I can think of a lot of things I would rather do with my life than be public editor of the NY Times, spending 8 hours a day (is this his only job? Not that I don’t think correcting the Times wouldn’t be a full time job.) trying to squeeze corrections and admissions of error from the NY Times staff. However, Byron Calame seems to be giving it the old college try:
ONE of the real tests of journalistic integrity is being fair to someone who might be best described by a four-letter word.
The New York Times flunked such a test in rejecting a demand by Geraldo Rivera of Fox News for correction of a sentence about him in a column by the paper’s chief television critic.
The underlying issue arose from the penultimate paragraph of Alessandra Stanley’s TV Watch column on Sept. 5 about the coverage of Hurricane Katrina: “Some reporters helped stranded victims because no police officers or rescue workers were around. (Fox’s Geraldo Rivera did his rivals one better: yesterday, he nudged an Air Force rescue worker out of the way so his camera crew could tape him as he helped lift an older woman in a wheelchair to safety.)”
Calame watched the tape, and thinks the Times should have corrected. They won’t, so he spanked ’em. Good for him, even though this is perhaps one of the dumbest mini-stories involved in the whole Katrina saga. He is also still pissed about Krugman making things up:
Meanwhile, in the opinion section of The Times, the corrections policy of Gail Collins, the editor of the editorial page, is not being fully enforced. As I have written on my Web journal, Paul Krugman has not been required to correct, in the paper, recent acknowledged factual errors in his column about the 2000 election in Florida.
The Times has long been a trailblazer in its commitment to correcting errors [which might explain why Judith Miller is still in jail- ED.] . This is no time to let those standards slip – even when well-known critics and columnists are involved.
Now that few can read Krugman anymore, I guess all we will get to see for free are Calame’s demands for corrections/retractions.
Bob
Is Judy Miller in jail because of something Krugman wrote about the 2000 elections? I thought it was because she wouldn’t reveal her part in the administration’s smear attack against Joe Wilson’s wife.
John Cole
Bob- That was supposed to be a joke- the way the Times was dealing with the mistake of having Judith Miller as an employee was to leave her locked up.
Rick
Valerie Plame working for the CIA is a smear? Gosh, like being a pedophile or a crack-dealer, huh?
Cordially…
Jack Roy
Okay, I didn’t get the joke either, but now that you explain it, it’s pretty funny.
Isn’t there a standard of “harmless error” when it comes to Rivera, though? I think the Times could publish an erroneous story that Geraldo murdered an infant with his teeth; it wouldn’t exactly lower the man’s credibility. I’m not a terribly big fan of the Times, but I still think there are better uses of time.
DougJ
There must be another big golf country club somewhere that doesn’t admit women as members, right?
David
It is clear that Calame is trying to do his job as ombudsman for the NYTimes in an honest, straight forward way. I anticipate a diminishing presence for Mr. Calame in the Times to a point that he just isn’t heard from again.