Times Edit Page Editor Andrew Rosenthal Responds To The Horse's Mouth
January 14, 2008 -- 11:46 AM EST // //

Updated below.

Updated again.

New York Times editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal is very ticked off about the post I did the other day pointing out that Maureen Dowd's column led readers to believe that she interviewed voters at Hillary's victory party when in fact she was in Jerusalem at the time.

Since the post went up, its argument was supported by several media-oriented writers out there, including writers at Columbia Journalism Review and on the MediaBistro.com Web site. This prompted Rosenthal to give an interview to The New York Observer defending the column and responding to his critics.

And just as he was when he labeled critics of the William Kristol hiring as merely "intolerant," the new round of criticism has the man very upset again:

"It’s driving me out of my fucking mind," Times editorial-page editor Andy Rosenthal told Media Mob this afternoon.

Oh, please. By outward appearances Rosenthal has a very good life. He gets to spout opinions for a living and has lots of influence. He can take it if some people question what goes on in His Lordship's journalistic sanctum once in awhile. Dialog is part of the gig. Deal with it.

On to the crux of Rosenthal's argument...

"[Dowd] reported the column in New Hamsphire. The fact of the matter is, particularly when covering a campaign which is a very high-speed story, it’s incredibly unusual for the reporter to be in the same place as the dateline when the story is filed. What do you do, stay in Des Moines while a candidate travels to New Hampshire? Oh, don’t go to Ramallah with the President because you have a Jerusalem dateline on your story! I mean this is just ridiculous! This is a complete invention, this controversy."

"Datelines are kind of an anachronism," he said. "It’s a little bit of an affectation."

Perhaps datelines are an "anachronism," in the sense that they aren't adequate to deal with the realities of modern high-speed campaign coverage. But just saying this and feeling clever about it doesn't get us anywhere -- the very idea suggests that there might be a problem here. If datelines are an "anachronism" and an "affectation," why bother having them at all?

There's no question that on a high-speed story reporters will be moving around a lot. And this isn't the hugest deal in the world. But the point still stands: In a case like this it's fair to ask whether a bit more clarity might be in order. This is a straightforward representation issue. Because of the combo of the dateline and the uncredited reporting, readers of the Dowd column came away with the belief that she went to the victory party and talked to voters, when she didn't.

Now, if Rosenthal doesn't mind that readers are coming away with this mis-impression, that's fine. It's his newspaper. But if he does mind, then a small fix might be worth thinking about. Rosenthal doesn't think a reporting credit is a good idea because it will take a line or two of space away from the columnist. But really, civilization as we know it will not grind to a halt if we get 10 less words from Dowd on any given day.

Rosenthal also points out that reported articles in the paper's news section are sometimes not fully clear about who's reported what. But this is different -- a column is the embodiment of one person, the columnist. The column, really, is the columnist. And in this case the column led readers to believe that this major journalistic personality was somewhere she wasn't -- at the victory party, taking the measure of voters.

Again -- I don't particularly care if Rosenthal or anyone else doesn't want to deal with this. It's not the hugest deal. But when Rosenthal protests that he's "not really sure" what the reader would get out of it if this were dealt with, the answer's pretty straightforward: Readers will come away from columns like these knowing what actually happened and how their favorite prestige columnist gathered her info, rather than not knowing these things.

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Update: Some, such as Times reporter Adam Clymer, are saying there's no issue because no rules governing the use of datelines were broken. But nobody is saying any rules were broken.

The problem isn't just the dateline. Rather, the problem is the combo of the dateline and the reporting on-scene at the victory party, which led readers to believe that Dowd was there, when she wasn't. I don't particularly care about this anymore, but let's at least be clear what we're talking about here.

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Update II: Over at The Huffington Post, Rachel Sklar gets it right:

"Datelines are kind of an anachronism," Rosethnal told the NYO dismissively. "It's a little bit of an affectation." That may be true, but it's an affectation Dowd and Rosenthal slapped knowingly on her column. In so doing, they were making a choice, and a statement: Maureen Dowd was here, our reporter was on the scene and in the mix. She's not just reporting on the same stuff we all saw on TV, she was there. Well, maybe she was, but barely, and, by the looks of it, with a little uncredited help. How to credit writers and denote datelines may be matters of internal Times policy, but insofar as they give a false impression of what that columnist actually did, it becomes an issue of greater journalistic import. Unless Rosenthal thinks being accurate and transparent is an anachronism, too.

Yep.

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