Jack Shafer

New York Times Public Editor Arthur Brisbane made a huge mistake in his morning blog item titled “Should the Times Be a Truth Vigilante?” for which the Web has been punishing him all day. Brisbane’s mistake wasn’t to bring up the topic of how much time, space and effort reporters should commit to truth-squadding the iffy stuff that oozes out of the mouths of politicians, other notables and their spokesmen.

It’s a worthy topic. Brisbane’s mistake was to pose the topic as question — as if a journalist with his sort of experience didn’t know what the correct answer is — and then to stupidly ask and re-ask the question in the final paragraphs of his item, as if he were Phil Donahue with microphone in hand, rushing up and down the carpeted stairway eager to collect comments from the studio audience.

The awesome stupidity of Brisbane’s blog inspired prominent citizens of Twitterville, as well as Salon’s Alex Pareene, HuffPo’s Jason Linkins, Poynter’s Craig Silverman, New York University’s Jay Rosen, and Boing Boing’s Rob Beschizza, to take up their keyboards. “Should the New York Times — America’s ‘newspaper of record’ — print the truth?” is how Pareene restated Brisbane’s question in his lede. “Brisbane’s job is to embarrass the NY Times for its shortcomings, not to become one of them,” tweeted Village Voice Editor Tony Ortega.

Brisbane sought to quell the fury sparked by his 500-word post in correspondence with Jim Romenesko, who asked Brisbane what the hell he was getting at. He responded:

What I was trying to ask was whether reporters should always rebut dubious facts in the body of the stories they are writing. I was hoping for diverse and even nuanced responses to what I think is a difficult question. …

I was also hoping to stimulate a discussion about the difficulty of selecting which “facts” to rebut, facts being troublesome things that seem to shift depending on the beholder’s perspective.

Stimulate a discussion! Well, yes, Arthur, not even Phil Donahue could have stimulated a more intense discussion of how bulky and numerous the knots in your skull are today.

Brisbane deserved the abuse for writing without thinking, but those who think Brisbane prefers stenography to journalism should seek his back pages. I don’t think I’ve ever met Brisbane, but I recall reading his work closely when he was a Metro reporter for the Washington Post in the mid-1980s and I was editor of Washington City Paper. Brisbane was a skeptical, thorough reporter, and his coverage of Mayor-for-Life Marion Barry often sharpened the knife that we at City Paper would use to slice Hizzoner up. Instead of climbing the Post ladder of success, he returned to Kansas City and climbed the ladder there, eventually becoming editor of the Kansas City Star. I’m not familiar with his work as editor, but it’s safe to assume that he didn’t publish press releases as news.

Part of the outrage against Brisbane is theatrical. It’s fun to excoriate the Times. I’ve made a career out of it! But Brisbane has no power outside of the bully pulpit that the paper gives him. He speaks for himself, not the Times, as the paper endlessly reminds those who ask. But because editors and reporters generally don’t have the guts to take abuse directly from readers, they employ ombudsmen and public editors like Brisbane as their shields: The ombudsman exists primarily to take in the face whatever rotten fruit, bean balls and shards of broken glass that angry readers want to heave at the editors and reporters who produce the newspaper. The ombudsman is a safety valve that prevents reader fury from exploding, a way for the newspaper to say “we listen.” And today, as the gashes on his face prove, Brisbane is earning his pay.

At the risk of being the ombudsman’s ombudsman, what he was trying to ask his readers was how much time and effort the Times should put into refuting or contesting every flawed expression of “fact” that they come across when writing about newsmakers. Of course, Brisbane did himself no favor by labeling the aggressive refutation of squirrelly facts as “truth vigilantism” in his headline.

But to be fair to Brisbane — and I promise not to make this a habit — I think he was asking how fully reporters must tweeze every utterance spoken by newsmakers. Politics teems with gray areas and half-truths. If a reporter were to investigate every assertion of fact — assuming that that’s possible on deadline — the story he was supposed to be working on would dissolve into pixel dust. Infinite skepticism is swell, but it requires infinite fact-checking, and who has time for that? There’s a longstanding joke among journalists about what an infinitely vetted wedding announcement would look like: “A couple representing itself as Mr. and Mrs. John Smith say they hosted a reception Saturday, to commemorate what they claimed was the marriage of their son, in an apartment on Park Avenue that they assert they own.” As Edgar Allan Poe once put it, we crave “journalism in lieu of dissertation.”

