A Second Hand Conjecture

The recent hullabaloo over the New York Times (NYT) cracking down on its ace war reporter, as covered by Lance below, raised the issue of whether the paper would issue similar admonishments to a reporter expressing an opinion that was more in line with the NYT editorial page. Specifically, would the NYT reader’s representative, Byron Calame, treat a reporter voicing anti-American screeds with the same disapproval as his treatment of Michael Gordon? Lance, via Newsbusters, highlighted one particular instance that suggests it would not:

I’ll give an example of a personal opinion from another Times reporter, Neil Mcfarquhar, I got from Newsbusters as well:

“If you talk to people my age — I’m in my mid-40s — and who grew up in poor countries like Morocco, you know, they will tell you that when they went to school in the mornings, they used to get milk, and they called it Kennedy milk because it was the Americans that sent them milk. And in 40 years, we have gone from Kennedy milk to the Bush administration rushing bombs to this part of the world. And it just erodes and erodes and erodes America’s reputation.”

That is a statement that says a lot, and there is much to criticize. It is certainly a personal opinion, but is it one that I want the editors of the Times to keep him from spouting? No. Nor did they.

While I admit that this example appears somewhat damning, I think there is a better comparison to be made, one that may shed more light on the answer we seek. Some of you may recall this past Summer’s story regarding the NYT’s premier Supreme Court journalist, Linda Greenhouse, making some rather scathing remarks during an address at Harvard.

Sept. 28, 2006 - Linda Greenhouse is unarguably a leader in her field. For nearly 30 years, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter has covered the Supreme Court for the paper of record, The New York Times. Back before she covered the high court, she became the first woman to work out of the Times’s state capital bureau in Albany. Among many awards, Greenhouse received the 2004 career award for excellence in journalism from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and this past June, was asked to return to Harvard Law School to give a speech.

Three months later, that speech has raised questions about Greenhouse’s objectivity, as some claim she broke the basic tenet of journalism. Speaking to an audience of hundreds, Greenberg reminisced about her college years of 1960s idealism, but charged that since then the U.S. government had “turned its energy and attention away from upholding the rule of law and toward creating law-free zones at Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Haditha and other places around the world.” She went on to attack the “sustained assault on women’s reproductive freedom” and “the hijacking of public policy by religious fundamentalism.”

Like the to-do over Gordon’s opining, Greenhouse’s remarks also raised some pulses. Conversely to the reaction that Gordon has received, however, some saw Greenhouse’s outburst as opening new doors for journalists. Indeed, in an interview with Newsweek, former NYT in-house media critic, Daniel Okrent, “was kind of amazed and thrilled” about it.

NEWSWEEK: Elaborate on what you meant when you told NPR you were “amazed” by Greenhouse’s comments.
Daniel Okrent: When I said that I was amazed, I was kind of amazed and thrilled. My point was that when I was at the Times for 18 months, Linda was writing about the most sensitive, divisive issues in America—those that have come before the Supreme Court. She wrote about them analytically, not quoting other experts, but stating her own analyses of why things were this way and that way and what the court meant by that—and I never received a single complaint [about her]. Which is to say that no one ever perceived any ideological bias in her work.

What does that say about journalists’ ability to keep their reporting separate from their ideological views?
There’s a distinction between what a journalist may think about the issues of the day and how the journalist writes about the issues of the day. And that’s the way it ought to be. [Greenhouse's] views should not come into her work, which they don’t, even though we now know that she has very strong political views.

I’ll refrain from countering Okrent’s assertion that Greenhouse is without perceivable bias (let’s just say that she’s better than Nina Totenberg). Her statements to the Harvard audience elicited enough questioning of her objectivity (albeit, three months after the fact) to force Calame to address the issue in his column:

A FOUR-MONTH-OLD speech by Linda Greenhouse, The New York Times’s much-honored Supreme Court reporter for 28 years, has suddenly raised anew two thorny questions related to the paper’s ethics guideline covering the public expression of personal opinions by news staffers.

How do top editors at The Times interpret and enforce the policy when a star reporter is involved? And what is the value of such an ethical standard, given that journalists are human and have personal opinions?

[...]

It seems clear to me that Ms. Greenhouse stepped across that line during her speech. Times news articles are not supposed to contain opinion. A news article containing the phrase “the hijacking of public policy by religious fundamentalism” would get into the paper only as a direct quote from a source. The same would go for any news article reference to “the ridiculous actual barrier” on the Mexican border. [ed. - Yes, Calame actually wrote this. No, I don't believe it either. Accept it and move on.]

The reaction of The Times has been muted so far, however. Mr. Keller acknowledged in his e-mail to me that he has talked to Ms. Greenhouse about her remarks, but would not disclose what he said or whether her role would change. There was a more public Times response in 1989 when The Washington Post reported that Ms. Greenhouse and some Post journalists had participated in a march in support of abortion rights. In The Times’s catch-up article, Howell Raines, then the paper’s Washington editor, said of Ms. Greenhouse, “She now acknowledges that this was a mistake and accepts the policy.”

Ms. Greenhouse told me she considers her remarks at Harvard to be “statements of fact” — not opinion — that would be allowed to appear in a Times news article. She said The Times has not suggested that she avoid writing stories on any of the topics on which she commented in June. “Any such limits would be completely preposterous,” she said.

Calame went on to address Okrent’s reaction to the situation, and his suggestion that reporters should be allowed to express their views in public when they are as without the sin of bias *cough* as Greenhouse:

There is no perfect traffic light for the intersection of The Times’s commitment to impartiality — in both perception and reality — and the personal opinions its journalists obviously hold. But I don’t see Ms. Greenhouse’s situation as making a case for a looser guideline. I believe there are good reasons for The Times’s policy on the voicing of personal opinions in public by news staffers. Mr. Keller’s e-mail to me clearly indicated that he considers the standard important and worth preserving.

So here we have two different utterances of opinion, by two different reporters, with two different political bents to their remarks. To his credit, Calame treated both the same, and in fact gave much more attention to the Greenhouse incident than the Gordon one. However, as Lance also noted, there is a much more important distinction to be made:

I am hypocritical about this by the way, and unashamedly so. If a reporter were to go on the Charlie Rose show and give their opinion that there was no chance to accomplish something I would be un-offended. However, should a reporter say that he didn’t want the effort to succeed, the opposite of Mr. Gordon’s view, I would have been offended and suggested Mr. Calame take action. Not because he expressed an opinion, but because some opinions are so disgraceful they should be condemned. Hoping the “surge” fails is one such example. Hoping we succeed is not.

For Mr. Gordon to claim that he personally hopes the current “surge” mission succeeds should be unremarkable considering the fact that he is an American, and that it is his country that will suffer should it fail. To suppose that he has no interest in his own country succeeding is an exercise in fantasy. And, as Lance contends, had he claimed the opposite not only should there be an issue raised as to his objectivity, there should be widespread condemnation.

But, Gordon also expressed his opinion as to how the war has been fought, and how it should be fought. Even though I happen to agree with Gordon’s assessment, it is an opinion that is apparently verboten under current NYT policy, every bit as much as Greenhouse’s opinions were chastised (notwithstanding her claim to have merely been declaring “facts”). That Calame and the NYT treated both incidents in a substantially similar manner deserves to be noted, no matter how misguided one might find the policy, or how substantively dissimilar one finds the comments. That notwithstanding, I do agree with Lance’s thoughts on the matter with regard to how messages of defeatism should be handled by the American press.

Technorati Tags: MSM, New York Times, media bias, Daniel Okrent, Byron Calame, Michael Gordon, Linda Greenhouse

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