Asymmetrical Information

Jane:

It's easy to do what I did.Just don't read the rag anymore. Sure, the local paper is even more rag-y, but it has comics.

I find myself going to the web more and more for news and commentary. I can read the Washington Post, LA Times, yes, even the NYTimes if I so desire. Instead of paying the newspaper for its content, I pay my ISP. I get more choice, better commentary - just consider Bob Herbert versus Steve Den Beste and your humble selves - it isn't even close.

Some day Punch Sulzberger will wake up and realize he's all alone. And nobody's coming to play in his sandbox.

Jane,

It’s YOUR opinion that the NYT is more slanted. Ignore it, if you wish.

If they are making a mistake, it will show up in their bottom line, won’t it?

According to Newsweek they have been expanding their readership.

I only hope you don’t become like Sullivan or Kaus, where it seems that every couple of posts is yet another variation of “If only I were in charge of the NYT!”.

They repeat the same thing over and over and over again. I assume their readers like that. You on the other hand provide actual analysis on relatively technical issues.

Don’t lose that.

I stopped reading the NYT some time ago, because it became a regular source of gargantuan whoppers, and corrections took too long to appear. The worst that I can remember is the story about the supposedly unprecendented appearance of open water at the north pole as evidence of human caused global warming. I'm no oceanographer, with only a layman's knowledge of the subject, but this story was so obviously, exceedingly, silly that the fact it was able to pass an editor's sniff test was taken as proof by me that the NYT had become completely agenda- driven. Being purely driven by an agenda is not necessarily bad, as long as one acknowledges that this is the case, but of course the Paper of Record would never do that.

GT, do you read all the way to the bottom? That's what I said: it irritates me, and I'm enjoying the prospect of watching the paper slowly implode. Of course it's my opinion -- although I think that you would find few to argue the proposition that the Washington Post's news coverage leans as far, or farther, left as the New York Times. I take no moral umbrage at their slant -- only the intellectual joy of pointing it out and watching people squirm.

People have been complaining about the supposed "liberal bias" of the Times since before you were born, Jane. It hasn't affected their "paper of record" status before and isn't likely to now. It certainly won't until all of you righties who allege bias start to substantiate your claims, instead of just quoting each other's allegations as if they constituted proof.

If something newsworthy happens this morning at 9AM, I won't read about it in the newspaper until the following morning - almost 24 hours later (unless the paper has an evening edition, but most don't). By that time, I've already read news AND> commentary about it on the web, and have watched it on the TV news (twice if I want a late update).

At this point, I think the only thing newspapers are good for are gossip/entertainment shlock to keep your mind busy during the commute...

I see no evidence of the NYT imploding. Quite the contrary. Their readership is up and conservatives can’t stop talking about them. That tells me that their influence, if anything, is rising.

The issue I think is the false premise in Mickey’s post when he asks: How many of the New York Times' journalistic problems would be solved…?

Er, who said the NYT has journalistic problems? That’s Mickey’s point of view.

We could easily rephrase that to say , How many of the kausfile’s journalistic problems would be solved if he just admitted he’s to the right of the NYT and can’t stand that they don’t follow his lead on how to run a newspaper?

Bottom line?

The NYT has been accused of liberal bias by conservatives for decades.

It still remains one of the most influential newspapers in the world with an increasing readership.

If anyone has problems it’s the critics of the NYT, not the newspaper.

Well, I guess we'll see, won't we? I have no emotional stake in my belief; just what I lightheartedly think is a rational bet that the New York Times will either move back to the right, or see its readership chomped by WaPo and the Journal (for business/economic reporting, which WaPo doesn't do very well -- but then, increasingly, neither does the Times).

The largest circulation broadsheet (non-tabloid) paper in the UK is easily the Daily Telegraph. The Telegraph is quite obviously seen to be biased to the right, and they freely admit it.

