staff on duty, with print deadlines to worry about and a Web site that needed to be fed as fast and as frequently as possible.

And if we ingrates would start buying more ads with the Times instead of selling our junk on eBay they’d be fully staffed!

The Times’s first online posting came at 1:47 p.m., followed by two quick updates — at 1:53 and 2:16. These stories, pieced together from other news organizations that were on the ground in Tucson, reported the shootings and other basic facts, attributing word of the shooting to the congresswoman’s spokesman, C. J. Karamargin. At this point, her condition was described as “unclear.”

Timely! Authoritative! Letting others do the reporting for you! Gee, when bloggers do that they’re called lazy plagiarists.

At 2:27, though, the story was revised to say Ms. Giffords had been shot and killed, attributing the information to Mr. Karamargin and “news reports.” Lower in the story, those news reports were identified as coming from NPR and CNN. As it turned out, the information was incorrect. The Times compounded the error by appearing to attribute it in part to Ms. Giffords’s own spokesman, who was not the source of the error.

I recall an interview I did a few years ago with the late David Poole, who was the NASCAR beat writer for the Charlotte Observer. He used a phrase I’d never heard before: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” In other words, trust only to a point, but always verify. Too bad no one at the Times followed his advice.

Here’s how the error was made.

Bet the reason won’t be “we made a mistake — no excuses.”

It was hectic in the newsroom with many news reports flowing in as Kathleen McElroy, the day Web news editor, was trying to decide whether The Times was ready to report Giffords’s death. She decided against it and was telling Web producers to hold off reporting it in a news alert when J. David Goodman, who was writing the story, told her he had a few changes he wanted to make.

Don’t you understand? It was hectic! Which never happens at any other workplace.

Ms. McElroy said, “I should have looked at every change,” but she thought Mr. Goodman was referring to small stuff. Mr. Goodman told me he then erred by reporting Representative Giffords’s death in the lead as though The Times itself were standing behind the information. In any event, Ms. McElroy had said O.K. without seeing that change, so Mr. Goodman pushed the button.

So working for the Times requires the ability to play Tweedledee and Tweedledum when the pressure’s on? Gee, who knew.

The result was a news story with changes that were not edited. Less than 10 minutes later, a new story appeared with the words “and killed” stricken.

An old-time editor would have been striking McElroy and Goodman’s heads together.

“Nobody should self-publish,” said Philip B. Corbett, standards editor for The Times. “Everything should go through an editor. Ideally, it should go through two editors.”

Or, if you’re a blogger, go through everyone and their grandmother who won’t for a moment hesitate to call you out if you flub.

I agree with him, but that takes time. In the 1440/7 news cycle, and in the environment of the newsroom on Jan. 8, time seemed unavailable. On this particular day, things were happening quickly and simultaneously, and a mistake was made.

Um, dear New York Times. I bring news. You’re not the only news source in the western world. Should you be a few minutes behind others, no big. What is big is this: if you can’t follow your own rules, using the tyranny of the urgent as an excuse, why should we believe you double-check and fact-check everything even when you’re working at your own leisure?

The Tucson shootings afforded another, quite different illustration of the pressure of time in news coverage — not pressure measured in seconds and minutes, but pressure that news organizations feel to define the context of a story, to set up a frame for it, sometimes before the facts can be fully understood.

Because the narrative must be adhered to all times, inconvenient truths notwithstanding.

The Times’s day-one coverage in some of its Sunday print editions included a strong focus on the political climate in Arizona and the nation. For some readers — and I share this view to an extent — placing the violence in the broader political context was problematic.

Hmm. Might this be problematic because THERE WAS NO POLITICAL CONTEXT TO THE VIOLENCE?!!

C. Wenk, a reader in Alexandria, Va., criticized “an egregious rush to judgment in the Times coverage of the Arizona shooting, specifically aimed at linking the shooting to various conservative or Republican political rhetoric.”

Mr. or Ms. Wenk was being kind. The Times perpetrated a 100% falsehood, falsehood of the most vicious kind. It declared innocent people to in fact have blood on their hands. It was, is and always will be a filthy lie. One which the paper has not once apologized. Not once.

A second reader, Kevin O’Donnell of Greenbrae, Calif., saw it as a case of The Times jumping too quickly: “I understand the larger point about coarse speech raising the potential for violence. By offering that debate within hours of events, doesn’t The Times risk starting at the conclusion end of the argument?”

