New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt has not had a chance yet to respond to questions about his commentary on the ACORN hoax (FAIR Action Alert, 3/11/10), instead devoting his Sunday column (3/14/10) to a discussion of political labeling. It included this question:

Why is the American Enterprise Institute almost always called "conservative" in the Times, while the Brookings Institution seldom gets a label, although it has been described as a Democratic government in exile during Republican regimes?

First off, the right-wing AEI (Extra!, 3-4/99) is not "almost always called 'conservative' in the Times"; a Nexis search of the paper over the past year turns up 77 references to the think tank, of which 18 have the word "conservative" in the vicinity.  Twenty-three percent of the time is not "almost always."

And Brookings "has been described as a Democratic government in exile"--who, exactly, has described it thus? The only previous time that Brookings was described as a "government in exile" in the New York Times, it was a column (9/29/89) that said the think tank served as such for Democratic and Republican economists alike.

It would certainly be an odd shadow government for Democrats that provided a home for so many Republicans. While its current president, Strobe Talbott, was a deputy secretary of state in the Clinton administration, his predecessor, Michael Armacost, was an undersecretary of state under Reagan (Extra!, 11-12/98); the president before that, Bruce MacLaury, worked for Nixon's Treasury Department (Extra!, 5/91). Brookings' current roster of experts includes George W. Bush administration alumni like Ted Gayer, Mark McClellan and Ron Haskins--not to mention prominent Iraq War hawks Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack (Extra! Update, 10/07).

New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt (2/21/10) returns to the issue of Times Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner having a child fighting on one side of the conflict he's covering (FAIR Activism Update, 2/12/10):

Some Times journalists have taken issue with my position in this case, believing it suggests that no Jewish reporter could fairly cover the Israeli/Palestinian conflict (or, for that matter, a corollary: that a Muslim of Arab descent could not cover Iraq). Until Thomas L. Friedman was sent to Jerusalem in 1984, the Times would not assign a Jew to that post, a sorry history that nobody should want to repeat.

But there is a huge difference between being a Jewish reporter covering the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and being a reporter whose son has enlisted in the Israeli military. For one thing, as the letter from Ira Glunts illustrates, there is no unanimity among Jews about Israel. To suggest otherwise is to buy into stereotypes. Good reporters bring their life stories to their work and learn both to mine them for material and to correct for bias. But having a son take up arms in a foreign fight you are covering--any fight--creates intolerable pressures and appearances, in my view. I would have said the same thing if the Times had had a reporter in Northern Ireland with a son in the British military there--or fighting with the Provisional Irish Republican Army....

If it isn't acceptable for a Jerusalem correspondent's son to volunteer in the Israeli Defense Forces, would it be OK for him to be in the United States Army? My answer is yes, though the reporter's assignment might be affected by what his son was assigned to do--and where. Though some journalists concerned with objectivity may not always be comfortable with it, readers expect American reporters and their family to be part of this society and to exercise the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. But they don’t expect a correspondent sent to cover an intense overseas conflict to wind up heavily invested in one side--or to be perceived as such--even if it is through the action of a close family member over whom the reporter has no control.

Hoyt is right to reject the odious equation of concern over Bronner's situation with the idea that Jews (or Muslims) should be barred from reporting on the Middle East. The assumption that reporters will naturally side with their own ethnic group is bigotry, and the Times shouldn't try to appease any readers who make that leap. If there is any personal tie to a story that a journalist should not be expected to be able to set aside, however, surely it's having a child whose life or death is at stake.

If you want a lesson in how right-wing pressure on corporate media works, look no further than the ACORN story. Right-wing talkshow hosts have targeted the community organizing group for years, primarily on charges of vote fraud. Then two conservative activists produced some embarrassing videos of ACORN workers at some local offices giving tax advice advice to a couple passing themselves off as a pimp and a prostitute. From there, the story turned to right-wing gloating—and complaints about the media being too slow (and of course too liberal) to pick up on the right's anti-ACORN crusade.

And some in the media agreed. Washington Post ombud Andrew Alexander (9/20/09) criticized his paper for running just two early stories about the recent scandals involving the group. The problem was that the paper apparently doesn't pay enough attention to the concerns of the right--a feeling shared by the paper's executive editor, who called for more coverage of the group.

Over at the New York Times, public editor Clark Hoyt reached a similar conclusion (9/27/09), writing that when the paper misses such stories, it can "wind up looking clueless or, worse, partisan itself." The Times was clueless, apparently, because they ran just one story about the anti-ACORN campaign, a piece that upset conservatives because it looked at the issue as a political matter--explaining that the videos and talk radio brouhaha was a way for the right to try and do harm to a group it opposes, and to try and connect ACORN to the Obama White House.  This is undoubtedly true. But editors at the Times, like the folks at the Post, offered the same self-criticism: We don't pay enough attention to the complaining of conservatives.

Sure enough, only a few days later, readers would see how this was changing. On October 6, the Post ran a piece on Republicans going after the Service Employees International Union, or SEIU, for their ties to ACORN. The union has paid ACORN for various services over the years. A nearly identical story appeared in the next day's New York Times (10/7/09). So the completely-blown-out-of-proportion case against ACORN has now become a drive against SEIU, with no apparent news hook other than the fact that right-wing Republicans are trying to make this non-story into a story--and succeeding.

