More to the point, such thinking represents a distortion, rather than a reflection, of journalistic reality. As Bob Garfield and James Fallows noted in this weekend’s “On the Media”—while discussing the misleading TNR article that contributed, ultimately, to the downfall of the Clinton administration’s proposed health care plan—the blogosphere plays a valuable and, in fact, essential role in fact-checking and otherwise truth-squadding the journalism produced by the MSM:
GARFIELD: So I guess what it comes down to is this, Jim: 15 years ago there was no blogosphere, there was Talking Points Memo to go over the health care proposal line by line. Can you Swift boat a policy issue in 2009 in the way that they were able to pull off during the Clinton Administration?
FALLOWS: You can probably do it in some way, but I think that particular form of misinformation is a lot harder now.
Thus, another point that should go without saying: the fact that there is now a community of people on the Web who hold the work of Times reporters and their counterparts accountable—which is to say, who care about the Times’s quality and reputation enough to critique it in the first place—is to be celebrated. It is not to be resisted—or, worse, to be dismissively, defensively decried. The bloggers in question in Hoyt’s column—“those outside,” as it were—were doing the work that Hoyt himself is charged with: representing readers, and policing journalists to ensure that the journalism they produce reflects the best interests of their audiences. The Times, in the cases the public editor described this weekend, met its match. And that, Mr. Hoyt, is a good thing.
Until this latest debacle, I had forgotten the NYTimes even had a public editor! They need to get Daniel Okrent back. He was good at calling a spade a spade or, in this case, plagiarism, plagiarism, and not mincing words to curry favor with the paper's coddled columnists.
#1 Posted by TimesSquared, CJR on Tue 26 May 2009 at 06:01 PM
So now Clark Hoyt's tough internal critiques of the Times are not enough? So now he's institutionally protective of Maureen Dowd and that's not appropiate? So now all Times responses to critics are "wierdly defensive?"
I've only worked for the paper as a regional stringer and have written one piece for the Magazine.I competed with it as a reporter for New York Newday. But whoever this writer is -- a blogger, a grad student? -- she's taken umbrage at Times "arrogance" to an unprecedented degree. How is it arrogant to respond with a reasoned, qualified answer to a strident, overwrought barrage from people who, in a hyped-up media environment, go after the Times armed primarily with their own egos. Talk about entitlement! Bloggers have such momentum in this increasingly tiresome conflict that they think it's their obligation to whack whatever mainstream target comes along, and the realities of the situation be damned.
They don't know the difference beween Jayson Blair and Maureen Dowd, and clearly they don't care. Why in god's name should the Times be grateful for being pounded repeatedly by maringally informed critics? Why should the Times not respond "defensively" when it's up against the wall financially but still nitpicked to death (they hope, it appears) by, yes, outsiders.
How all this translates to the public is still a bit difficult to gauge, but if the bloggers themselves are any reflection of the wider world, the Times is losing the battle. The essential truth about the newspaper that disseminates so much essential truth every day is ignored by bloodthirsty bloggers (yeah guys, that's defensive), and print journalism, as exemplified by the Times, remains on the ropes.
Go to your corners, bloggers. You've done enough damage already.
#2 Posted by David Holmberg, CJR on Tue 26 May 2009 at 09:10 PM
I am just a reader of the Sunday NY Times.
But, I found Clark's disassembling of the controversy to be CRAP.
Maureen (don't call me Jayson Blair) Dowd copied someone else's work without attribution.
#3 Posted by Dave Barnes, CJR on Tue 26 May 2009 at 09:26 PM
I am not a blogger, I am a NYT home subscriber, a faithful fan and reader of Maureen Dowd. However, the lady is guilty of plagiarism, plain and simple. Hoyt dissembled, defensively. Let's move on.
#4 Posted by michael metz, CJR on Tue 26 May 2009 at 09:31 PM
This isn't the kind of arrogance that's killing journalism.
This is merely the kind of arrogance that is offensive, stupid and counterproductive.
#5 Posted by Michael Andersen, CJR on Tue 26 May 2009 at 11:27 PM
Hoyt: “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.”
What a howler from the Time's Ministry of Happiness.
Is Dowd a plagiarist/fantasist on the scale of Jason Blair? Who knows? Maybe not. And it doesn't matter a whit. She admits that she appropriated (ie, stole) somebody else's words. Period. It doesn't matter whose they were. By definition, that is plagiarism.
Hoyt's laughably dishonest column reminds me of some banana republic's double-speak spokesman: 'Gentlemen, the election wasn't perfect.'
#6 Posted by Francis Smith, CJR on Wed 27 May 2009 at 12:04 AM
"[T]aken umbrage at Times "arrogance" to an unprecedented degree," says commenter Holmberg.
Oh come now, I'm sure Holmberg can find more outrage at the Times' arrogance than this piece by CJR's staff writer Megan Garber. I'm certain if he tried he could find more annoyance at the Times and at Hoyt in particular, coming from bloggers.
Make that bloggers who are seasoned journalists -- or will that cause problems for Holmberg's twisted view of bloggers as "outsiders" who are not journalists and who are not representative of the public at large?
