Writing in the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz, my Northeastern journalism colleague Laurel Leff raises some questions about a recent open letter signed by more than 50 journalism and communication studies professors calling on The New York Times to conduct an independent review of a December story on Hamas’ use of sexual assault as a weapon of war.
The story, “Screams Without Words: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7,” came under scrutiny after The Intercept reported that the Times had relied in part on a freelancer who had liked tweets advocating extreme violence in the Gaza Strip and that some of the harrowing details in the Times story couldn’t be corroborated. Leff, though, observes that a United Nations investigation found “clear and convincing information” that Hamas had raped and tortured Israelis on Oct. 7 as well as some of the more than 200 hostages it took, a few of whom it is still holding. She writes:
In this case, the gist of the story has held up; no clear evidence of journalistic wrongdoing has emerged, and the Times has exhibited some willingness to respond to criticisms. The professors calling for an investigation therefore seem more interested in joining an ongoing propaganda war, than in righting a journalistic wrong. That’s no place for a journalism professor to be.
Leff’s column is not behind Haaretz’s paywall, but you may need to register in order to read it. The Washington Post recently reported on the letter (free link), which you can read in full here. This is a fraught issue, obviously, and I urge you to read all the relevant documents, including the Times’ original story (free link) and The Intercept article.
There have been rumblings for a while that it was time for news organizations to bring back the position of ombudsperson, also known as the public editor — an in-house journalist who would look at issues in coverage and render a judgment.
At one time the job was fairly common at many larger news organizations, including The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Boston Globe. But as the business model for journalism deteriorated, the position was increasingly seen as a luxury.
On Tuesday, The Dallas Morning News took a step in the right direction, hiring a public editor who will be independent of the newsroom and report directly to the publisher: Stephen Buckley, a journalism professor at Duke University, who is a longtime journalist and has worked for The Washington Post, the Tampa Bay Times and the Poynter Institute. His first column will be published on May 12. According to a press release:
Through active reader engagement and a regular column, Buckley will use an independent lens to help provide readers with understanding and clarity and hold the News accountable for adhering to its high standards. Buckley will be an observer and advocate while informing readers how the News reported controversial topics and issues as they arise.
In an interview with Tom Jones, who writes Poynter’s daily newsletter, Buckley called his hiring “a really bold, counterintuitive move. And the motivation is exactly right, which is: the most important issue for our industry is reestablishing trust with the public.” Oddly, Buckley also said, “I don’t represent the newsroom and I don’t represent the readers.” The public editor’s position has sometimes been described as that of a reader representative. But if Buckley wishes to emphasize his independence, that’s not a bad thing.
A year ago I called for the Globe to restore its long-abolished ombudsman position after the paper published a flawed investigation of MBTA executives who worked from distant locales. It turned out that the story wrong was about some of those executives, and it led to the departure of veteran investigative reporter Andrea Estes. The Globe has never explained what went wrong or why Estes, a respected journalist, was fired. Estes is now doing good work as a reporter for the nonprofit Plymouth Independent.
More recently, Globe columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr wrote that it was time for news organizations to bring back the public editor, taking note specifically of the oft-voiced criticism that The New York Times’ political coverage is too often marred by both-sides-ism — a criticism I’ve been making for many years. For a long time, the Times employed excellent public editors, culminating in Margaret Sullivan, its penultimate and best in-house critic. But the position was abolished after Sullivan’s successor, Liz Spayd, clashed with the newsroom over a few questionable judgments she offered.
NPR still has a public editor, Kelly McBride of the Poynter Institute, and she demonstrates why the position is valuable. She was a guest on last week’s public radio program “On the Media,” offering some thoughtful insights into the recent controversy over former senior business editor Uri Berliner, who resigned from NPR after writing an error-filled essay about what he regards as the network’s liberal bias.
For many news organizations that are still facing financial challenges, bringing back a paid in-house critic may seem like a bad idea. Large newspapers like The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times are losing money and cutting staff. But The New York Times and the Globe are profitable and growing. At a moment when trust in the media is at a historic low, hiring a public editor can represent a small but significant step to restoring that trust.
These newsroom culture stories are coming fast and furious. Today The Wall Street Journal weighs in (free link) with a detailed look at angst and turmoil inside The New York Times, encompassing everything from current controversies over its coverage of the war in Gaza and transgender issues all the way back to the 2020 defenestration of James Bennet. Not much new here, but it’s nicely pulled together.
A new book, “Newshawks in Berlin,” by Larry Heinzerling and Randy Herschaft, details the shameful coddling of the Nazis before and during World War II at the hands of The Associated Press’ Berlin bureau. Tunku Varadarajan reviews it (free link) for The Wall Street Journal. There are echoes of my Northeastern colleague Laurel Leff’s book “Buried by the Times,” about The New York Times’ playing down of the Holocaust.