I certainly agree that being biased to the left in no way is guaranteed to cause the New York Times to fail-- there are quite a lot of people who enjoy that, and plenty of people will read it anyway if the coverage and writing is good enough. They are free to write the paper however they wish, and may well prosper. I think their obvious long range plan to take over and destroy the quality of the Boston Globe will help them, as did their extortion of tax breaks from Manhattan.

All that said, it's obvious that the New York Times is the most leftist major newspaper in the United States. (I'm excepting papers like the Village Voice.) There's no reason to assume that they'll fail because of it, but neither is there a point in denying it.

I'm not seeing your (or Kaus') point when you criticize the NYT for being non-objective when all you point to is the editorial page (Elvis Mitchell, maybe, but Linda Greenhouse is pretty deserving of her Pulitzer). If you want insipid conservative echolalia, why not just read your own column aloud to yourself? Why bother with a subscription (or news) when you (and your ditto-head followers) are always right?

Unless things changed again, it's Punch, Jr. who's been running the paper for about 10 years now, not Punch.

Ummm. . . if you'll scroll down a little, you'll see the criticism I linked of their news coverage Thumper.

I've basically decided that WaPo is best for politics, WSJ for business/economics, and the NYT for arts and culture (at which it is far superior to anybody), the Sunday mag, and the Book Review.

And of course the NYT editorial page on Tuesdays and Fridays… gotta have my Kristof and Krugman ;).

I do agree that the NYT is more agenda driven, but rather than a liberal bias I think it's more of an agenda of always trying to be the paper that gets the big scoop and sets the agenda in Washington, and of being critical of whoever is power.

The NYT is often more critical of Bush than the WaPo, but it was also more critical of Clinton as well. To take one example, recall their shameless hyping of the Wen Ho Lee - Chinese espionage story. And the editorial page (which was then run by none other than Howell Raines) from the start ran more editorials criticizing Clinton than any major paper outside of the WSJ. I didn’t hear conservatives complaining then…

About a decade ago, a savvy newspaper person told me that Wall Street was looking at Gannett's money losing creation of USA Today all wrong. His perspective was that great newspaper franchises were created over decades, not years, and that Gannett was doing a great job of creating a national franchise paper for sports, business, politics and travel. I'm not sure he was totally correct on USA Today, but it has become quite successful even if it hasn't (yet) earned Gannett a fabulous return (in net present value) due to the enormous start up costs in the early years.

Anyway, in the short run the New York Times readership is rising despite the bias, perhaps even helped by the controversy . . . . . the million dollar question is, "will the bias damage the paper's credibility to the point where long term readership begins a secular decline?"

The jury is out on that question, and will be for quite a while I suppose.

And also Jane, if 'aggressively editorial news coverage' annoys you so, why no posts on Fox News? Or the Washington Times?

RC: She explained the answer to your last post at length in the original and her responses. Something about being a wolf in sheep's clothing, I believe.

But Fox says it's not biased, so it isn't!

Another point: do newspapers have a future? What assures them that they will be there forever?

Right now the NYTimes IS gaining readership, but by becoming more a national paper with national distribution. After all, outside NYC there are more nuts waiting to be harvested...

My favorite section in the NYTimes used to be what we called (sorry about that, Jane) 'the Dog Show'. Debutants and brides. The latter came with grooms that looked like they needed a stiff drink. The captions were worth the price of admission...

Frank: I believe the Fox claim is "fair and balanced". Nothing about bias, especially when you have two talking heads on one show like Hannity and Combs who are especially chosen for their demonstrated editorial biases. If you wish to confute their claims, stick to what they claim.

Yes, that NYT just gives so much loving coverage to anti-war protests. Those bleeding hearts dug so deep into Bush's connection to corporate titans. They've been banging the drums real loud on the hands-off Ken Lay policy of non-enforcement enforcement.

Or not.

NYT arts coverage hit the crapper many months ago: one of Raines' lesser-known crusades has been to turn this part of the paper away from all that weenie high culture stuff and focus on Britney Spears et al. (However, general decline's been somewhat covered by the pasturing of Holland for the at least competent Tommasini.) How this fits into the liberal-conservative divide is left as an exercise for the reader.