Then, late today, Brisbane dug himself in a little deeper with a new post, claiming that his stupid questions had been misunderstood. I’ve read this post a dozen times and can’t figure out what he’s trying to say other than that he’s still looking for “reasoned discussion.” I urge Brisbane to forget about the reasoned discussion and start over with a blank screen — and not to ask stupid questions he doesn’t have the answers for.
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The last refuge of a bogus trend story is the claim that it “got people talking.”

If the author and editors of “A Last Bastion of Civility, the South, Sees Manners Decline” from today’s New York Times have adjourned to a coffee shop to eavesdrop on the conversation, I suspect they’re hearing what I’m thinking: Does that bold assertion come with evidence?

Here are a few examples from the  “growing portfolio” of behaviors the Times draws on to plot the decline of Southern manners.

·         Two black men drinking at a bar were asked by a bartender to surrender their seats to two white women. They declined and a lawsuit ensued.

·         A professor of history and Southern culture at the University of Mississippi tells the Times, “Manners are one of many things that are central to a Southerner’s identity, but they are not primary anymore. Things have eroded.”

·         The South’s make-up has changed: More Northerners have moved in; modern communications technology has made parts of the South less insular; and changing politics and the recent economic upheaval have made the place more contentious and insecure.

·         A “media specialist” says manners have dropped so low that African-Americans can no longer automatically trust other African-Americans.

·         A second grade teacher in Birmingham says today’s classroom manners have drooped lower than any time in her 36-year career.

·         A wedding planner (and graduate of the Emily Post Institute!) says brides and grooms are more selfish than ever.

·         Gov. Nikki Haley, R-S.C., was mean to 10 state lawmakers.

·         Charlotte, N.C., is the home to “road rage,” “rudeness,” and NASCAR “riots.”

Hmmmm. Blacks who won’t give up their seats to whites. A professor who thinks things aren’t what they used to be. A “specialist,” a middle-aged teacher, and a wedding planner who agree that standards of Southern behavior have shifted.

I wouldn’t want to go to trial with this case.

If you really needed to establish that Southern manners aren’t what they used to be, you’d first have to pick a baseline period for exactly when “used to be” was. Was it 1980? 1960? 1940? 1840? But the Times piece never pegs the golden age of Southern civility. Even if it had, journalistic anecdotes like these aren’t any way to reliably measure changes in civility.

The piece wisely concedes at a couple junctures how “courtesy and deference” have been used to control women and blacks, and to limit public debate. One voice in the piece holds that Southern civility was a coping mechanism designed to mask animosity. “If someone is polite, you better be careful and consider what that politeness veils,” says William Ferris, a University of North Carolina folklorist. This provocative comment, and the failure of the Times to fully explore its meaning, reminds me of the way Interview magazine conducted interviews during the Warhol era: Whenever the interview subject said something remotely interesting, the interviewer would quickly change the subject.

Other examples of bogosity: The Times cites a source to assert that Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Herman Cain all benefited from their “ability to pour Southern charm over the political process.” This is news to me. I missed Carter’s charm, saw through Clinton’s, and if anybody thinks Cain is charming, they’re crazy. The notion that Southern politics was once a bastion of good manners, a theme the story bangs on a couple of times, will jolt anybody who ever followed the careers of George Wallace, Lester Maddox, Strom Thurmond, Orval Faubus, et al.

Anecdotal news accounts charting the decline of this thing or that thing often include a counter-example, a stick-figure who functions like the Japanese soldier hiding in the jungles of the Solomon Islands who won’t surrender, demonstrating that against all odds, some people just won’t give up the faith. The Times observes this tradition by concluding the piece by visiting Dorothy McLeod, a 70-year-old who teaches ballroom dancing and etiquette to Augusta, Ga., children.

“I will not give up,” she says of her struggle to instill kindness and manners in unruly children.

As bad as the Times piece is, it could be worse. It could be about the return of Southern civility. Maybe next week.

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Seen a bogus trend piece that needs a good beating? (Thanks to reader Matt Jezior for suggesting this one.) Forward it to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. Follow me on Twitter, your reliable source of bogus-trend anti-venom. Sign up for email notifications of new Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns and subscribe to this hand-built RSS feed for corrections to my column.