A couple of notable women in New England media are moving on.
• Christine Stuart, who had run CT News Junkie since 2006, has accepted a job in state government as deputy director of communications with Connecticut’s Department of Social Services. Stuart acquired News Junkie not long after its founding and has kept it running as a for-profit source of news about politics and public policy ever since, even while supporting herself in several other news jobs over the years, including a stint as a television reporter.
Stuart was the very first person I interviewed for my 2013 book, “The Wired City.” I spent a day following her around the Statehouse in Hartford in 2009 and have stayed in intermittent touch with her over the years. She’s a dogged reporter, even unsnarling a weird connection between a Connecticut newspaper publisher and casino mogul Sheldon Adelson not long after the latter bought the Las Vegas Review Journal in 2015.
“I never thought I would be writing this, but the time has come for me to leave the news industry,” she writes in her farewell message. “I am incredibly proud of my 23-year career, which started as an intern at The Hartford Courant and will end at CTNewsJunkie.com.”
News Junkie will continue under the direction of Stuart’s business partner and former husband, Doug Hardy. The site is one of two state-politics projects in Connecticut, the other being the nonprofit Connecticut Mirror. Best wishes to Christine and Doug.
• Jess Bidgood, who’d been a senior reporter in The Boston Globe’s Washington bureau since 2018, is moving on to The New York Times, where she’ll be managing correspondent of the Times’ On Politics newsletter. Bidgood had previously worked at the Time’ Boston bureau, and before that at WGBH (now GBH News) and WBUR.
In an internal Globe message shared with me by a trusted source, Globe Washington bureau chief Jackie Kucinich said of Bidgood: “To say she is a force of nature is an understatement. There were times during the relatively short time we worked together when I swear there was more than one of her.”
Bidgood wrote on Twitter/X that “it’s bittersweet to leave the @BostonGlobe,” adding, “I am hugely proud of the work we do in the Globe’s DC bureau, and grateful for the Globe’s commitment to us.”
If you spend any time on the Twitter alternative Threads, then you know there is a revolt taking place among liberals and progressives over the way that The New York Times is covering the presidential election. I’ve been writing about the Times’ propensity for both-sides-ism in its political coverage for years, but the current outburst strikes me as over the top. CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy has a good overview of the controversy.
Like many of you have no doubt been doing, I’ve been tracking a story about a possible massive failure on the part of The New York Times. It’s about a story the paper published in December headlined “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.” It is a harrowing and horrifying report on how Hamas terrorists sexually assaulted women in the most violent ways imaginable during their Oct. 7 attack on Israel, which claimed some 1,200 lives.
Parts of the story came under serious scrutiny on Feb. 28 in an investigative report published by The Intercept. It’s a complicated critique, because no one, including The Intercept, doubts that the terrorists engaged in sexual brutality. But the Times relied in part on a freelancer whose social media activity suggests that she is anti-Palestinian and who has little in the way of journalism experience. The Intercept has also called into question some key details in the Times story. The Times, it should be noted, stands behind its reporting.
The Intercept has also reported that the Times canceled an episode of “The Daily” concerning the sexual violence story after internal and external critics raised questions about its veracity. That, in turn, has led to an investigation inside the Times to determine who may have leaked that news. The NewsGuild of New York has accused the Times of targeting employees whose backgrounds are Middle Eastern or North African, which the Times denies.
This is a developing story. For now, I highly recommend this overview at Semafor by Ben Smith, which not only lays out the details but offers some valuable background and analysis.
Boston Globe columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr calls for the return of the ombudsperson, sometimes known as the public editor — an in-house journalist who holds their own news organization to account. As she observes, at one time such positions were common at large media outlets such as The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and The New York Times.
They were eliminated, for the most part, when financial pressures made such a position seem like an unaffordable luxury. But as Stohr argues, with the Times and the Globe once again profitable and growing, “They can easily bring them back as a signal that they value public trust.” (Note: Stohr interviewed me.)
I suggested the Globe bring back its ombudsperson last spring after the paper published an extensive correction about a story involving top executives at the MBTA who were reportedly working from distant locales. Instead, the Globe fired the lead reporter, Andrea Estes, and has never really offered an explanation as to what went wrong. Estes, a respected investigative journalist, is now working at the Plymouth Independent, a new nonprofit edited by Mark Pothier, himself a former top Globe editor.