It's unfortunate that their competition hasn't really stepped up to the plate on this one. (The Sun tries, and I do like their book guy -- though as they brought New Criterion folk over, why not the wonderful Brooke Allen?)

Oliver, anyone watching the Enron story knows the reason Lay isn't in jail is that they can't get enough proof to indict him, not because the Bush administration is protecting him. The New York Times would have to start making stuff up to go after that story.

Here's a question I'd like to see answered by the Times, or for that matter by any Journalist (paricularly the ones who always seem to add that capitalization when talking about themselves). In a financial publication, writers are expected, nay, required to disclose any holdings or interests they may have in a company and/or industry they're writing about. In that light, why shouldn't a political reporter be expected to disclose his/her party affiliation, or lacking that, who they voted for in the last election, or (here's a kicker) who they plan to vote for in the next election?

Are political (or environmental, or military, or for that matter, sports) reporters, just that much more holy than the financial types? I tend to doubt it...

>> If they are making a mistake, it will show up in their bottom line, won’t it?

Sure, that's how the press is disciplined, just look at the supermarket tabs. ;-)

The Times has long been liberalish, but two things have changed in recent years and are being noticed increasingly by the rest of the press (not just Mickey): (1) Its news stories have become opinion pieces, that (2) are written by people who don't know the subject they are writing about but instead seem to have been chosen for the job for their writing flair and opinions.

I can give an example where I personally caused them to correct their page one reporting:

Back shortly after 9/11, while the US was getting ready to intervene in Afghanistan, the Times on the same day ran *two* page one news stories by its military correspondent saying the Soviets incurred 15,000 combat dead and 450,000 combat wounded in Afghanistan, and wondering if the US people would have the stomach to keep up the fight there after the US started incurring such casualties.

Now that's op-ed commentary, not news, but the *real* howler was that the 450,000 figure was ludicrous. Anybody who knows *anything* military -- I'm no expert and I knew -- knows that a high wounded/killed ratio is a good thing, it shows a sophisticated army is saving the lives of its wounded, and the best ratio ever achieved was about 5-1 by the US at the end of Vietnam. A 30-1 ratio was nuts. It was like a Times sports writer writing "Barry Bonds had a good year, but he didn't hit 450 home runs like Babe Ruth did in 1927!".

After reading that and thinking "that can't be right" I looked it up and in a few minutes found any number of sources, including the almanac, giving the Soviet killed/wounded numbers as 15,000/50,000 (over ten years). I found a US military web site with definitive data and e-mailed its numbers and a link to it to the Times "corrections" e-mail address, and promptly got an auto-answer saying that everyone submitting credible corrections gets a response in a couple days.

After that I heard nothing, of course. About 10 days later I submitted it again. Still no correction, no nothing. So a week after that I e-mailed it in again, this time cc:ing every big editor at the paper *and* smartertimes.com, the WSJ, etc. And *then* they published a very grudging correction.

Now I can remember when the Times' military correspondent was Drew Middleton, and when there was a war on somewhere he wrote on page one about what was actually going on in the war. Liberal opinions about the politics of it all were elsewhere in the paper. (And another's serious pondering of a 30-1 wounded-kill ratio would have left DM ROTFLHAO.)

Today I have more common sense knowledge about the military than the Times' military correspondent does. But he's got the opinions and political analysis and writing style to be on page one.

Jim,

Maybe I should have been clearer.

When I said "mistakes" I was not referring to factual mistakes.

I was referring to mistaken editorial and business decisions. If people don't like what they have to offer (like you and Jane I guess) they won't read it.

In any case they seem to be doing OK.

It seems to me it's the right that has the problem, not the NYT.

