Thursday, February 21, 2008
Was The New York Times ready to run McCain story?
All: This should get your journalistic hearts racing ... Read this New Republic piece on behind-the-scenes at the Times as the McCain story was reported, held, and published. Share your thoughts below ... (It isn't exactly a Web discussion, but the article did show up on the Web the night before ...) Here it is. Professor Eisman
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6 comments:
Hmm. I was reading this story last night at The Eagle before I had any idea the controversy that had been brewing around it. It's probably for the best because it helped me judge the story outside of all the fanfare. I remember as I was reading it how shaky I thought it was. How many sources went on the record? Not very many. I understood that the Times was trying to draw some link to the interests Iseman represented and the legislative decisions McCain had made, but even that was pretty weak. And that certainly wasn't the main focus of the article - it was his personal life and the sort-of-kind-of-not-really-maybe? affair. To me, the Times is just participating in the horserace, cut-them-down political journalism that does nothing to educate the public on these candidates' stances. Why don't I know who I think will make a good president? Because the mainstream media is awful at presenting the issues and where they all stand. This article was weak and did not make me any more intelligent for reading it because it said nothing of substance.
My immediate reaction to the story was: they paid 4 reporters for more than 4 months to write this?
At a time when every newsroom in America is downsizing, if you are going to put a staff of four investigative reporters on something, it had better turn out better than decades old rumors of hanky-panky.
The other thing I can't understand is what they finally got that they didn't have in December when they originally wanted to run the story. Except for of course, the fact that McCain has been basically assured the Republican nomination. That makes me suspicious of the editors at the NYT. If they were going to run this at all, why did they hold? And how could this possibly be better than what they had in December?
Kate N.
"This sounds like a pointless exercise to me--speculating about reporting that may or may not result in an article. But if that's what Special Correspondents of The New Republic do, speculate away. "
Kind of funny that Keller said this 2 days before publishing an article based largely on speculation.
Courtney
In my own words the story boils down to "political gossip" backed by the NYT.
I think it was a great move for the editors to hold the story until now. Iowa, N.H., Super Tuesday have come and gone. It's stratgy. RNC & DNC conventions are six months away.
This reminds me that maybe I should get my news from Mr. Drudge.
The fact that the NY Times held the story baffles me the most. If the editors and writers recognized that the article's anecdotal evidence was too insufficient for the story to make print before Iowa or Super Tuesday, why was that equally unsubstantiated evidence any more reliable a month later? Last time I checked, newspapers don't hold stories at the behest of public figures, so it's important we question whether the Times' threshold for evidence dropped in the time that the story was under construction.
And Jay Rosen, author of the Press Think blog I occasionally stalk, added another component to the discussion: Why did the NYT endorse McCain if it had its doubts? While the story was kept secret (not to mention, as Rosen notes, the editorial board is separate from the paper's objective content), at least one person must have known of the allegations -- the publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. Why, then, would he allow the newspaper to endorse a candidate if he had reasonable suspicion (if that's what you can call this) of foul-play?
I think the understatement here is that the NYT didn't call this one right. And I think other papers saw that too; other coverage, such as The Washington Post's, led with the only hard facts available and avoided the anecdotal evidence (aka hearsay) that many criticized the Times for using. I mean, I'm all for investigative reporting (not to mention taking McCain down), but seriously, NYT? The media landscape may be changing, but the ethical and legal rules of the game are not; new web competition does not invite lax standards.
[Here's the PressThink link, which I can't embed because the comment feature won't allow HTML; http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/
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