The New York Times has a new Public Editor, Margaret Sullivan, former editor of the Buffalo News, which is a decent paper, and I have hope that she’ll do better than the last idiot who held the job. She’s got a heavy lift, though, especially with “he-said/she-said”, because it’s such an ingrained reflex:
The national editor, Sam Sifton, rejected the argument. “There’s a lot of reasonable disagreement on both sides,” he said. One side says there’s not significant voter fraud; the other side says there’s not significant voter suppression.
“It’s not our job to litigate it in the paper,” Mr. Sifton said. “We need to state what each side says.”
Mr. Bronner [the reporter who wrote the story] agreed. “Both sides have become very angry and very suspicious about the other,” he said. “The purpose of this story was to step back and look at both sides, to lay it out.” While he agreed that there was “no known evidence of in-person voter fraud,” and that could have been included in this story, “I don’t think that’s the core issue here.
How do you get to “stating the truth”, which Sullivan thinks is a good idea, when reporters believe that including a fact that undercuts one side’s position is “not part of the core issue”? It seems like every time someone scratches the surface of a “he-said/she-said” issue by talking to working reporter at one of these big papers, their response is almost too depressing to contemplate.
Robin G.
Every time I think I’m too cynical to react to media stupidity, something like this comes along and my mind boggles all over again.
Snarki, child of Loki
Shorter NYT public editor:
“he said/she said, or fact based reporting: opinions differ”
c u n d gulag
OY!
‘Nuff said…
JMG
It’s not our job to tell people what the facts are to the fullest extent possible? Whatever happened to “All the News That’s Fit to Print”?
The equivalent would be a quarterback saying it’s not the offense’s job to score touchdowns.
dmsilev
I note that there are precisely 0 comments attached to that story. Guess someone decided to go slow on the approval process for some reason.
(I sent in a comment on that article yesterday afternoon, so I know for a fact that there’s at least one in the queue…)
Todd
They’ve crushed their own business by skipping the old “who, what, when, how and why” model and going into false equivalence and stenography.
In order to have eyeballs to sell to advertisers, you must attract the eyeballs with reliable, accurate information.
Baud
The New York Times: Like Twitter but with crosswords.
scav
Might as well print up the Useless Layer of Overhead! motto up in Times Roman and print it on the masthead.
Oh, and national editor, Sam Sift
onless? I don’t think you can’t assert it’s “reasonable disagreement on both sides” without actually investigating under the rock of reason just a teeny tiny bit, I know it’s a bore and cuts into your time spent typing or tweeting or whatever a hollow tube in the information network does. Is your next junket to do a national travel report on high-end B&Bs at the four corners of the world where the ships fall over the edge?Todd
One other thing – I’m watching Chris Hayes, and this is wretched – a pundit show with pundit commentators.
Dennis SGMM
Lily Tomlin said it so well. “No matter how cynical I get, I can’t keep up.”
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Thank you for enabling the problem, dumbass
Chris
Is it just me or is it only one side that gets that kid gloves treatment? I can’t remember the last time anyone was that solicitous of our POV.
Todd
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
He should have just stated that.
drj
Facts have a well-known liberal bias.
We can’t be biased, can we?
Baud
@Chris:
This. If the Democrats acted like Republicans, the “core issue” the media would be writing about would be the demise of civility in our political discourse.
arguingwithsignposts
@Todd:
Um, no.
ETA: Just to explain myself, I could pile up contrary evidence to that statement that would reach the moon. Eyeballs and accurate information are not that intimately related.
Marshall
I do not think that it is really that hard. The reporter should take what is said at face value, and then dig into the consequences of that. Take voter suppression. The Republicans who are pushing this say they want everyone to vote, they just want everyone to be verifiable. OK, fine. Then they should ask, have you produced Public Service Announcements (PSAs, which are free to air) explaining the new law and what you have to do to be sure you can vote? Do you have a hot-line people can call for advice? (And, if so, do you have PSAs telling people to do that?) Do you have a web site with step by step instructions? Is there a waiver program to help undoubted voters who have trouble with their documentation, or with the cost of it? What other steps have you taken to help citizens cope with this change in law?
If (as I believe to be the case in Pennsylvania) the answer to all of these questions is no, nothing, then the people pushing this are either incredibly incompetent or lying (or, both).
The problem with the press is not that they report the BS they are fed, it is that they never seem to dig into anything. That’s not called litigation, that’s called reporting.
azlib
“not significant voter suppression” WTF???
