Link: The Public Editor - How Did This Happen? - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com.
So the story below runs a little something like this: The NYTimes ombudsman (Public Editor) is asked to look into a problem with the Walter Cronkite obituaries that ran in the paper, obits that turned out to be pretty riddled with errors.
The public editor asks: How did this happen? But in asking that question, he came up with a lot of technical answers, while still avoiding the elephant in the room (or rather, missing from the room, the way so many reporters, copyeditors, etc. are now missing from newsrooms across the country).
By CLARK HOYT Published: August 1, 2009
THE TIMES published an especially embarrassing correction on July 22, fixing seven errors in a single article — an appraisal of Walter Cronkite,
the CBS anchorman famed for his meticulous reporting. The newspaper had
wrong dates for historic events; gave incorrect information about
Cronkite’s work, his colleagues and his program’s ratings; misstated
the name of a news agency, and misspelled the name of a satellite.
“Wow,” said Arthur Cooper, a reader from Manhattan. “How did this happen?”
The
short answer is that a television critic with a history of errors wrote
hastily and failed to double-check her work, and editors who should
have been vigilant were not.
But a more nuanced answer is that
even a newspaper like The Times, with layers of editing to ensure
accuracy, can go off the rails when communication is poor, individuals
do not bear down hard enough, and they make assumptions about what
others have done. Five editors read the article at different times, but
none subjected it to rigorous fact-checking, even after catching two
other errors in it. And three editors combined to cause one of the
errors themselves.
[...]
We're losing the forest for the trees here. I actually feel sorry for the journalist, at least as she emerges in this story (and I've heard other folks speak up on her behalf on Twitter as a very talented person). I know very little about her, but I feel like I have a sense of her in my mind's eye, because I've worked in newsrooms with others I would describe in the same way she is described in this story.
Yes, she's gotten some great bylines at the most incredible newspaper in the country. She's got a wonderful career that many out-of-work veteran journalists would give their eye-teeth for (and yes, I know many of those out-of-work vets are probably male, cuz it is far easier to pick on error-prone journalists if they are women... the cultural sexist baggage kicks in, just another variation of the same idiotic crap that was spouted in the Senate hearings of Judge Sotomayor, and just as wrong).
So don't lump me in with THAT crowd, as I am not piling on that narrow-minded bandwagon. Doors of opportunity have to open somehow, and there's nothing worse than feeling certain spaces (like prominent journalism jobs) are so exclusive and elite, the only non-smarmy-prep-school-buddy types who get jobs in those places got in with the same odds as winning the lottery.
I know people who work at the New York Times, and I know that is not true. Or that it is and it isn't, because my friends are not smarmy-prep-school-types and they didn't win the lottery, or maybe they did, but it's a pretty easy lottery. (My jury is out on that score, because I've inadvertently won some lower-level lotteries myself, at least in my own mind)
BUT BY THE SAME TOKEN... I am also owning up to having worked with some ridiculously inexperienced and/or bad journalists, people of both genders, in newsrooms which I thought were better than that.
It's one thing to work with and mentor interns and entry-level folks. It's another thing when people without much journalism experience are promoted REALLY quickly and seem to have an effortless rise to newsroom gatekeeper roles or plumb assignments. It does leave one gasping, especially in an environ of almost constant layoffs of newsroom veterans (who generally happen to have been around long enough to have gotten into more expensive pay grades), not just for the loss of beat knowledge over time, but even knowledge of basic things, like knowing the capitals of states and countries, or times of moon landings, or having enough knowledge of WWII events to place a reporter in the correct setting.
[...]
What Sam Sifton,
the culture editor, ruefully called “a disaster, the equivalent of a
car crash,” started nearly a month before Cronkite died, when news
began circulating that he was gravely ill. On June 19, Alessandra Stanley,
a prolific writer much admired by editors for the intellectual heft of
her coverage of television, wrote a sum-up of the Cronkite career, to
be published after his death.
Stanley said she was writing
another article on deadline at the same time and hurriedly produced the
appraisal, sending it to her editor with the intention of fact-checking
it later. She never did.
“This is my fault,” she said. “There are no excuses.”
In her haste, she said, she looked up the dates for two big stories that Cronkite covered — the assassination of Martin Luther King and the moment Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon
— and copied them incorrectly. She wrote that Cronkite stormed the
beaches on D-Day when he actually covered the invasion from a B-17
bomber. She never meant that literally, she said. “I didn’t reread it
carefully enough to see people would think he was on the sands of Omaha
Beach.”
[...]
Recent Comments