All the News That's Fit to Print
The New York Times continues to be the nation's paper of record, but that record is becoming an increasingly shabby one.
What should have been a major scoop for the paper — the story about the NSA's warrantless wiretaps — quickly turned into just another example of why the "MSM" in general and the NYT in particular have become such a sad joke.
The NYT's Public Editor, Byron Calame, has written a surprisingly frank piece about his insider's efforts to learn why the story was held back for a full year, and why it was published when it was.
On management's "stonewalling":
I e-mailed a list of 28 questions to Bill Keller, the executive editor, on Dec. 19, three days after the article appeared. He promptly declined to respond to them. I then sent the same questions to Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher, who also declined to respond. They held out no hope for a fuller explanation in the future.
On the 800-pound gorilla that the NYT's editors and publishers hoped no one would notice — whether the story was pulled before the 2004 election:
For me, however, the most obvious question is still this: If no one at The Times was aware of the eavesdropping prior to the election, why wouldn't the paper have been eager to make that clear to readers in the original explanation and avoid that politically charged issue? The paper's silence leaves me with uncomfortable doubts.
On why the story was finally published in December:
The publication of Mr. Risen's book [State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration], with its discussion of the eavesdropping operation, was scheduled for mid-January - but has now been moved up to Tuesday. Despite Mr. Keller's distancing of The Times from "State of War," Mr. Risen's publisher told me on Dec. 21 that the paper's Washington bureau chief had talked to her twice in the previous 30 days about the book.
So it seems to me the paper was quite aware that it faced the possibility of being scooped by its own reporter's book in about four weeks.
And so our long national nightmare continues...
