I'm glad the NYT public editor called out the NYT op-ed editor on the Luttwak "Obama is a Muslim apostate" nonsense. Not only was the piece a transparent exercise in religious bigotry, it was wrong. And there's no excuse for the Times' refusal to run a rebuttal by people who actually know something about Shari'a.
But there's a deeper pathology here, one that extends well beyond the opinion pages: the stubborn refusal of journalists to submit their product to expert vetting before it runs.
Clark Hoyt, the public editor, gets exactly the right quote from the op-ed editor:
David Shipley, the editor of the Op-Ed page, said Luttwak's article was vetted by editors who consulted the Koran, associated text, newspaper articles and authoritative histories of Islam. No scholars of Islam were consulted because "we do not customarily call experts to invite them to weigh in on the work of our contributors," he said.
The notion of a bunch of editors at the Times, none of whom can read Arabic, "consulting the Koran" is either funny or sad, according to your temperament. But the horrible truth is that they were just acting according according to the rules of their guild. In this context, Shipley's "customarily" is exactly the right word: it is not the custom among journalists to check with experts to make sure that what they publish isn't appallingly wrong.
According to the conventions of "objective" journalism, the journalist is the impartial judge among competing opinions, and experts are merely purveyors of some of those competing opinions, with no special standing. For every expert opinion saying X, an "objective" reporter will find another expert opinion saying not-X; that's why outfits such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute exist. Sometimes a bold reporter will decide to privilege an expert opinion above a non-expert opinion, usually to do a "gotcha" on some hapless politician; that's what happened to Hillary Clinton on the "gas tax holiday." But the authority always rests with the journalist, never with the expert. Therefore the journalist's work must not be subjected to any sort of outside scrutiny.
It wouldn't be hard, or expensive, or time-consuming, for newspapers to get academics to look over news and opinion pieces for howlers. They don't do it because it challenges the idea that any journalist is competent to report, and any editor to "vet," any story, regardless of its technical complexity.
This is not the same sort of post-modernism as that practiced by the Bush Administration, but it expresses the same post-modernist contempt for the idea that someone, somewhere actually knows something in a way not merely the result of a contest among social forces.
In his headline, Clark Hoyt alludes to my favorite quotation from Daniel Patrick Moynihan: "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts." But it's slightly scary how controversial that idea remains in practice.
They wonder why readership,viewer ship is down. It is because people are aware that they have nothing to offer but propaganda.
If you get your information from the New York Times,Washington Post, Wall Street Journal or any of the TV news shows you will be misinformed about most topics.
They don't hire journalists,they hire propagandists.
It is a joke for Time,"News"week magazine and the others I mention above, to consider themselves a news source when you have people like Rove,Judith Miller, Tom Friedman, Kristol,Brooks,Krauthhammer,etc writing for you.
Anyone who reads these for information is seriously uninformed.
Unfortunately, politicians and editors have worked in seeming lockstep over the past 15 to 20 years to discount the need for veracity. While the left wing decries the corporate media and the right wing moral relativism, neither seem to get that what Moynihan said undermines whatever ideology you are pushing.
Ironically, the only place where there seems to be at least an effort to tap the experts who truly know the facts of a situation and their context is online, where wikipedia and some other vertical services actually are designed to illicit the ephemeral 'truths" of this world.
Spin keeps media spinning. Truth is the end to what we call news this days..
Sad, but true.
They say, it is the job of everyone else to believe.
Just like the GOP, they say, it is the job of everyone else to believe.
Just like Corporations, the management says, it is the job of everyone else to do.
Another insightful essay/post. Agape.
If something happens in Chicago, for example, that is normal for Chicago, the story may be picked up in New York and completely either misinterpreted or blown out of proportion or twisted into some grotesque fairy tale of a story. People in Chicago, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Denver, Dallas...you get the idea, don't really care what news pundits in NYC care. I wish that could be understood.
The same measure can also be used for other media centers, such as D.C., Atlanta, or L.A..
Understand - heartland America does not care what they think.
So now what does the set of fairy tales of islam say about who is a muslim? one who is born to muslim parent - father is the imperative parent. Or one who has converted to islam under whatever circumstances. Given that Mr. Obama was muslim at one point - immaterial whether he was one voluntarily or not. That he has declared that he found jesus, he is an apostate according to the book of islamic fairy tales. Do I consider him an apostate? No I consider him as a silly man in this context, otherwise a smart and charismatic man.
We need more journalists like Hoyt to continue calling out hacks like Luttwak .
But Clark Hoyt is excellent and he is doing a really good job addressing the paper on behalf of the public.
Just Cue Card Readers.
JCCR's