Rogers Cadenhead calmly lays out the reasons that Danny Okrent should have been fired from his job as not-the-ombudsman at the New YorkTimes months ago:
Posted by DeLong at October 24, 2004 12:10 PM | TrackBackWorkbench: Sunday, October 24, 2004: Today's New York Times includes a letter I wrote to ombudsman Daniel Okrent about his decision to out a reader who sent a violently hostile e-mail to political reporter Adam Nagourney:
I was disappointed by your decision to reveal the name of the offensive e-mail correspondent.
The easiest thing for any newspaper columnist to do is to quote his most abusive critics. It's a win-win: no one would be persuaded by the person's horrendous comments, and it builds sympathy for the columnist.
On the other hand, if the columnist only quoted reasonable people whose criticism is well informed, it would be more of a challenge to refute them.
I don't think a readers' representative should ridicule his readers. Readers need to know that the ombudsman is on their side. If he adopts the same "us against them" bunker mentality as other journalists, he should find another position.The reader, a weblogger named Steve Schwenk, has received a barrage of abusive e-mail and phone calls, a circumstance that Okrent undoubtedly knew would happen as a result of his column.
In retrospect, I was too charitable to Okrent, who clearly doesn't have the temperament to be an ombudsman. The job requires a herculean amount of patience, as I learned observing the work of Phil Record at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
At the Telegram, Record wrote a daily column for internal use at the paper in addition to a weekly column for the public. Even in the internal column, I can't recall a single occasion when he roughed up a hot-headed reader for an inappropriate remark, in spite of hearing from cranks all the time.
Okrent has now twice compared verbally mistreating a Times reporter to desecrating a church, including this remark to BusinessWeek: "... someone who goes out at night and paints a swastika on the door of a synagogue doesn't want it written about either."
In defense of the sacred sensibilities of reporters, Okrent claims an obligation to hold readers to "public responsibility" for their communication with the newspaper. That's an odd niche for a readers' representative to carve out for himself, unless he's more interested in protecting the paper from critics than challenging its mistakes.
I think that people who succeed and making it to the Times or a comparable level elsewhere really believe that they now deserve respect because of their position or office. The way a priest deserves a degree of respect from believers, for example, or a policeman deserves respect as a representative of the law -- in part regardless of their personal qualities.
I think that that is the significance of the joking and nicknaming Pres. Bush does with reporters. He's telling them that they've gotten in on the bottom floor of the same establishment he belongs to, and that he'll eventually accept tham but is going to put them through some hazing first. (Bush was, in fact, a rush coordinator in college, as Doonesbury's Trudeau testifies from personal experience.)
It's not exactly ironic that media corruption has ensued now that the media have been "established" (as a fourth or fifth* branch of government, someone has said.) The whole point of establishment is to give a monopoly invulnerable, and corruption more or less always happens.
I'm at the point of thinking the opposite -- that no one in the major political media, at least, deserves much respect. For example, I was speculating about how Pres. Kerry should deal with the media. I immediately thought of establishing a (Rovian) "kill list" of media people who should never be talked to -- restricting access can destroy a reporter's career. It was easy enough to find names for the list (whether for bias, dishonesty, inaccuracy, or silliness). It was harder to establish a list of people to talk to.
Posted by: Zizka at October 24, 2004 04:40 PMA bit disappointed in his ombudsman work as of late, but I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for Okrent's contributions to popular sports culture.
Maybe Dan needs to retire to devote more time to the Okrent Fenokees.
Posted by: tcs at October 24, 2004 04:42 PM*The fourth branch of government is the "quasi" branch hated by little-government conservatives: the "quasi-executive, quasi-judicial" regulatory agencies.
Posted by: Zizka at October 24, 2004 04:44 PM*The fourth branch of government is the "quasi" branch hated by little-government conservatives: the "quasi-executive, quasi-judicial" regulatory agencies.
Posted by: Zizka at October 24, 2004 04:45 PMI don't know that I equate the OpEd page of the Fort Worth Telegram with that of the newspaper of record: I doubt there's quite as much vitriol directed at a local paper vs the national equivalent.
Of course, the Times brought this on themselves with their slack coverage of the war. I don't that excuses Mr Okrent doing what he did, but I suspect a lot of bloggers/armchair commentators have wished for the reach of the Times for their message. It's unfortunate that Mr Schwenk chose the message he did: that seems to be left out of the discussion for some reason.
Posted by: paul at October 24, 2004 04:47 PMZizka, of course, is right.
To add on, i had some hopes for Okrent when he started. Those hopes declined when he decided that the Times' coverage of the Tonys was worth one of his columns.
