Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, has posted an extraordinary mea culpa on Jim Romenesko’s Web site at Poynter online.
In the form of a memo to his staff (and to the world), Keller says he has had long conversations with his managing editors, Jill Abramson and John Geddes, in the days since the Times printed its own painstaking, albeit incomplete, reconstruction of the Judy Miller affair. And he cites “a few points at which we wish we had made different decisions.”
Among them:
* “I wish we had dealt with the controversy over our coverage of WMD as soon as I became executive editor … [but] it felt somewhat unsavory to begin a tenure by attacking our predecessors.”
* “By waiting a year to own up to our mistakes, we allowed the anger inside and outside the paper to fester. Worse … we fostered an impression that the Times put a higher premium on protecting its reporters than on coming clean with its readers.”
* “I wish that, when I learned Judy Miller had been subpoenaed … I had sat her down for a thorough debriefing, and followed up with some reporting of my own …. I missed what should have been significant alarm bells.”
* “… if I had known the details of Judy’s entanglement with [Scooter] Libby, I’d have been more careful in how the paper articulated its defense, and perhaps more willing than I had been to support efforts aimed at exploring compromises.”
Keller ends quoting reporter Richard Stevenson to the effect that there’s an implicit contract between newspaper and reporter. “The contract holds that the paper will go to the mat to back up [reporters] institutionally — but only to the degree that the reporter has lived up to his or her end of the bargain … to have been open and candid with the paper about sources, mistakes, conflicts and the like …”
This is a document that had to be painful for Keller to write, and we commend him for doing so. Read it. For these are the words of an honorable man confessing to mistakes that grew out of the best of intentions — a determination not to scapegoat either his predecessors or their teachers’ pets.
–Steve Lovelady
Steve Lovelady was editor of CJR Daily.