So the suppression crowd is saying the new rules are okay because they do not sufficiently suppress the vote. I have never heard them say that. Where is this reporter getting his facts from?
Marshall
@JMG:
“once the footballs are up, who cares where they’re landing?
That’s not my department,” says Eli N. Manning.
(with apologies to Tim Lehrer)
smintheus
Isn’t Sam Sifton the guy who used to write on cooking for the Times? How in the world did he get promoted to editor of national news? The man clearly is incompetent to do that job.
kay
They could fix it by writing specifically and accurately.
The problem that voter ID laws are intended to address has a name. It’s voter impersonation fraud.
The “impersonation” is important, because when it’s explained, when people are told “Republicans say we need these laws because they fear one voter will IMPERSONATE another, walk into a polling place and announce another voter’s NAME” people understand how crazy that assertion is.
Voter impersonation fraud wouldn’t even add to (total) votes, because the whole premise of the thing is you’re replacing one valid voter with another invalid voter.
It’s a really dumb and difficult way to throw an election, with the constant threat of revelation, when the valid voter appears after the imposter and asks for a ballot.
Have you ever even read that? “I went to the polling place and they said I had already been there that day”? That’s “in-person” voter fraud. There’s a reason no one does it.
ChrisNYC
It’s not even a culture issue. It’s a logic and meaning of words and thinking issue. “There’s lots of REASONABLE disagreement on both sides.” How the hell does he land at reasonable? Reason, rational, having a basis, not arbitrary. You’d think that clearly not knowing what words mean would be an impediment to being a NYT national editor.
He’s basically adopting Santorum’s ploy when he made the false euthansia charge (about Holland?). His defense was, “Regardless of whether what I said is supported by the facts, I believe it, therefore I stand by it.”
poco
Is Bronner the same Ethan Bronner who used to be NYT’s Jerusalem Bureau Chief? (Not getting off the boat to check.) If yes, why is this surprising–he spent his tenure there carrying water for Israel (omitting any facts troublesome to that state) and he is doing the same here.
quannlace
Gah! Just because someone says something, does not make it a ‘fact.’ ‘Reasonable disagreement’ is not a ‘fact.’ Facts are little things like, taking five minutes to research the actual data of voter fraud. You know, journalism.
ChrisNYC
His bosses, by the way, must LOVE that he characterizes the NYT’s job as “stating what both sides say.” Not a lotta value-added there. Pay us and we’ll give you access to …. the best and most incisive press releases.
smintheus
@kay: If in-person voter impersonation occurred, then people would be arrested for committing fraud…or innocent voters would be falsely arrested for trying to vote a “second” time. There would also be public reports of people being denied the right to vote because somebody had already impersonated them.
None of those things happen. Therefore in-person impersonation is a myth.
Halcyan
This type of reporting – reporting on what people SAID rather than reporting actual facts (although, in fairness, it becomes “TRUTH” that they DID SAY it, sigh) — is being played hard by the psy-ops crowd paid for by the hard right.
Everyone knows that the facts have a liberal bias, and everyone knows that when the vast majority of the American People understand the issues, they side with the Dems, the Left, the Liberals.
Remember the State of the Union speech about the yellow cake? “The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” FactCheck.org says, “He was wrong, but he was not lying.”
Fox News has someone say in the morning, “I heard someone say that Obama is a socialist.” And throughout the day, it is repeated. Then on prime time, they “News” organization says, “Lots of people are saying that Obama is a socialist.” THey are reporting the “news” that they themselves created.
If reporters are only going to go as far as to say, “This is what each side said,” then the mind-twisters – those not bound by the reality based community — have every incentive to say increasingly outrageous things, because no one is reporting that what they are saying is utter horse pucky.
kay
Voter impersonation fraud never made sense for new voters, which is how the charge is always leveled (Obama)
They’re new voters. We’re ADDING, not REPLACING one voter with another.
I think they have to use their heads, ask Republicans “how does this in-person fraud work, exactly?” Make them explain it, step by step. They can’t.
kay
@smintheus:
But there again, they never get to that, because they put everything under “voter fraud”.
I’m not asking for bias. I’m asking for specifics, some thought and rigor applied to these idiotic assertions.
That’s the added value of a newspaper. If I want to read two competing campaign releases, I don’t need to pay for that.
smintheus
Yep, Sam Sifton restaurant critic is now the Times’ national editor.
