It’s probably an understatement to say that we at The Audit weren’t nuts about the prospect of News Corp. buying The Wall Street Journal, the world’s leading monitor of corporate behavior, the economy and markets, for reasons duly enumerated in this space.
(Heck, our Ryan Chittum was popping off about it while he still worked over there.
“It’s just been a dark day,” said Ryan Chittum, a real estate reporter at The Journal. “There is a tremendous amount of anxiety about being subsumed into News Corp. We are all extremely worried about the future of The Journal and its credibility. Its credibility is The Journal’s calling card and if that’s in question, then it hurts the paper.”)
So it’s probably not a shock to our readers that we give David Carr credit for taking on a noticeable-enough-but-difficult-to-prove subject: the WSJ’s recent rightward tilt, a phenomenon we’ve noticed quite a bit ourselves, as Chittum wrote this morning.
But I like a good crosstown newspaper war as much as the next media critic, and I admire combativeness in editors, so in principle it’s good that the Journal’s top editor, Robert Thomson, rose to his paper’s defense, if for no other reason than to rally his troops (h/t Jon Koblin, the Observer).
Having said that, it’s too bad Thomson heads for the low road:
The news column by a Mr. David Carr today is yet more evidence that The New York Times is uncomfortable about the rise of an increasingly successful rival while its own circulation and credibility are in retreat. The usual practice of quoting ex-employees was supplemented by a succession of anonymous quotes and unsubstantiated assertions. The attack follows the extraordinary actions of Mr. Bill Keller, the Executive Editor, who, among other things, last year wrote personally and at length to a prize committee casting aspersions on Journal journalists and journalism. Whether it be in the quest for prizes or in the disparagement of competitors, principle is but a bystander at The New York Times.On planet News Corp., no one operates in good faith. Carr can only be channeling the Times’s commercial interests. Why address substance when it’s easier to head straight for motive?
This is the same allegation of bad faith that News Corp. made at the time of the (superb) Times two-day series on Rupert Murdoch’s company before the 2007 deal to buy Dow Jones, the Journal’s parent. The series turned up damaging facts about News Corp.’s behavior in China and the U.S. But facts were never the issue, as News Corp. said in its statement at the time:
“News Corp. has consistently cooperated with The New York Times in its coverage of the company. However, the agenda for this unprecedented series is so blatantly designed to further the Times’s commercial self interests — by undermining a direct competitor poised to become an even more formidable competitor — that it would be reckless of us to participate in their malicious assault. Ironically, The Times, by using its news pages to advance its own corporate business agenda, is doing the precise thing they accuse us of doing without any evidence.”
It’s argument by name-calling. For most companies, it’s a sign of desperation. For a news organization, it’s worse. News Corp.’s business, too, is gathering facts and seeking a response, so it wants to be careful about throwing around allegations of fact-gathering in bad faith.
As for faulting Carr for quoting ex-employees and anonymous sources, that’s something the Journal does every day, as it should.
The allegation against Keller is left floating—like space junk.
But, you know, no one is on the level, and everyone’s got an angle. We’re all somebody’s puppet; it’s just a matter of finding the strings. Principle? That’s just a bystander.
Ah, yes, Mark, you are SO right, here's a an example of the Times' "deliberate fanning of race-hatred based on trumped-up facts" in the Duke lacrosse case.....
June 12, 2006
Prosecutor's Silence on Duke Rape Case Leaves Public With Plenty of Questions
By DUFF WILSON and JONATHAN D. GLATER
DURHAM, N.C., June 9 — When a woman hired to dance at a Duke University lacrosse team party claimed that members of the team raped her, Michael B. Nifong, the district attorney for Durham County, responded with an aggressive, unflinching and very public investigation.
"There's no doubt in my mind that she was raped and assaulted at this location," Mr. Nifong said on national television after the case surfaced in March. Mr. Nifong called other lacrosse players "hooligans" who had aided, abetted or covered up for the rapists. Local police officers seemed equally certain that they had a horrific crime to solve.
But in the intervening months, the case has come to appear far less robust. Three players have been indicted, but evidence that has surfaced, much of it turned over to defense lawyers by prosecutors and then filed in court with defense motions, has thrown the woman's claims into doubt. Mr. Nifong, so vocal at first, has refused to speak publicly about the case since the beginning of April.
The result is a growing perception of a case in trouble. Increasingly, the onus is on the district attorney. People in Durham are asking what Mr. Nifong is up to, whether his prosecution was influenced by politics — he was in the midst of a campaign when the case began — and what other evidence he might have.
. . . .
DNA samples from the woman and 46 players, which Mr. Nifong had said would identify the suspects, turned up no matches. Other DNA evidence proved inconclusive. Defense lawyers provided time-stamped photographs from the party to rebut the woman's assertion of a 30-minute rape.
Just this week, defense lawyers introduced records of interviews of a dancer hired to perform with the woman; the second dancer said they had been together at the party for all but five minutes and that any claim of rape was nonsense.
....
Mr. Evans's lawyers, Joseph B. Cheshire V and Brad Bannon, said that the woman did not identify Mr. Evans in an earlier photo lineup and that she falsely claimed he had a mustache. Mr. Evans has passed a polygraph test administered by an expert hired by his lawyers.
Mr. Nifong released 1,278 pages of investigative material to the defense lawyers on May 18, saying it was everything he had. There is nothing there, defense lawyers now say, to show evidence of a crime but the woman's own story, which they said had changed frequently and did not fit any plausible timeline.
"Out of those 1,300 pages, I'd be surprised if 200 of them relate to this case at all," Mr. Cheshire said. "The discovery is actually very minuscule, and there's absolutely nothing in it that impacts negatively on the defendants in any way, shape or form."
. . . . the biggest obstacle may be the lack of DNA evidence. Though the results, released by defense lawyers on April 10, showed no matches, Mr. Nifong suggested that condoms could have limited available evidence. But this week, it was disclosed that the woman had told hospital personnel that no condoms were used.
....
ETC ETC
YES, the Times' reporting on the Duke case was flawed, it gave too much credence to the prosecutor's version of events (the paper's own ombudsman said so -- rather sneaky, isn't it, Mark, in a plotting leftist bombthrowing way, to have someone on the payroll who regularly and freely critiques your own reporting?) But "deliberate fanning of race-hatred based on trumped-up facts"? Hardly.
#1 Posted by factbased, CJR on Mon 14 Dec 2009 at 06:29 PM
and by the way, the tendency of the media to give too much credence to the prosecutors' case can cut both ways in the race/crime equation. This often happens, for example, when a black defendant gets accused of a crime against a white person. Bias in favor of prosecutors' side of the story is an age-old problem in journalism, and is certainly not the result of liberal bias. It's actually more an example of institutional conversatism, part of the editors and reporters tendency to prefer official sources (and those sources that can cut off access to info if they don't think they're being treated well enough).
#2 Posted by factbased, CJR on Mon 14 Dec 2009 at 08:08 PM