Thanks, Jim, for relating your personal experience with the NYT, which conforms to the pattern I noticed. These factual whoppers seem to be more and more frequent, and given your experience, and what I have noticed, in regards to the length of time it takes to print corrections of even the most ridculous agenda-driven errors, like the open-water-at-the-north- pole-whopper listed above, it leads me to suspect that there are many unacknowledged errors in fact printed primarily because the errors support Howell Raines' agenda. This doesn't mean that factual inaccuracy will cause the NYT to suffer financially; it appears the supermarket tabloids manage to do well. At a certain point, however, citing the NYT as a source when making an assertion will be seen as quaintly nostalgic, or maybe even a little embarassing.

>>> When I said "mistakes" I was not referring to factual mistakes.

Systemic factual mistakes and misrepresentations in news stories are the essence of bias in journalism. Slanted editorials and op-eds aren't, everyone knows those are just opinions, they're supposed to be slanted.

But people believe factual mistakes in news stories are true facts when they read them in the "newspaper of record".

>>> It seems to me it's the right that has the problem, not the NYT.

The Times gets combat casualty numbers off by a mere 400,000 (near a factor of 30) while warning against intervening in Afghanistan, and it's "the right", not the Times, that has the problem? OK...

>> in regards to the length of time it takes to print corrections of even the most ridculous agenda-driven errors, like the open-water-at-the-north-pole-whopper listed above, it leads me to suspect that there are many unacknowledged errors ...

Well, I started to watch the corrections after submitting mine of course, and it's impressive how many middle initials, street addresses and photo credits they correct promptly. But to get them to correct substantive mistakes seems about as easy as pushing a camel through a mouse hole, even after they get reported elsewhere, the water-at-the-pole thing being a nice example.

That said, to be fair to Raines, the Times did pull some whoppers before he arrived. Here's my favorite:
~~
JULY 17, 1969 -- An editorial-page feature of The New York Times dismissed the notion that a rocket could function in a vacuum and commented on the ideas of Robert H. Goddard, the rocket pioneer, as follows:
"That Professor Goddard, with his 'chair' in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react -- to say that would be absurd. Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools."

Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th century, and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. The Times regrets the error.
~~
... and even of the Times' recent errors are not all ideological...
~~
JUNE 10, 2001 -- A report misidentified the former owner of the home that is now the Bamboo Garden Hotel, site of the Drunken Beauty Veranda restaurant.
A reader's e-mail pointed out that Mr. Shen was a prominent businessman and government official -- he was not the Qing Dynasty palace eunuch.
~~

Those are from "Kill Duck Before Serving: Red Faces at the New York Times", a book of corrections collected from the Times, which shows that not all of its misrepresentations come from its playing its key role in the vast left-wing conspiracy. Only some of them do.

I see now you and will are stooping to saying that the NYT is not all that different from supermarket tabloids.

Oh well.

Once again, you guys have the problem. Not the NYT. They are doing fine. Their influence is as strong as ever (notice the amount of time conservatives spend discussing the NYT and its columnists). Their readership is increasing.

But by all means, ignore them if you wish. I doubt they would care too much.

GT, this is really quite bizarre on your part. I merely observed that there was no evidence that factual accuracy was required to achieve profitability. Why is it so important to you to defend a publication that can't be bothered to represent accurately whether open water is common at the north pole? What's next, your impassioned support when the NYT produces a five part series asserting that the earth is, indeed, flat? How about a Howell Raines crusade to convince us that the moon is, in fact, made of cheese, and that if the earth becomes warm enough, millions will face a horrible death by being covered with dripping, bubbling, dairy products? Why does your ideology prevent you from plainly recognizing that what sucks, does, in fact, suck? The fact that the NYT is increasing it's readership has no bearing on it's degree of factual accuracy, just as the fact that Sylvester Stallone movies have made millions at the box office has no bearing on whether Stallone is a good actor. Stallone is a lousy actor depsite his ticket sales, and the NYT has become a mediocre reporter of facts, despite it's increase in readership. People read papers for all sorts of reasons, so it is plainly wrong to assert that factual accuracy is essential to attracting those readers.