Jon Rockoford
@dmsilev: I also submitted a comment yesterday. o course it hasn’t been “approved.” I’m tempted to post a comment agreeing with the idiot reporter and editor and see if they’ll let that one through.
gelfling545
Talk about “opinions differ”! The Buffalo news is a decent paper? I guess if you only read the sports pages. I stopped getting it in 2000 and when I glance at the web version (to look at the death notices) I don’t find much of merit there.
pluege
the problem is that journalist trust republicans – the hucksters, and distrust democrats or progressives who actually work in an honest manner for average people. Thus they think there is a legitimate case of “both sides do it” when in fact nothing could be further from the truth.
Journalists are a key component of what’s wrong with American politics and by extension America.
smintheus
@kay: When I’m looking for credulity, I don’t bother with newspapers, I go straight to The Abominable Snowman Newsletter.
smith
I’m guessing that when low-information voters hear “voter fraud” they are imagining a couple of possibilities:
1. People voting who are not eligible to vote (e.g., non-citizens, felons). Demanding ID at the point of voting won’t help much with that situation, especially if the required ID is a common form of ID such as a driver’s license. Better record-keeping and tighter controls at registration might filter that out, but of course the recent history of voter purges shows how easily those can be abused.
2. Someone voting in place of a dead voter. It’s been known to happen, but recently only in isolated cases and only by Republican rat-fuckers. Better record-keeping would solve that, and with the computerization of both voter records and vital stat records there’s really no excuse for not keeping it all up to date.
The bottom line though, is that too many people value the vote too little, so that denying someone the opportunity to vote seems like a small price to pay for preventing problems better solved by other means.
kay
I don’t understand why the “voter fraud” premise was swallowed whole in the first place.
The phrase is descriptive. It’s accusatory. It’s a claim VOTERS are committing fraud in such numbers that 36 states have to address it with ID laws. No proof. None.
They swallowed the GOP premise whole, and after that, we all just went down the rabbit hole. It never should have gotten this far, and it wouldn’t have, had they not broken the first rule, which is “back it up”
Republicans are accusing millions of people of felony fraud. Why did newspapers accept that in the first place? There is NOTHING to back that up.
Brachiator
We may be doomed, and the NY Times is certainly doomed, when its national editor demonstrates such a total misunderstanding of what reporters are supposed to freaking do.
And I am not even sure that a Public Editor would be necessary if a newspaper got the story right the first goddam time.
There was a story about attempts to push a voter suppression law in Iowa on Friday’s Rachel Maddow Show. A judge who rejected the regulations noted in his decision that the state official who insisted that emergency regulations were necessary was making shit up, asserting a false emergency in order to achieve the results he wanted. This pretty much negated the idea that there was any “both sides” aspect to voter suppression efforts.
This shit is just depressing.
Villago Delenda Est
@JMG:
It’s almost so bad that the quarterback thinks it’s his job to throw interceptions that can be run back for touchdowns…by the other team.
Brachiator
@smintheus:
Was he the last man standing after a round of layoffs?
@pluege:
A good journalist trusts no one, and certainly does not presume that a person who claims to be progressive is always or naturally honest.
Tara the Antisocial Social Worker
One side says Barack Obama was born in Hawaii and is the President of the United States. the other side says he was born on the Planet chartreuse and is a 3-headed alien planning to make casseroles out of voters.
It’s not our job to count his heads.
ChrisNYC
Notable quote from Sifton’s work:
22 courses at Torrisi last night and the memories kaleidoscopic …
Villago Delenda Est
@ChrisNYC:
Apparently, he wasn’t paying attention, or Torrisi wisely put acid in the first course.
Chris
@Brachiator:
“May” be?
Never lose that sense of optimism, bro.
dmsilev
@Jon Rockoford: Apparently the person in charge of comments decided to wake up and press the necessary buttons, because there are now ~130 comments, most of which (mine including) are ripping that reporter and his editor a new asshole.
kay
@Tara the Antisocial Social Worker:
It reminds me of birthers, because it’s a boring, mundane rule-laden state recording process that conservatives and media have managed to swath in mystery and malice. Like voting.
They have to start at the beginning. What is a birth record? Who vouches for it? What is state law on birth records?
