New York Times Public Editor Dodges Central Question At Heart Of GOP Attack On His Own Paper
September 24, 2007 -- 1:54 PM EST // //
Clark Hoyt, the public editor of The New York Times, has now weighed in with a long piece on the whole controversy involving the MoveOn ad in his own paper attacking Mighty Scholar-Warrior Petraeus. It's a deeply disappointing article. He takes a very high-horse tone in the piece, rapping The Times for violating the paper's "own written standards," which say that generally the paper doesn't publish ads containing personal attacks.
Unfortunately, Hoyt doesn't weigh in on the question that's at the center of this whole controversy: Whether or not The Times gave a discount to MoveOn because the paper's editorial stance is antiwar.
The crux of the GOP/winger assault on the paper right now is simple: For ideological reasons, The Times institutionally helped MoveOn slime Petraeus with a "subsidized" ad rate because it supports MoveOn's antiwar agenda. What does Hoyt think of this argument? He doesn't say.
In his piece, Hoyt devotes a great deal of energy to answering two peripheral questions: One, whether MoveOn paid the right ad rate; and two, whether the ad was appropriate to our discourse. Let me be clear: There's nothing wrong with answering these questions. And Hoyt does unearth a relevant fact, reporting that the paper's own ad guidelines say that the paper won't generally accept ads with "attacks of a personal nature."
But ultimately, these questions aren't what this whole thing is really about. The GOP's assault on the paper isn't about whether an ad violated ad policy or not by being mean to General Petraeus. Instead, the central charge from the GOP and its media enablers is that the paper gave a cheaper ad rate to the attack on Petraeus because as an institution it was indulging in ideological collusion with MoveOn. This idea, not whether or not ad policy was violated, is what's generating all the outrage.
The charge is pure crackpottery, of course. Do we really believe the fact that this one ad rep mistakenly gave MoveOn the wrong rate has anything whatsoever to do with the paper's institutional editorial stance on the war? This is UN-troops-in-green-helmets territory.
Hoyt gives a great deal of ink to the Republicans making this charge. But what does Hoyt himself think of these charges, now that he's investigated the situation? Here's the sum total of his judgment on the matter, buried at the end of the piece:
The Times bends over backward to accommodate advocacy ads, including ads from groups with which the newspaper disagrees editorially....and that's it. Hoyt almost certainly knows how ridiculous the charge of ideological collusion is. Why didn't he say so, then?
By failing to reach for a conclusion about the question at the center of this whole controversy, Hoyt succeeded only in giving more ammo to right-wing critics -- and let down the paper's readers, who deserve to hear a journalism expert like him pronounce judgment on the assumptions and questions at the core of this whole assault on the paper. Hoyt squandered a chance to use his platform to say something meaningful about the whole affair, instead focusing solely on a bunch of peripheral details about ad rates and guidelines.