Waving the (white) flag of credibility. I'd say the Times knew what it was doing, assigning political apparatchik Kit Seelye to write the summary of the Bill Keller-mandated "Credibility Group" report that appeared in yesterday's edition. Knew what it was doing, because Seelye's article, with its obscurantist focus on PR strategy ("the Times must respond to its critics") and error-checking, has so far succeeded in dissuading anybody in Blogovia (left or right) from reading too deeply into the Credibility Group report itself. Which is a shame, because you're missing a signal moment in the paper's contemporary history: its official, essentially unconditional surrender to the demands of right-wing political correctness.

Nothing the Times understands better than burying the lead. You have to persist to the report's final set of recommendations (blandly labeled "The News/Opinion Divide"), beginning on page 12 (of 16)—and in fact to the discussion of those recommendations, beginning a page later—to reach its statement of capitulation. I'll excerpt the two key sections.

2. Monitoring Cumulative Coverage

Though we have our lapses, individual news stories on emotional topics like abortion, gun control, the death penalty and gay marriage are reported and edited with great care, to avoid any impression of bias. Nonetheless, when numerous articles use the same assumption as a point of departure, that monotone can leave the false impression that the paper has chosen sides. This is especially so when we add in our feature sections, whose mission it is to write about novelty in life. As a result, despite the strict divide between editorial pages and news pages, The Times can come across as an advocate.

The public editor found that the overall tone of our coverage of gay marriage, as one example, “approaches cheerleading.” By consistently framing the issue as a civil rights matter -- gays fighting for the right to be treated like everyone else -- we failed to convey how disturbing the issue is in many corners of American social, cultural and religious life.

3. Diversifying Our Vantage Point

Too often we label whole groups from a perspective that uncritically accepts a stereotype or unfairly marginalizes them. As one reporter put it, words like moderate or centrist “inevitably incorporate a judgment about which views are sensible and which are extreme.” We often apply “religious fundamentalists,” another loaded term, to political activists who would describe themselves as Christian conservatives. ...

Many staff members say that the paper covers breaking news well, but that it needs to take additional steps to cover the country in a fuller way. The national desk is already moving in this direction, but we encourage more reporting from the middle of the country, from exurbs and hinterland, and more coverage of social, demographic, cultural and lifestyle issues. We would also welcome even more enterprise reporting beyond New York, Washington and a handful of other major cities.

Nothing we recommend should be seen as endorsing a retreat from tough-minded reporting of abuses of power by public or private institutions. In part because the Times’s editorial page is clearly liberal, the news pages do need to make more effort not to seem monolithic. Both inside and outside the paper, some people feel that we are missing stories because our staff lacks diversity in viewpoints, intellectual grounding and individual backgrounds. We should look for all manner of diversity. We should seek talented journalists who happen to have military experience, who know rural America first hand, who are at home in different faiths.

Or, we can just cut to the shorter version: The Times has separated from the wisdom of the Volk, and must return to it.

Didja catch how those confessions of lapse all seem to go in a single direction? Apparently nobody is more convinced of the Times' liberal bias than the Times itself. This barely even requires comment: the Credibility Group has fully adopted a critique of "labelling," and a rhetoric of "diversity," that only L. Brent Bozell and David Horowitz, respectively, could love—could hardly fail to love, seeing how tirelessly they've been propagandizing these very terms, the state-of the art language of right-wing victimization. Well, it's nice to see that hard work pays off. About the only thing missing here is the Times admitting that its Science section has persecuted Christians by being insufficiently skeptical about evolution.

This, then, would be the shape of things to come at the Times, under what's emerged as Bill Keller's grand vision: a kind of grotesque inversion of the Wall Street Journal, a (very modestly) liberal and reality-based editorial page (Brierny excepted) marooned within a sea of news columns given over to right-wing time-serving. If you've still got a subscription, now might be an opportune time to cancel it.

As for the notion of the Times turning to go on the offensive against its critics: given the paper's new commitment to "diversity" and fairness in "labeling," is there any doubt where the boom's going to be lowered, first and foremost? Any doubt that Danny Okrent and Ad Nags haven't already established the template for the campaign?

posted by michael  10:00:29 PM  
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