New York Times Death Spiral Watch: Jay Rosen Asks a Question

Outsourced to Jay Rosen and his commentators:

PressThink: Three Vetting Stories Went Awry at the New York Times: Find the Pattern.: Obama's drug use. Hillary's marriage. McCain's lobbyist. The New York Times made weird decisions in all three. What gives?....

• The New York Times trying to “vet” Obama. (On youthful drug use.)
• The New York Times trying to “vet” Hillary Clinton. (On the state of her marriage.)
• The New York Times trying to “vet” John McCain. (On cozy ties with lobbyists.)

Each story went weirdly wrong. Each story left people scratching their heads: what were the editors thinking? Each was part of the “vetting” ritual in which the press imagines itself asking the hard questions of candidates who would be president. Each has a touch of the bizarre to it.

My question to you: what is going on here? Anything in common among the cases?

It’s just a question. I’ll post any good answers I get....

Freudians! “This “vetting” may seem to reveal skeletons in the closet, but what what it really seems to reveal to me is that the NYT editors are Freudians looking for keys to character.”

Weldon Berger: “I don’t think there’s an institutional link between the three stories other than that the people who run the paper live in an alternate reality from most people.”

Benjamin Melançon: “All three ‘tough-on-the-candidates’ pieces, driven by the New York Times’ own choices and research rather than breaking events, have in common a great lack. Each goes out of its way to turn something arguably tangential to being president into a character issue.”...

---

The McCain piece was a bigger fiasco because they departed from the formula by dropping in the not-ready-for-prime-time sex angle. Given that the sex-with-lobbyist allegation had originally been concieved as a stand-alone piece of "investigative reporting" and got shoehorned into the historical "vetting" piece at the last minute, I don't think the "vetting" genre deserves the blame. --Ralph Phelan at February 28, 2008 2:28 PM....

Bill Keller's incredulous reaction to the nearly universal professional disdain for the McCain story's shoddy sourcing pretty much said it all: No one at the top of the New York Times can conceive that they might be wrong about a story, before or after the fact. That kind of insularity may be understandable, but it is also correctable. And as the NYT is a leader in American journalism, and is so conscious of seeing itself in that role, correcting that attitude would be helpful to the entire trade. --Mike at February 28, 2008 3:41 PM....

I thought money might have something to do with the Obama piece: they must have spent $20K or more on time and travel, sending the writer to Hawaii and California and giving him a couple of months to pull the story together. Not much there there for that kind of money, so they decided to wonder whether Obama was exaggerating his drug experience. Without that angle, the story was so vacant that it wouldn't have been printable. The reporter, oddly, seems to have been a refugee from the society pages with no real history of political or investigative reporting that I could find. The Clinton piece was just another manifestation of the weird fascination the couple hold for the higher echelons of the press: Chris Matthews light. On McCain, the problem may have been that the editors didn't recognize the significance of the lobbying shenanigans and felt, similarly to the Obama piece, that it needed sexing up; it was just coincidence that the sexing up was literal. The angle probably gained value to them because the McCain camp fought it so strongly before publication. I don't think there's an institutional link between the three stories other than that the people who run the paper live in an alternate reality from most people. --weldon berger at February 28, 2008 4:21 PM

Comments

[hilzoy]

I actually liked the Obama drug use piece, except for the "did he exaggerate? bits, which were silly. But the actual information the reporter came up with was quite interesting. I think they should have had the guts to just report it straight -- it's interesting the way scientific studies that fail to find an effect can be, and I suspect people have the same kind of reluctance to just report the absence of a finding straight.

[Robert Waldmann]

Now that he's denounced and rejected Farakhan I think Obama should denounce and reject the NY Times's gossip about gossip about McCain. My first attempt (also at my blog). I'm pretending to be Obama. Don't sneer I bet you do too when no one is watching.

Sadly the New York Times risks sinking to the level of the National Enquirer (hey someone find a low circulation tabloid which Obama can afford to insult). The notorious February 21 article reports that 8 years ago, un-named aids were concerned that the relationship between Senator John McCain and the lobbyist Victoria Iseman might be romantic. This article is un-acceptable for six reasons. First the salacious innuendo distracts the public from the really important issues. Second it attempts to violate my esteemed colleagues privacy. Third the hint of a possible past concern of an unfounded allegation would not amount to news even if the allegation concerned something that is newsworthy. Fourth the sources were clearly aids to Senator McCain in the past, but the article does not note whether their association with Senator McCain has ended. I am sure it has and that they are pissed because it passed. Fifth, I trust both Senator McCain and Ms Iseman and concluded that their relationship was strictly business. But finally the alleged evidence of a possible cause for concern isn't evidence of anything. There is no need to appeal to cupid to explain why Senator McCain is in constant contact with a lobbyist, when cupidity will do as well. Right now both Senator McCain's campaign manager and his chief political adviser are lobbyists. No one suggests that their relationships are romantic.

Reporting that Senator McCain works in close and constant collaboration with lobbyists is like reporting that the sky is blue. That the media has been reluctant to mention the plain fact that Senator McCain is closer to lobbyists than any Presidential candidate in history does not justify pretending that this fact requires a sexy explanation.

back to m

to Melancon
How did you manage that font in this site ? Oh and, aside from the sex angle, the article on McCain's doing favors for lobbyists is not tangentially related to his qualifications for the Presidency or his character. Such favors are common, perhaps universal among people who have had to raise campaign cash from special interests. They are also bad policy and thus a sound reason to vote for someone who hasn't done any yet and clearly has no need to rais campaign cash from special interests.