I guess editors at the Times and Post can rest easy knowing that they're not ignoring the whining of the right-wing.

Posting to the Columbia Journalism Review's Behind the News blog, Megan Garber (5/26/09) catches New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt espousing "a peculiar brand of institutional defensiveness" in his May 23 column:

One that plays itself out via divisiveness--and via, in particular, a false dichotomy that aggrandizes Times reporters and dismisses those who are not. In particular, those nagging, nattering bloggers. (Outsiders! Pouncers! Rougher-uppers!) And he does so right in his lede: There are those "within" the Times, "trying to protect the paper's integrity"…and then there are those "outside" it, "ready to pounce on transgressions by Times journalists."

Garber contention that "such thinking represents all too well the protective, entitled, wagon-circling attitude that so many people resent about the Times--and about mainstream journalism more generally"--even comes after choosing to "leave aside the fact that Hoyt's column vastly underplays the transgressions in question within it":

MoDowd’s, in particular. (After a quick, he-said/she-said summary of the scandal, Hoyt declares: "I do not think Dowd plagiarized, but I also do not think what she did was right.... If the words are not hers, she must give credit." And then he moves on.)

For the record, even Dowd herself admits having lifted lines wholesale from Talking Points Memo blogger Josh Marshall.

FAIR's latest Action Alert asks media activists to ask New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt about a recent Elisabeth Bumiller article that reported on former Guantanamo prisoners "returning" to terrorism--even though it was not clear there was evidence that any of the released prisoners had ever been involved in "terrorism" of any sort.

Please leave copies of your messages to Hoyt in the comment thread here.

Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald gets the site's lead story today (5/8/09, ad-viewing required) with an excerpt from the New York Times obituary for U.S. fighter pilot Harold E. Fischer Jr., who, as the Times headline puts it, was "Tortured in a Chinese Prison." Greenwald deems such naming of Fischer's ordeal--"kept in a dark, damp cell with no bed and no opening except a slot in the door...handcuffed. Hour after hour, a high-frequency whistle pierced the air"--to be "a major editorial breach" for the paper that so agilely dances around the T-word when reporting on U.S. actions:

So that's torture now?... Using the editorial standards of America's journalistic institutions--as explained recently by the NYT public editor--shouldn't this be called "torture" rather than torture--or "harsh tactics some critics decry as torture"? Why are the much less brutal methods used by the Chinese on Fischer called torture by the NYT, whereas much harsher methods used by Americans do not merit that term? Here we find what is clearly the single most predominant fact shaping our political and media discourse: Everything is different, and better, when we do it. In fact, it is that exact mentality that was and continues to be the primary justification for our torture regime and so much else that we do.

Along those same lines, I learned from reading the New York Times this week (via the New Yorker's Amy Davidson) that Iraq is suffering a very serious problem. Tragically, that country is struggling with what the Times calls a "culture of impunity." What this means is that politically connected Iraqis who clearly broke the law are nonetheless not being prosecuted because of their political influence!

Luckily for us, such a scenario could never play out under the press' watchful eye (let alone with its outright endorsement) here in the U.S. where "everything is different, and better."

Brad Jacobson has an incisive take (Media Bloodhound, 4/29/09) on the consequences of mealy-mouthed torture language at the New York Times, where public editor Clark Hoyt

provides he said/she said examples to show how the public has reacted. But in doing so, in this context, he turns the very idea of news reporting--that it should be based on fact rather than opinion--on its head and, in effect, concedes that Times editors, on news stories as serious as torture, are allowing public sentiment to color their reports.

Robert Ofsevit of Oakland, Calif., asked, "Why can’t the New York Times call torture by its proper name?" He added, "Please find more backbone and fulfill your journalistic responsibilities by describing these immoral and illegal practices for what they were." Theodore Murray of Cambridge, Mass., said that if the Times fails to adopt the word torture, "you perpetuate the fantasy that calling a thing by something other than its name will change the thing itself."

But Cynthia Jacobson of Phoenix said the Times is "outrageously biased" to use a term like brutal. "The Times has simply placed itself as one actor in a political fight, not a neutral media outlet," she wrote.

And herein lies the crux of what Hoyt--who is supposed to be the Paper of Record's ombudsman, not its cheerleader--should be addressing in this column: ...If the Times called techniques such as waterboarding torture in its reporting, which it should based on U.S. and international law, legal experts, historians, military judges, combat veterans and human rights organizations, and described, however briefly, what that torture entailed, then the use of modifying adjectives such as "harsh" or "brutal" would not only be superfluous but, in a news story, better left out.

In fact, Jacobson sees that if the Times insists on omitting the basic facts that "a) waterboarding is torture and b) torture is illegal," instead "simultaneously ascribing arbitrary descriptors to it like 'brutal' or 'harsh,'" then the paper "is not only denying its readers the necessary information to understand the issue but this denial may also lead directly to accusations of bias."