” Obama’s birth record is invalid” “millions of voters are impersonating other voters”
These are wild claims. Yet, somehow the burden shifted, and Obama and voters must disprove these claims. That’s crazy. The person leveling the accusation has to back it up.
Ben Franklin
Dickhead Gregory was just trying to trap BiBi into saying something nasty about Obama, but he kept waving those attempts off. I think BiBi is now convinced Obama is going to win.
ChrisNYC
Sam Sifton’s best pizza in New York list has 8,638 entries, all tied for first place. “Each of these establishments clearly states that they serve the best pizza in the city. My job is to pass that information on.”
bemused
Is there any site that reports the number of voter id law bills proposed in the US in the last few years vs the number of states that have passed voter id laws? I think the number of republican dogged attempts to pass voter id laws must be staggering.
GregB
Peter King is an anagram for Mendacious Douche Bag.
GregB
@bemused:
The Brennan Center.
Link.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Ben Franklin: Bibi is an unpleasant self serving ideologue, but he’s never been a fool. His strident expression of ideology can confuse people.
amk
@Brachiator: whatdayamean ‘may’ ?
bemused
@GregB:
Thanks much.
Ben Franklin
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q):
His strident expression of ideology can confuse people.
Gregory’s confused as to why his bait wasn’t taken.
Paul
If Sifton had been alive when they figured out that the planet wasn’t flat, I assume the article above would have been written as follows:
The national editor, Sam Sifton, rejected the argument. “There’s a lot of reasonable disagreement on both sides,” he said. One side says the planet is flat; the other side says the planet is not flat.
“It’s not our job to litigate it in the paper,” Mr. Sifton said. “We need to state what each side says.”
Mr Sifton seems to think his job is to be a stenographer, not a serious journalist.
Commenting at Ballon Juice since 1937
ha, ha, ha. No its not.
Daulnay
News is information that’s important, new, and true. The reporter’s job is to find that information. American reporters for the national media have quit doing their job, preferring to leave the heavy lifting – finding out the truth – to their readers.
They’ve decided that it’s enough to report what’s technically true but unimportant — that so-and-so said ‘this’ — while failing to actually report what’s true and important. What do you do with a press that has decided to quit working?
ChrisNYC
It’s gonna be fun to watch Netanyahu sob on election night. I wonder if he’ll make it all the way through his concession speech?
BGinCHI
Here’s my analogy for the journos who think this shit:
“the 40 year old man and the 12 year old girl both had reasons for, respectively, wanting and not wanting sex. While the girl was forceful in her emotional way of arguing, the man had his own line of reasoning.”
There is a reason we don’t want or allow this kind of thing, and it’s why we ought not tolerate it in political reporting. There are almost always imbalances of power. Self-interest is almost always a factor in important disputes.
Journalism is not, I repeat, NOT refereeing a sporting match.
Brachiator
@amk:
People can always decide to do the right thing. People can decide whether to stop falling for the bullshit, or whether they want to continue lapping it up.
Joel
I love how the top comment is a wingnut special.
Amir Khalid
The New York Times apparently no longer believes that fact-checking is a basic part of reporting the news, to be done before the story is published. I see a lot of whingeing here about deadline pressures making it unpractical to verify that someone, to whom the NYT is lending its credibility by putting his words on its pages, is telling the truth.
I also suspect that when reporting on a dispute between A and B, NYT reckons its obligation to balance means it should be impartial between A and B. Whereas readers want it to report the truth, whomever the truth may favor — which, NYT complains, puts it on the spot by demanding it be an arbiter of truth, something beyond the scope of a mere newspaper. (Pish-tosh, I say.)
So NYT lets this basic element of reporting slide. Lies and bullshit see print and go online. Readers are either deceived, or see the truth being contaminated and get angry; and NYT’s own credibility suffers. This is what Arthur Brisbane didn’t get when he professed surprise that readers did actually expect the NYT to be “truth vigilantes”. I think Sullivan is giving just a little too much face to editorial staff at NYT who continue to beg off this fundamental responsibility of journalism.
When an outside organization like Politifact or Factcheck.org sets itself up to check news reporting and commentary post-publication, that isn’t supposed to mean that an NYT or a CNN can or should let go of that function. When the fact checker flags an untruth that you reported, or a truth unfairly shaded, it hits your credibility. That’s supposed to make you more vigilant about the truth, not less so.
Tonal Crow
The NYT owes me reconstructive jaw surgery for the line
which the “public editor” then professionally handled by immediately changing the subject.