Also McCain is a bald faced blatant shameless liar. This is a character issue, but it is also important. Just on the lobbysists front he has claimed he received no money from special interests, that he never did a favor for a lobbyist, and that he didn't discuss a letter to the FCC with Paxson. All claims are demonstrably false and concern his personal actions which he should recall.

[TJ]

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

[Jay Rosen]

Thanks for the outsourcing, Brad. I thought your readers might find this explanation from Romenesko's Letters of interest. The writer is a former newspaper journalist, Larry Kart. The letter in full is worth a read.

http://poynter.org/forum/view_post.asp?id=13165

Larry Kart:

The common thread here, and the main reason for the bizarreness, is that the real subject of all these stories is the Times itself --and/or the image the Times thinks it's creating or would like to create for itself when it runs an ostensibly major story about a subject that is or will become of common interest. ...the Times is dancing in front of a mirror here, trying to move in ways that telegraph to a somewhat imaginary audience that it is a truly supple paper -- iconoclastic toward its own perceived liberal image (if the "facts" of a story require that it be so) and certainly capable of seeing all sides of all issues. Thus these Times stories were mis-conceived and mis-edited so as to incorporate and express the paper's own image-shaping needs; and the "facts," such as they were, were pushed about one way and another toward the end. The paper is not so much a paper anymore; it is itself a candidate.

[bakho]

The NYTimes does not do well at scandal mongering. Their reporters depend on insider contacts that feed them info because they are the NYT and they have clout. For the most part, the insiders don't play the NYT reporters (but note Judy Miller) because of negative consequences. Scandals are always a mixture of mystery lies and half truths. Rumor mongers often have nothing to lose by lying to reporters. They wear tin foil hats and don't care. Scandal reporting requires a degree of verification above and beyond that of reliable sources. The NYT seems to hire a lot of very gullible reporters like Jeff Gerth who not only attend the opening of The Great Nonesuch but return for the performance the next 2 nights as well.

[Christopher Colaninno]

This is good discussion of an emerging trend in American journalism, particularly the New York Times. Candidates create narratives of themselves, which are almost necessarily not wholly accurate portrayals of themselves. I think the media gets tripped up when they can establish that candidates narratives are not accurate in someway (Clinton’s marriage is “complicated”, Obama’s friends don’t remember him exactly the way his portrayed himself in his book, McCain is obviously not some shinning light of integrity, that tells lobbyists shove off every time they ask for a favor), but they can’t actually create a definite narrative of their own because they lack the facts or on the record sources.

They’re committed to the process of anti-veneration and creating an alternative narrative for these political figures, but they don’t actually have the goods. So they write these half baked stories, not realizing that they’re narrative is a lot easier balloon to pop then what any of the candidates have put out there.

[Mr Punch]

Everyone, including the Times, seems to have lost track of what "the character issue" is, or was. The term came into use, as I recall, with Nixon, and didn't have to do with his been "tricky" or dishonest -- on the contrary, it referred to the possibility what had been read as trickiness or dishonesty was actually outright craziness. "Character" was a euphemism for "sanity." Vetting for sanity would be a valuable public service, but that's not what the Times has been doing.

[David in NY]

Yeah, I agree with hilzoy. If you wanted to know something about Obama's background, the Times story was good (leaving out the 'he was exaggerating' conjecture). But it wasn't a tabloid piece, it just informed the public about some mildly interesting stuff about somebody who may turn out to be President. Why wasn't that good enough for them?

[Joe]

Why has The Times veered from investigative reporting to gossip? Since the paper is descending from its once-proud position of the nation's newspaper of record, down to the cultural level where pop psychology prevails, let's look to pop psychology for an answer. Val the Relationship Gal has much to say about gossips. She identifies two types:

Type 1: On average, 2 out of 10 people are the self-absorbed, cruel, "all-about-me" kinds of individuals that feel they are superior to others in every way and show no mercy when saying bad things about others.

Type 2: The remaining 8 out of 10 habitual gossipers usually appeared confident on the outside, but were actually individuals with low self-esteem and repetedly [sic] cut down others to try to make themselves feel better about themselves."

So, if Val is correct (and I see no reason to suppose that she is any less qualified in her claimed area of expertise than are people who write for The New York Times), then The Times is (or perhaps its writers are) suffering from either a smug self importance or from low self-esteem.

My guess would be that it's the latter. After all, aren't they constantly being bullied by bloggers these days? And isn't it likely that, back in high school, the journalism nerds who have now become the staff of The Times were bullied by jocks (such as John McCain), condescended to by popular kids (such as Barack Obama), and (worst of all) rejected by all the girls? (Oh, Hillary! How could you?)

If this be true, then we should not condemn The Times, or its writers. Instead, we should pity them, and recommend counseling. At the very least, perhaps The Times could hire Val to give one of her talks to its staff, to get them back on the right track.

Of course it's possible that at least some of the people at The Times are actually the first type of gossips, and thus deserving not of pity but of a swift and powerful kick in the arse. But, come on; people at The New York Times smug and self important? What are the odds?

[Thorstein Veblen]

Well, I think its clear that the McCain piece was spoonfed to the Times by someone who wanted to kill Weaver's influence with McCain (note David Brooks' being played for a fool in his follow-up pegging Weaver as the snark based on the testimony of ... people who hate Weaver). I doubt being the target of an unfair story in the NYT has hurt McCain very much w/ the Republican base he desperately needs to shore up... I would very much think the opposite would be the case. It is interesting that they printed the sex stuff about McCain and not about Hillary and her ole' boyfriend, Harold Ickes. (Yes, that's right... and if I know someone at The Times must know too... instead they only give vague hints.)