PHOTO: A window washer cleans the windows above the front door of the New York Times building in New York, March 26, 2010. REUTERS/Gary Hershorn

Washington’s anonymous sources are disagreeing with one another today.

In the lead story in today’s New York Times (“U.S. Debated Cyberwarfare in Attack Plan on Libya”), the anonymous sources tell reporters Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker that the issue of whether or not to attack Libya with cyberweapons was “intensely debated” by the Obama administration last March.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post‘s catch-up story by Ellen Nakashima that runs on A5 in today’s print edition, disputes an important element of the Times revelation. Relying on its own anonymice, the Post piece confirms that a cyberwarfare debate took place but asserts unequivocally that the debate “did not reach the White House” according to Pentagon officials. [Emphasis added.]

Obviously, either the Times or the Post owes its readers a correction because the administration cannot have “intensely debated” cyberwar against the Libyan military at the same time that it did not. Such  a fundamental contradiction screams out for a follow-up story by both papers, but will we see them?

Probably not, because the whole genre of anonymously sourced Washington journalism avoids the basic accountability that comes with on-the-record attribution. Speak an untruth on the record to a Washington reporter and he will hound you for an explanation. Speak the same untruth to a Washington reporter as an anonymous source and the reporter will probably insist on taking you to lunch to pump you for more information and only gently chide you for your misdirection.

Washington reporters care for, feed, and coddle their anonymous sources because reporters here outnumber important sources by at least 100 to one. The lopsided supply and demand permits important sources to dictate the terms of engagement, and anonymity is one of the terms they often demand. Anonymity allows them to dictate or spin a story to their advantage while suffering no liability for what they say.

The reporters behind the opposing stories are talented and deeply tapped in. Timesmen Schmitt and Shanker are particularly well versed in the subject of cybercapabilities, having recently published a book about the Pentagon’s secret wars against Al Qaeda. The Post‘s Nakashima similarly has a number of solid bylines on the topic of cyberwar to her credit.

But the differences between the two stories are dramatic. The Times makes it sound as if the Pentagon and the White House conducted a spirited trans-Potomac conversation about contaminating the Libyan military’s computer grid, which means the Obamaites were open to the idea. The Post makes the discussion sound more like a Pentagon rap session than deliberations over escalating the Libyan war. (Odd, isn’t it, that the decision to bomb radar installations—and kill people in the process—came easily, but the decision to dispatch a virus to infect those same radars and not kill people is still on-going? But that’s the topic of a different column.)

The Times piece gives credence to the Post‘s interpretation in several passages, most notably writing that “the cyberwarfare proposals were rejected before they reached the senior political levels of the White House.” If the proposals reached only junior political levels of the White House, it seems misleading to describe those conversations as “intensely debated” inside the “Obama administration,” which is what the Times does. Other reasons to speculate that the Times inflated its story: The “previously undisclosed debate” took place “among a small circle of advisors” and, “The debate about a potential cyberattack against Libya was described by more than a half-dozen officials.” So the “debate” was small and the sourcing pool was small, too.

But there’s a case to be made for the Times‘s interpretation of events. The Post‘s equally anonymous story was published after the Times‘s, which was posted to the Web on Monday, so one way to critically read it is not as a news story but as an answer by the Post‘s White House anonymous sources to the Times‘s Pentagon anonymous sources. Viewed this way, the Post and its sources are saying, move along, never happened, to the assertion by the Times and its sources that we came this close to declaring cyberwar.

The Post‘s account invites skepticism if only because its biggest news—that the debate did not reach the White House—is ascribed to “officials.” Well, of course “officials” are the sources, as opposed to stumps and rocks. But in which bureaucracy–Pentagon or the White House–are these “officials” located?

When anonymous sources duel like this in the pages of the Times and the Post, there’s often a more nuanced power struggle going on than the press corps can detect. Not to get all Rashomon on you, but the identity of a story’s sources is as important as what the sources said. When a newspaper fails to name its sources—as the Times and the Post did today—it invites skepticism, disbelief, doubt, and suspicion from readers, making press critics of us all.

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PHOTO: A laboratory mouse. (Credit : Dennis Thiele/University of Michigan)