As far as I know, the only major news organization that still has a public editor is NPR, where those duties are carried out by Kelly McBride, who’s also senior vice president at the Poynter Institute. Meanwhile, as Stohr writes, the Times is increasingly under fire on social media from liberal critics who complain that the paper normalizes Donald Trump by treating him like a typical presidential candidate rather than as someone facing 91 criminal charges who attempted to foment an insurrection. I largely share that critique, although I think some of it is overblown.
The presence of a public editor, Stohr writes, “can help journalists be more self-aware while not placing the burden of public criticism on individual reporters, who are usually not in a position to make the sort of organization-wide changes that are often necessary to restore public confidence.”
The public editor was not a perfect institution by any means. Partly it depends on the skill of the person doing it. The Times’ next-to-last public editor, Margaret Sullivan, was the best I can think of, and Stohr quotes a post Sullivan wrote on Twitter/X arguing that the Times needs to bring that position back. Partly it depends on how willing top editors are to provide access. (Sullivan, who still writes media criticism for The Guardian and her own newsletter, is now executive director at the Craig Newmark Center on Journalism Ethics & Security at the Columbia School of Journalism.)
But there are certain things an in-house critic can do that an outside commentator can’t. A public editor has the time to dig deeply and, if they have the cooperation and support of the top leadership, can make a real contribution in helping the public understand why certain decisions are made. And, sometimes, what the story was behind mistakes and misjudgments.
More: There is still an Organization of News Ombudsmen, though I don’t know how active it is. If you look at the U.S. members, you’ll see that most of them hold titles like “managing editor for standards.” I should have noted that PBS has a public editor, Ric Sandoval-Palos.
For those of us who care about the byzantine internal politics of The New York Times, there is a tantalizing aside in Adam Rubenstein’s essay in The Atlantic about his stint as an editor in the opinion section. Rubenstein was involved in editing the infamous June 2020 op-ed by Republican Sen. Tom Cotton (free link) calling for the use of the Insurrection Act to suppress violent demonstrators at Black Lives Matter protests. The op-ed led to an internal revolt at the Times and, ultimately, the firing of editorial-page editor James Bennet.
One of the principal charges against Bennet was that he admitted he hadn’t read Cotton’s screed before publishing it. Yet Rubenstein’s Atlantic essay, which is sympathetic to Bennet, includes this:
In addition to my own edits, I incorporated edits conveyed by Bennet, Dao, and the deputy op-ed editor, Clay Risen; then a copy editor went over the essay.
(Dao, by the way, is James Dao, now editorial-page editor at The Boston Globe.)
“Edits conveyed by Bennet”? What, precisely, is that supposed to mean? Did Bennet have a hand in editing the piece or didn’t he? It sure sounds like Rubenstein is telling us that Bennet read the op-ed before it was published — but that contradicts what’s on the public record. For instance, here’s an excerpt from the story (free link) that the Times itself wrote about the controversy just before Bennet was fired:
James Bennet, the editor in charge of the opinion section, said in a meeting with staff members late in the day that he had not read the essay before it was published. Shortly afterward, The Times issued a statement saying the essay fell short of the newspaper’s standards.
Last December, in a massively long essay revisiting the entire affair, Bennet himself reiterated in The Economist’s 1843 Magazine, where he is a columnist, that he had not read the op-ed. He recounts an internal meeting at which he tried to defend himself and the decision to publish Cotton’s piece:
[A] pop-culture reporter asked if I had read the op-ed before it was published. I said I had not. He immediately put his head down and started typing, and I should have paid attention rather than moving on to the next question. He was evidently sharing the news with the company over Slack. If he had followed up, or I had, I might have explained that this was standard practice. Dao’s name was on the masthead of the New York Times because he was in charge of the op-ed section. If I insisted on reviewing every piece, I would have been doing his job for him – and been betraying a crippling lack of trust in one of the papers’ finest editors.
There is one other tidbit in Bennet’s piece that perhaps Rubenstein is referring to: “Rubenstein also told me that in one draft Cotton had linked disapprovingly to a tweet from a Times reporter that could be read as expressing support for the rioters. I told Rubenstein to make sure that this link was removed. I had prohibited criticising any work, including any social-media activity, from the newsroom, unless I ran the idea by a senior newsroom editor first.”
Is that the edit “conveyed by Bennet” that Rubenstein refers to in The Atlantic? If so, it’s a pretty thin reed. Rubenstein and his editors at The Atlantic should have realized that he was directly contradicting what Bennet had said about his involvement in Cotton’s op-ed and clarified that Bennet was merely responding to a routine question Rubenstein had asked him. And if Rubenstein is suggesting that Bennet was more involved than he has claimed, then that should have been highlighted, not buried in an aside.