GT, your argument is completely persuasive. Why, just look at IBM in the 1970s. Everything was ok when looking at a shapshot of the company, but it ignored the coming change and lost its dominant position and struggled mightily. To stay in the tech field, take a look at Jane's post on Apple. Apple was doing pretty good back in the 80's. How is it doing today? The history of business is litered with companies that thought they could do no wrong until they found themselves looking up at their competitors or staring at a Chapter 11 judge. You can't dismiss someone's criticisms of future problems by saying everything is fine RIGHT NOW. I'm sure the crew of the Titanic was feeling pretty good right up to that loud thud.

Kaus isn't pissed at the liberal slant of the paper(hint: he is a liberal), he is pissed that they do it so sloppily and then lie about it. The overwhelming number of people who criticize NYT would love to read it. I assume that if you asked Will and Jim, they would return to reading the paper if they found the standards of honesty and integrity had returned to their former levels. Every fair criticism that I have seen of NYT has been on this level, not rejoicing that the paper will finaly get theirs, but a sadness at losing such a valuable benchmark for the journalist profession.

Will,

What you see as flagrant errors of fact I see as nitpicking. Sure they make mistakes. Sure many of them are caused by personal biases.

So what else is new? That applies to every newspaper in the word.

For work and personal interest I read about 4 newspapers. Is any one of them perfect? No. each has different advantages and, depending on what I'm focusing on, I will prefer one over the others.

If you, or Jane, were constantaly wailing at the biases of the right wing media (like the Washington Times or the National Review) and many of their fact-challenged articles one could think that this obsession with the NYT was part of something bigger.

But it isn't. You dislike the NYT. So be it. Maybe Joe is right and they will start declining and you will be able to declare victory. I sincerely doubt it but it could happen.

In the meantime, may I repeat my suggestion. Just ignore them. It's your loss.

er, every newspaper in the world.

hehe

GT, have you seen some of the corrections that have come out of NYT recently? There was one recently that made its way around the net where about the only thing that was right with the column was the byline. They have manipulated data to get results that paint the ideological picture they want (mean temp in Alaska) by picking an illogical starting point so as to include outlying data that skewed the sample. That is something that would get you fired if you were doing acedemic research. I don't think it can fairly be called 'nitpicking'.

If you want to compare them to an opinion mag(NR) and a Moonie paper(WT), then I think that you are making your position worse, not better. Those publications, like Mother Jones and TAP are in ideological ghettos appealing to such a small number of readers that it is difficult to operate profitably. If you follow Kaus at all, you know the financial problems TAP has. I don't think NYT wants to use them as a business model. And you are right, it is our loss when NYT lowers their bar for excellence. That is why everyone is so upset. Even with the liberal bias, it was still worth the effort and time to read the 'Paper of Record' every day. Now you just feel cheated.

So they pursue a liberal agenda by misrepresenting facts but then they correct those misrepresentations?

Oh yeah, that makes sense.

The problem remains the same. You guys confuse YOUR perceptions with what the whole world thinks. The fact that YOU believe the NYT has a problem does not mean, in the real world, that it really does.

As one of the previous posters put it so well:

People have been complaining about the supposed "liberal bias" of the Times since before you were born, Jane. It hasn't affected their "paper of record" status before and isn't likely to now.

Nitpicking? Sorry, GT to assert that open water is unprecedented at the north pole, or that there was a war that resulted in 15,000 soldiers KIA, and 450,000 soldiers wounded, IS akin to asserting that the earth is flat, and people who assert that the earth is flat really shouldn't be trusted on much of anything. I don't say much about the Washington Times or National Review precisely because their circulations are tiny in comparison (so their factual idiocies don't become nearly as widespread), publications such as National Review make no pretense to being objective, and the NYT is fairly unique for trading on a reputation of being the Paper of Record. A publication which frankly acknowledges it's agenda is a more trustworthy news source, because one does not have to decipher the reporting through unannounced motivations. When National Review or The Nation engage in factual idiocies, it is far more readily apparent, becasue neither represent themsleves to be the factual publication of record, and both frankly acknowledge what agenda they are attempting to advance. It would be preferable if the NYT did the same.

