There was a time when readers of The New York Times never knew what they were missing. You had to run down to Hotaling's, the out-of-town newsstand in Times Square, to check The Washington Post or the Los Angeles Times, or wait a few days for the Manchester Guardian. Or you subscribed to I.F. Stone's Weekly and relied on him to call your attention to the 23rd paragraph of the Times piece, the one where your eyes had glazed over but Izzy had unearthed some nugget that shattered the story's otherwise anodyne arc.

Today, all a reader need do to shine a light on the paper is log on and surf around to see what the Times ... has missed, buried, or fuzzed. The New Yorker features the stellar investigations of Seymour Hersh, whose indispensable X-rays of hush-hush government agencies once graced the Times. Slate's "Today's Papers" routinely specifies the Times' misjudgments of omission, commission, and position—placement, in other words—as do any number of persnickety bloggers with hours to fill and advanced degrees in the arts of close reading.

Gitlin is celebrating, or anti-celebrating, the one-year anniversary of Bill Keller's ascension to the Executive Editorship. "It has not been a banner year," says Gitlin, with studied understatement. Writing about the structural problems that have repeatedly caused the Times to embarrass itself in its Washington-based reporting, he doesn't pull any punches.

The Miller problem, which is also her editors' problem, goes to something deeper: the everyday slackness and gullibility, the on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand blah-blah and other unreflective stenography that passes for "coverage" of the most powerful government in the history of the world. Omission includes the failure to connect dots. Position means dumping the tough stuff in the back pages. Leave aside the case of the missing weapons of mass destruction and the Times has still not covered itself with glory. ...

One of the Times' own investigative reporters (call him I.R.) told me: "Match the Times against The Washington Post. They're getting their clock cleaned. It's obvious to everyone except the top editors of The New York Times. ... You don't have any sense from the Washington bureau that there's a government—just a lot of politics. ... The bureau is clearly not getting hell from New York for the fact that they're getting beat by The Washington Post and the L.A. Times and even USA Today."

This persnickety blogger heartily agrees.

posted by michael  3:51:02 PM  
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