***
Aside from the ambiguities about the degree to which Bennet was involved in editing Cotton’s op-ed, there is at least one other significant failure by Rubenstein and his editors. In attempting to prove that the Times newsroom is hermetically sealed in a left-wing bubble, he takes a shot at Times reporter Edward Wong, writing:
A diplomatic correspondent, Edward Wong, wrote in an email to colleagues that he typically chose not to quote Cotton in his own stories because his comments “often represent neither a widely held majority opinion nor a well-thought-out minority opinion.” This message was revealing. A Times reporter saying that he avoids quoting a U.S. senator? What if the senator is saying something important? What sorts of minority opinions met this correspondent’s standards for being well thought-out?
This passage in @TheAtlantic essay by Adam Rubenstein is wrong. The quote is from a paragraph in which I discussed only China policy. I named a GOP senator whom I think speaks with more substance on China than Cotton. Readers know I quote a wide range of knowledgeable analysis.
I respect @TheAtlantic. It should issue a correction. No one asked me for comment, or I would’ve pointed out the false context. The irony is that Rubenstein twisted a line to fit his ideological point — the very act he criticizes. And all serious journalists scrutinize opinions.
In other words, Rubenstein inflates Wong’s well-founded skepticism of Cotton’s expertise (or lack thereof) on one topic into what amounts to an ideologically based boycott of anything Cotton might tell him. This is sleazy and wrong, and The Atlantic needs to respect Wong’s request for a correction.
***
The Atlantic appears to be in the clear on one other controversy. Rubenstein opens with an anecdote aimed at making the Times look like a caricature of what the right might imagine to be wokeism gone wild:
On one of my first days at The New York Times, I went to an orientation with more than a dozen other new hires. We had to do an icebreaker: Pick a Starburst out of a jar and then answer a question. My Starburst was pink, I believe, and so I had to answer the pink prompt, which had me respond with my favorite sandwich. Russ & Daughters’ Super Heebster came to mind, but I figured mentioning a $19 sandwich wasn’t a great way to win new friends. So I blurted out, “The spicy chicken sandwich from Chick-fil-A,” and considered the ice broken.
The HR representative leading the orientation chided me: “We don’t do that here. They hate gay people.” People started snapping their fingers in acclamation. I hadn’t been thinking about the fact that Chick-fil-A was transgressive in liberal circles for its chairman’s opposition to gay marriage. “Not the politics, the chicken,” I quickly said, but it was too late. I sat down, ashamed.
Columbia Journalism School professor Bill Grueskin, who is not one to swing from the hips, wrote on Twitter that perhaps Rubenstein’s tale is just a little too good to be true: “I will swear on a stack of AP stylebooks that it is perfectly acceptable for editors, even at @TheAtlantic, to both fact-check first-person anecdotes and tell your readers you did that.” Times Magazine writer and Howard University professor Nikole Hannah-Jones went further, asserting, “Never happened.”
But evidence has emerged that the session Rubenstein describes actually did happen. Conservative commentator Jesse Singal wrote that he obtained a statement from The Atlantic confirming its accuracy, and former Times opinion writer Bari Weiss said that Rubenstein “told me and others that story when it happened.”
***
One final observation. “As painful as it was in my mid-20s to think that my journalistic career would end as a result of this episode,” Rubenstein writes of his decision to leave the Times, “it’s even more painful to think that newsrooms haven’t learned the right lessons from it.”
In his mid-20s? When you’re in your mid-20s, you should be covering city council meetings or, if you’re adventurous, a war. If Rubenstein really wants to explore what’s wrong with the culture of the Times newsroom, he might begin with an examination of how someone as young and inexperienced as he found himself holding an important editing job at our most influential news organization without having any relevant journalism experience beyond working at The Weekly Standard and interning at The Wall Street Journal.
It has become a strange and perverse exercise. Every so often, Press Gazette, a U.K.-based website that tracks developments in the news business, rounds up the latest weekday print circulation figures reported by U.S. newspapers and informs us that, yes, they’re down once again. For instance: The Wall Street Journal, 555,200, a drop of 14% over the previous year; The New York Times, 267,600, down 13%; The Boston Globe, 56,900, down 11%.
These same news organizations, though, are succeeding in selling digital subscriptions. The Times has 9.7 million digital-only subscribers. The Journal is around 3.5 million. The Globe has about 250,000, and CEO Linda Henry has announced a push for 400,000.
Why does Press Gazette persist in tracking these print-only numbers? Because they’re there. Twice a year, the Alliance for Audited Media reports print circulation for every newspaper that’s a member. Reliable digital numbers are much harder to come by.
As the Press Gazette itself concedes: “While print remains an important revenue stream, data on digital subscriptions presents a more promising picture.” No kidding.