It continued to decline when i sent, easily, 15-20 emails discussing specific flaws in the coverage of the election by adam nagourney and katharine seelye, and got back, each time, a note that okrent intended to write a column about the times' election coverage (thereby showing us that he thought that the times' coverage of the presidential election of 2004 was precisely as important as the times' coverage of the tonys).
And it collapsed altogether with his complete, total, piece of shit column about the times' coverage of the election, a truly ineffable piece of sold-out awfulness that demonstrated that okrent has been completely neutered and should resign before his contract runs out as a service to readers.
paul, an angry letter writer's actual email is not relevant to this conversation. i don't really care how offensive okrent found that email, it didn't justify a paragraph of his highly limited discussion of the times' coverage of the election.
As it happens, though, i'm sure that bill keller thought okrent's discussion was just peachy and is undoubtedly proud of okrent's waste of space on one angry email....
Posted by: howard at October 24, 2004 05:34 PMRemember that even though he was recently appointed he took off 6 weeks this summer during a campaign season.
Posted by: Rob at October 24, 2004 06:57 PMOkrent today is a masterpiece of smear. First he repeats his attack on Schwenk by name, this time comparing him to a felon and a bigot (someone who vandalizes churches). Then, lifting his skirts out of the muck he's just spread, he pretends to apologize for calling Schwenk a coward - not because he isn't one, but because it's beneath Okrent's dignity to descend to Schwenk's level. Meantime, although most of the column is devoted to readers' letters, Okrent doesn't mention that Schwenk wrote back in an effort defend himself. Two attacks on a powerless reader in two weeks, while denying him the chance to respond - who's the coward in this exchange?
Posted by: jr at October 24, 2004 08:52 PMI gave up on the Times early in the 1980's when I saw what they did to Ray Bonner by way of covering up more war crimes by our allies and clients in El Salvador and for Ronnie Reagan. I agree completely with Zizka above, the obvious biases are getting pretty ridiculous by now. I no longer read or trust any 'paper of record' in this country, the reporters and management have been so throughly corrupted by right wong corporate biases. It's really akin to living in the old USSR and expecting Pravda to deliver the news. Never happened without the standard approved spin from the interior clique of ruling elites.
I'd recommend doing far worse to most of their miserable reporters and management. Re-education camps and IRS audits all around for starters. For the serious cases, impressment into the front lines of the Imperial wars they cheered and lied for. It's only fair and right...
Posted by: VJ at October 25, 2004 01:21 AMI gave up on the Times early in the 1980's when I saw what they did to Ray Bonner by way of covering up more war crimes by our allies and clients in El Salvador and for Ronnie Reagan. I agree completely with Zizka above, the obvious biases are getting pretty ridiculous by now. I no longer read or trust any 'paper of record' in this country, the reporters and management have been so throughly corrupted by right wing corporate biases. It's really akin to living in the old USSR and expecting Pravda to deliver the news. Never happened without the standard approved spin from the interior clique of ruling elites.
I'd recommend doing far worse to most of their miserable reporters and management. Re-education camps and IRS audits all around for starters. For the serious cases, impressment into the front lines of the Imperial wars they cheered and lied for. It's only fair and right...
[Edited for some clarity and an inclusion of some of the history of the NYT reportage of the Central Am. wars under Reagan at the above link. Check the archives].
Posted by VJ at October 25, 2004 01:21 AM
[sarcasm]
But what about all that liberal bias?
[/sarcasm]
The Times has an arrogance problem. I'm just a simple western Canadian - our big paper day is Saturday - but I enjoy spending an hour or so reading a paper on Sunday. The Toronto Globe and Mail offered a deal where I could get the Sunday Times delivered. Wow. Great.
It turns out the paper I received is the West Coast Edition - which is not edited for a "national" audience. I mean the paper had New York high school sports, classified adds, New York Theatre listings and advertising inserts from stores not even in Canada. This Okrent jackass had an article in one paper stating the need for all this extra paper that is not practical or useful to those outside of New York is all Times readers want to be New Yorkers and need their fix of the city.
What an arrogant organization. The National edition Globe and Mail I get delivered each day is not the same paper as the folks in Toronto get - news and editorials are the same but much of the local Toronto stuff is edited out. And this is good - movie listings for Toronto don't have much meaning to me even if I was planning to go to a movie that night. If I want to buy a used car in Toronto I could go to a news stand and buy a "Toronto" edition, usually a week old.
The Times just doesn't get it. Make a truly national edition and save some trees. When the Globe and Mail went national they did the same and were savaged - the difference appears to be the Globe needed the national edition to survive and the Times has a national edition as a service to all us wanna be New Yorkers.
It would be a real treat to get a Guardian or London Times same day.
Posted by: joe at October 25, 2004 06:22 PM