>> I see now you and will are stooping to saying that the NYT is not all that different from supermarket tabloids.

Oh, please. Those corrections were humorous. Do we have to put smileys on everything so people can know when they are permitted to be not entirely serious? ;-)

Get the book in the library and enjoy it. It's funny -- but there's also the lesson that even the newspaper with the most fact checkers in the world makes howlers all the time because when one writes and publishes daily there's no way to avoid it. So one has to take everything in a daily newspaper as being necessarily superficial to a degree, because it has to be, and subject to verification.

And yes, the Times is like the tabs like that. So is the WSJ and all the rest. (With their biases necessarily affecting the sorts of error they unavoidably make).
~~

JULY 14, 1985 -- The document on which John Hancock put his famous prominent signature was the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution.

APRIL 7, 1995 -- [...] misquoted the Senator at one point. In his conversation with the radio host Don Imus, he said: "I mean, this is a disgrace. Judge Ito will be well known." He did not say, "Judge Ito with the wet nose."

OCT. 22, 2000 -- A Sunday Magazine article on Ivana Trump and her spending habits misstated the number of bras she buys. It is two dozen black, two dozen beige and two dozen white, not two thousand of each.

An odd trait about an abused spouse is that she (or occassionally, he) knows that all is not quite right, but still happens to have attachments to the abuser that are not easily broken.

Frequently, when the abused party is confronted by a third party with the possibility that the relationship is not so good as it once was, s/he will then rationalize excessively to avoid any truth that may exist in the charges.

The New York Times: A good lover slowly going bad? GT: The spouse who cannot let go?

Film at 11.

GL, I was wondering, do you need to keep the same volume every step of the graveyard or are there spots where you whistle just a little louder?

No doubt you'll all be bitching about Fox News next? You know, the network that makes the NYT look even-handed? Yet continues to insist its unbiased?

Jason,

I've generally heard FoxNews claiming they are "fair and balanced" not "unbiased and objective." It's something of a semantic argument, but the former means they are biased, but try to find someone to argue the opposing view. The latter means that they have no bias and thus you don't have to filter for any ideological biases.

Jason, I don't recall ever hearing Fox news call themselves the 'Network of Record' and behave as if they were the saviors of the profession. When you proclaim you are the best, your standards of conduct become higher. It isn't enough to say it, you have to do it every single day, in every single column.

And compare the panel on Fox's Sunday show with the panel on ABC. Two conservatives, a moderate/liberal and a liberal vs three liberals and George Will. Or the fact that Andrew Sullivan, that fire brand of conservativism was banned from the NYT, while Fox has purged Juan Williams, Alan Combs, and all other liberal commentators except for one. Oh, wait a minute. That second part didn't happen, did it. While NYT still ony has one regular conservative contributor on its editorial page.

You must be living in an interesting world if you think the Sunday morning gasbags skew liberal.

Or the fact that Andrew Sullivan, that fire brand of conservativism was banned from the NYT

After he started bashing Raines full-time while submitting pieces for them? You'll need a better data point than that.

while Fox has purged Juan Williams, Alan Combs, and all other liberal commentators except for one. Oh, wait a minute. That second part didn't happen, did it

You know as well as i do that Colmes is just there, along with the rest of the liberals on Fox, for Hannity to beat up on.

It's something of a semantic argument, but the former means they are biased, but try to find someone to argue the opposing view.

Have they made this actual defense themselves?

I don't watch T.V. news, or T.V. pundit shows, and have not for many, many, years, whereas my abandonment of the NYT is relatively recent, so I can't really compare the two. If FOX is reporting that the earth is flat, out of a desire to advance it's political agenda, I condemn them as well.

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