Hey NYT! I pay $800 a year to keep your leaky ship afloat. I want real journalism for my coin, not false equivalances, meta-false equivalances, and lack of followup squared. Get to work!
Amir Khalid
@Tonal Crow:
It is disheartening, isn’t it, when a reporter looks straight at the core issue with his story, the omission of a key fact for the sake of a spurious “balance” between two sides that he’s reported on, and then tells you he doesn’t think it’s the core issue here.
ThresherK
@Baud: Except the NYT has figured out folks will pay separately for its crosswords.
I guess, like “conservapedia” or “The Half Hour News Hour”, there is no viable right-wing alternative to the regualr Times crosswords which is ceded to be half of the story.
scav
The New York Times New Journalism: They report faithfully anything that’s said to them in the name of “balance” but put a major filter on comments.
Tonal Crow
@Amir Khalid:
Yes indeedy. And it’s meta-disheartening when the “public editor” just lets that big fat dripping crawling softball creep across the plate with not even an attempt to whiff it. Jesus H. bin Laden Kee-rist on a crutch! Whatever happened to “Who, what, when, where, why, please explain” journalism? Is everyone in the media on Koch’s payroll?
ellennelle
did anyone here listen to yesterday’s on the media on npr? they actually addressed this problem of bias head on. well, at least, best they could.
the third quarter hour included (at the top) an interview with daniel hall of miami u in OH, who’s been studying this question for a while. he noted that, once upon a time, there really was a line drawn by the media between what was news and what was just crackpot and out of bounds; he noted that this line has been destroyed, and so we don’t have any sense of a “center” of reality we can all agree on.
he didn’t spend much if any real time addressing what went into this shift, except to point out (if memory serves) that it’s been in the past 20-30 years or so, and in that time we’ve seen the growth of talk radio and fox news. he spent no time making any overt connections there, but perhaps he left it to the bright npr audience to connect those dots.
speaking of npr’s bright audience, i also recommend the final segment; the show’s producers hired some statisticians to survey the network’s audience by demographics, and compare it to others; truly eye-opening, and npr – as per usual – came out smelling very good indeed. comparatively speaking.
but, if you do listen to the show (highly recommend it), take particular note of the conservative listeners they interviewed for this show in that last segment. sorry, but someone back me up on this; especially the one guy they talked to most (had an irish accent)seemed to me to be whining about his hurt feefees and not at all concerned about the core of journalism’s mandate, to report the truth without having to tailor it to avoid hurting all those various feefees out there who might be offended by said truth.
of course, the show was very respectful and never pointed this out, but i’m thinking i will email them a comment. you should too, if the mood sways you. i encourage you to do so, because at least this show is looking at the problem, and the more of us who respond to their efforts, the more real news will be likely to win out.
the good news (heh heh) is, more and more attention is being paid to these media issues these days, and we need to jump into the conversation in any and all ways we can.
Egypt Steve
@Tonal Crow: I dunno. Here’s how she transitioned:
Nora
I’m confused. If the fact that there is “no known evidence of in-person voter fraud” isn’t the core issue here, then what the hell is the core issue? That both sides differ? Seriously, you don’t leave something like that dangling out there — that’s not the core issue, this is. Whatever “this” may be for that writer.
Tonal Crow
@Egypt Steve: I think you’re reading the segueway too charitably. Just before the segueway, the “public editor” herself did a “he said/she said”, giving ample room for the perps to obfuscate the issue and to get the last word. NYT needs to do far better than this.
Tonal Crow
@Nora: Exactly. The “public editor” completely missed the “core issue” herself by leaving that hanging.
ThresherK
@ellennelle: Decent episode, wretched framing. Leave it to OTM to ask the question “Does NPR have a liberal bias?”
What happened to the NPR Mothership’s BothSides mantra? The question of a conservative bias is so beyond the pale it needn’t be asked?
Brachiator
@Amir Khalid:
And yet, in a recent gigaom piece, Matthew Ingram suggests that we are all supposed to be citizen journalists and getting the story right the first time out doesn’t matter, because the Internet and social media can be part of a seemingly endless process of evaluation and correction. Post modern journalism, I guess.
http://gigaom.com/2012/08/21/why-its-better-for-fact-checking-to-be-done-in-public/
Chris T.
In other words: “He said she had just beat him to within an inch of his life. She said she did no such thing. There wasn’t a mark on him and she was covered in bruises but that seemed completely irrelevant so we ignored it!”
