Bill’s Blog

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 OpinionJournal.com

• Reporting and Opinion Merge at New York Times

• Newspapers Start to Inch Away From Political Correctness

• Best of the Web Today

  • Blogs Expose Journalistic Shortcomings of New York Times

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“Turmoil at the Times: What now? How about a return to good, old-fashioned reporting?” OpinionJournal.com. June 6, 2003.

It's a free country, and perhaps the Times has decided it wants its reporters to explain the world in this partisan tendentious way. This is the tradition in Europe, where newspapers and their staffs are understood to be right (Le Figaro) or left (Le Monde), and it was once true of American papers too. If the Times wants to return to those days, its editors would do better to come out and admit their bias. The confusion--for readers and especially for impressionable young reporters like Jayson Blair--comes when a newspaper preaches one standard of fairness and objectivity but practices another.

Levey, Colin. “A Media Coup: The Times' shakeup is a victory for the little guy.” OpinionJournal.com. June 4, 2003.

Yesterday's announcement that Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd were resigning from their posts as executive editor and managing editor was the media equivalent of a coup. Management at the country's pre-eminent newspaper was forced, by scores of smaller journalists at less powerful outlets, to walk out of their newsroom in disgrace.

It couldn't have come at a better time: Public-interest types howling over a recent FCC decision to loosen media merger restrictions have become panicky over impending Rupert Murdoch thought-control. Nothing could be more divorced from reality. Miles from the swaggering monopolies of critics' imagination, the Jayson Blair episode revealed the soft underbelly of Big Journalism, and the nontraditional media at their most powerful and democratizing.