No, it risks revealing its pathetic bigotry against and hatred of Sarah Palin. Which we already knew, but had not previously been revealed to such an obscene extent.

The Times had a lot of company, as news organizations, commentators and political figures shouldered into an unruly scrum battling over whether the political environment was to blame.

Didn’t the “they did it too” excuse get thrown out in grade school for these people? Apparently not.

Meanwhile, opportunities were missed to pick up on evidence — quite apparent as early as that first day — that Jared Lee Loughner, who is charged with the shootings, had a mental disorder and might not have been motivated by politics at all.

And why were the opportunities missed? Because the Times was and is addicted to its own meme: conservatives bad, liberals good, Palin worst of all. Note how even in the face of overwhelming evidence there was zero political motivation to Loughner’s madness the Times still slips in the insinuation (“… might not have been…”) that it was correct after all.

“If I were a reporter on this story, my very first call would have been to a mental health professional willing to consider the nature of Mr. Loughner’s illness,” Max Etchemendy of East Palo Alto, Calif., wrote. “The ‘political’ angle has been beaten to death, and ‘medical’ angle has been ignored completely.”

Mr. Etchemendy should work for the Times.

So why does a story get framed this way?

Here, let me answer that for you. Because you’re addicted to your mantra, you don’t give a rat’s ass about the truth and you’re disgusting biased hacks.

Journalism educators characterize this kind of framing as a storytelling habit — one of relating new facts to an existing storyline — and also as a reflex of news organizations that are built to handle some topics well, and others less well.

I do believe “less well” translates into any story involving those pesky facts.

Jerry Ceppos, dean of the journalism school at the University of Nevada, Reno, said journalists’ impulse to quickly impose a frame on a story is “genetic.”

Try pathetic. Just report the story. We’re not so flippin’ stupid we need you to put things into context for us, you condescending arrogant self-worshiping jerk.

“Journalists developed automatic framing protocols generations ago because of the need to report quickly,” he said. “Today’s hyper-deadlines, requiring journalists to report all day long and all night long, made that genetic disposition even more dominant.”

So it’s okay to lie when you’re in a hurry?

To be fair, there were some good reasons to steer the coverage initially in this direction.

I was unaware that “rubbing our hands together in glee that it looks like we’ve finally got the opportunity to nail those racist violent teabaggers and especially Caribou Barbie” qualified as a good reason.

As Rick Berke, the national editor, said: “Our coverage early on was broad and touched everything from the possible shooter to the victims to the reaction to, yes, the political climate in Arizona.

Which had not a single thing to do with the shooting, but hey — it made for some awesome editorials!

“By our count, there were 49 stories in the paper the first six days after the tragedy, of which only 14 were political in nature.

The fact they were pure slander is apparently negated by there being fewer of them.

“But it would be ridiculous for us to neglect that. After all, a politician was shot in the head while meeting with constituents.

And Sarah Palin owns a gun. Obvious connection!

“That same lawmaker had her office vandalized during an especially rancorous campaign.

Which is reprehensible. However, without proof it was in any fashion connected to the shooting, irrelevant.

“And after the shooting the sheriff called his state the capital of hatred and bigotry.”

The same sheriff that five minutes on Google would reveal is a partisan Democratic hack.

Still, I think the intense focus on political conflict — not just by The Times — detracted from what has emerged as the salient story line, that of a mentally ill individual with lawful access to a gun.

That’s it, then? That’s your response to flat-out lying? Be thankful my Mom is in heaven now, Mr. Wilson, or else she’d grab you by the ear with one hand, Paul Krugman with the other, and march you right over to Sarah Palin to apologize.

But no. Not you. You’ll never apologize. You lied because it suited your purpose. You falsely accused because it correlated with your despising any and all things conservative. And when your lies and false accusations were exposed, you ignored it like it never happened. You hurled your bile, and when it was proved to be utterly untrue washed your hands and went on, believing that a mealy-mouthed non-apology is more than sufficient to cover your sins. Guess again.

Whether covering the basic facts of a breaking story or identifying more complex themes, the takeaway is that time is often the enemy. Sometimes the best weapon against it is to ignore it, and use a moment to consider the alternatives.

Gee, wish I could use the clock as an alibi.

Mr. Wilson, kindly get lost and don’t be found until you find integrity.

P.S. The pictures have nothing to do with the song (“Portrait of an Apology” by Jars of Clay), but they’re nice nature shots.