Imagine my surprise that a five-month-old post (after I've been all but AWOL for so long) should have generated a comment—and even more that the commenter should be an aggrieved NY Times reporter.

Back in July, I wrote about Kurt Eichenwald's Sunday A1 interview with Ken Lay, then just about to be indicted for Enron crimes and misdemeanors. I followed up, post-indictment, with Eichenwald's piece on Lay's appearance before the press in his defense. Yesterday, Eichenwald wrote the following in reaction to the second post:

I posted another comment on your other attack, which was so loaded with falsehoods it is ridiculous. But it didn't post because I didn't enter my email address. Oh, well. It is not worth going to the trouble again. I'll just make my point about your sloppiness here.

You attack me on this one for leading with Lay's defense on the day of his indictment. True, that is what we did. Why could that be? Hmmmm...

OH!! I KNOW!!! Because the morning of his surrender, anyone picking up the New York Times would have seen my 1,900 word exlusive story laying out in excruciating detail what ever charge was going to be, what meetings and statements they involved, what witnesses had said to the grand jury, etc, etc.

Now, my editors and I might be wrong, but we figured that readers might be interested in reading new developments on our second day story, rather than us simply reprinting what we had published the day before. But apparently, some readers don't bother to read the paper -- even those who analyze it.

And it wasn't like this first story was hard to find. It was above the fold on page 1 of the front section. You know, the page that you are supposedly analyzing?

Whoops.

Sorry for the snotty tone. But people in any profession who do lazy, half-hearted jobs on gathering the facts, then take out the blow-torch on the attack, really hack me off. That's why they call that blogging. And why what I do is called journalism.

[By the way, I want to make it clear that this is a comment posted to the site, and hence public, not a private email to me, which I would not have printed without permission.]

Here's my email in reply, which contains a minor apology, but which I post here mainly because it goes to the reasons I undertook this blog project:

Dear. Mr. Eichenwald:

I'm sorry for your initial difficulty with the comments feaure; I appreciate your providing me with an email address for response.

I've reviewed both of the posts in question. As to the first, responding to your interview with Ken Lay, my point was that you (and the Times) were practicing what amounted to celebrity journalism—a compromised form at best, which the context rendered odious. I am unaware of having written any falsehoods: as a way of illustrating the compromises intrinsic to the genre, I offered speculation about the circumstances of your interview with Lay based, as I stated in the post, not on evidence but on a calculation of the probabilities. If I speculated in error I am, of course, happy to be educated on what I got wrong, and will post any necessary correction. I doubt that I'm going to learn anything that will vitiate my main point, but I won't prejudge the case.

As to the second, follow-up post: I'm afraid you've misread, though I can see that I may have invited that misreading. I did not mean to suggest that the article in question was your or the paper's only coverage of the Lay indictment. I was not "attacking" the fact that you led with Ken Lay's press appearance in his defense on the second day of the indictment story. The point of the post was to indicate what I saw in the tenor of the piece—and still see—as seriously misplaced sympathy for a man who did enormous damage to people who didn't deserve it, and who appears entirely unrepentant. There's a hero-izing tendency in its focus on Lay that I find, well, icky. It seemed an object lesson in how the compromises which I read in the earlier interview might well ramify into news coverage. However, I partially made that point by contrasting your piece with a more by-the-numbers summary article in the Washington Post, which doesn't really make an apples-to-apples comparison. In that respect, I agree that my post can be called sloppy, and I apologize.

As for the moral superiority of journalists to bloggers: I make no claim to be practicing journalism, and never have, so I'll just sidestep that tiresome little debate. What I'm doing is a form of literary criticism, the discipline in which I am professionally trained. My effort has been to read the paper as it represents itself, in what it chooses to publish, in order to understand its place in our public life. I'm not engaged in a fact-gathering enterprise. I make no apologies for using a range of literary devices, including speculation and hyperbole, in developing my observations. As a critic, my sole responsibility is to read the text before me, and to report on what I find in it, as honestly as I can.

I will confess, I hesitated a moment or two before sending this reply, which contained my full name and email address and thus to that extent puts me at the mercy of Kurt Eichenwald's discretion. Maybe that was the intended chilling effect of the nasty business conducted a couple of months ago by Dan Okrent and Adam Nagourney. But I guess that's why they call what I do blogging, and what those guys do journalism.

posted by michael  3:30:43 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

The conclusion seems inescapable: Bernie Kerik's not just an asshole, he's mobbed up.


posted by michael  11:00:05 AM  
tell me about it []