Free Republic

March 28, 2004 THE PUBLIC EDITOR The Privileges of Opinion, the Obligations of Fact By DANIEL OKRENT T sounds like a simple question: Should opinion columnists be subject to the same corrections policy that governs the work of every other writer at The Times? So simple, in fact, that you must know that only an ornate answer could follow. For the news pages, the rule is succinct. "Because its voice is loud and far-reaching," the paper's stylebook says, "The Times recognizes an ethical responsibility to correct all its factual errors, large and small (even misspellings of names), promptly and in...

... Now I'm going to pick on the worst habits of certain anti-Times critics lurking on the Web. Last Sunday, an item appeared on FreeRepublic.com under the headline "FReeper Call to Action! Help make N.Y. Times correct the phony setup outrage story of Bush ads." Posted by "Doug from Upland," it exhorted readers of the self-described "Premier Conservative News Forum" to call Washington correspondent Richard W. Stevenson and demand that he "correct the record." Stevenson's apparent offense was a March 5 story he and Jim Rutenberg had written about negative reactions to Republican ads invoking the events of 9/11. Stevenson's...

Now I'm going to pick on the worst habits of certain anti-Times critics lurking on the Web. Last Sunday, an item appeared on FreeRepublic.com under the headline "FReeper Call to Action! Help make N.Y. Times correct the phony setup outrage story of Bush ads." Posted by "Doug from Upland," it exhorted readers of the self-described "Premier Conservative News Forum" to call Washington correspondent Richard W. Stevenson and demand that he "correct the record." Stevenson's apparent offense was a March 5 story he and Jim Rutenberg had written about negative reactions to Republican ads invoking the events of 9/11. Stevenson's...

America's most dangerous liberal pundit has been on his best behavior lately — almost. Paul Krugman's New York Times columns over the last month have been bland, at least relative to his normal shrill standards. Just the usual mindless Bush-bashing Halliburton-causes-cancer stuff you can read on almost any editorial page these days. What's reined Krugman in? Well, there's a new cop on W. 43rd Street. In December, Daniel Okrent became the Times's first "public editor" — something between an ombudsman and a special prosecutor, brought in to restore the paper's tarnished reputation in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal...

THE PUBLIC EDITOR THE first true blizzard of the first public editor's first season began Sunday, Dec. 21. The lead headline on the front page of The Times declared, ''Strong Support Is Found for Ban on Gay Marriage." Reading the article over my morning coffee, I wondered why a single poll - The Times's own, co-sponsored by CBS - was itself considered news (at least one other released around the same time showed substantially different results). But for the next two weeks, rising drifts of e-mail provoked by the piece made me realize my attention belonged elsewhere. Most correspondents felt...

MOST people who are subjects of newspaper articles they believe to be unfair or inaccurate have few avenues of recourse. You can write a letter to the editor, and if you're extraordinarily lucky, it will leap out of the enormous haystack (The Times gets more than 300,000 letters and e-mail messages every year) and into print. You can ask for a correction, which even if granted isn't likely to be seen by nearly as many people as the original story. If you've got a lot of money and a lot of time, you could even hire a lawyer. Some complainants...

WHEN The New York Times invites you to be the first person charged with publicly evaluating, criticizing and otherwise commenting on the paper's integrity, it's hard to say no: this is a pretty invigorating challenge. It's also hard to say yes: there are easier ways to make friends. Reporters and editors (the thickness of their skin measurable in microns, the length of their memories in elephant years) will resent the public second-guessing. The people who run the newspaper may find themselves wondering how they might get away with firing me before my 18-month term is up. Too many combatants in...