#7 Posted by Rayne, CJR on Wed 27 May 2009 at 12:19 AM
'essential truth'? Fact is, reading the New York Times feels much like reading the New York Pravda in quite a number of areas. It can be quite hilarious; - though, as Goethe said, 'Himmelhoch jauchzend, zu Tode betrübt' - it's quite depressing that the NYT is supposedly the American paper of record. I wonder if, ultimately, the people wouldn't be better served if the NYT collapsed; currently, much of the purpose of the MSM seems to be a simulacrum of a real newsmedia, heaping out servings of artless propaganda and meaningless 'star columnists' while maintaining the pretence of being a genuine fourth estate.
#8 Posted by Senhal, CJR on Wed 27 May 2009 at 02:52 AM
"The soft bigotry of anonymity": that's a good way to put it. Note too the condescension in Dowd's corrected column: "Josh Marshall said in his blog . . . ." If you don't recognize Marshall's name, you have no way of knowing that Talking Points Memo is a site of some importance. I think it's interesting too that Dowd doesn't link -- a breach of Interweb etiquette.
#9 Posted by Michael Leddy, CJR on Wed 27 May 2009 at 09:22 AM
There's no doubt many of us in the mainstream media historically have been defensive and dismissive of critics. But I'm struggling to understand how Clark Hoyt's opening graf deserves so much criticism. Garber's piece hinges on a presumption that Hoyt is dismissive of "the ethics police," yet a fair-minded reading of the sentence shows that he includes in that phrase "those within the Times." Bloggers can and do perform a service in critiquing news coverage of the Times and other media. As the majority of comments on this post demonstrate, however, there are indeed people whose purpose is not to enhance journalistic integrity but to "pounce on transgressions" as confirmation of their own biases.
#10 Posted by Jim Naughton, CJR on Wed 27 May 2009 at 10:11 AM
What silliness. Any person who reads widely and writes is quite capable of using a line written by someone else without conscious intent not to credit.
To criticize Mr. Hoyt and The Times in this instance is absurd. On any given day there are justifiable complaints to be made about The New York Times, but weighed against the whole of the journalism profession they are fewer in number than any other American newspaper.
When Mr. Hoyt came to The Times I was dubious as to his WSJ background. I didn’t think he measured up to Daniel Okrent. But I was wrong.
That said, the very fact The Times has a public editor should be celebrated. That doesn’t mean Mr. Hoyt should be free of criticism, but in the matter of Ms. Dowd there is no issue.
The fact The Times has a columnist, Tom Friedman, who’s paid $75,000 a speech, now that’s an issue.
George Mitrovich
San Diego
#11 Posted by George Mitrovich, CJR on Wed 27 May 2009 at 10:24 AM
Nobody with any honesty who has experience doing research would exactly reproduce (with the exception of changing "the Bush crowd was" to "we were") a phrase down to the punctuation marks without attributing it.
It's not as if Dowd is buried under a huge burden of writing assignments where she might lose track of the sources she's drawing from. She's only got to churn out a couple of columns a week of less than a thousand words each.
The feeble self-defense from Dowd when she got caught -- particularly about a column where she's complaining about Nancy Pelosi's dithering response to her own issues, and coming from the woman who was influential in thrusting forth Joe Biden's own plagarism two decades ago -- is truly pathetic.
#12 Posted by darrelplant, CJR on Wed 27 May 2009 at 01:25 PM
this critique does smack of grad-school condescension ... unnecessarily outraged and overwrought, with the conviction we can only acquire in the sterilie environs of a classroom. Hoyt's column wasn't perfect, but its tone was far more measured and practical that Garber's critique. On the Web, perhaps such a tone will only earn Hoyt another demerit; but as a reader, I value reasoned thought more than reactionary indignation.
#13 Posted by charles, CJR on Wed 27 May 2009 at 01:27 PM
"Bloggers" and the "Niggers" of "Professional Journalism."
#14 Posted by David Ehrenstein, CJR on Wed 27 May 2009 at 02:05 PM
Aggrieved bloggers and foaming-mouth-Times-haters aside, the fact remains that that Dowd was caught engaging in a textbook definition of plagiarism.
Dowd knows this. Hoyt knows this. Indeed, every intellectually honest writer or journalist who's ever been published--and who recognizes, instantly, in their heart of hearts, that all the usual lame excuses (subliminal 'borrowing,' poor note-taking, etc.) are just fig-leaf lies--knows this. Among adults, this isn't even an arguable issue.
What IS arguable is that the penalty Dowd suffered for her transgression is remarkably disproportionate. If a lowly, first-year metro reporter at the Times had been caught lifting the exact same graf, it is doubtful that her editors would dismiss the crime as 'non-plagiarism'--or that she would be let off with such a weaselly-argued wrist-slap.
The real issue here isn't ethics. It's newsroom power politics . . . and the Times' predictable blindness to how transparent this is to all other journalists.
#15 Posted by Observer, CJR on Wed 27 May 2009 at 02:54 PM
Ms Garber's article is well worth the read. Hoyt should be so forth coming in his role as the so-called Public Editor. Dowd's column is an insignificant example of the issues that could be raised regarding the journalistic quality of the NY Times. Unfortunately we have little else in the way of a daily newspaper to turn to when the Times is at its worst. That worst is rarely at the low level of the other two widely read NY newspapers. That there is much to be desired in Hoyt's approach to his position only underscores the inadequacy of an in-house ombudsman. You can't truly point out the short comings of the hand that feeds, that is pays, you. It is likely to smack you down.
#16 Posted by Jack, CJR on Fri 29 May 2009 at 09:22 AM