Paul
Most people only read the initial story. Thus, they are left with what the original story covered with all its errors and flawed logic.
Nutella
This is a dog-bites-man story. “Opinions differ between parties.”
They like to do this because it’s easy. Every day’s stories can be the same as every other day’s stories. Just tweak a few words and the same story can be written about pretty much any topic.
And they wonder why nobody reads or buys ads in newspapers any more.
Mike G
This is how lazy journalists operate in Middle Eastern monarchies and corporate PR departments where their job is to be a mouthpiece for the elite.
“Powerful entity A said this. Powerful entity B said that. It is So Very Important that they Said Something. Who is accurate and who is full of shit? Hell if I know, and I’m not going to piss off anyone powerful by looking into it!”
As Atrios would say, time for another blogger ethics panel.
Billy
This is one of the reason the big newspapers are failing. They provide no value. He-said she-said is not enough, I want to know which said said factual things.
Reporters used to dig in and find that out. Now, they are just stenographers. I don’t intend to pay good money for that.
Billy
This is one of the reason the big newspapers are failing. They provide no value. He-said she-said is not enough, I want to know which said said factual things.
Reporters used to dig in and find that out. Now, they are just stenographers. I don’t intend to pay good money for that.
JustAnotherBob
Is there the potential to create online “real” reporting?
Let’s say you had a site that hired some good journalists whose job was to take an issue like voter ID and to dig into it on a factual basis. No spin. Let the chips fall where they might.
Charge readers to read. Not a subscription to the entire site, but just that article. Charge them a nickel.
Let people prepay a buck or two and then use up their balance as they read.
100,000 reads at a nickle would gen $5k. And there is advertising revenue. What does it cost to do real reporting?
NYTs has over 500,000 digital subscribers.
arguingwithsignposts
@JustAnotherBob: That’s spot.us.
JoyfulA
And then there’s the whole concept of “both sides.” Most topics have many, many sides, most of which never see print, not just two sides.
Downpuppy
@Tonal Crow: For now, I choose to believe that she simply left the 2 morons to twist in the wind & receive the arrows.
Because the mockery will just pick up.
JustAnotherBob
@arguingwithsignposts:
I need convincing. That’s a site with “16,450+” contributors. 16 thousand plus journalists working to produce factual news?
It might be a model but it’s not what I’m thinking about.
Consider a “Huffington Post” without crap headlines, T&A pieces and actual reporting. (OK, leave in the T&A if it helps the bottom line and doesn’t hurt the quality of the actual reporting.)
An online newspaper that you let you see a picture, read a headline and summary paragraph for free and dive into the weeds for a nickel. Maybe a dime for real investigative pieces that require a lot of reporter time.
A real quality news editing staff that would not allow crap and fluff to make it to the page.
El Cid
If you are not ‘litigating’ in your reporting between the true and the untrue, the verifiable versus the alleged or inaccurate or falsified, then what you are doing is not ‘journalism’.
You are taking dictation, or transcribing comments, etc, things which can be done by press releases and by the websites of relevant parties.
We don’t need a multi-billion dollar media empire for that; for that, temp firms can find us administrative assistants or secretaries or stenographers if transcribing oral statements is needed.
Otherwise, why should we be buying some publication or listening to or watching some broadcast when there is no real ‘value added’?
Really? We need a billion dollar newspaper to tell us what a GOP spokesman said?
JustAnotherBob
Wouldn’t you imagine that there a dozen or couple dozen good reporters now working in other fields who would love getting back to their real calling? That afternoon shift at Costco would allow for some morning reporter work.
If someone were to get some small seed money and a group of actual reporters willing to work for ownership share, supporting themselves with their current non-reporting jobs wouldn’t you think they could get something going in one or two years?
I’d sure turn to “You Can Trust US” to get my information fix. I’m sick of ‘writing to please the audience’ news that I can’t trust.
JustAnotherBob
@El Cid:
Leapfrog the old model.
Offer a better product at a better price and the old will die away.
JWR
Ms. Sullivan gives good lip service to the notion of Journalism and Democracy, but does anybody really believe for even a moment that the Times won’t crumble at the first hint of complaint from a Karl Rove or the Chamber of Commerce? We’ve been reading these sorts of proclamations from the Times that “we’ll do better” for years, and I’m sure we’ll be reading them again.