The NY Times isn’t serious about reader trust — or it just doesn’t get it
Some in the media are thinking big about how journalism can rebuild trust through transparency. I was glad to see this Twitter exchange about how we can alert readers when news outlets’ social media posts get edited. Similarly, Los Angeles Times data editor Ben Welsh has some good ideas about how we alert readers to article corrections, which we dip into in my recent Reynolds Journalism Institute white paper.
And then we have this: the New York Times, which has shown some of the strongest self-examination instincts over the past decade, has decided, “Meh. Why bother.”
This week the paper eliminated the public editor role, created in 2003 in response to the Jayson Blair plagiarism and fabrication debacle, and replaced it with a “Reader Center,” which mostly seems like a social media monitoring station. Will the Center thoroughly investigate readers’ criticisms, even if (especially if) the criticisms demand a change to long-standing journalistic practice? Will it publish frank and honest analyses of those critiques? There’s no indication that it will.
It’s breathtaking that as the flagellatory fallout from November continues, a major news organization can demonstrate itself so shockingly out of touch with its own fallibility.
If you doubt that the New York Times’ public editor performed a valuable service, just take a look at the long-running debate over stealth editing. Readers wrote in with their ears steaming, by the hundreds, after the Times changed a piece to make it more skeptical of Bernie Sanders’ chances in the 2016 election. First Margaret Sullivan and then Liz Spayd used the public editor position to take the paper to task for its lack of transparency around this and similar changes.
At the same time, only they had the level of access required to disprove some of the more conspiratorial charges that readers leveled in these incidents. They therefore wielded the power to improve the paper two-fold: first, by chiding it to do better, and second, by pointing out where criticisms went too far. By doing one, they gained credibility for the other.
Not only hasn’t the Times committed to avoid stealth editing, an opaque practice that sows confusion at best and suspicion at worst, but it has now cut the one position that seemed to shed some light on this opacity.
That the Times is now eliminating the role set up as a response to the Jayson Blair affair adds another level of irony. Newspapers continue to be terrible at alerting readers to when they’ve made a mistake, despite 20 years of web and social media publishing during which they could have forged solutions. Once people absorb an error in a news article, they hardly ever are exposed to the corrective information.
So when politicians and pundits apply the “Fake News” label to reputable news organizations — it’s simply not good enough for those outlets to get offended and walk away. Very, very occasionally, the New York Times has been fake news. And the fake news lingers: I was able to find Jayson Blair stories on ProQuest without any corrections attached.
Less rarely (but still rarely), the New York Times is wrong — honestly wrong, not fake. And there too, there’s no truly workable system to alert readers that the paper was mistaken. Read some bum advice from the Times via Facebook? Too bad: unless you’re the sort of news weirdo who likes to cruise the corrections page daily, you’ll never know it.
So someone who nods their head when Trump applies his famous “fake” label to the Times — or CNN, or NPR, or whoever — might not simply be falling to ideological reasoning. He might genuinely remember that time that the paper got something wrong, and didn’t seem to give a damn.
The Times’ recent actions appear to demonstrate that it still doesn’t give a damn. Which, unless I’m mistaken, is the bare minimum requirement for mutual trust.
