THE FREE AND CLEAR PRESS

[thepennyking]

Truth over Rowbacks
A Times policy-shift is subtle but significant.



Something happened at the New York Times last week — a small thing, perhaps, but fundamental and potent — that may forever diminish the privileges and power of the liberal media elite.



What happened is that the Times has been forced to deal with its fox-guarding-the-henhouse policy of letting its op-ed columnists handle corrections of their own errors. That policy of institutionalized unaccountability has led, just as you would expect, to lots of errors and almost no corrections, and to the illusion of infallibility for the likes of Paul Krugman.

Think how much less influential liberal icons like Krugman and Maureen Dowd will be when their errors must be admitted and corrected. Think how the threat of that will restrain them from making errors in the first place. And, most important, think how much less powerful their rhetoric will be when it can no longer rely of errors which, to be blunt, are frequently not "errors" at all — but rather deliberate distortions, misquotations, and downright lies.

The Times's policy-shift is subtle but significant. In a memo last week, editorial-page editor Gail Collins declared,

while their opinions are their own, the columnists are obviously required to be factually accurate. If one of them makes an error, he or she is expected to promptly correct it in the column. After some experimentation at different ways of making corrections, we now encourage a uniform approach, with the correction made at the bottom of the piece.
What does this mean, exactly? It means that no longer can columnist corrections come in the form of what Times “public editor” Daniel Okrent calls a “rowback” — the correct restatement of the error in a subsequent column, without reference to the original error or any admission that there even was an error in the first place. Columnists (and reporters, for that matter) love rowbacks — they can comfort themselves by setting the record straight, but without having to admit the error.

Here's an example. I pointed out in a Krugman Truth Squad piece last year that Krugman's November 4 column had foreshortened the following quotation by Republican representative George Nethercutt — excising the critical final five words and making it seem as though Nethercutt were indifferent to the deaths of American soldiers:

But it's, it's, it's a bigger and better and more important story than losing a couple of soldiers every day, which, which heaven forbid, is awful.
Outed by the Truth Squad, Krugman ran a rowback in his November 11 column:

Some say that Representative George Nethercutt's remark that progress in Iraq is a more important story than deaths of American soldiers was redeemed by his postscript, “which, heaven forbid, is awful.” Your call.
Pretty slick, eh? No admission of the shameful distortion in the first column. That's down the memory hole. Instead, the correct restatement of the quotation is used as a way to take another slap at Nethercutt, and at Krugman's critics at the same time.

Under Gail Collins's new policy, however, it will have to read something like this:

Correction: In my November 4 column, I foreshortened a statement by Representative George Nethercutt, omitting a phrase in which he said of the death of American soldiers in Iraq, “which, heaven forbid, is awful.” Without that phrase, the misleading impression was given that Mr. Nethercutt is indifferent to the death of American soldiers. I regret any misunderstanding.
Will Collins really make Krugman — and Dowd and all the rest — change their self-serving ways? Maybe. In her memo, she writes,

They are expected to correct every error. Anyone who refused to fulfill this critical obligation would not be a columnist for The New York Times very long.
Strong words. And in his Sunday column, Dan Okrent put Collins in a position in which she's going to have to take the heat if her new policy isn't followed. Okrent wrote that

it's [Collins's] assertion of responsibility that matters most. Critics might say her statement of policy is very gently phrased, but when I asked her if there was wiggle room, she was unequivocal: “It is my obligation to make sure no misstatements of fact on the editorial pages go uncorrected.”
It must be said, though, that Collins has never been anything more than a dutiful Times apparatchik when it comes to defending the illusion of her columnists’ infallibility. On my blog, The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid, I've twice documented (here and here) what amount to nothing less than blatant Collins cover-ups of Krugman errors.

The trick, now, is to keep the pressure up — here, at the Krugman Truth Squad, at The National Debate blog, and even at The Nation, where David Corn has urged correction of what he thinks are unadmitted errors by conservative Times columnist William Safire. It has been nothing but pressure from people like these — combined with the arrival of in-house watch-dog Okrent — that moved things this far at the calcified and self-satisfied New York Times.

So, Miss Collins . . .

. . . if your columnists "are expected to correct every error," we need to see a prompt correction of Paul Krugman's misquotation of Vice President Dick Cheney in his column last Tuesday.

As Krugman Truth Squad member Carol Vitucci pointed out, Krugman quoted Cheney saying that former terrorism czar Richard Clarke was "out of the loop." In fact, Cheney told Rush Limbaugh in a radio interview that Clarke "wasn't in the loop."

A tiny difference — perhaps no difference at all when it comes to essential meaning. Or, as Krugman Truth Squad member Mike Hertzberg pointed out to me, maybe there's all the difference in the world:

The correct quote is that Clarke “wasn't in the loop, frankly, on a lot of this stuff” (emphasis added). That's a qualified “wasn't in the loop,” not a global one. It's an admission that Clarke was in the loop on some stuff, but not on other stuff. This suggests not as wide a chasm between Cheney and Rice as the Times and others have reported.
Either way, it's an error. And it's a misquotation of the Vice President of the United States. And an honest correction at the end of some future Krugman column would be just as effective as anything else in punching through his veneer of infallibility.

So far, there's been no correction, and the misquotation was even repeated last Thursday in a Times news story by Elizabeth Bumiller. Apparently Timesmen and Timeswomen find it more satisfactory to get their quotes from Paul Krugman, rather than going to original source material — especially when reading the transcript requires going to such distasteful places as Rush Limbaugh's site or the White House site.

On Friday, however, in a Times house editorial, the quote was suddenly printed correctly, with no mention of the two prior misquotations. A rowback! Collins had not at publication time replied to my e-mail regarding this. She's in deep on this one now — hopefully she hasn't opted for silence.

Still, I think, truth has an ally in Dan Okrent. His moral sanction will be more valuable than anything else in keeping pressure on the Times. He was sending a message in his column Sunday when he quoted me and wrote about the work of the Krugman Truth Squad on National Review Online. He's letting the Times know that he's listening to even its most hated critics — and that the so-called "newspaper of record" isn't the only arbiter of truth.

When Okrent's 18-month term as "public editor" is over, let's hope that no one has any illusions anymore that the Times is, indeed, the newspaper of record. Stripped of that undeserved imprimatur, its power to unfairly influence public debate will be greatly diminished. The most powerful tool of the liberal media elite will be cut down to size — at last.

— Donald Luskin is chief investment officer of Trend Macrolytics LLC, an independent economics and investment-research firm. He welcomes your comments at [e-mail].